LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA OF Class THE CHRISTIAN SOCIAL UNION (LONDON BRANCH). President: THE BISHOP OF DURHAM. Chairman: CANON H. S. HOLLAND. of THIS Union consists of Members of the Church England who have the following objects at heart : 1. To claim for the Christian Law the ultimate authority to rule social practice. 2. To study in common how to apply the moral truths and principles of Christianity to the social and economic difficulties of the present time. 3. To present Christ in practical life as the living Master and King, the Enemy of wrong and selfish- ness, the Power of righteousness and love. Members are expected to pray for the well-being of the Union at Holy Communion, more particularly on or about the following days : The Feast of the Epiphany. The Feast of the Ascension. The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. Further information can be obtained from the Secretary ', Rev. PERCY DEARMER, 28, Duke Street, Manchester Square, W. A LENT IN LONDON A LENT IN LONDON A COURSE OF SERMONS ON SOCIAL SUBJECTS ORGANIZED BY THE LONDON BRANCH OF THE CHRISTIAN SOCIAL UNION, AND PREACHED IN THE CHURCHES OF ST. EDMUND LOMBARD STREET, AND ST. MARY-LE-STRAND DURING LENT, 1895 WITH A PREFACE BY HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, M.A. CANON AND PRECENTOR OF ST. PAUL'S " Is not this the Fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wicked- ness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke ? " Lesson for Ash Wednesday /*Z%?^ UNIVERSITY 1 LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. AND NEW YORK I89S All eights reserved PREFACE THE following Sermons have been selected from two courses preached during Lent, 1895, on week- days, mainly to business men, at the churches of St. Edmund, Lombard Street, and St. Mary-le- Strand. The London Branch of the Christian Social Union is responsible for inviting the several preachers. But each preacher is entirely responsible for his own utterance ; and for nothing more. It will be obvious that they differ widely in aim and judgment. It would be meaningless if they did not, in face of the intricacy and the complication of the vast social problem which Christianity is called upon to handle. Many types, many minds, many experiences, must draw together, through much correction and discipline, before the Church can adequately grapple with her task. The Christian Social Union has thought it well, therefore, simply to invite such speakers as were qualified to win a hearing, and then to leave them perfectly free to express themselves. Our one aim is that such matters as these should be pressed upon the anxious attention of the laity in Lent. VI PREFACE. Only by so doing can we hope to arrive, after many a long day of dispute and of sifting, at that agreement, which as yet could only be forced or mechanical. We cordially thank the Archbishop of Canterbury for consenting to assist in this our endeavour. Yet there is one basal agreement which we did set ourselves to secure. We have asked only those to preach who believe, in heart and soul, that, below all the varieties of social work and social thought, there is but one living Lord and Master Who can solve our riddles, and disentangle our confusions, and give union to our broken brotherhood. Here is our rock. Other foundation can no man lay than is laid in Jesus Christ. H. S. HOLLAND. i, AMEN COURT, ST. PAUL'S, May, 1895. CONTENTS PART I. OUR MOTHER. PAGE A NATIONAL CHURCH. THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY 3 SOCIAL UNION AND CHURCH UNITY. REV. EDMUND Mc- CLURE, M.A. 4 'We are members one of another." EPH. iv. 25 10 THE POLITICAL OFFICE OF THE CHURCH. REV. T. HANCOCK, M.A. Acts ii. 8-1 1, 40-47; Hi. 1-6 ; iv. 1-3, 7-12 20 THE CHURCH AND THE PEOPLE. REV. R. R. DOLLING . 31 PART II. OUR BROTHER MEN. PARTY POLITICS. REV. WILFRID RICHMOND, M.A. ''Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth." i COR. viii. i . 41 CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM. REV. H. RUSSELL WAKEFIELD, M.A. 50 PEACE AND WAR. REV. J. LLEWELYN DAVIES, D.D. "If it be possible, as much as in you lieth, be at peace with all men." ROM. xii. 18 63 THE COLONIES. REV. BERNARD R. WILSON, M.A. "His seed shall become a multitude of nations." GEN. xlviii. 19 81 Vlll CONTENTS. PAGE COUNTRY LIFE. REV. J. CHARLES Cox, LL.D., F.vS.A. " Desire a better country." HEB. xi. 16 93 CLERK-LIFE. REV. H. C. SHUTTLEWORTH, M.A. ... 105 Civic DUTIES. REV. CANON BARNETT, M.A. "Jerusalem is built as a city which is at unity with itself." Ps. cxxii. 3 114 WHAT THE CHURCH MIGHT DO FOR LONDON. REV. STEWART D. HEADLAM, B.A 127 CHRISTIAN CHARITY. REV. PREBENDARY HARRY JONES, M.A. * l Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor . . . and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." I COR. xiii. 3. . . 134 OVER-POPULATION. REV. G. SARSON, M.A. " So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him ; male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it." GEN. i. 27, 28. " Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary." I COR. xii. 22 142 ART AND LIFE. REV. PERCY DEARMER, B.A. " For with Thee is the Well of Life, and in Thy Light shall we see Light." Ps. xxxvi. 9 155 PART III. OUR SELVES. A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE. REV. CANON HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, M.A. "Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly : gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children, and those that suck the breasts : let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber, and the bride out of her closet. Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say, Spare Thy people, O Lord, and give not Thine heritage to reproach, that the heathen should rule over them : wherefore should they say among the people, Where is their God ? " JOEL ii. 15-17 169 CONTENTS. IX CHARACTER. REV. E. F. RUSSELL, M.A 180 THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF SIN. REV. W. C, G. LANG, M.A. "For their sakes I consecrate Myself." JOHN xvii. 19 ... 186 PERSONALITY. REV. A. CHANDLER, M.A. " What is man ? " Ps. viii. 4 193 LOSING THE SOUL TO SAVE IT. REV. PREBENDARY EYTON. " Whosoever will save his life shall lose it : and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it." MATT. xvi. 25 . . 200 CHRIST THE SOCIAL RECONCILER. REV. T. C. FRY, D.D. " There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female : for ye are all one man in Christ Jesus." GAL. iii. 28 207 DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT. REV. A. L, LILLEY, M.A. " He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls." PROV. xxv. 28 . . . 214 THE CHRISTIAN SENSE OF BEAUTY. REV. W. C. GORDON LANG, M.A. " Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name : bring an offering, and come before Him : worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." I CHRON. xvi. 29 222 DOGMA A SOCIAL FORCE. REV. CANON HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, M.A. "And even things without life giving sound, whether pipe or harp, except they give a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped or harped ? ... So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken ? for ye shall speak into the air. . . . Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me." I COR. xiv. 7, 9, ii 230 PART I. OUR MOTHER CHURCH B Of THI UNIVERSITY OF A NATIONAL CHURCH. BY THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. HE who can teach and loves to teach, teaches. They who can trade and seek to trade, trade. They who are strong and love justice, judge, either by num- bers or by chosen men. The community soon finds its interest in encouraging education, commerce, law. Lynch-law ceases, commerce is defended, schools are founded. Villages, castles, kingdoms, welcome the religious teacher. The nation, while it takes force and soldier- ing, and law and penalty, wholly to itself, leaves not only trade but scholarship and science to the utmost in the hand of individuals, but encourages and pro- tects them, assigns them privilege and the means which their precious work cannot earn. The universal gifts of individuals to religion, the lands, the charges, the buildings which are bestowed by their self-sacrifice, are recognized ; their dedication approved, their perpetuity assured. Teachers and disciples alike are so devoted, so strong, and so leading, that it is wise to take their leaders into counsel, to confer privileges which coincide with limitations, to provide that what they do shall be done for all. This, however, is their Divine mis- sion, and its acceptance by the community becomes an actual fresh strength to them as against the 4 A LENT IN LONDON. narrowness and exclusiveness which in human nature too readily follow the profession of even the truest tenets. The patron who charges himself and his posterity commonly retains the right of recommending the individual teacher from among those whom the Church has commissioned to spread the Divine knowledge and grace. The people name the lay- men who are to attend to the less spiritual affairs. The discipline of the clergy is exercised by courts of specialists adopted by the community. The public worship is that of the Catholic Church, edited (so to speak) from age to age by those that have authority, and received by Church and realm. Then, when he is ordained priest, a man has set before him the awful, yet stimulating picture of " the people committed to your care ; " of the service hence- forth due from him " to all Christian people, and specially such as are committed to your care ; " of his personal obligations "as well to the sick as to the whole ; " of exertions among individuals so extensive as that " there be no place left among you for error in doctrine or for viciousness in life." Nothing smaller, lower, poorer than that ideal can the Church of God delineate. To nothing more contracted is her minister commissioned and sent. Whatever may be the ideal of that Church, within sects or exclusive confessions, that care of all, that responsibility, that "being sent to all" is the ideal we cherish. No clergyman of a National Church can do more in his own person to denationalize it than one who would either invent and expatiate in liturgies at his pleasure, or disdain the " admonition " which he promised reverently to obey, or divert to his own benefit by payment of money one of those cures of souls which others hold in trust. But the spirit of the clergy is against these things A NATIONAL CHURCH. 5 these denationalizing, self-aggrandizing practices. What class of citizens has better recognized their national as well as their catholic position? They are themselves men of the people ; none more so than their bishops. There would have been no popular education for ages in England but for the work of the clergy, who in days of apathy founded schools everywhere, and with a true recognition of the nature of that work called them at once " national schools." The very roads and bridges to a vast extent owe their construction to clerical bodies. What art in England compares to the art of the churches ? And is it not far more than doubtful whether there would have been anything worthy of the name of liberty if it had not been for the un- dauntedness and the political science of the bishops guiding the instincts of the military leaders against oppression at home and from abroad? Certainly whatever benefits sprang, or are yet to spring, from our Reformation could never have been attained but by the study, science, and martyrdoms of a national clergy. What could a sect have effected in that hour ? Granted that, in a well-known period, apathy and corruption pervaded many, what institution is incor- ruptible which has men for administrators? What institution, what organization, was more overpowered by that benumbing drench of apathy and corruption than the House of Commons and its constituencies ? The typical stronghold of independence was sur- rendered. Is there any more singularly national fact than the recovery, the simultaneous, contemporaneous recovery, of both ? Of our own passing day I will say but this. Do we not recognize that in the last half-century there 6 A LENT IN LONDON. has been a national revival in religion one that has thrown all opposing forces with all their power into strong relief? Compare our schools, our churches, our services, our dioceses, our benevolent or mis- sionary efforts, with the best that could be produced by the best men half a century ago. It would be ridiculous to deny that the enormous change is a national movement, though it has risen as peacefully as a smooth tide. And I would ask you to look back to lives and letters and memoirs that are within every man's reach, and say (if you please) what men, what individuals, of what class, of what profession, were the very fountains of all this. Let any man say, who professes to know the history of his own times. And if you feel it is impossible to despair of the nation with that strong and holy record of its latest years will you, with the facts before you, despair of or despise the Church ? If so, it is at the dictation not of truth but of wilfulness. I see it said, " This is a phase caused by modern pressure. The spirit of the Church is sacer- dotal, self-aggrandizing." It is not for me to explain revenues which exist on paper. But if you will look below the surface, if you will read memoirs which exhibit the initiation of the modern pressure itself, the underground work which preceded measures, societies, funds, you will realize that Church work out of sight was the strength of the situation ; and as you look back and back you will find little break. The modern spirit is the ancient spirit the spirit which has moved the National Church from the beginning. Nor was that Church anything but national, anything but established ever. No act or deed, no word or resolution or sign-manual ever established it, ever altered its first relation to the people, or its view of its obligations. What was it when this was going on ? " They A NATIONAL CHURCH. 7 preached the Word of life to whom they could. . . . When the king was converted they received larger licence to preach throughout all parts, and to build and restore churches." " He forced no one into Christianity, only he embraced believers with closer affection as his fellow-citizens in a heavenly kingdom. He had learned from the teachers and authors of his salvation that Christ's service must be voluntary, not of constraint. Nor did he delay to give those his teachers a settled residence suitable to their degree in his metropolis, with such possessions in divers kinds as were necessary for them." l Is that establishment or is it not ? It is the primitive record of Augustine's position under Ethelbert. Or this in Wessex : " The king, observing Agil- bert's erudition and industry, desired him to accept an Episcopal see there, and stay there as bishop of his nation." Or this about St. Aidan, the Apostle of the North : " He was in the king's residence. . . . He had in it a church and a chamber, and was wont often to go and stay [at Bamborough], to make excursions, to preach in the country round, which he did also in other of the king's residences, having nothing of his own except his church and some adjacent fields." Or this in East Anglia : Fuesey " built a monas- tery on the place which he had received from the king . . . afterwards [the next] king of that province, and all the nobles adorned it with more stately buildings and donations." Such is the England of the early seventh century. These are the first beginnings, and the very earliest records of that same National Church estab- lished, of which six working men, coming as a 1 Bede, i. 25, 26, 597. 8 A LENT IN LONDON. deputation with a complaint, said to me the other day, as they left my room, " Well, sir, we hope you will do what you can for us about our parish church, for it's the last bit of freehold we have left." Or as a very poor, ignorant man, leaning against the churchyard wall, said to my friend, " Yes, sir, it's the parish church my parish church. There's no- body can hinder me from going in there. Whether I go or whether I don't go, I have got the right to go to service when I please." Poor fellow ! he was no controversialist ; he knew nothing of the politics which were manoeuvring over him and his rights. But these men held a doctrine about their rights which had been well understood and acted on for thirteen hundred years in England, and for a good fifteen hundred years in Wales. And surely politics, party politics, have no con- cern with that doctrine. They have not formed or built up either the rights or the duties. They are ephemeral. They are " a phase of modern pressure," if you please. They have the same power and the same right to deprive and reconstitute the Church as they would have to claim the accumulated capital of chartered companies as national property ; the same right and power as they would have to suspend the protectorate of the high seas, and to call on the British merchant navies to provide for their own security the same right and power, and not a grain more. The very existence of the fleets of commerce repays the national protection of them a thousand times over. You will not suppose, will you, that I, thus speak- ing against time, have confounded the clergy with the Church ? I have taken for granted that all here have before them the fact that the grandest political action of the Reformation was that it replaced the A NATIONAL CHURCH. 9 clergy in the position of citizens ; that it made the highest moral interests of clergy and laity identical. If the Church were the clergy there would be no National Church. The most Judicious of theologians could never have maintained that the Church was the nation and the nation the Church. But if they are a Christ-commissioned class of citizens, mes- sengers, watchmen, stewards of the Master, like Himself not ministered to but ministering, then the history of the nation down to this hour, the history of England, with the history of the Church erased from its pages, would be an unintelligible chronicle. As it stands, no man can deny that through evil and good, through darkness and light, through storm and sun, through blunder and through right, it is a pro- gressive tale of the kingdom of God and of the upward march of men. SOCIAL UNION AND CHURCH UNITY. BY THE REV. EDMUND McCLURE, M.A. [Secretary of the S.P.C.K.] u We are members one of another." EPH. iv. 25. " ALL the labour of man," says the Preacher (Eccles. vi. 7), " is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled." Hunger and thirst, cold and heat, these are the goads to labour, and in the continual recurrence of their demands lie the main stimulants to human activity. The constant efforts required to meet these exigencies furnish the warp and woof of history. The migration of peoples, the antagonisms between man and man, the wars of tribe with tribe, and nation with nation, have had here their chief sources. The hunting-grounds or fertile lands of the world are neither equally distributed nor unlimited in extent, and hence the perpetual struggle among men for the possession of the best. If food dropped into our mouths without effort, if the needs of the appetites could be met as easily as the demand of the lungs for air, there would be no incentive to labour, no cause for competition and conflict. In such circumstances we should, indeed, escape the burden of toil, and be freed from the difficulties of the labour question ; but our security as SOCIAL UNION AND CHURCH UNITY. u to daily bread might be purchased at the expense of being reduced to a condition resembling that of the lower parasites, or of being wiped out of existence altogether. The recurrent demands of the body put physical muscles and mental fibre to usury, with the result of a gain in bodily strength, and a clearer mental prevision. In the absence, on the other hand, of the labour struggle, our bodies and minds would become fibreless, and we should be unable to endure the strain put upon us by our environment. While recognizing, however, in the ceaseless effort for daily bread, the development of muscular and mental faculties through the forced activity of brain and limb, we are at the same time made painfully aware, by universal experience, that the struggle for existence brings many and terrible evils in its train. Competition has its favourable aspects, it is true, but these are not so great that we can afford to neglect altogether the serious ills which follow from it. Moral considerations come in here which lower our estimation of that treadmill life to which the struggle for existence would consign the greater part of the human family. " Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost," is an aphorism which may satisfy the philosopher who excludes ethics from his scheme of economic laws. The average man, as well as the moralist, finds it jar upon his idea of the fitness of things. " Every man for himself," is a principle which, if fully carried out, would not only render corporate life impossible, but would in the long run frustrate even the selfish aim it was meant to serve. It is in such an atmosphere of personal competition that the anti-social vices grow luxuriously. Here is the source of that covetousness which the inspired Apostle recognizes as idolatry an idolatry more debasing, perhaps, than that of the old world. Hence come " hatred, variance, emulations, 12 A LENT IN LONDON. wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings." Hence, too, that restless struggle after so-called independence, that paradise of some men in which they may " live their own lives " without any regard to the opinions or well-being of the community as a whole. We cannot, however, even if we would, " live to ourselves." We cannot attain that ideal of independence which some men put before them as the expected reward of years of privation and labour. Independence is impossible in the human family as it is constituted. If we want an illustration of independent lives, we must go far below the human species. Of all God's creatures, it is strange that the lowest in organization should be the most independent. The minute Amoeba, found in the mud of our ditches, enjoys an almost perfect independence. It has no opposite sex, no family in the strict sense, no tribe to which it owes duties of any sort. Each individual is self-contained, supports and perpetuates itself without any co-operation from beings of its kind. Its life does not even depend upon the differentia- tion of function, for each part acts like every other part. The lack of a circulating, digestive, or nervous system, the absence of senses or limbs, is but an ex- tension of its independence. We might imagine man to have been created on such a model, and we might well ask, What would be his condition in such circumstances ? In the first place, he would be non-social. He would have no relations to others of his kind, since there would be no sex, and since each individual would be complete in itself. Consequently there could be no possible breach of moral obligations, no sin in its social aspect, in the lives of such beings. A supreme egotism would determine the normal line of conduct, and that, too, without sin or blame. Suppose such a being brought into a sphere of SOCIAL UNION AND CHURCH UNITY. 13 social relations by the introduction of sex. We have here the beginning of duty, the origin of social ethics. There would henceforward be a counter-strain acting upon the original egotism love to wife, love to family, enlarging successively by duties owed to the tribe and the nation into patriotism. All these duties would be in conflict, at first, with purely personal desires. These external claims, moreover, would become more exacting in proportion as the community adopted a higher standard of public duty, and they would tend to be enforced by punishment inflicted on all who neglected them. The collective, coercive voice of the community would at length become expressed in law. The statute-book would furnish the standard for re- pressing the purely personal instinct, or where it failed, a common sentiment vox populi public opinion, would tend more and more to restrain in- dividual selfishness. This external reminder that a man's life is not his own would be persistent, and would burn into the blood of each individual, in each passing generation, respect for the whole community. It would beget and strengthen the social instinct, and prepare the individual, under the incentives of the religious ideal, to merge his personal concerns in the concerns of the whole, to realize that his highest life is not in the abundance of the things he possesseth, not in the satisfaction of purely personal desires, but in the sacrifice of his egotistic instincts to the welfare of the whole community. If all men were actuated by this spirit we should have attained the social ideal. True Socialism recognizes that selfishness is the great enemy of progress, and that the man who evades social duties, who tries to lead an egotistic and independent life, without consideration for the whole, is a sinner against society not to speak of a higher culpability. 14 A LENT IN LONDON. The Christian and the Socialist are thus agreed as to the true aim of social development. They both recognize St. Paul's ideal of society, that, looking not only at the nation, but at the great human family as a whole, when one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. This interdependence of the whole human family is brought home to us more vividly every day by economic proofs. The great arteries of steam com- munication all over the world, the extending nervous system of telegraphs, are manifestations of the cor- porate life of nations. A dearth or an abundance in one part of the world makes itself felt everywhere. Prosperity in one country gives greater means of purchasing the imports from another ; a famine in one country means the cessation of exports, which are the means of paying for what men require from afar. No country can, therefore, any longer " live to itself." Solidarity, in a word, is being enforced upon us even by events which seem in themselves non- ethical. This gospel of the solidarity of humanity is not a new one, requiring a new organization and the enforce- ment of new motives in order to realize it. It is as old as Christianity. The hybrid word " altruism," which expresses the incentive to solidarity, and which some think to cover an ideal as new as the invented vocable, is as old as St. Paul. Ye are " every one members one of another," " many members, yet one body ; and the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee : nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of thee." The term " body," used by St. Paul to de- signate the new society set up in the world by Jesus Christ, enables us to realize more fully its constitution and aim. St. Paul saw in this society a combination in which the members might each have as varied func- tions as those of the eye, ear, and limbs of the human SOCIAL UNION AND CHURCH UNITY. 15 organism, and yet be all under the regime of the one Head, with no antagonism or friction between the components, " with no schism in the body." It was to be a visible organization, one in its Head, in its faith, and in its entrance rite. The apostles and evangelists, the pastors and teachers, were given for the edifying of this body of Christ ; and the work of building up the society was to continue " until we all come to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ." The human body as known to St. Paul illustrated in its co-operating members fully enough the solidarity of the Christian society. All the knowledge which we have acquired about the body since his day serves but to bear out more fully the truth of the illustration. The body, as known to the modern physiologist, is built up of myriads of minute living cells. There are muscular cells, fat cells, nerve cells, bone cells, and cells floating freely in the blood. Each cell has a kind of independent life, but a life that is con- ditioned by the well-being of the whole. No cell can live to itself, and each and all are at their best when they co-operate together and work in harmony. Some of the cells, indeed, if we may trust accredited physiologists, have such a function assigned to them as the protection of the citadel of the body from the attacks of enemies. These cells are always on the look out, as it were, for any virulent microbes which may find an entrance into the human organism, and are competent, if in vigorous vitality, to make away with such dangerous intruders. The principle of co-operation could find no more striking illustration than in the attitude of the cells of the human body to each other, to the whole, and to external influences generally, and this principle of co- operation was contained in the concept of St. Paul. If or THC ( UNIVERSITY ) 1 6 A LENT IN LONDON. that large section of society which calls itself Chris- tendom could realize the concept of St. Paul in such fashion, that each member of it should stand in relation to every other, as each cell of the human body stands to its colleagues, can we doubt that the highest interests of the Christian community would be secured ? Could any statesman or any enlightened Socialist conceive a more satisfactory scheme of society? If a com- bination of men, which occupies itself with securing the interests of each craftsman of a certain trade, sees that its well-being is not imperilled by becoming a unit in a larger confederacy of all trades, would it not be prepared to believe that the principles upon which it is formed would find a fuller and more satisfactory application in a labour league which, embracing all workers, would transcend the limits of language, national boundaries, and race ? The one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church is, in fact, but an extension of this idea of social union an organi- zation which aims at extending the " labour league " into a league of all men, in order to secure the individual interests, temporal and eternal, of all its members. Can such an organization, in which most Christians express their faith by the lips, ever be realized realized, I mean, in such a way as St. Paul describes the Church ? The belief in an invisible Church maintained by some, can only be logically held by those who believe that Christianity has nothing to do with the temporal welfare of its adherents, but is a simple sifting machine, by which a few previously determined souls are to be selected out of the many for a higher stage of existence. Our Lord's solemn prayer, thrice repeated at the most solemn moment of His life, for the unity of His followers, gives no countenance to such a view : " That they all may be one : I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may ^perfect in one ; that SOCIAL UNION AND CHURCH UNITY. 17 the world may know that Thou hast sent Me." The visible proof to the world of His own Divine mission is made here to depend upon the unity and consequent perfection of His followers. All preaching and teach- ing, as St. Paul tells us, is in order that we may all come to the unity of the faith to that condition of things when the vision of the prophet will be realized, and men shall no longer look for rules of conduct to external statutes, but shall have God's Law written in their hearts, and all shall know Him from the least to the greatest. 1 Is it not strange that such a state of things, the unconscious aim of all social reformers, should seem so visionary, so Utopian, that its consideration can barely be entertained by practical men ? The unity for which our Lord prayed; the Church without blemish, or wrinkle, or any such thing, which St. Paul foresaw ; the one Holy Catholic Church in which we all profess our faith ; is this never to come into the consideration of men as capable of practical realization ? If we are prepared to think that our Lord's prayer for visible unity can never be attained in this world, what warrant can we have that any of our own prayers will be successful ? There is, in truth, no reason for such apathy and unconcern. Even at this moment all Christian men are consciously or unconsciously yearning after unity. It is in the air. Labour com- binations, Grindelwald conferences, Papal Rescripts addressed to east and west, manifestoes of leading English Churchmen, are all indications that the Holy Spirit of unity is at this moment especially at work in the hearts of men. Is it not a remarkable fact that the head of the great Latin Church should at this time be using words of conciliation and peace to the non-Roman world ? May we not consider it as providential, and as making for unity, that he 1 Jer. xxxi. 33, 34. 1 8 A LENT IN LONDON. should be empowered by the Latin Communion to " voice " that Church in deciding questions of faith ? Is it too much to see in all these movements the pledges of the final attainment of Christian union, which is the truest form of social union ? The obstacles to such a realization are, it is true, many and serious. Arrayed against the Power that makes for solidarity and unity, are all the works of the flesh the seven deadly sins, Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger, Sloth which are as inimical to the temporal interests of man as they are to his eternal welfare. Strong though these enemies are, enthroned as they may be in the hearts of thousands of professing Christians, we ought not to fear the final issue, for we have the secure promise of final triumph "The gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church of Christ." Each one of us, in the mean time, can do something to mar or promote that unity. We can war against selfishness in our own hearts. We can help to make public opinion a more perfect representative of the Christian conscience. We can show, by our interests in the great social questions of the time, that we have sympathy with everything that tends to secure the prosperity of all men. We can study, too, the causes and history of our divisions. The series of publications published under the Master of the Rolls will afford us abundant material for following the early division-movements in this country ; and I think it may be safely said, on the evidence of these documents, that the main and immediate causes of these movements were political, and not religious. The subsequent divisions in this country which have ended can we say ended ? in producing some three hundred sects among us, will be found to have been owing in the main to the im- perfect knowledge of their promoters ; to the tyranny of words, which are " the counters of wise men and SOCIAL UNION AND CHURCH UNITY. 19 the money of fools," and to the subtle pride of men. Each body of Christians naturally thinks itself pos- sessed of the'" truth/' and therefore cannot see its way to endanger this sacred deposit in any steps towards union. But is it possible that the " truth " can be a divider? Where is the judge, too, who will decide between all these rival possessors of "the truth "? An appeal to the sacred Scriptures has been the ostensible cause of the variance, and can, therefore, hardly bring about union. We know that the Church existed, and had accomplished the conversion of a large portion of the Roman empire, before the documents of the New Testament were put together. Indeed, we have no warrant from the sacred writings themselves that the Church was to be founded upon documents. It was founded by men, Jesus Christ being the chief Corner Stone of its foundation ; and the deeds of these men and their successors, as they are recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and other chapters in early Church history, were under God the means of building it up. We can study these records in such a spirit of humility as will make us ready recipients of even new and unpalatable truths. We can pray for enlightenment best when using the means to obtain it, and we can, following the Apostle's command, " mark them which cause divisions among you " divisions which lead to the frittering away of spiritual power in antagonism with each other which ought to be expended against the common enemy, divisions which make it easy for the selfish to secure their ends, and defeat the aims of all true social combina- tion. We can, above all, echo our Lord's prayer for visible unity. " Pray for the peace of Jerusalem : they shall prosper that love thee." [A portion of the conclusion of this sermon was, for time-reasons, omitted in delivery.] THE POLITICAL OFFICE OF THE CHURCH. BY THE REV. T. HANCOCK, M.A., Lecturer of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, London. Acts ii. 8-1 1, 40-47 ; iii. 1-6 ; iv. 1-3, 7-12. THIS is a very long text for a short sermon, but it is the shortness of the sermon which makes it needful to take so long a text. The text is itself a sermon which sets before us the alliance and the contrast between those two cities or commonwealths, the ecclesiastical and the civil, to which every Church- man belongs. In the early sections we see "the Jerusalem above," whereof the Apostle of the Nations told the Galatians they had by baptism received the franchise ; therein Jew and Greek, bond and free, are equally citizens, and she is "the mother of us all." In the later sections we see " the Jerusalem above " exercising her " political office " in the midst of " the Jerusalem that now is," the secular city or common- wealth. The very same persons who in the secular city are sundered into castes and classes, sects and parties, citizens and slaves, " impotent " and healthy, learned and ignorant, are by the universal ecclesi- astical city which is therefore the most real commonwealth united in one community and fellowship through Christ Jesus the Lord, as they THE POLITICAL OFFICE OF THE CHURCH. 21 are in every common or parish church. His Apostles at once begin to assert that the " Jerusalem above," the Catholic Church, is in so full a sense " the mother of us all," the mother alike of Christianity and of Humanity, that the first man whom they " save " in Christ's name is not a Christian. He is a lame beggar, who is outside the new fellowship of Christi- anity, who has not yet been christened. " His Name through faith in His Name hath made this man strong, whom ye see and know : yea, the faith which is by Him hath given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you all." St. Peter here asserts, as St. Paul afterwards urged his episcopal successor to teach, that the Head of the Church is not only the Saviour "specially of those that believe," but because He is the Saviour of the faithful, "is the Saviour of all men ; " so that every lame and im- potent beggar, in every secular State, has a right to the very greatest expectations from Jesus Christ and His bishops, and from us the members of His Church. I. It would be easy to preach a hundred sermons upon the title which has been given me to-day as my text. What the brother who wished me to speak upon "The Political Office of the Church" exactly meant by this encyclopaedical sentence, I do not know. I feel how difficult it is to talk for a limited time about so unlimited a matter without uttering truisms which most of us consent unto, though few of us may act upon them. The line which I intend to take, after much thinking over it, may not be the best in itself, but it will certainly be the best to relieve me from impertinence, and to serve you with hints which may help you to understand " the political office" which you hold in your national 22 A LENT IN LONDON. State and in your local parishes as the citizens of the supernal Jerusalem. I propose only the very modest task of reminding you what we ought in a parish church to mean by the three terms in the title, "The Church," "Political," and "Office," or at least part of what we ought to mean by them. Although such a method as this may not be exciting or interesting, it seems to be needful. For you have perhaps noticed that our professional politicians, our newspapers, and our other public enlighteners or mystifiers, mostly use each of these terms in the vaguest manner, as if everybody knew what they meant, or nobody should be disturbed about their meaning, (i) By "the Church," they mean the bishops and the beneficed clergy. (2) By " Political," they mean the very thing which the Church, as the common mother of us all, is obliged to regard as most anti-political, namely, the squabbles between the rival parties which divide and rend the political commonwealth, the ups and downs of Whigs and Tories, Radicals and Conservatives, money-lords and landlords, Progressives and Moderates, or whatever be the political nicknames of the hour and place. The Church justifies that political ideal which is more or less clearly seen by each party ; but she condemns the unneighbourly hatred, slander, false witness, and conceit by which each party attempts to realize an ideal which it professes to be intended for the profit of the undivided commonwealth. The common ecclesiastical mother reminds the Tory politician that his very first obligation to God and the community is to look chiefly at the good side of Radicalism and Radicals, and she preaches to the Radical believer the precisely contrary social morality to that which he preaches on the platform and reads in the newspaper. They are equally her children ; and her estimate of the slaves of both parties is to be seen in that THE POLITICAL OFFICE OF THE CHURCH. 23 " General Confession " to which she calls them both in her "Common" Prayer. (3) By " Office," the parties which divide the commonwealth seem usually to mean the individual wealth, place, or power which may be obtained at the end of a campaign by the cunningest fighter for the triumphant party. The bewildered citizen has always to come out of the heated strife of the dividing parties into the cool shadow of the common uniting parish church, in order to learn the right meaning of his everyday " political " phrases. II. What ought we, as the citizens of Christianity, to understand by these terms ? By " the Church " we ought to mean the whole organic body of the bap- tized, not in England and Wales merely, but through- out all the nations upon earth, with the apostolic bishops whom Christ Jesus has sent to the national polities, and the priests and deacons whom He has sent into the local polities. I say expressly " The Church," because the two kindred parties which occupy so much time and space in the field of politics the Liberationists and the Erastians never speak of " The Church." Or if they speak of " the Church," the one and only Church, it is as some vague and intangible ecclesia in nubibus beyond the reach of political life, and which cannot be set upon a hill, so that all men on earth may see it, and go up into it. They say that " Tlte Church " is " invisible." If so, the Church can have no " political office " at all. The Liberationists and the Erastians always speak either of " a Church" or of " the Churches."' But, as by birth or naturalization men are made members of the one nation of England, or the one nation of Russia, and may become citizens or parts of the 24 A LENT IN LONDON. State polity of either ; so by baptism the same men are made natives or citizens of a catholic commonwealth, a universal human State, city, or polity. Men, women, and children subject to the law of England thereby become fellow-citizens of the saints in Russia, Italy, and Spain witnesses to the unseen King and Re- deemer of all mankind. All these various and un- like persons, Jew or Greek, bond or free, male or female, impotent or wholesome, as the Apostle of Nations said to the Galatians, are actually constituted by the common christening into one body, one polity, one commonwealth, one Christianity, one Church, into whatever contrary sects or parties they may be dividing themselves. " The Church " has this in- destructible affinity with the State, as Richard Hooker said to Archbishop Whitgift, that she " is a city (civitds)) a state, a commonwealth ; yea, something more than ' a city/ for she is the city of the great King ; and the life of a city is polity? Hence, as he shows, comes her inherent sympathy with whatever is " political." But she is the one commonwealth of world-wide extent. Hence every English parish joins itself by its own congregational Te Deum in the common worship of "the Holy Church throughout all the world." Hence, too, the pastor of every Eng- lish parish is intentionally ordained not as the mere priest of a Church of England, as the Liberationists and Erastians fancy, but as " a priest of the Church of God," and so is he established in an "office" with which no one State on earth may dare to interfere. The Church in all the nations is one, and only one. It is as impossible for there to be two, or three, or a hundred " Churches," as it is for there to be two, or three, or a hundred baptisms ; or to be two, or three, or a hundred Christs ; or two, or three, or a hundred Gods. This catholic or human-universal constituency of the Church is one reason why " the political office THE POLITICAL OFFICE OF THE CHURCH. 25 of the Church," in every nation, must be something altogether unlike any other political force within that nation. Other reasons, of course, there are for the distinctive character of " the political office of the Church " in each of the nations, which for time's sake I must omit. Yet one of these so often confronts us in our political life that I ought not to leave it unmentioned ; I mean the moral contrast between the laws of Christ's commonwealth and the laws of any and every State in which it is established, or is seeking to establish itself. Where the State says to the citizen, " Thou shalt do no murder," the Church says to the same citizen what the Parliament dares not say : " He that hateth his brother is a murderer ; " " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The Church, as "the mother of us all," is the mediator and advocate for the human, humane, equal, or universal rights of the free citizen and of the slave, the native and the foreigner ; she is the divinely established and divinely endowed representative, within every State, of the rights of man as man, and of that entire humanity whereof every State is but a fragment. What ought we, as citizens of Christ's society, to mean by " office " ? Surely we must mean that which we are all obliged to understand by it, often disagreeably enough, in daily life. " Office ;J is an obligation, duty, or debt which is peculiar to us, for which we are personally qualified, or are taken to be qualified ; and it is a debt which is so binding upon us, that we ought not to shuffle it off upon another who does not owe this debt. The " political office " of the Church must therefore be such duty or duties as the Church owes to political life, which the Church is peculiarly called and qualified to render, and which no proxy or substitute for the Church can properly do in her stead. " I am debtor," said the Apostle of 26 A LENT IN LONDON. States to the Church of Rome, " both to the Greeks and the Barbarians ; both to the wise and to the unwise." But I am restricted by the title to "political" office. Wise men have disagreed over the question whether the quality " political " belongs rightly to an art or a science. Perhaps we may say that politics is both the science and the art of a righteous common life in the city, state, nation, or fatherland of which the Father of all has made us to be members ; and so includes alike the true doctrine of nationality and of citizenship, and the just conduct of natives and of citizens. The political science of the Church is in the common or catholic dogma and creed which St. Peter here recited to the rulers of his people. The political art of the Church is the practical application of all the articles of this creed to the education, libera- tion, salvation, healing, or making whole of the " im- potent," the suffering, desolate, and oppressed amongst our neighbours and fellow-citizens who are of the same body with ourselves in the same national commonwealth. By "political" we mostly mean "national." In the most important province of politics, the social, where we English use the Greek adjective "political," the Germans and Italians use the Roman adjective " national." We speak of " political economy," they of " national-okonomie " and " economia nation- ale : " but we mean the same thing. The politics of the state or nation deals with that which is national ; or if it deals with international or uni- versal human concerns, it is principally when poli- ticians and newspapers think that they affect the nation. But it is the office of the Church, in every nation, to deal with that which is universal, human, or humane, or that which belongs to man as man. So it is part of her political office, in every nation, to THE POLITICAL OFFICE OF THE CHURCH. 27 represent not only all the unrepresented and the mis- represented, the desolate and oppressed, the outcasts of that nation, but also even the outlandish the men, women, and children of other nations. When I say this is the office of the Church, I mean it is the office and obligation of each English citizen, who is also a citizen of Christ's catholic commonwealth. It is this that justifies Englishmen in clamouring for the salva- tion of the " impotent " Armenians. You will see, I hope, how the political science of the Church and the political art and office of the Church were combined in the very earliest political experience of the universal ecclesiastical community. One lame citizen is brought before us in the text. This one impotent beggar, in the belief of St. Peter and St. John, the two bishops of the Church, as they are going up to the common worship in the great national cathedral, becomes the foremost and most important of all their fellow- citizens. They do not ask him whether he is a Christian, a member of Christ's new universal common- wealth. But in the name and power of Jesus Christ, the universal-human King and Saviour, Whose legates they are, they exercise their " political office " by saving or making whole this miserable beggar, their fellow-citizen in the secular Jerusalem. They assert that supernatural alliance between Christ's Church and the national State which Parliaments can never disestablish ; and they declare what sort of men ought to be the first and foremost care of the political commonwealth, because such are the first and fore- most care of Him Who only can be called " the Man." Before His throne all " nations'' now stand gathered, and to Him each secular State, as well as His own Church, is subject as its Judge, and it is held by Him responsible, as He had told His Apostles a few days before His execution, for its conduct to every hungry, 28 A LENT IN LONDON. thirsty, naked, foreign, sick, imprisoned, or other im- potent person within its jurisdiction. Everything in these first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, at the beginning of the office of the Church in the State of Jewry, seems to me to be " political." These rulers who laid hands on the Apostles, and put them in hold until the next day, examined the bishops of the Church on the morrow as political offenders. The rulers were mostly " Sadducees," as the historian reminds us, such as would now think them- selves the advanced, critical, anti-dogmatic, rational, enlightened class of the nation. These were the rulers who had politically said, " We have no king but Caesar." They had already put the Head of the Church to death, not only for blasphemy in making Himself to be the Son of God in some sense in which no other man can be, but for " political " crime in making Himself to be a King ; yea, the King of truth and conscience, which must imply a universal- human kingdom, to which every politician as well as every ecclesiastic is subject. To this King, to His kingdom, the Apostles were to be " witnesses." This was their " political office," as it is still of the Church after them. So Jesus said and says, "Ye shall be wit- nesses unto Me." The Book of the Acts is the first Church newspaper. It relates how these rulers who said, " We have no king but Caesar," and how the poli- tical majority which had heaped its votes uponBarabbas which had disestablished Jesus of His kingdom and disendowed Him of His life are now suddenly confronted by Christ's universal society. These Jews and Greeks, and folk of all Nations, agree in declaring Christ to be risen, ascended, and sitting at the Father's right hand as " the Prince and Saviour," the Champion and the " Maker-whole " of the impotent, miserable, oppressed, and sinful members of the secular commonwealth, which can never be more THE POLITICAL OFFICE OF THE CHURCH. 29 than the caricature of a real commonwealth so long as it contains any miserable and wicked members, or until Christ Jesus is so owned and obeyed as its King, that all in it are made whole. " Be it known unto you all " ye rulers of the people and elders of Israel "and to all the people of Israel, that by the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Whom ye crucified'* ye prime ministers and chancellors by your sinister party-policy, and ye majority of the people by your blind ungodly votes " Whom God raised from the dead, even by Him doth this man " a mere beggar in your streets, the characteristic product of your kind of ruling and of voting" stand here before you whole. This is the Stone Which was set at nought of you builders " of a shoddy Babylon " Which is become the Head-stone of the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, where- by we must be saved" Possibly these politicians of Jewry would have told the man, as our rich place- mongers and politicians have lately been telling the poor parish priests of Christ in Wales, that a beggarly condition is helpful to " spirituality," and that a man may travel more quickly to their Elysium if he be made " impotent," whether by the sins of society or its parliaments. It is perhaps worth observing that St. Peter's political sermon to the rulers and citizens of Jewry is cited in the eighteenth Article of Religion, " Of obtaining eternal salvation only by the Name of Christ." Now, St. Peter uses one and the same verb (<roiw) for the making whole of the lame beggar and for the salvation of the entire human race. But whilst our translators have rendered it as " made whole " in Acts iv. 9, where the Apostle applies it to the personal salvation of his wretched fellow-citizen from lame- ness, they have rendered it as "saved" in ver. 12, 30 A LENT IN LONDON. where the Apostle applies it to the social entirety of mankind " under heaven " that is, to every man in every nook and corner of every polity on the earth. So that our English Bible has omitted that very point which St. Peter emphasizes in his political sermon to the politicians and people of his city. For the Apostle preached the inseparable oneness of secular and " eternal salvation " in the one Saviour of body, soul, and spirit. THE CHURCH AND THE PEOPLE. BY THE REV. R. R. DOLLING, Winchester College Mission. "THERE is a Church question to-day. Something wants doing." I would thus venture to translate Prince Bismarck's famous words. The very fact that I am asked to speak upon the question of Town Missions, and that one of the Church papers has for the last six or seven weeks delivered itself over to the discussion of the question, " Why don't working men come to Church?" surely proves conclusively that something wants doing. For the last eighteen years of my life I have lived amongst working men, the vast majority of whom are altogether untouched by the Church of England. Working as a layman, I saw this more plainly than I do to-day, though I have tried, even after I was ordained, to preserve my common sense. When I was ordained, I was sent by Bishop How to a district containing seven thousand people in the East End of London. I don't believe that twenty-five of these were influenced by the Church of England. Nine years ago I took charge of my present district in Landport. It contains between five and six thousand people. Dr. Linklater had had charge of it for two years. When he came there were not five communicants living in it. Nor is this 32 A LENT IN LONDON. to be wondered at. The parish from which it is taken contained twenty-three thousand people, and was worked by a vicar and a curate. I thank God there were five active centres of Dissenting worship in my own district alone. In the county of Hamp- shire there are practically three great towns. Win- chester, with a population of over nineteen thousand, has twelve beneficed clergy, dean, archdeacons, canons, minor canons, etc. ; Southampton, with a population over sixty-five thousand, has fifteen bene- ficed clergy ; Portsmouth, with a population of over one hundred and fifty-nine thousand, has sixteen beneficed clergy. Canon Jacob in Portsmouth, with splendid self-denial, keeps nine curates ; but there are few Canon Jacobs in the Church of England. The real difficulty is that those in authority know nothing about it. Bishops give timely notice before they visit parishes, and generally see things through the spectacles of the clergyman or of the ecclesiastical layman generally a much more ecclesiastical person than the clergyman himself. If they want to know the real truth, let them get a census made of the male communicants. It is far wiser to know your weakness than to know your strength. Many believe that increase of population will explain our present failure. But did you ever know a new district springing up without some Dissenting worship being offered to the people ? I don't believe it is a want of liberality on the part of Church- people that prevents the Church of England doing the same. It is the red tape of the ecclesiastical commissioners, and the freehold of the parochial clergy. But even in places where there has been no increase of population the large mother parishes of London, and little village churches where for the last thousand years there have been priests and sacraments what is the proportion of regular THE CHURCH AND THE PEOPLE. 33 communicants? Don't think for a moment that I mean to say that the working man of England has lost his respect for religion. I read in a French author once, " You in England have two sacraments, the Bible and Sunday. You retain them both. We had seven, and have well-nigh lost them all." I would to God that I could impress upon you how much the maintenance of this respect for religion has depended on our English Bible and our English Sunday. Let us be very cautious before we dare, by act or word, to weaken their influence. Don't let us be ashamed to confess what we owe to the splendid work of the Dissenters. It makes me oftentimes sick at heart to hear the way in which the newly ordained, strong in the orthodoxy of his High-Church collar, and of his grasp of doctrine, speaks of these class-leaders at whose feet he is unworthy to sit. And yet, thankful as we are to God for the self-denying and consistent witness that they have borne to Jesus, a present Saviour, we cannot but recognize that without the Church men cannot be perfected. The Church has lost its hold on them, and they have lost their hold on the supernatural. The Reformation in England, the work of the king and the aristocracy, never really touched the common people ; and because it lacked a popular element, lost its democratic side, the chief power in the Catholic Church for revolutionizing the world. The parish became the property of the in- cumbent, the diocese of the bishop. You remember the story of the wife of an established minister in Scotland remonstrating with her husband when she saw all the people crowding into the Free Church, and his answer, " He, my dear, may get the people, but I have got the tithes in my pocket." The incomes given in pre-Reformation times partly for services now discontinued, or only now just being gradually re- stored, and partly for the good of the poor, their D 34 A LENT IN LONDON. education and their needs, the clergyman being then the only man of light and of learning, has become now the prey of his wife and his sons and daughters, enabling them to be educated like ladies and gentle- men, and to take their part in upper-class society. Not only is the money their prey, but oftentimes the management of the parish as well. Do you think that you will get working men, or any other men, interested in that in which they have neither part nor lot? Practically the clergyman is forced upon the parish, and in turn enforces his own methods, per- chance even those of a Low-Church wife or of a Ritualistic daughter. Does vicaress spell " vicarious " ? And there are far graver scandals than this. Men perfectly incompetent through age and illness must linger on because, forsooth, of their families. Every one pities them ; but, for God's sake, let us pity them out of our own pockets, and not out of God's tithe. Sometimes it is the clergyman who is really to be pitied : he would do anything he could to touch the people ; but how can he, seeing he has never learnt ? A public school, a university, does not train a man to understand artisans or farm-labourers. Five per cent, of his parishioners, his equals, he does understand ; fifteen per cent., those hungering after gentility, he may guess at ; the eighty per cent, he is practically hopeless with. Then he is bound to consider the feelings of those with whom he mixes most freely, who support his charities, and very likely with many true kindnesses help himself. There is a deeper meaning in St. James's scathing words than the actual localities mentioned. And then the terrible difficulty of the Book of Common Prayer, containing as it does but one popular service ; the administration of the Holy Communion, which has been till quite lately reserved for a few of the elect, shorn of all the assistance . THE CHURCH AND THE PEOPLE. 35 which music might have rendered to make it understanded, with no dignity or glory about the rendering of it, frigid simplicity according to the mind of the Church of England falsely interpreted ; Morn- ing and Evening Prayer, at best services for clerics or for the really spiritually instructed, full of difficulties, full of perplexities. Is it any wonder that men pre- ferred the warm and loving and personal worship that they found in the chapel ? Is it so long ago since many dignified clergymen believed that the chapel was really more suitable for common people? And if the Church of England suited the working man so badly in ecclesiastical matters, did her attitude on social questions suit him better ? You have been told how largely the very roads and bridges, the art and education of England, were due to the clergy ; that liberty in England is due to the undauntedness of bishops ; that the history of the Church of England is " a progressive tale of the upward march of men." I am constrained to believe this because of the authority of him who said it. But in all earnestness I pray you ask yourselves, are there ten working men in England that believe it ? Perhaps you will answer back to me, " All this can be reformed/' A free Church can re- form herself, a fettered Church never. And if your heart is aflame to defend the Church of England, first, at any rate, see that you cleanse her. And you will never do this until you have the courage not only to think, but to speak, the truth about her ; to put away from ourselves all tall talk, and in a spirit of true and real humility begin by confessing where we fail. Let those in authority put the question to the test ; let them through Convocation propose the needed reforms ; and if our Establishment forbids us to reform, let us burst our bonds, and set ourselves free. And now I believe that the missions in the Church of England are practically doing this very thing. 36 A LENT IN LONDON. They are indoctrinating the minds of the younger clergy with the spirit of divine discontent with their methods and themselves. Just as from the slums of Holborn and of London Docks the restoration of the beauty of worship arose, which, attracting the multi- tude, has re-enthroned the Sacraments in the hearts of understanding and intelligent worshippers, the life of poverty and degradation, of meanness, of utter want, which those pioneers in mission work shared with their people, and by the sharing enabled them so to understand their minds, their longings, their desires, as to translate into a language which they could understand the Catholic learning of Oxford schoolmen ; so to-day it is the contact with the suffering and degraded and impoverished that enables men to translate into actual amelioration the theories and statistics which Oxford and Cambridge Christian Socialists have, at the cost of so much toil, evolved. Splendid as the individual and personal work is of so many of our present missions, yet their actual achievements are as nothing compared with their power as centres of education. They are the leaven which little by little is leavening the whole lump of the Church of England. And if I might venture to suggest, like all true educational centres, they make terrible demands on the teacher. If to go down and stay at the Oxford House is merely a fashion, an interesting way to spend a few weeks in the year, or if men from the universities or public schools for change do a little slumming as fashionable women did ten years ago, the use of missions will soon cease. It is the enduring of hardness, it is sharing the life, as far as possible the very food, the understanding of the thoughts, the realizing of the difficulties, the carrying away out of sight poverty which degrades men and women made in the image of God, a dis- content with the luxury, the "needed comfort" as THE CHURCH AND THE PEOPLE. 37 it is called of modern life, that will create amongst the educated classes a true enthusiasm for the right- ing of wrongs that cry out continually into the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth for which, if we do not repent of them, England's Church, at any rate, because she has not dared to speak out the truth, must expect her punishment. And for those of you who cannot from circumstances take part in this actual work, do not let other burdens besides that of personal suffering and labour fall on those who are doing this work for you. It is possible, by denying yourselves and surely this season of Lent speaks of that to remove in a large measure one of the most wearying of these burdens. During the ten years in which I have been privileged to conduct missions I calculate that I have spent at least eight hours a week in begging. It would be perfectly possible for the congregation that hears me to-day to relieve me of this. Let each one of us put it to our own conscience, whether we are doing our duty towards Almighty God and our fellow-Christians in this respect. PART II. OUR BROTHER MEN. PARTY POLITICS. BY THE REV. WILFRID RICHMOND, M.A. " Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth." I COR. viii. I. A POLITICAL leader, alluding to the subject only by way of illustration in the course of a philosophical treatise, has recently made use of words minimizing the part played by political discussion and political measures in the furtherance of the interests of society. " We perceive," he said, " that they supply business to the practical politician, raw material to the political theorist ; and we forget, amid the buzzing of debate, the multitude of incomparably more important pro- cesses by whose undesigned co-operation alone the life and growth of the state is rendered possible." Such language suggests, though it cannot be said to commend, a separation, if not a divorce, of social progress from political activity. Social reformers on their side are inclined to protest that in the strife of political parties social questions are neglected. Plain men, not committed to any party allegiance or to the advocacy of any special measures of social reform, are apt, with something of the same feeling, to cry, " A plague o' both your houses ! " And it must be confessed that it needs something of an effort to view political life as what it is, a branch of our general social life, subject to the same social principles as the rest, and that means, for a Christian, to Christian 42 A LENT IN LONDON. principles. To put it baldly, it sounds like a fatal combination of truism and paradox to say that party politics should be governed by the principles of Christian chanty. And yet a suggestive parallel may perhaps be drawn between the evils of party strife in politics and in religion. The need for religious toleration is often enforced by men of the world. Is there no need for political toleration ? Religious people of various sects and parties are told to dwell on their points of agreement rather than on their points of difference. Do politicians never forget that they have a common end in view ? We are told that we waste our forces in internecine warfare, when we might combine them against the common foe. Both parties in politics are at least acczised of obstruction, and their combinations for a common object are notable and fruitful, but comparatively rare. The man of the world, as a spectator of religious divisions, expresses surprise at a disunion so inconsistent with the Christian profession. Have we no common political ideal ? Might not an observant foreign admirer of our self-governing constitution express a little surprise, that so much of our force is spent on preventing the machinery of self-government from producing its normal and natural result. Theological hatred is a byword ; but if I were in the company of a man who differed from me both in theology and in politics, I think I had rather, for the sake of charity, that the conversation turned to the subject of my deepest religious beliefs than to even the personal character of my political leaders. Would you not say yourself that you had more often offended the political susceptibilities of your friends than the religious prejudices of those to whom you are most opposed ? " The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity." Where is that so true as in politics ? Our political PARTY POLITICS. 43 intercourse is poisoned by political abuse. It is not our political leaders who are the most to blame. Leaders might be named on either side who seldom add un- necessary bitterness to necessary strife. It is we, the rank and file, who afford the best example of the party spirit which is the exact antithesis of charity the spirit which does vaunt itself, and is puffed up, and does behave itself unseemly, and does seek its own, and is easily provoked, and thinks all the evil it can, and does rejoice in iniquity far more, it must be confessed, than it rejoices in the truth. Sometimes, it is true, our leaders play to the gallery ; but we are the gallery, and if they are to catch from us the spirit in which they are to play their part, it is from those who express their appreciative criticism of the political drama by utterances that might perhaps be less mischievous if they were even more inarticulate, but whose worst mischief is in their tone rancous, reckless, sibilant. And if we were challenged on the matter, I suppose we should be inclined to plead in self-defence the strength of our political convictions. " Perhaps/' a man might say, " I have no right to dogmatize as to the motives of such or such a political leader, but at least I know that the policy he pursues is fatal to the interests of the state and of society." " I know " that is just where St. Paul strikes in with his dictum to religious partisans. We know ? " We know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth." Observe what is the line St. Paul takes. There is a division in the Church on a very arguable point. The heathen feasted on meat that had been offered to idols. One party among the Christians said, " If you eat the meat that has been offered to idols, you are a sharer in the idolatrous worship." Another party said, " We don't believe in 44 A LENT IN LONDON. idols. An idol is nothing. The meat is neither the better nor the worse for being offered before an idol. To treat it as though it were is to appear to give a reality to the idol." Now, St. Paul does not say, " Both parties are partly in the wrong. The truth lies between you. Don't be one-sided." He does not say, " Your dispute is all about nothing. The point at issue is altogether un- important. There should be no division on the matter at all." He does not say, " You are both altogether on the wrong tack. Here is the true way to look at the matter." He takes a side. He starts by saying to one party, " On the point at issue you are altogether in the right. An idol is nothing at all. And meat offered before an idol is neither the better nor the worse." And then does he turn to the other party in the dispute and say, " Why do you disturb the peace of the Church ? Why do you set yourselves against a principle so obviously true ? " Not a bit of it. He turns upon his own side and says, " You are guilty of the evils of party division. You are right ? Certainly it is obvious enough. You know ? As to knowing we all feel like that. * We know that we all have knowledge.' You are perfectly convinced that you are right ? Exactly. ' Knowledge puffeth up.' Your knowledge, your strong conviction, your unerring and correct judgment on the question of principle, is of no use, confers no practical benefit on the society to which you belong, unless it is in- spired and used by charity. You with your know- ledge have to play your part in the construction, in the building up, of a spiritual society. In this social construction being perfectly right is not the con- structive force. In and by itself it is of no use ; it issues only in your dwelling with complacency on your own unerring wisdom. There is only one con- structive principle the principle of love." PARTY POLITICS. 45 That is a little vague. Let us follow the guidance of St. Paul's treatment of religious partisanship and see what it means. Does it mean, Don't let us have any parties ? Sometimes you hear people say, " If we could only do without parties and all agree ! " St. Paul's treat- ment of the matter does not point in the direction of an ideal state, which would pass an act of political uniformity, and have thirty-nine articles of political belief and no dissenters. Nor does St. Paul seem to say, " Why must you be ranged into parties ? Why not let each man judge for himself, and take each question on its merits as it comes ? " He lends no support to any such ideal of political atomism. So far St. Paul's teaching harmonizes with our accepted political doctrine. Political parties come, we should say, from two main causes. There are at least two sides to any practical question, and what Burke called the great leading general principles in government, to which the consideration of any par- ticular question will naturally be referred, lead the individual man to approach the particular question in the first instance from one side rather than the other. On the other hand, corporate action is stronger than individual action, and we are naturally led to associate ourselves with those on one side or the other with whom we are bound to find that we agree. Party is a body of men for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest upon some particular principle upon which they are all agreed. A bureau- cracy would eliminate partisanship in politics, but it would do so at the cost of a complete suppression of that individual liberty of opinion with which party allegiance is supposed to interfere. And individual self-interest, now educated and disciplined by party allegiance, that is, by subordination to the interest of common principles of public policy, would seek 46 A LENT IN LONDON. the ends of individual self-interest alone. The exist- ence of parties, bodies of divergent opinion, we need not deplore in politics any more than St. Paul did in religion. They are to be used for the attainment and realization of an adequate political ideal ; only charity is the force to use them. Nor, again, does St. Paul's charity say to us, " There must be parties, it is true, but keep clear of them. See the good on both sides, but don't belong to either." Rather he seems to say, " Choose your side on a clear ground of principle, and declare yourself. Only," he adds, " remember it is not the clear grasp of principle that does the work of life. To begin with, you must be a partisan ; but you must be more. 'Charity edifieth.' Charity is the practically con- structive principle." There are two ways of picturing the aim, the ideal result, of party conflict. According to one ideal, what each party would aim at would be gradually to permeate the other to pervade it, to include and comprehend it. Where political discussion is most fruitful, this is, in fact, the kind of result that comes about. According to the other ideal, each party should aim at neutralizing the efforts of the other, preventing them from accomplishing their ends. Religious divisions are sometimes said to neutralize in this way the efforts of religious activity, and it must be confessed that to this ideal political life seems sometimes to approximate. Charity in this sense is no more than a sympathetic endeavour to understand the mind of your opponent, and, while the opposition between you remains, to give effect to all that you can appreciate as practicable and true in his ideal. A very commonplace form of chanty, no doubt, but a virtue not only of incalculable prac- tical value, but of incalculable moral worth in the eyes of those who believe that God's work can only be done in God's way. PARTY POLITICS. 47 But charity " edifieth," is a constructive power, not only as the inspiration of practical effective work, but as the influence which forwards the interests of the truth. We look back with horror and wonder to the days when the principle of persecuting your religious opponents was recognized by the professors of nearly all religious creeds. Sometimes one is inclined to doubt whether the evil spirit of persecution, exorcised from the soul of the religious enthusiast, has not found for itself a home swept and garnished in the mind of the political partisan ; whether he does not need to be reminded that you can't compel political orthodoxy, or suppress the element of truth which must surely lie concealed in the worst heresies of your political opponents. In politics no less than in religion, truth is the possession not of the individual but of the society, and of the individual only as a member of the society. If you recklessly disregard your neigh- bour's conviction, you not only fail to forward the interests of the conviction you profess ; you insensibly dwarf your own mind and contract your own intel- lectual sympathies. The enlightened Corinthian who shared St. Paul's freedom from superstition as to meat offered to idols had an alternative of this kind before him. His opponent was rightly and con- scientiously anxious to be free from any complicity with idolatrous worship. This loyal devotion was theoretically approved by the opposite party. But this theoretical approval might die down into a very shadowy kind of belief, if he declined to give prac- tical effect to the sympathy he professed to feel ; or it might be deepened into a strong practical con- viction, influential in other spheres of Christian life as, for instance, in inspiring a loyal adherence to that moral ideal of the gospel which made the Christian separate himself from the vices of the Gentile world, and saved him from being " unequally yoked together 48 A LENT IN LONDON. with unbelievers." If we look back in political history, we may be able to say at any time since the Petitioners and Abhorrers of Charles II.'s time first gained the nicknames of Whig and Tory, that at such and such a juncture our sympathies would go with this party or with that. But we should generally be disposed to allow the truths for which I plead that the party with which we should not sympathize had some truth to maintain, some danger to avert ; that where from any cause the results of mutual sympathy and mutual appreciation were realized, there more good was done, less evil left to be undone ; and that where any party behaved as if the differences of party were as the differences of light from darkness, justifying a kind of proscription of political principles, there some truth suppressed revenged itself with all the greater force on those who had presumed to pose as the masters, not the servants, of the truth. Take your side. Maintain its principles. Uphold your political ideal as you see it. But remember that you do not see all, and that your political ideal, as it really is, as you would see it now if your vision were wide enough, is not likely to be realized solely by the efforts of that section of the population who support your own party, and without any con- tributory share on the part of that nearly equal section of the population who are politically your opponents. But, above all, charity " edifieth," charity is a con- structive force in politics in the sense that the spirit of charity, as the spirit of practical sympathy and appreciation toward your opponents, and as the spirit of genuine political toleration towards your oppo- nents' views, helps to build up in the mind and heart of the people whom politicians serve, the one com- manding political ideal of a social life governed throughout by the principle of mutual help. Such PARTY POLITICS. 49 an ideal may shadow itself out to us in very different shapes according to our political attachments. Such an ideal may be as distant from the realities of political life as the ideal of your own individual con- science is from the realities of your own individual conduct. But in the social as in the individual conscience the saving fact is that the ideal is there. The common end is paramount. And if we can agree on no common formula for describing it, if we can agree as to scarcely an outline here and there in the delineation of our hope, it is no mere empty ideal, if it dictates the method and the means of political action, if it governs the otherwise ungoverned tongue, if it gives chivalry and courtesy to the combatants, and to the victor that generosity which saves the van- quished from humiliation, if through the spirit thus diffused it makes victor and vanquished feel them- selves to be after all and above all fellow-workers with one another, fellow-workers with God. CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM. BY THE REV. H. RUSSELL WAKEFIELD, M.A., Rector of St. Mary's, Bryanston Square. IF this were not one of a special course of addresses on social subjects, there would be two kinds of Christian patriotism which one would ask you to think of to-day. The first of these is the duty which the devoted Christian adherent owes to his creed, the second is the obligation resting upon all followers of Jesus Christ to take a keen interest in the general well-being of the land of their birth and early train- ing. I only refer to the first of these for the purpose of reminding you of its importance; but I believe that, in view of the objects of these sermons, it is to the second I should direct your attention this morning. What is the view of the faith of Jesus as to the duty of a patriot? Are we encouraged by our Master to have a special love for, and to be prepared to suffer in the cause of, our country? The reply would be a determined affirmative if we had only the pages of the Old Testament to go to for guidance. It is evident that the Jewish people were under the particular care of the Almighty, and that of them He expected a peculiar service. It is, of course, not possible for us to get out of the realm of human argument, but with this reservation one may say that CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM. 51 God looked upon the land of Israel as the source whence all good was to flow throughout the world. It was to Israel that special revelations were given ; the experiences undergone by the chosen race had all of them for intention the training of the people for their high responsibilities ; out of Israel was to come the One Who was to give to the whole world a new idea of life. If even to-day we find the Jew to be one who is distinct from all men, mainly on account of his own desire for isolation, because of his belief in the peculiar privileges of his own land and his own race ; if, in fact, he is in some respects the most patriotic of men, it is not to be wondered at when we remember the emphatic utterances of law- giver and prophet of old time. Turning next to the life of Jesus Christ, we notice an equal devotion to His land and to His countrymen, tinged though it be with signs of His disappointment at the failure of the Jew to accomplish the purpose of the Father. Is it not a Patriot of Whom we read that " when He was come near, He beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace ! but now they are hid from thine eyes " ? 1 Is there not deep love of country in the cry, " O Jeru- salem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not " ? 2 It is a disappointed Patriot Who, when He finds a stranger ready to recognize in the Man of sorrows the Conqueror of disease and death, exclaims, " I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel"* In all the labour of Jesus Christ there seems to be a yearning desire that the Jewish people should be His fellow-workers, and it is only when 1 Luke xix. 41. 2 Matt, xxiii. 37. 3 Matt. viii. 10. 52 A LENT IN LONDON. He finds them determinedly opposed to Him that He goes to the Gentiles. It is hardly too much to say that we have evidence of the longing of the Founder of our faith that those of His own nation should be the missioners to the outside world. Few sharper pangs can have been felt by our Master than that one, to which the prophet had beforehand testified as one of the sufferings of the Messiah : " We hid as it were our faces from Him ; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not ; " l and to which reference is made by St. John in the first chapter of his Gospel, " He came unto His own, and His own received Him not." Admitting, then, that by word and act our Lord encourages the love of the native land, let us try to realize the meaning of the word " patriot." In order satisfactorily to do this we must begin by getting a clear notion as to what constitutes a nation. It is not a collection of people living in the same country, whose only uniting link is force, though that force may be exercised over all by one supreme ruler. We can define a nation as the abode of people held together by mutual consent in a social confederacy, which is based upon the general good and common interest. "What constitutes a State? Not high-raised battlements or labour'd mound, Thick wall or moated gate ; Not cities proud with spires and turrets crown'd ; Not bays and broad-arm'd ports. Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride ; Not starr'd and spangled courts, Where low-brow'd baseness wafts perfume to pride. No : men, high-minded men, With powers as far above dull brutes endued In forest, brake, or den, As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude ; Men who their duties know, 1 Isa. liii. '?. CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM. 53 But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain ; Prevent the long-aim'd blow, And crush the tyrant, while they rend the chain ; These constitute a State." l Each individual has the duty placed upon him of doing his part, suffering his share for the promotion of the best benefit of the general number. In so far as he fails in this, so far does he fall short of being a true patriot ; the greater his self-sacrifice, the more worthy he is of being numbered amongst the lovers of his native land. The patriot is one to whom sahis reipublicce is indeed suprema lex. We have in Christ an example of what may be the fate of one prepared to surrender all for his country ; we have also in Christ a proof of how much blessing may come to the general mass by individual self- sacrifice. God has implanted in our hearts a love of our fatherland, a love often not realized until absence from home has made us long for our return. It is when away from England that we feel most strongly the meaning of such lines as those of Clough "Dear home in England, safe and fast, If but in thee my lot lie cast, The past shall seem a nothing past To thee, dear home, if won at last, Dear home in England, won at last." If it be true that in each of us there is a natural love of our country, if this be encouraged by the word and example of Jesus Christ, it is strange to notice the indifferentism of the many to the general good, and also the narrowness of some as to what constitutes patriotism. Very few people, compara- tively, allow their hearts to be moved by matters outside their own immediate circle. They circum- scribe what they consider their interests, so as only to include persons and things which they must 1 Sir William Jones. 54 A LENT IN LONDON. consider if they are not themselves to be sufferers. Their business, their family, these make up their life's care. To them the cry of the old heathen, " I have not begotten thee, but for thy country's good," would appear meaningless. They consider that if they keep their own doorstep clean, every one else must do the same. The demands of country they hold to be satisfied if they pay their rates and taxes, and avoid breaches of the laws of their land. Such an attitude would be inexcusable in one who had never heard of Christ, and whose only notion of nationality was founded on earthly ideas ; it is doubly to be condemned in one who calls himself by the name of Him Whose life was given up for the purpose of making all mankind members of a great self-sacrificing brotherhood. One cause of this in- differentism may be the objection often taken to the religious teachers of a land showing any care for the polity of the nation. It is as important that the pulpits of England should be used for the purpose of stirring the sluggish citizenship of the people as for moving to any other form of active service of Christ. To omit the consideration of how it was for His country's good that Christ gave Himself up, is to neglect a valuable motive power for driving the wheels of civic life. It is curious to notice that the Jews crucified Jesus because He did not answer to their conception of a patriot. They looked for one who should head an army of deliverance from Roman government ; to them there was no beauty in a Man Who impressed upon His hearers the faithful per- formance of the duties incumbent upon the members of any organized society. The teacher of the religion of Christ must to-day remind people that whilst their personal conduct should be moulded upon the teaching and example of Jesus, they must get out- side their own little circle of interests, and must so CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM. 55 care for the well governing of their land that the influence of Christianity may be a leaven working in every department of national life. There is no greater danger than indifferentism. In 1870 many of the quieter and less self-seeking inhabitants of France had given up the politics of their country in despair. They looked out upon the land, and believing it to be given over to luxury and the consequent evils, tried, by abstaining from part or lot in the matter, to wash their hands of the whole business. The result is a matter of history. Those who saw some- thing of the great war between Germany and France, will acknowledge that the main factor in the over- throw of the latter country was the fact that the soldiers were led in many instances by men whose patriotism had been sapped out of them by years of self-indulgence. The neglect of their duty by many of the better people left the management of affairs in the hands of the less worthy. Government became a chaos, and the battle-field a shambles. One word as to the narrowness of view as to what constitutes patriotism which is taken by some of the more earnest people. It is a fact which can hardly be questioned, that with some, care for the native land is only active when there is some question pending with another country. The man who would readily sacrifice all for England in the time of war, will often regard with indifference internal dangers which threaten the well-being of the state. There are those who will consider little the justice of their country's cause when any dispute arises with another nation. The physical force which can be brought into action is with them the main consideration. There is to them excellent morality in the saying sometimes quoted, "My country at all times, my country with a just cause if possible, but my country, right or wrong''' But there is no true foreign policy 56 A LENT IN LONDON. for any state which has not at its back the power of Christ, and which cannot appeal to something higher than the argument of force. It is, however, neces- sary to realize that to manage our land so as to make her an example in all that tends to civic righteousness is the surest way to render her influential beyond her borders ; that to prove her the best governed, the most united of countries, is the truest way of exhibiting to others her strength. This widening of the idea of what is meant by patriotism is not the least of the objects which should be forwarded by every man who loves the land whence he "derived his birth and infant nurture." It is well for us sometimes to bear this matter in view even in regard to directly religious work. Here in England we are very active in the development of foreign mission work. Do we not, however, some- times overlook the fact that the truest way by which to spread Jesus Christ in other lands, is by showing the influence which He has upon us at home ? If every emigrant ship which sailed to distant ports, every regiment of soldiers which was quartered on the borders of semi-civilized districts, every band of explorers which penetrated the recesses of savage regions, carried the grace of God in their hearts, and showed an example of wholesome, Christian living, each of these would be a more potent evangelizing force than the labour of the missionary, and would certainly be also a most wonderful help to that devoted worker in his not too encouraging task. If this would be the case in directly religious effort, how wonderfully it would affect all questions of social reformation ! If every one felt that it was incumbent upon him as a Christian to regard all in his land as brothers for whom it would be a pleasure to suffer ; if we all understood that for the true patriot every CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM. 57 social question should be a matter of keen interest, what a fresh life would be breathed into the political atmosphere of the land ! What a different effect would be produced upon some of us by the head- line in a paper, " Death through Starvation " ! It would not matter to us then whether we could trace to some weakness of the one dead, the gradual sinking into poverty. To us the one thing present would be the feeling that shame should cover the face of a true patriot at the loss by such means of a brother, one who with us could call England his country. Think of some of the things which we have to confess to be blots on our land, and which should stop our boasting as we show the benighted foreigner our signs of wealth. In 1894, twenty-six per cent, of the deaths in London occurred in public institutions. How far was this due to the over- crowding of people in unhealthy dwellings, causing an early passing to the hospital ? Was any of this awful percentage the result of the pressure of poverty, which sends one to the workhouse, another to the asylum, a third, by its goading to crime, to the gaol ? Think, again, of the case of the children. Of the little ones born into this world, one in every five dies in many parishes before the close of one year of life. Three cases of suffocation of infants during sleep were recorded in one week in a large London parish. Look at the undersized men and women in some parts of our metropolis. They speak to us of ill-fed and ill-cared-for childhood. Does it not seem as if the sixth commandment were still read by some people " Thou shalt not kill, but need'st not strive Officiously to keep alive " ? Think, again, of the promotion of happiness in the land. There are few more pathetic sights than one which is to be seen in many a by-street and court 58 A LENT IN LONDON. in London : an " organ-grinder " playing away, sur- rounded by a number of badly clothed children, dancing and enjoying themselves after their manner. It is all they can have, and they make the most of it. God gives them the power of being easily made happy ; but how little man does in the matter ! Some people require six months out of London at the sea- side now, on the Continent next, at a country house afterwards. It is only because they do not think y because they are not in the highest sense actively patriotic, that they do not see to it that in some modified way their happiness is shared by those bound to them by the strong tie of national brother- hood. The poor of London are being driven away from the neighbourhoods where they work. They are now obliged to live either terribly overcrowded in particular districts, or else they must find a shelter in some cheap suburb. It would not be all disadvan- tageous that this disturbance should take place, if the State took care that cheap and rapid communica- tion should be ensured between the dwelling and the workshop, if the children had good air to breathe, and if the new home was one provided with reason- able sanitary appliances. It rests as a responsibility upon those for whom the poor have to toil, to see that these matters are not neglected. The patriot is one who will see to it that the education of the children of the land is what Milton calls " a complete and generous education, fitting a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices both public and private, of peace and war." How seldom is the responsibility of citizenship taught to the young of any station in life ! It cer- tainly is a fact that there was greater emphasis laid upon this part of life's duty by the old Greek philo- sophers than by many present-day teachers. All instruction under a truly patriotic system is bound to CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM. 59 have for its object the provision for every child of a fair opportunity to become the best possible outcome of the gifts bestowed upon him or her by Almighty God. Where the individuality of one of our citizens has not fair play afforded it, the State is probably the poorer, and we have failed in the highest patriotism. The patriot is one who will not primarily live for his own advantage. His desire will not be to gain ease for himself, but to secure happiness for his fellows. The man who overreaches in competition, who succeeds by cunning, may have what Bacon calls " crooked wisdom ; " but he will leave his country not the better, but the worse, for his having lived. Such men, indeed, merit to be " unwept, unhonoured, and unsung." They are festering sores, destructive of the true health of any state. All that makes men to be estranged the one from the other, that breeds suspicion, that causes forgetfulness of national brotherhood, is hurtful to the needs of the general number. The patriot, again, is one who will be specially care- ful of the interests of those who perform for the State those duties which strictly belong to each one of us. The soldier, the sailor, are prominent instances of the class to which this applies, but there is no one who is doing his work honestly and well, who is not in some sense benefiting the whole land, and who is not a vicarious labourer. We should, then, each one of us, make a determined effort to lighten life's load the one for the other. We have no business to put unnecessary temptation in the way of those who work for us. The provision of innumerable drinking-saloons, the foster- ing of every kind of opportunity for gambling, these are matters which call for State action. The latter of these is, in the opinion of many, almost the most serious danger menacing our land. Some doubt, and that not without evidence of the truth of their view, whether drunkenness is as great a curse, to the young 60 A LENT /A LONDON. especially, as gambling. Would that we could pro- vide some counteracting influence and interest for those likely to come under its baneful power! In all these directions true patriotism demands that active interest shall be taken by the State, whilst undue interference with individual liberty is avoided. In fact, there is no matter affecting the general well- being as to which the lover of his country will not be on fire. If any one should fancy that the consequence of this zeal for the good of the whole body would be neglect of individual interests, our reply would be, that the only true success in life is that which is achieved by those who recognize their responsibility in regard to others. Christ gave wholesome teaching when He insisted that "whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister ; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant;" and for all real Christians there is a strong incentive to such a life in the words, " Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many." l If we look through the records of past ages, if we think of those to whom are raised enduring monuments, we find that the most lasting success is that of self-sacrifice. True though it be that there has not always been " selection of the fittest" for honourable mention, still the desire has generally been to commemorate the labours of those who lived and died servants of their country. The soldier, the sailor, the statesman, the physician, the divine, the man of science, these are the ones whom we delight to honour, when we know that they cared less to advance themselves than to bless their country. So, then, the ambitious man can give nobility to his natural desire to shine, by using his powers in the service of his fellows. The greater our wealth, the more influential our position, the higher our gifts, the 1 Matt. xx. 26-28. CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM. 61 more it is laid upon us to spend and be spent for others. It is true that we must not confine our ideas of service within the borders of our own land ; there is a Christian patriotism which remembers the brother- hood of man, and which knows no boundaries ; still the first care must be in regard to that country in which our lot is cast, and towards which our hearts are most strongly drawn. If we are members of no mean land, if we are citizens of a leading nation, the more we assist in making it a happy and, in the best sense, holy State, the better its influence upon the rest of the human family. It must not be forgotten that when lands have fallen from their high position, it has been through their degrading themselves, and becoming hurtful to their own interests and to those of others. " The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof." These words tell us the same truth which experience teaches to peoples as well as to individuals. Privilege involves responsibility. Glorious opportunities are before Englishmen to- day. Our race is now more influential than ever before in the history of the world. A new idea of life and duty has arisen, and there is a place for every one to fill. Let us each, in God's Name, do our part, and then the time is not far distant when we shall see our land not merely the richest, but the brightest, the best, the freest, and consequently the most Christian, in the world. So long as there is one untended sick-bed, one unrelieved poor person, one unavenged injustice, one preventible misery per- mitted, there is work for us to do. What better lot for any one of us than to give our lives in order that the existence of our brothers, the lot of Englishmen, may be the brighter for our self-sacrifice ? There was gathered in the Temple of Theseus at Athens, during 62 A LENT IN LONDON. the battle of Marathon, an anxious crowd of citizens, who eagerly looked out towards that plain on which was being decided the fate of the nation. Suddenly a figure is seen approaching, and when he gets near it is noticed that he is clothed as a warrior, and that his steps are feeble. However, he climbs on, up the hill on which the temple stands, and reaches the entrance. Raising his hands aloft, he cries out to the assembled multitude, " Victory, O Athenians ! " and falls dead at their feet. The man's one desire had been the safety of his land, and he died bringing a message of comfort and success to his countrymen. Be it ours, in our day and according to our opportu- nities, to be messengers of brightness to our England ; to delight to suffer for the land we love ; to assist in winning to all that is true and godlike the men and women who are bound to us by the holy tie of national brotherhood. We may have an uphill struggle ; we may be misunderstood ; we may seem to fail ; we may have our trial before Pilate ; we may have our Cross. But we know of what glory Calvary is the antechamber ; and even if we did not, so long as the world is the better for us, so long as the truth prevails, who would stay to consider what he himself might have to suffer ? It is not the object of this address to suggest how in matters of detail this conception of Christian patriotism shall be carried into effect. Its purpose will be attained if it stimulates the desire of but one Englishman to devote himself to the service of his country, and to help forward for humanity generally that time when there shall be in all respects a satisfying of the " armies of the homeless and unfed," " And liberated man, All difference with his fellow-mortal closed, Shall be left standing face to face with God." PEACE AND WAR. BY THE REV. J. LLEWELYN DA VIES, D.D. " If it be possible, as much as in you lieth, be at peace with all men." ROM. xii. 18. THERE is a line in the " Faery Queen " in which Spenser notes the unshrinking resolution with which loving pity faces darkness, filth, and foul smells, in setting itself to rescue a half-dead captive out of a dungeon. "Entire affection," he says, "hateth nicer hands " hands, that is, too nice or fastidious to put themselves to such work. Similarly, we are insisting in some of these lectures, Whole-hearted Christianity hateth nicer hands. There have been persons, even divines of high reputation, to whom war has seemed too repulsive a fact for Christianity to have anything to do with. They have regarded wars between nations as inevitable ; they have not been able to understand how the course of the world could dis- pense with them ; but war is so dreadful to Christian feeling, that they have concluded that the only thing for religion to do is to pass by on the other side. To us the spirit of Christ is bearing witness that our faith must not pass anything by on the other side. The worst and most impracticable things in the world are those which belief in Christ is specially called to affront and to attack. We have no right to turn away from blood and carnage, or to admit 64 A LENT IN LONDON. that, if war is wrong from the Christian point of view, it is to be allowed to go on. And though it may seem honourable to the gospel to affirm that its morality is peremptory and will have nothing to do with compromises, we can see that the method of Christ in His ruling of the world does not disdain the partial remedying of evils, the gradual improve- ment of human society. I should be making but a futile use of the oppor- tunity given me to-day, if I were to content myself with repeating Christian commonplaces about peace on earth and good will amongst men. It is the wish, I am sure, of those who have organized these lectures that the preachers should in all practical questions come to the point. It is true that international relations belong to " high politics ; " but in a demo- cratic age, those who are but units of the population cannot entirely divest themselves of responsibility, and may perhaps exercise some influence, even with regard to matters that must be practically dealt with by experts of administration. We are warranted in assuming that international peace is not only a Divine ideal, commending itself to all the good aspirations of mankind, but also a proper object of the efforts of statesmen and the policy of govern- ments. During centuries of almost unceasing war between the nations, all who have gone to church have been bidden to pray that it may please God to give to all nations unity, peace, and concord. But the Christian Church has not in old time done much has hardly even laboured with conscious en- deavour to prevent wars from occurring. George Fox and his followers have made protests, with a sincerity which they have attested by voluntary sacrifices, against the causing of bodily pain to any one either by individuals or by nations, as an act altogether forbidden to Christians ; but the under- PEACE AND WAR. 65 standing of Christ's precepts in the letter is mis- chievously confusing to the Christian conscience, and it is doubtful whether such repudiations as those of the Society of Friends and of Count Tolstoi have not done more to discourage than to stimulate intelligent and general efforts to avoid war. In our own age, however, many causes have been co- operating to awaken the conscience of Christendom on this question, and to set people thinking how peace between nations may best be preserved. Our eyes have been in some degree opened to the kingdom of heaven as a living reality, and we have been led to see that this spiritual kingdom claims all the earth, with its kings and its nations, and all provinces of human life, for its own ; and it is evident that when two nations are fighting with each other they are breaking the pax coelestis, and that one of them certainly, if not both, has been showing disloyalty to its heavenly Lord. The idea of the Catholic Church has .at the same time begun to shine with more of steady and attractive light before the minds of all Christians ; and the song has a new music to our ears in which the four living creatures and the four and twenty elders pay homage to the Lamb, saying, " Worthy art Thou to take the book" the book of destiny "and to open the seals thereof: for Thou wast slain, and didst purchase unto God with Thy blood men of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation, and madest them to be unto our God a kingdom and priests ; and they reign upon the earth." And then the immense increase of inter- course and the growing complexity of interests between the different countries on the face of the globe make war more unnatural and more ruinous ; whilst the development of the machinery of destruc- tion causes the imagination to quail before the terrors of the battle-field and the siege. So that whilst the F 66 A LENT IN LONDON. childish doctrine that Christians ought never to consent to go to war at all takes no hold of men's minds, many earnest persons are much occupied with anxious thought as to the ways in which war might be superseded, or the chances of its occurring be diminished, or its horrors, if it should occur, be mitigated. The suggestion that nations should be persuaded to contract together for a proportional reduction of their armaments does not seem to be entitled to much serious consideration. But the movement in favour of referring differences between nations, such as have so often ended in war, to impartial arbitra- tion, is undoubtedly what we call a practical one. The method of arbitration has been actually tried with success ; and it is admitted by the most un- romantic statesmen that there is promise in it for the future. Apart from the particular cases in which irritating and threatening differences have already been thus settled, the very fact of nations submitting their claims to what they hope will be just judgment, and then acquiescing in any concessions which the judgment imposes upon them, is likely to exercise a very important moral influence. And this submit- ting of differences to independent judgment is the line which the historic progress of peace in the world has hitherto taken. The savage way of settling quarrels is to fight them out, till the weaker is killed or has had enough. The interest of the community, as soon as a community of the most elementary kind has existed, has always sought to restrain the free indulgence of personal anger, and with that view the ruling power has undertaken to see any complainant righted and to punish the wrong-doer. The ruling power forbids the members of the community to avenge themselves ; it pronounces judgment, and en- forces its judgment upon all the parties concerned. PEACE AND WAR. 67 And so peace is preserved, in a greater or less degree, in a tribe or a nation. Not only are individuals thus kept from trying what one can do to injure another, but combinations of persons, sometimes embracing large numbers, bring questions of right and wrong into the courts, and submit to the judicial settlement of them. It has been easy to ask, Why should not nations, which are large combinations of persons, have their differences similarly adjusted ? And the answer has unfortunately been equally obvious. Nations are not subject to a ruling power. If Europe were divided into a hundred small countries, it might be possible to establish a European federal govern- ment, with an adequate force to maintain peace amongst the federated States. But, as things now are and tend to be, we cannot even imagine a central European force that would undertake to treat say France and Germany as subjects, and to prevent them from fighting. And we are obliged to admit that the internal peace of communities would have had a poor chance if it had depended on voluntary submission to arbitration. With regard to the apparent hesitation on the part of the United States to act on the judgment given by the Court of Arbitrators in a recent controversy, it is impossible that the American people could be guilty of such treason to the cause of peace, and so dishonour themselves, as definitely to repudiate the obligation which they have incurred. But the very hesitation is greatly to be deplored. Whilst, then, the lovers of peace will do all that they can to promote the international use of arbitra- tion in particular cases, and to establish such a custom of submitting disputed points to arbitration as may have some constraining moral influence over statesmen and people, it is idle to hope for any such success in these endeavours as will warrant a 68 A LENT IN LONDON. great Power in disarming. When national safety and national honour are at stake, it will not do to trust unreservedly to the kindness and unselfishness of other nations. Arbitration may do mankind the great service of preventing some wars, but no sensible person will persuade himself that it lies in arbitration to abolish war. There are questions which no Eng- lish statesman would think of referring to arbitra- tion, unless he meant to surrender altogether his country's independence, and to make England the vassal of some Power or Powers outside itself. Our occupation of Egypt is a living example of such a question. Frenchmen, it is said, will never be heartily friendly to us so long as we retain our control of Egypt. I am afraid there is truth in this statement, and it is a serious one for us to keep in mind. But we cannot imagine any earthly judge or jury to whom we could be expected to submit the simple question whether we are to retire from Egypt or not. It would be equivalent to saying to the court, " You must undertake to govern Egypt, and the British empire, and the world." For there is a second question which would require an immediate answer, " What is to happen in Egypt, not to speak of other parts of the world, if we withdraw ? " But my business in this place is to ask what our Christianity prescribes with regard to international peace ; and the direct concern of our faith in Christ is not so much with expedients as with tempers and affections. And the properly Christian spirit, if it responds to the heavenly voice which is bidding it claim public affairs as one sphere of its duty, cannot fail to be a powerful influence in the promotion of international peace. Magnanimity seems to be the name that will best describe the temper proper to a great Christian nation in its dealings with other nations. A state PEACE AND WAR. 69 differs from an individual, and national duty is not quite the same as individual duty. But it is a great point to recognize that there is such a thing as duty towards a neighbour nation. To the Christian eye, not only are men of all races members of the universal human race, but the nations are under one heavenly law, and each one has its place and its calling in the great Divine economy. As regards sacred precepts of policy, we are at a disadvantage from the fact that the New Testament age was not an age of independent nations, but of an empire with subject provinces ; and every precept of Christ and His Apostles possesses the reality and life of being meant for those to whom it was first addressed. The New Testament is the book of the Catholic Church, of redeemed mankind. But the New Testa- ment is supplemented by the Old, which is the book of a nation. And even in "the New Testament there is enough to make nations honourable and sacred to those who see, as we do, that God is at this time constructing the world out of them. I must take this for granted, and I will ask, Have we in England, we English Christians, acquired thoroughly the habit of honouring the nations with which we stand side by side in the world ? Do we always bear in mind that they are entitled to our respect, to our good will, to our friendly consideration, to a favourable con- struction of their sentiments ? Do we feel it to be wrong, an act to be ashamed of, a violation of God's law, though there may be no human tribunal to punish it, that one Power should behave unjustly or offensively to another Power? There are those who persuade themselves that wars are the wanton work of kings and diplomatists, and that if we could only get the populations con- sulted before coming to blows, there would to a certainty be an end of war. But most of us do not 70 A LENT IN LONDON. so read history. A population often has more passion, a hotter sense of outraged pride or interest, less prudence, than sovereigns and ministers of state. And with us in England, there is no great danger of the Government hurrying us into a war which the people would judge to be unnecessary and unjusti- fiable. At all events, a gracious and magnanimous feeling on the part of the general population towards foreign nations would quickly tell on the policy of our Foreign Office : nay, why should we not con- gratulate ourselves on its having told already ? For I do believe that in the general mind of England there is more of a desire to act justly, considerately, peaceably, towards all other nations, great and small, than is abroad put to the credit of perfidious Albion. If we venture to think fairly well of ourselves in this respect, let us try earnestly to justify our self-esteem. By our own habitual temper and way of speaking we should let our representatives know that we wish them, not to weaken our fighting force, not to lessen our influence for good in the world, but to refrain carefully from all that an impartial judge would pronounce to be aggressive, insolent, vexatiously exacting, and to make liberal allowance for national susceptibilities. I have admitted that, as regards Christian duty, we cannot transfer the principles of conduct straight from the individual to a nation. The Christian law of personal duty is that a man should surrender himself absolutely to the disposal of the heavenly Father, so that by him and through him the Father's will may be done : not as sacrifice is sometimes perversely misunderstood that he should throw himself away, or make himself less serviceable to the Father's purposes than he might be ; but that he should offer himself, the best he is and the best he can make of himself, to the doing of the Father's PEACE AND WAR. 71 will. And this we may believe to be also the true principle of a nation's conduct. But an individual may easily be called, in this sacrifice of himself, to give up his life or his property : for a nation, on the other hand while we may refrain from laying down that it can never be conceivably a nation's duty to give up its life it seems to be almost an absolute duty to cherish and defend its life. It is not a selfish feeling in a citizen to rejoice in his country's in- dependence and greatness. And such a feeling will of itself dispose the wise patriot to desire that his nation should cultivate an unaggressive and respectful policy, a policy of good will and consideration, towards other nations. For a nation may take to itself the encouragement given both under the old covenant and the new to indi- viduals : " He that would love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile : and let him turn away from evil and do good ; let him seek peace, and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and His ears unto their supplication ; but the face of the Lord is upon them that do evil." It cannot be hurtful to a nation in the long run that it should endeavour, at the cost of some self-restraint and of any reasonable concessions, to be on the best possible terms with its neighbours. I am far from advocating a feeble external policy, but before and beneath any duty of going to war and of trying to be victorious in war, the Christian must set, for his country as for himself, the great ideal of peace and good will amongst men. The Lord, Whose slaves we Christians are, is the Prince of Peace. If He forbade us absolutely to strike with the whip or with the sword, to deal death with rifle or artillery, we should be bound to obey Him. When He bids us fight, it must be because the true peace which He loves, and 72 A LENT IN LONDON. which He came to establish, is to be better attained by fighting than by submitting. Inasmuch as the Son of God is the heavenly Peacemaker, there is a blessing on all who anywhere make peace, and they shall share His name, and be called sons of God. But St. Paul's precept admits that the keeping of peace does not depend upon one party only. The most peaceable of men may be forced into a con- tention, into an appeal to the law. which may result in bringing serious punishment upon his adversary. And a nation may be forced into war more easily, according to Christian principles, than a single person into a quarrel ; because kings and ministers of state, and all citizens in their degree, are trustees for large and high interests, which it is not within their right to surrender as men may surrender things which are privately theirs. At present there is no way of securely preventing war. That a great nation should make it known that nothing will provoke it into war, and should let its high spirit run down and its weapons of attack and defence grow rusty, is un- questionably the way to invite treatment from other powers which no self-respecting nation could tolerate. If you could imagine England persuaded by blind letter-worshipping Christians to disarm itself, totally or partially, that would be the worst service that could be rendered to the cause of peace. We have to reckon upon war as possibly inevitable. I do not enter into argument with those who hold that a Christian man is not allowed in any circum- stances, in a private or a public cause, to lay a finger of force upon a fellow-man. I believe that they entirely misread the New Testament; but they are few, and almost silent. A far more injurious notion is that of those who assume that war is an unchristian sort of thing, but also that it is a necessity in such a world as this. If it is necessary to go to war, it is PEACE AND WAR. 73 not unchristian. Nothing that is necessary is for- bidden by Christ. And if we can enter upon war with a clear conscience, it is foolish to urge that we should disable ourselves beforehand for the conflict. The chance of having to go to war implies to a rational mind our making ourselves ready for war. What can we think of the good sense of those and there are such persons who in the same breath will denounce armaments and demand that our Govern- ment should instantly protect Armenians from the cruelties of Turks and Kurds ? It is not for me to express an opinion as to what our armies and ships of war and defences should be, and I do not know that there is any slackness on the part of our people in making such preparations as their responsible advisers tell them are necessary. Every one can understand how important it is to protect our trade and guard our dense population from being starved. But it does not appear to me to be unsuitable that I should appeal to our Christianity as not merely permitting but enjoining us to keep ourselves well armed, and to nourish a courageous spirit. I remember being present a good many years ago at a meeting for religious discussion, at which Mr. Henry Richard was invited to plead the cause of peace. Mr. Richard was a good man, who drew to himself the reverent esteem of all who knew him. We listened to him with sincere respect as he dwelt upon the horrors of war, and made appalling calcu- lations of the money spent on armaments. And we were then constrained to ask him what his counsel was with regard to our armies and fleets. He pro- tested rather warmly that he had never maintained that we ought to disarm ourselves altogether. What then ? Did he contend that we were spending four times as much, or twice as much, on armaments as we ought to do ? But he disliked being thus 74 A LENT IN LONDON. questioned, and replied that he was sorry not to meet with more sympathy from his audience. No doubt we ought not to blind ourselves to the wounds and deaths and destruction of property which war causes, nor to the fact that the millions which we spend on our army and navy might be otherwise spent on various good objects. But a nation which spends what it deems necessary, however immense the sum may be, on self-preservation, may rightly ask, " Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment ? " An accurate description of a field of battle, of a rout, of a siege, of an army wasted by disease, may be painful beyond what we can bear. But it is not amiss to remember that there are other human sufferings which would not form a pleasant picture. These soldiers who have been killed or badly wounded were not otherwise going to live for ever in perfect health. How many of them might not have suffered as much or more before they died, if they had not been victims of war ? And the lives of many of them, if they had been prolonged, would not to a certainty have been of great value. Human life is not all golden. We often express without misgivings a deliberate wish that there were not so large a quantity of it upon certain areas as there is. But if we decline to go into uncomfortable com- parative estimates of this kind, the horrors of war and its expensiveness, honestly and sternly faced, may produce another impression upon our minds than that of daunting us. If there are any lessons characteristic of Christianity, this is one of them that we are to set the things of the spirit above the things of the flesh. There is no amount of fleshly ease that can be weighed in the scales of Christ against even a low spiritual value. And the honour and consciousness of a nation are spiritual things. It has often been alleged by free PEACE AND WAR. 75 critics that the morality of the New Testament is defective in not including patriotism amongst the Christian virtues. But Christianity puts no slight upon the Jewish patriotism, that supreme virtue of the Old Testament, which is a part of our Christian inheritance. If you could bring together under one view all the deaths and wounds that Englishmen have suffered and inflicted in war, and make one colossal addition sum of all the moneys spent on war by English governments from the days of Alfred till now, can we set the pain and the cost for a moment against what England has been and is in the realm of the spirit to her sons ? The truth on which I am insisting has been expressed in some vivid sentences by the author of "Ecce Homo." "War is frequently de- nounced as unchristian, because it involves circum- stances of horror : and when the ardent champions of some great cause have declared that they would per- severe although it should be necessary to lay waste a continent and exterminate a nation, the resolution is stigmatized as shocking and unchristian. Shocking it may be, but not therefore unchristian " (p. 278). Whilst he condemns religious persecutions as deplor- able mistakes, carried on with much evil passion, he is yet bold to testify "the ostensible object of such horrors was Christian, and the indignation which pro- fessedly prompts them is also Christian, and the assumption they involve, that agonies of pain and blood shed in rivers are less evils than the soul spotted and bewildered with sin, is most Christian " (p. 280). I do not see how we can refuse our assent to these statements ; and in days of softness, when an absurd value is set upon human life as mere existence, it must be well that we should steep our minds in such convictions. At the same time, it is a comfort to know that Christian humanity has done something, and may probably do more, to mitigate the horrors 76 A LENT IN LONDON. of war, as well as to make its occurrence less likely. Under international rules, which it is the interest of all powers to observe, non-combatants have now a degree of protection which formerly they could not claim ; and to the fighting men war is made by various prescriptions less exasperating than it used to be. Here is a field on which our Christianity is bound to push its influence to the furthest possible point. Some of those who denounce war would meet the argument that there are spiritual values for which we must be ready to suffer and inflict the pains in- volved in war, by asserting that war necessarily degrades the contending nations by the unspiritual passions which it stimulates and lets loose. I find it alleged, for example, that " the moral deterioration and the depraving of right principle involved in war are much more serious than the visible and immediate results of this abysmal evil." I believe that actual experience calls for some modification of this judg- ment. There is a terrible war, producing hideous slaughter, now going on between China and Japan. It looks as if it were an aggressive war on the part of Japan. But I feel little doubt that the Japanese people are raised in the moral scale rather than lowered by this war ; that they hate the Chinese less now than they did before the war began ; that the patriotic sentiment inspiring the whole people to make joyful sacrifices for the sake of the safety and aggran- dizement of their country is on the whole an elevating one. The most shocking war of my lifetime was the American civil war ; and I do not believe that any American who lived through the war in either Northern or Southern State would admit that the general moral tone of the population was lowered by it. As to the moral effect of the Crimean war I can speak with more knowledge. Some of my hearers may think that I am making myself an apologist for war ; but I * or THS { \?*HVBiT>r or PEACE AND WAR. 77 am conscious of no other desire than to do justice to the good I have known. It is impossible for those who lived during that war to forget how deeply we were all moved by it ; and every emotion that it stirred, of hope, of anxiety, of awe, of grief, was a nobler one than the habitual feelings of ordinary life. We had no malignant hatred of the enemy. The luxurious class sent out its men in larger proportion than any other class to die and to suffer cruel hard- ships for their country. I was then living and work- ing in Whitechapel, and I had much to do with correspondence between families there and soldiers in the Crimea, and I could not help seeing how humble lives were exalted by the demands and the dangers of heroic service. I had a friend who was with our army as chaplain in the Crimea, and who saw all the miseries of that terrible campaign without the stimulus of being a combatant ; and after his return he told me that, as he reflected on the past, he was sure he had never lived in so good a spiritual atmosphere as that of the English army on those blood-stained heights. Do not suppose me to say that we should do well in going to war for the sake of the moral advantages that we might gain by it ; I have suffi- ciently declared that I count it a sin to bring on a needless war : but I hold myself warranted in believ- ing that, if at any time we felt that as a self-respecting nation we had no alternative but to accept a challenge to battle, we might expect a fine thrill to go through every section of the population, waking up unselfish aspirations, drawing us into mutual sympathy and united effort, and teaching us to value more worthily the glories and blessings of our national heritage. As I am asking you to look at the question of international peace and war in the light of reso- lute uncompromising Christian faith, and especially with reference to the personal duty lying upon us as 73 A LENT IN LONDON. citizens of a Christian country, I do not dwell at any length upon the aspects of war which have presented themselves to historical inquirers, when they have endeavoured to estimate the effects of particular wars upon the nations which have been engaged in them. But if we reject the doctrine that a war has always been sin and wickedness from beginning to end and on both sides, and hold that a nation may be obeying Christ in taking up arms, there may well be some Christian satisfaction in recognizing the service which war has been made to render to the progress of man- kind. We rightly desire to see in the history of the world as many signs of a beneficent governing Hand as we can discern. Looking back upon the period which comes within living memory, we find results of primary importance ascribed by political observers to almost every great war of the period. There seem to be knots in human affairs which cannot be untied by negotiation, and which require the violence of war to cut them. I suppose there is no American, even in the Southern States, who does not now recognize that the sufferings and losses of the civil war were a price that it was worth while to pay for the deliver- ance of the continent from slavery, and for the higher and closer unity which binds the several States and their people into one great nation. On the soil of Italy rivers of blood have been shed in our time ; but the result of the carnage has been to change Italy from being a geographical expression into a united nation and an important European Power. As to the terrible war between Germany and France, it is im- possible that Germans can regard it as a baneful and fruitless crime ; whilst even Frenchmen, smarting under the humiliation of their country, have been able to recognize great compensating advantages in the downfall of the Second Empire and in the forcing of wholesome thought into the minds of the French PEACE AND WAR. 79 people. Those who value trade highly, as most do of those to whom war is entirely evil and absolutely wrong, will not be able to blind themselves to the good which may at least be occasioned by evil, if victorious Japan should compel the Chinese to open their whole empire freely to foreign trade. This will do the Chinese themselves more good, in the mere maintenance of physical life and well-being, than they will have suffered harm in the slaughter of their worthless armies and the disabling of costly vessels. A war is sharp, but it does not last long, whilst these vast boons go on spreading their influence from year to year and from generation to generation. Such historical observations may make us doubtful whether the time has yet come in the counsels of God for the superseding of war, and therefore less will- ing to risk the honour and greatness of our country on the chance that no foreign Power will ever offer us an insult or do us an injury ; but they ought not to persuade statesmen and I do not believe that they would to speculate in war as a means of gaining something for their country and for mankind. I would echo the doctrine of the Quakers, that where duty is clear, the results of doing it are to be left in God's hands. God knows better than we do how His world is to be governed. He must have ways, whether we can imagine them or not, of governing the world without war. He must know how to save a people from being engrossed by money-getting, or surrender- ing themselves to the excitements of frivolity and carnal pleasure, or being turned into sheep by the dull and comfortable routine of a quiet life. And nothing can be clearer than the Christian duty of doing what makes for peace. It can never be right to be insolent, grasping, false to engagements. We ought to be lovers of our country, and it cannot be wrong that a blush of anger should come into the So A LENT IN LONDON. cheek of a Christian citizen if the honour of his nation should be outraged or its rightful interests assailed ; but it is still more certainly right that the blush should turn itself into one of shame if the country that he loves should be betrayed by its Government into aggressive or justly irritating action, especially towards a weaker state. The ideal bearing of a Christian Power in international relations seems to be that of a high-spirited gentleman of the old time of a person, that is, trained to the use of arms, ready to resent a purposed outrage, but mindful of the obliga- tions of courtesy and honour and social harmony, conscious that his station pledges him to self-restraint and magnanimity, twilling to wound yet not afraid to strike. THE COLONIES. BY THE REV. BERNARD R. WILSON, M.A., Rector of Kettering. "His seed shall become a multitude of nations." GEN. xlviii. 19. THE old Hebrew patriarch lay dying. Summoned to his bedside, his sons are to be " gathered together to hearken unto Israel their father/' as with pro- phetic insight, made more penetrating by approaching death, he gives to each his final message. But first Joseph, his best-loved son, has brought his own two lads, born to him in Egypt, to receive the old man's parting blessing. "God . . . bless the lads," he says, "and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth." And then, with growing keen- ness of prophetic vision, he looks down the ages of the future, and, singling out the younger lad, lays upon Ephraim's head his right hand, and promises to his tribe a destiny of growing power. " His seed shall become a multitude of nations." We must not stay to consider what measure of fulfilment the words received in the later history of the powerful tribe of Ephraim, with its predominant influence, its men of war, its royal house and goodly cities. They lend themselves to our present purpose, and far more literally describe a national growth and development of modern times even more remarkable G 82 A LENT IN LONDON. and quite as unexpected as that of Israel of old from a clan to a people. The English people, once isolated among the nations of Europe, numerically insignificant, over- shadowed by more powerful neighbours, by a wonderful outburst of national vigour and develop- ment, extending over three and a half centuries, has " grown into a multitude in the midst of the earth " " a multitude of nations " reproducing in the utter- most parts of the earth their own free institutions of self-government, yet bound together by ties of common kinship and common interest, and by a very real sentiment of common love. This expansion of England, the causes which have produced it, the essential conditions of its permanent stability, and the larger moral responsibility which devolves upon each citizen of our great empire, these are the subjects for our consideration to-day, not unfitly introduced by the suggestive words of the dying patriarch, which lend themselves as a suitable motto to the story of the English people. The greatness and importance of the subject may well claim our closest attention, and if the complexity of the issues involved seem to make its adequate treatment well-nigh impossible, I can only ask your pardon, and express the hope that you will follow out for yourselves some of the lines of thought which I can only hope to suggest to you in barest outline. Only, before we finally turn our thoughts from the death-bed of the patriarch, let me point out that his words are not merely a convenient motto, but to this extent a text that they suggest an underlying moral correspondence with the central thought which I desire to emphasize. The so-called blessings of Jacob to his sons are, as you remember, prophetic outlines of the varying fortunes of their tribes in THE COLONIES. 83 later days. And the characteristic feature of his prophecy is this, that the moral and spiritual character of the fathers, reproduced in their children through successive generations, is the determining factor which will shape the social and political fortunes of their several descendants. Reuben and Simeon will hand on characters which will fail to leave a mark upon the world. Their names will be blotted out from the map of the tribes. Judah and Joseph have gained a personal force of character which, if maintained, will make their offspring great and mighty peoples. It is this suggestive thought, that the political welfare of peoples is determined by moral considera- tions, which justifies such a subject for a sermon as that proposed to you to-day. It is not, then, wholly unreasonable to go to church to hear about the colonies. Rather we may rejoice that in a course of sermons in which a consistent effort is being made to turn the light of Christian teaching upon modern social problems, space has been found for a brief study of those problems peculiar to us as a people whose " seed has become a multitude of nations." "The expansion of England" has become the almost hackneyed phrase by which we describe the steady upgrowth of this multitude of nations. Familiar as the thought has become, it still stirs the feelings of most of us. We are proud of our great empire over which the sun never sets, and of the oceans of the world which have become the highways for British commerce. We are proud of the vigorous life of our growing colonies, and of the British flag under which peace and order are secured to distracted peoples. We rejoice at the confidence inspired by the British name among countless uncivi- lized races of the world. But are we at the pains to study the causes which have led to English greatness, 84 A LENT IN LONDON. and the conditions of its permanence ? Do we ever realize the extent of our corresponding responsi- bilities, or ask ourselves seriously how far they are being neglected or fulfilled ? In studying the causes which have led to the strange and irresistible development of our colonial empire, we can no longer content ourselves with attributing this new historical phenomenon to an inherent genius for colonization. The late Professor Seeley, in his well-known lectures, 1 has shown conclusively that it is a new and startling fact characteristic only of modern English history. However much the blood of Danes and Northmen may have adapted our forefathers for colonial enter- prise, the significant fact remains that as a people we were the last to enter the field. At least four of the continental nations of Europe had won colonial empires before our earliest venture in this direction was made. And next, we cannot fail to note that this modern development which forms the distinctive feature of our later history as a people, had its origin in that mighty movement of the six- teenth century of which the mainspring was the great religious revival which we call the Reformation. It was not until England had freed herself from the trammels of medievalism that she began to send forth her sons to the uttermost parts of the earth to be witnesses to the force and vigour of the new modern life which was opening before them of which their religion was, in fact, the inspiring power. It would, of course, be utterly misleading to assert that the impulse to colonial enterprise was based upon religious motive. But none the less it may fairly be maintained that the colonial development of England had its origin in that religious revival which stirred the life and moulded the character 1 " The Expansion of England," by J. R. Seeley. THE COLONIES. 85 of Englishmen ; while the presence of the religious factor in this development is further evidenced by the fact, that when the first charter for the founding of an English colony was granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who took possession of Newfoundland in 1583, the main object of his expedition was declared to be to " discover and to plant Christian inhabitants in places convenient." And from this time and throughout the seventeenth century the extension of Christ's kingdom continued one of the avowed objects of British colonization. 1 But if it be true that religion thus operated as one of the powerful causes which resulted in successful colonial enterprise, we are led to approach the further question as to the essential conditions of stability of our colonial empire with a fresh thought in our minds. To all who try to study the moral aspects of political or social life, the serious question cannot fail to present itself whether, after all, it can be true that nations and peoples, like individuals, have each of them a great moral purpose to serve, and that in the faithful fulfilment of national vocation lies the real condition of a nation's peace. The Bible appears to state this with absolute clearness. The inspired books are largely historical, and profess to give us a true philosophy of history the veil lifted from some typical chapters so as to reveal their spiritual import, and teach us something of the laws of God's government of the world. There, in the Old Testament, we have the story of a nation, which was also a Church, called by God to do a certain spiritual work for the world ; and the failure of the Jewish Church to realize its high vocation as the appointed witness to God's truth, led to the ruin and destruction of the Jewish people ; and the scattered 1 See "Digest of S.P.G. Records," p. I. 86 A LENT IN LONDON. Jews of every later age stand forth to the world as God's great object-lesson on a lost vocation. Can it be that similar principles obtain elsewhere ? That history is but the slow unfolding through successive ages of God's great moral laws affecting social life ? That nations and empires, with their rise and fall, pass under the operation of moral forces as uniform as all the known forces of God's world, only of a higher order ? The suggestion is apt to be laid aside as impossible. For how, we ask, can political ethics be other than purely utilitarian in character ? Ob- viously it appears that nations and empires are bound together solely from considerations of mutual interest. We shrink from the application of the theocratic idea to secular history. We can hardly bring ourselves to believe that the fulfilment of a moral and spiritual vocation constitutes that which belongs to a nation's peace. But the old conviction to which we hesitate to give expression comes back to us again with renewed force. Last year most of us were reading with great interest a book on " Social Evolution," in which the writer, proceeding as an investigator from the purely scientific standpoint, leads us to somewhat startling conclusions. In social evolution he traces the operation of the same ever- present law which makes all vital progress depend upon a constant struggle for existence ; he sees that, with the development of the rational principle in man, the selfish instinct of the individual will seek to suspend the struggle, even at the cost of the ultimate progress of the race ; and he concludes that continuous social progress will increasingly depend upon the development of a spirit of self-sacrifice of sufficient force to fortify men for the ever-increasing pressure of the struggle; that this spirit of self- sacrifice, which he regards as the essential condition of all social progress, must rest upon an adequate THE COLONIES. 87 motive and moral sanction ; that religion alone can furnish the required motive, and that the progress of the future will be religious in the direction of its development. And lastly, he affirms that the spirit of the Reformation has given to an unique extent the inspiring impulse to social progress. But if this argument, even in general outline, commands our assent, the scientific investigator has thrown an entirely new light upon the political history and social progress of our race. The ex- pansion of England needs to be regarded from a new point of view. "The multitude of nations," which is the result of a great religious movement, has a mighty task to perform in the world ; but the task is primarily a religious one, and the determining factor upon which the welfare of the empire depends is the continued religious character of the peoples of whom it is composed. Well may the British empire thrill us with a feeling of enthusiasm and patriotic zeal. But we shall begin to realize that its centre of gravity is shifting from the Stock Exchange to the Church. Its real condition of permanent health depends upon its ability to maintain a dis- tinctively religious character. The English empire will no longer be regarded merely as an aggregate of peoples accidentally held together by economic considerations, but rather as " a multitude of nations " with a spiritual vocation which must at all costs be fulfilled. Probably this aspect of our empire, viewed from a religious point of view, will strike many as an unfamiliar thought, perhaps as a merely fanciful idea. For myself, I can only say that if I did not believe in it, I should not be here to-day to preach about our colonies. And surely indications are not want- ing which go to prove that it is not a fanciful idea. The practical evidence of a dominant religious 88 A LENT IN LONDON. principle is to be sought, as the writer of " Social Evolution " indicates, in the existence of the spirit of self-sacrifice. And we find abundant proof that England and her colonies are prepared for mutual self-sacrifice. The very existence of the principle of free trade amongst ourselves, with no assertion of a corresponding claim upon our colonies for reciprocal advantages, is a standing evidence of the spirit which animates England ; while the enthusiastic rivalry with which colonial volunteers sought to gain the place of honour by the side of English soldiers in their vain attempt to save a noble Englishman from a cruel death, proved to the world the readiness of our colonies to spend and be spent for the sake of the mother country. But these are only isolated examples, and they come upon us almost as a surprise, for the simple reason that we have hardly learned to regard the question from this point of view; and because, if we admit that religion provides the only adequate motive of self-sacrifice, we must acknowledge to our shame that in the past we have made no real attempt to provide our colonies with the means for developing this motive. And this brings me to my last point our national responsibility : its past neglect, and our present opportunity. How have we as a Christian people dealt with our colonies in this respect ? Not like the old pioneers who went out to "discover and to plant Christian inhabitants in places convenient." We peopled Australia with our convicts. We sent them out by hundreds, with no adequate provision for their spiritual needs. We founded societies of criminals, where the conditions of life became so loathsome that suicide was regarded as a legitimate and natural end to their miserable existence. We thought to THE COLONIES. 89 govern India with greater ease by seeking to prevent the conversion of the natives to the faith of Christ. We closed our eyes in days gone by to cruel treat- ment of native races by English traders. These are some of the stern facts which mark the spiritual apathy of our people in the past. And every such fact is a cause which involves a consequence. We have good cause to know, from home experience, how the spiritual apathy of one age produces the political problems of the next. The burning questions of to-day which exercise the minds of our statesmen are but the outcome of the spiritual failure of the Church of the English people to realize in days gone by her high vocation. Can we wonder if, in the face of facts like these, colonial problems seem difficult of solution ? Should we have a right to complain if those young communities repaid our past neglect with a growing indifference and selfishness ? That such is happily not the case to any large extent, is due to the great awakening of the conscience of England during the past fifty years to a sense of the spiritual responsibility which rests upon her. Much, indeed, has been done to roll away the reproach. Eight years ago we kept the centenary of our colonial episcopate. And now, in little more than a century, we have nearly one hundred colonial and missionary bishops. This fact is one index of the extent to which the Churchmen of England have been roused to learn, if tardily, the force of the Apostle's question, " How shall they hear without a preacher ? how shall they preach except they be sent ? " But even now can we profess that our responsibilities are at all adequately discharged? Our oldest missionary society, which makes the welfare of our colonies its special charge nay, which has given us our colonial Churches is supported with a paltry sum of ^"80,000 a year. How many business men, with direct or 90 A LENT IN LONDON. indirect colonial interests, think it their duty to be subscribers to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel ? Or, again, to turn to more direct responsibilities, any one who has had experience of colonial work knows that the circumstance which most hampers every scheme of colonial Church extension (and remember the furtherance of religion is that which the scientist now points to as the essential condition of future progress and prosperity) arises from the fact that owners of property are to a large extent non-resident. Our colonies suffer from absenteeism. They are largely worked by English capital. And while the poor of England pour forth in a steady stream to the colonies to seek new homes beyond the sea, where no adequate provision is made for their spiritual needs, the wealth of those colonies, which should enable such provision to be made, to a large extent comes home to England to enrich the shareholders in colonial companies. Its results are seen on Scotch moors and in our London parks. And the mass of those whose economic connection with the colonies lays upon them a moral responsi- bility to the distant land from which their income is in part derived, find too many reasons to repudiate the claim. The majority of individual shareholders are not prepared to make the discharge of this moral claim a first charge upon their dividends. They have many calls at home. They give liberally, it may be, to religious objects. They cannot concern themselves with the needs of colonial Churches. The public companies plead their inability to give in support of Church work because of the tenor of their articles of association. These things ought not to be. And each can do a very little to insure a more frank and liberal acknowledgment of this moral and spiritual claim. Will not individual shareholders THE COLONIES. 91 learn to regard this as a debt of honour, due to the colony from which their income comes ; due to England and to the empire which depends for its prosperity upon vocation faithfully fulfilled ; due to Christ, Who has laid it upon us above all people to be His faithful witnesses unto the uttermost parts of the earth ? If once a healthier public opinion be formed through the force of individual example, the good leaven will spread, and the great investment com- panies which own colonial property will eliminate from their articles any clause which forbids the recognition of spiritual claims. It will be a sad day for England if " the multitude of nations " which have sprung from her become dominated by secularism and selfishness through our neglect. It has already proved in many cases, if I mistake not, a sad day for shareholders in colonial companies. And while I almost shrink from seeming to base an appeal upon sordid and secondary motives, my task will not be complete without the expression of my own strong conviction that the discharge of these spiritual responsibilities has a very real economic value. In our economic dealings with our colonies we shall find a very literal fulfilment of the Master's words, " With what measure ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again." In the flowing tide of colonial life there are strong currents which set with increasing force in the direction of social and financial disorganization. Industrial problems, racial problems which are closely connected with them, a dishonest mental habit which finds expression in reckless speculation with all its disastrous results, these are some of the dangers which give to colonial prosperity a sense of insecurity which quickly makes itself apparent in the money market. One force alone can give the true solution to these problems 92 A LENT IN LONDON. that which comes from the application of Christian teaching to the facts of life. And if that force is found too weak to stem the tide of selfishness, it is because our niggardliness withholds the means which can make the Church of Jesus Christ the informing power of the life of those great and growing com- munities. The noble task is ours by right. The special genius of the colonies demands an inspiration of a special kind, which the Church alone has in- herited the power to give. Strong with the force of Catholic tradition and the authority of an Apostolic mission, and quickened by the free spirit of self- reliance drawn from the Reformation, she can bring forth out of her treasures things new and old. No other Christian community, however zealous, can supply the spiritual force adapted to impress the Christian character upon colonial life. The golden opportunity is ours still. It remains for all who realize the urgency of the call, and the greatness of the issues which are involved, to strive, by liberal offerings and earnest self-denying efforts, so to fulfil our national vocation that the " multitude of nations " may become "the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ." COUNTRY LIFE. BY THE REV. J. CHARLES COX, LL.D., F.S.A. " Desire a better country." HEB. xi. 16. IT has been suggested to me, as the half-century of my life has been spent almost exclusively amid the fair surroundings of England's rural scenery, that a suitable theme for this brief city talk would be " Country Life." But keen as may be my appre- ciation of nature's rustic charm and yours may be keener still just because of your rarer opportunities of enjoying them we meet not here to " babble of green fields," nor to "... pause on every charm, The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm, The never-failing brook, the busy mill, The decent church that topt the neighbouring hill, The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade, For talking age and whispering lovers made." A sterner task is ours. We meet here in God's house to remind ourselves that there is a social question in our thinly populated country districts just as much as in our crowded towns; that the urgency of its demands is the most pressing question of the day ; and that " the intolerable situation into which the lower grades of our industrial population now find themselves driven " (I quote the words of 94 A LENT IN LONDON. that great leader of earnest city church-folk, Canon Scott Holland) is mainly owing to our failure to make the country attractive and liveable for those who ought to be the busy and therefore the happy toilers in our fields. When we reflect that the extraordinary and un- paralleled disproportion between our rural and urban population is growing, after a startlingly increasing ratio, year by year ; that our sturdy agricultural labourers are turning their backs upon the land, and adding to the overcrowding of city tenements and the unskilled labour markets of the town, by the ten thousand in a twelvemonth ; that much of England's soil is going altogether out of cultivation as season follows season ; that one hundred thousand acres per annum have for some years been turned from the growing of cereals into mere pasture-land ; that the land which is under active cultivation is producing less and less, and getting more and more befouled ; that about fifty per cent, of the unemployed of our towns were originally working on the land ; and that the number of steady-lived villagers who are prac- tically out of employ from the ingathering of the harvest to the spring sowing grows larger each recurring winter ; why, then, surely, it is permissible for us nay, not permissible, but right, and if right, righteous, and therefore a godly thing to desire in this England of ours, for the sake of our nation, our- selves, and God's starving poor, a " better country " than the one in which we now live under its present conditions. These are broad and general statements, but they are amply substantiated by national statistics as well as by the independent researches of painstaking indi- viduals. They are facts that approve themselves not only to those who long for great and consider- able social changes, but to sober, earnest-minded COUNTRY LIFE. 95 Conservative statesmen such as Sir John Gorst, and to many careful speakers who support the agricultural views of Lord Winchelsea's Union. It would be downright sinful, as well as cowardly, to quote such figures, or to give credence to such statements from the pulpit, unless they were practically assured realities. It is in vain to expect to kindle in practical Englishmen a desire for a "better country," unless they are first convinced that the country needs improving. Occasional visits to picturesque villages or breezy downs, for health or recreation, may leave no other impression than a gratifying contrast to London grime or town squalor. Nay, the whole of a mainly selfish life may be led in the country or the suburbs, and eyes and ears and heart may remain sealed to the truth. Allow me, in a sentence or two, to put the case of the purely country district where I now live in certain aspects before you. It is the rural union district of Brixworth, Northamptonshire, comprising thirty-six small parishes, with an area of 60,000 acres and a population of 12,000. It is well known to some as being in the centre of the Pytchley hunt, and to others as being the ideal union of the most rigidly enforced experiments of the non-out-relief school of Poor Law economists. But whatever success this workhouse-test, rate-saving policy of twenty years' duration (now beginning to collapse) may have had in the eyes of its well-intentioned promoters, it has not saved the district from depopulation of a most serious character (the most serious in all the county), it having decreased by 1600 in seventy years, 1200 of that decrease being in the last ten; it has not enabled the employers of labour to pay better wages, the weekly wage having dropped this winter to 12s. for the ordinary workers and 13^ for the seven-day men ; and it has not prevented a large 96 A LENT IN LONDON. number of men, eager for work, standing idle during the winter. An amateur census of the unemployed in that union was recently taken, with the result that 234 able-bodied labourers were found to be out of work before ever the recent long-continued frost set in. Most of these were married men, so that it followed that some 700 persons were suffering considerable privation just at the season when warm clothing, abundance of fuel, and extra nourishment are among the necessaries for sustaining a decently healthy life. In my own small historic village of Holdenby, round the charming village green, were living fifteen able- bodied householders ; ten were in work and five could not obtain it, or only fitfully and an odd day at a time. In the same parish, on the home farm of 540 acres, there were three men employed that is, one labourer to 180 acres. Broad statements require corroborating occasionally by more minute details such as these. Can any one dare to say that this is a desirable state of things ? Is this to be the country life of England? Is it not, too, a condition of things for which each one of us is to some extent, and in differing degree, responsible ? Is it not right, then, that we should desire a " better country " ? And a better country means a better town. Strange talk, methinks some of you, my brothers, may be saying to yourselves, for a church pulpit ; but if there are these evil conditions wrapping themselves closer and closer round the very germs of our national life and existence for the origin of all existence and prosperity is the cultivation of the earth surely it is better that they should be brought home to us in positive methods, rather than be smothered up in sermon euphemisms, or rendered palatable by being presented in the vague generalities of everyday speech. Strange talk, too, some again may say, to COUNTRY LIFE. 97 base upon a text which, if taken in its entirety, clearly lays down that the " better country " we should seek is a heavenly inheritance. True ; but look for a moment or two at the teaching of this whole passage in the Hebrews. The great patriarch of old went forth from his heathen home to seek on this earth, under God's guidance, a promised land, a better country. Had he been unduly mindful of the country from whence he came out, he had many an opportunity to return. But no ; Abraham and his immediate posterity realized plainly that they were in the land of promise, where their descendants would be eventually established, each beneath his own vine and fig tree. At the same time, they equally acknowledged themselves to be but strangers and pilgrims in this world, looking forward finally to an inheritance in the heavenly country. One of the earliest of the Fathers who writes about this passage points out that all men naturally look for an earthly abiding-place, a home that they can call their own, one little spot, however humble, of which they cannot be dispossessed. The same idea is well elaborated by the modern commentator Delitzsch. "The promise," says he, "given to the patriarchs was a divine assurance of a future rest ; that rest was con- nected, in the first instance, with the future possession of an earthly home ; but their desire for that home was, at the same time, a longing and a seeking after Him Who had given the promise of it, Whose presence and blessing alone made it for them an object of desire, and Whose presence and blessing, wherever vouchsafed, makes the place of its manifestation to be indeed a heaven. The shell of their longing might thus be of earth, its kernel was heavenly and divine, and as such God Himself vouchsafed to honour and reward it." Yes, how true it is that the shell of the patriarchal H 98 A LENT IN LONDON. longing and their eager desire was for the establish- ing in their own earthly homes, in the valleys and plains of the fair land where they but lived in tents, of their numerous posterity homes of a permanent freehold character, which they should hold in peace, none making them afraid ! The kernel of their hopes was heavenly. But no kernel can come to perfection, nay, have any existence at all, without its protecting shell. The shell is large and real and self-evident, when the kernel is but tiny, delicate, and in the germ. Their desires were first directed to the beautiful and comparatively permanent earthly home, and thence on, by a transference of ideas, to the everlasting habitations of the world to come. What, then, become of the teachings of the Church, based as they mainly should be (with the writer of the Hebrews) on the reading of New Testament ideas into the histories of the Old, unless we can point to earthly abiding- places as pledges and fore- tastes of the eternal inheritance and the many mansions of Christian hopes ? The present extra- ordinary and unparalleled condition of land tenure in England, brought about gradually through centuries of past class legislature and class greed, whereby almost the whole of the farmers and labourers of England are the mere tenants-at-will of a handful of their fellows, a very considerable number of them liable to be dislodged with their families at a week's notice, is not only eminently undesirable in the interests of the whole nation, and an economically false position, but it deprives many a New Testament parable and apostolic saying, as well as the true spiritual interpretation of Old Testament narratives, of their efficacy and force. Are we dissatisfied with the country life of England as it now is, with its lack of comfort and stability for the workers those husbandmen who should be COUNTRY LIFE. 99 the first and not the last partakers of its fruits and with its ever-dwindling food-supply for the people who dwell upon its soil ? Do we, after a careful examination as to the realities of these evils, desire a better country life ? Why, then we must not let our yearnings evaporate in mere wishes, or even in words. We must each of us use all those powers that our English citizenship has given us, wisely and well, to try and effect some change. No need of discouragement, if it does not seem likely to us with our poor finite judgment, nor hardly possibly that any very thorough change should come in our own day or generation ; let us work as the patriarchs did for the establishment of permanent and happy homes for those that are to come after. Much, however, can be at once accomplished by the humane use of powers now within our grasp, and by the individual exercise of our humanity. Once we truly desire, and the battle is half won. Desire, we are told, is " an eagerness to obtain any good." That is a fine definition, and desires of that kind cannot fail of their eventual accomplishment. Do we " desire a better country, that is, an heavenly"? Why, then, the New Testament tells us that we must be full of energy and activity, true members of the Church militant ; for it is the violent only, or those who exercise continuous force, that gain final admission to the kingdom of heaven, the Church triumphant. Do we desire admission within the heavenly country ? Why, then, " our conversation " must be in heaven ; or as it is more faithfully ren- dered for this word is represented in the original by two expressions " our life of citizenship J> must be of a heavenly character ; that is, seeking not our own advantage, but the advantage of others. Twice over did St. Paul express this truth in his letter to the church of Philippi ; and surely there is need in these days ioo A LENT IN LONDON, for Englishmen, when their rights as citizens have of late been multiplied (more especially in the country districts), to be reminded of the golden truth that a conscientious, unselfish, and truly Christian or Christ- like exercise of our earthly citizenship, for the general good of others, is one of the best possible prepara- tions for the eternal citizenship of the New Jerusalem. Our desires for a better country in this life may lead us, when conscientiously and prayerfully followed out, in diverse directions. To some they may suggest the arrangement of various necessary public works in the winter months, direct employment and fair wages at the hands of district and county councils, labour bureaus, and other like agencies ; to others the exten- sion of allotments, and small holdings ; to others fixity of tenure, fair rents, change in the incidence of rates, or more drastic legislative remedies than these ; to others, who have the power, a more generous treatment and trust of their dependents. But to one thing an honest desire for betterment cannot lead, namely, to the sitting down, with our own hands folded, whilst tongue or pen are employed in the empty task of criticizing or sneering at the socialistic schemes of others. There are, alas, not a few amongst us of no mean intellectual gifts, whose chief contributions to the terrible problems before us are the belittling the dangers that others point out, and triumphantly exposing the exaggerations of which some earnest souls may occasionally be guilty. But in whatever direction our own idea of the best remedy or remedies may run, those ideas and the actions to which they lead cannot fail to be in some degree blessed, if we keep clearly before us as Chris- tians "that the ultimate solution of this social ques- tion is bound to be discovered in the Person and Life of Christ. He is 'the Man;' and He must be the solution of all human problems. That is our COUNTRY LIFE. 101 primal creed. Not only is He, as the 'Man of sorrows,' the Brother and Comforter of all who are weary and heavy laden ; not only are the poor His peculiar charge and treasure ; but more than that : He is Himself, in His risen and ascended royalty, the sum of all human endeavour, the interpretation of all human history, the goal of all human growth, the bond of all human brotherhood. It is in this character that He is kept so little in practical mind ; it is this office of His which is reserved to such an obscure and ineffectual background." This should be realized in all that pertains to the citizenship of to-day ; in all that we as Christians do or say, write or read, with regard to the socialism of our times. If the Christian or the Christ-follower is genuine, and not a mere mammon-worshipper labelled with the popular religious name of the century, he will strive to realize that on him individually, as a precious and very real baptismal gift, has been bestowed the indwelling power of the Holy Ghost, the guide and conscience of his life. To that unseen power he will appeal when he takes his part in parish or district or county council, when called upon to discuss social problems, or when these problems are thrust upon his attention in the course of daily life or reading. It is only by thus exercising his Christian citizenship here, in a prayerful and serious spirit, that he can expect to enter upon the pure citizenship of the hereafter. Let us just notice, in conclusion, the answer of God, as expressed in the verse from which our text is taken, to this yearning desire for a better country : " He prepared for them a city." At first blush this seems a contradiction to their hopes. But no ; the fulfilment of the patriarchs* expectation, and the goal of the clearer perceptions of Christians, is the con- joined idea of a garden and a city, a paradise and yet 102 A LENT IN LONDON. a town. Man's life must be a social one here a life of interdependence; and so, too, with the renewed life beyond the grave. Heaven is to be no dream of absolute rustic seclusion, amid the fairest of blooms and the sweetest of sounds ; no fencing in of a single family within either stately park walls, or fragrant cottage hedgerows. The life that centres round " God's dwelling-place " is to be a community life ; all its blessings are to be shared by all ; and if there is not on our part true brotherhood here, and continuous and earnest efforts to remove the miserable sur- roundings of our fellows, there can be for us no possible admission. The selfish, and those who fight mainly for their own sordid ends, will inevitably be shut out, or else the whole of Scripture is a lie ! The holy city is to be fair beyond the power of words in all its proportions ; the walls of jasper and the streets of purest gold ; the river of life that flows through its midst will be clear as crystal ; so pure and fertilizing will be the atmosphere, that the trees along the river's brim will bear all manner of fruits in continuous succession, and its courts will ever echo with the rhythm of melodious sounds. Nor can we doubt that all that is purest and best of God- inspired art will find its abiding-place in the eternal mansions. If that, then, is the ideal that God in His revelation sets before us as the ultimate realization of our hopes, let us on our part desire, whilst this life is ours, to make the citizenship of earth a fitting prelude to this glorious expectation. It becomes those of us who live in the country to welcome all that is best of town life in our midst the higher education, the attractions of the truest art as well as earnestly to strive to turn back the wave of our inner migration from the town to the country, instead of from the country to the town. And for you, my brothers, COUNTRY LIFE. 103 whose life is mainly in the city this city, the greatest the world has ever known to wage an unceasing warfare with slums and slum-life, both moral and actual, as well as with all that in its baseness or its greed creates or maintains the slum-conditions for your fellows. Bright gleams of light, that radiate from the New Jerusalem, where the great King reigns in the ful- ness of His beauty in the land that is very far off, sparkle on your horizon amidst much that is threaten- ing and dark with gloom. The library, the museum, the art-gallery open to all (and we of the country envy you such riches as these), as well as open spaces rescued from the abuse of the few, and consecrated to the use of the many, bright with fresh flowers and enlivened with soul-stirring music, these are all signs and tokens of the yearning for a better land ; they are the sacramental externals of your longing for the true land of promise, with its magnifical and undying surroundings. Yes, there are signs all around us, both in country and in town, of progress and advance; and though these budding hopes are checked now and again by the chilling blasts of indifference and greed, it is that they may take but deeper root before they shoot forth again with renewed energy and force. The true progress of the future must recognize the tripartite nature of man ; it must not be content with the promotion of healthy conditions of body or of mental activity, but it must be ready to acknow- ledge and to aid the soul-yearnings for the better and more perfected life beyond. Amidst the strife and clash of human opinion, one word in a double form, in this the centre of England's life, has recently come prominently to the surface progress and progressive. God forbid that the word should become the mere appanage of 104 A LENT IN LONDON. any stereotyped or exclusive views. It is a word that all conscientious Christ-lovers should desire to appropriate, whatever may be their convictions on imperial, or municipal, or local affairs. Stagnation is devilish, progress is divine ! A desire after better- ment, or a better country, is God's best gift to sinful man. Thus says the deepest and most devout of England's poets "Progress is man's distinctive mark alone; not God's and not the beasts. He is ; they are ; man partly is, but wholly hopes to be." CLERK-LIFE. BY THE REV. H. C. SHUTTLEWORTH, M.A., Rector of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, and Professor of Pastoral Theology in King's College, London. MY text is taken from the daily newspaper any newspaper, any day : "Wanted, for a London Warehouse, young gentleman of good address, able to correspond in French and German. Thorough knowledge of book-keeping. Shorthand preferred. Salary, $o to commence. " Clerk wanted. Smart, active, and quick at figures. Knowledge of German. Not afraid of work. Salary, 25 s. Apply by letter, stating age and full particulars. " Wanted, first-class English, French, and German correspondent for large export firm in the City. Knowledge of shorthand and slight Spanish desirable. Opportunity for willingness. Commencing salary, 60. Apply, personally, between n and I." I do not propose to speak of what may be described as the aristocracy of clerk-life, such as bankers 1 and brokers' clerks. I must confine myself to the ordinary office-clerk of the city, who humbly but efficiently helps to create much of its wealth, and whose con- dition of life is fairly indicated by the above advertisements. It might reasonably be supposed that men possessed of the qualifications desired would not be ready to accept such salaries as those here offered. We should imagine that a man who had a good knowledge of io6 A LENT IN LONDON. modern languages, and was well acquainted with book-keeping, to say nothing of shorthand, and of the convenient quality of "willingness," could com- mand a more adequate living wage than 50 or 60 a year. Yet it is a fact that there were more than eleven hundred replies to one of these advertisements ; replies from men of all ages and from almost all social grades ; from men with University degrees, and boys just out of school; from clerks out of employment in London, and from hundreds in the country, who for the most part were already in work there, but were bitten with the desire to get to the great city. A very large proportion were willing to take less than the salary offered ; some even volun- teered to do the work for nothing for the first few months. It is obvious that the fierce competition which prevails throughout our industrial life is especially relentless in regard to the great army of London office-clerks. The effect is to bring down the rate of payment to the lowest possible point ; so much so, that there is even a class of employers who syste- matically take advantage of those clerks who, for the sake of getting work, are ready to put in three months or six months without payment. When the end of their free time is drawing near, they are dismissed upon some trifling pretext, and others take their place on the like terms, to be treated in due course in the same way. I do not, of course, mean to say that all, or most, employers are of this level. I have not lived in the City for twenty years without discovering how large a proportion of em- ployers especially when the firm is not a limited company are most considerate and kindly in their relations with their clerks. In more cases than might be supposed, something of the old spirit still remains, which made the master the loyally served chieftain, CLERK-LIFE. 107 and the clerk the trusted colleague and friend. But in most instances, the keen pressure of modern com- petitive conditions renders the " cash-nexus " the main or the only bond between a clerk and the house he serves ; while at the same time it narrows to all but vanishing-point the avenues to such employment. Our clerks have to compete for their places with foreigners, who generally have a better acquaintance with modern languages, a lower standard of living, less independence, greater capacity for plodding, and more readiness to work long daily hours, than men of English birth and English habits. Inevitably, this foreign competition brings down the rate of wages all round, while at the same time it tends to raise the standard of capacity and education. But the Germans and Swiss are not the only competitors against the English clerk. He has lately found his own sisters in the field. Lady- clerks are in many respects more capable and effi- cient than men. They are neater and more careful in their work ; they do not drink or smoke ; they are quieter and less obtrusive in the office ; and, speaking generally, they make better servants in all cases where merely mechanical or routine work is required ; while before long, when they have gained further experience, they will be fully qualified to take the chief places. Many women are already better qualified than men, as the Government offices have discovered. Now, it would be absurd, as well as useless, to complain of the advance of women into clerk-life as a grievance or a hardship. Why should not women earn their living by office-work, if they can do it as well as or better than men? Moreover, they must earn it somehow. It is simply a bread-and-butter question. The struggle for life has driven women out into the world of work, and they are entitled to io8 A LENT IN LONDON. ask for fair play, on equal terms with men. But, unfortunately, women do not get paid upon equal terms with men. A clever and capable lady-clerk will do the same work for half or two-thirds the wage a man would require. Hence, the result of female competition is still further to reduce the average salary of a clerk. There is no pretence of hardship in the competition of women ; the hardship lies in the fact that advantage is taken of their fewer needs, and more frugal ways of living, to pay them less for similar work just as in the case of the foreigner. What is really needed is a living wage for all alike ; for Englishmen and Englishwomen, no less than for Germans, Swiss, Swedes, or Danes. As things are, the girls are taking their brothers' places ; and I know families where the girls work as clerks, while their brothers are " out." When the narrow avenue of entrance upon clerk- life has been successfully passed, what are the con- ditions of existence under which a clerk must spend his time ? It must be confessed that they are neither very cheerful nor very hopeful. The hours are long, say from 8.30 to 7 in the lower or general class of office, for men ; and in times of special pressure they may have to work far into the night. The following table refers rather to warehouses than to ordinary offices, and the four cases taken as examples of a week's hours are among the worst I have collected during the last ten years. But I could furnish many which are almost as bad. A. Commencing at 8 a.m. Monday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday 12 ,, Wednesday ,, 12 ,, Thursday ,, 10 Friday 10.30 Frequently as late as I a.m., and occasionally 2.30 a.m CLERK-LIFE. 109 B. Monday, 8 a.m. to 9.30 p.m. Tuesday ,, n ,, Wednesday ,, n ,, Thursday II ,, Friday 10 ,, B. left on account of refusing to work after II p.m. C. Monday, 8.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. Tuesday ,, 12 ,, Wednesday ,, 12 ,, Thursday 9-3 > Friday ,, 9 ,, Average time for five months in the year. Working to midnight quite a common occurrence. D. Commencing at 7*45- Monday, 7.45 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. Tuesday ,, 11.30 ,, Wednesday II ,, Thursday ,, 10 ,, Friday 9 Frequently worked up to midnight. Often the clerk's office is ill-ventilated, and gas- lighted during the greater part of the day. The stooping position, and the sedentary nature of his labour, are not good for his health or his eyes. More- over, the work of an office is not of a character in which ordinary men and women can take any real interest. An exact calculating or scribbling machine could do it as well. Certainly in this case the labourer can have but little joy in his work ; though a con- scientious clerk will even find some pleasure in the neatness, accuracy, and despatch with which his me- chanical task is accomplished. But for the average clerk, the dreadful drudgery and dulness of his daily work and surroundings must have their inevitable effect upon character. We cannot be surprised if the average man seeks relief and excitement in betting and gambling, finds some solace in drink, or looks for his society in the bars or in the streets. Some no A LENT IN LONDON. interesting papers were published a year or two back in the British Weekly, under the rather claptrap title of " Tempted London." The writers of these sketches got together a vast amount of information, very accurate on the whole, as to the conditions of clerk- life. But I cannot agree with them in their low estimate of the general tone of morality among the clerks of the City, in the midst of whom I have lived and worked for the past twenty years. There are good, bad, and indifferent among them, as there are in any other class of men and women. But I believe the general tone is very much higher than was indi- cated by the able Nonconformist weekly. I have been amazed to find what a good fellow the city clerk is, take him all round. He has his faults, of course, like the rest of us. But though his surroundings are less squalid and hideous than those of an East-End or South-London slum, they are dull and dismal to a degree that makes some of us fearful that, in the same environment, we should develop a less creditable average than the ordinary clerk. And for this species of crank-labour, what recom- pense ? Well, if our clerk is lucky, he may rise to a salary of ;i2O, even 150, a year. If he is less for- tunate, he may find himself out of employment at more or less frequent intervals, at the close of which he may have to begin again at the foot of the ladder. And when he grows old, he finds, to his bitter sorrow, that an old clerk, like an old curate, is of less value in the market than a young one ; that he is not wanted, that competition leaves no room for him. He may be married, for clerks do marry on ^100 a year, their wives doing a little dressmaking or mil- linery, or addressing envelopes and wrappers at three shillings or so the thousand, to add to the scanty in- come. Sometimes a firm, after a bad season's trade, will cut down expenses by ruthlessly dismissing CLERK- LIFE. in older servants who have the largest salaries, and putting- younger men in their places at a smaller "screw." The clerk has seldom any future before him ; he thinks himself fortunate if he can only keep the position and the pittance he has obtained. For such as he, there is no career in this country ; and it is not surprising to learn that South Africa is absorb- ing more and more young fellows from the City, and from elsewhere also, as the struggle grows fiercer year by year. I would not have it supposed that I believe the common cant against u early marriages." On the contrary, I would gladly see more of our young clerks married, at an even earlier age than is customary. But, then, they must be content to accept a labourer's standard of living, to send their children to the Board School, and to renounce the heresy of the top-hat for good and all. They must choose, in fact, between " maintaining their position," while shut out from the happiness of home life, and entering upon the latter at the cost of sacrificing the former. Often, indeed, such a choice is not open to them, for many business houses rigidly apply the test of the top-hat and the frock-coat to their clerks. It cannot be considered creditable to our London life that so large a number of men and women are compelled to an existence such as I have outlined. Yet I have no cut-and-dried remedy to propose, no short-and-easy solution of the problem to suggest. The symptoms are obvious to even a casual observer ; the causes lie deep in the social and economic con- ditions of our present complex life. Emigration, so confidently put forward as a remedy in some quarters, may be well enough for individuals, though probably those who get on well in South Africa are just the men who would have done well at home ; but emigra- tion does not and cannot touch the problem itself. The successful emigrant clerk leaves that behind him, H2 A LENT IN LONDON. and the failure returns to it. Palliatives there may be, and at one or two of these I will glance in con- clusion. i. Some sort of organization among clerks might possibly do for them what the Trade Unions have done for the working-men of England. There is, indeed, a Clerks' Union ; but the conditions are far more complex and difficult than those which prevail in regard to the organization of skilled labour. So long as the army of unemployed clerks, and of those seeking to become clerks, is so gigantic, there is little to be done by this means. Perhaps the most that can be hoped for is preparation for future action. In such a case, organization is always strength. 2. Something might be done in the way of extend- ing the principle of the Factory Acts, or the Shop Hours Labour Acts, to offices and warehouses. But unless a careful system of inspection is adopted, such legislation will be a dead letter; just as Sir John Lubbock's first Shop Hours Act was in danger of becoming, had not a small number of determined men formed themselves into a committee, employed inspectors of their own, and instituted prosecutions, so saving the Act, and ultimately securing its extension. 3. The writer in the British Weekly was entirely right when he pointed out that parents are largely to blame for the present state of things. It is absolutely true that among average middle-class parents " there is too much regard for ' the office,' and an exaggerated contempt for ' trade.' ' School-teachers can tell us what it is which such parents desire for their children ; not education, in any real sense, but quickness at figures, and similar clerical qualifications. I have no hesitation in saying that a clerk would do better to make his son an artisan, or a tram-car driver, than let him follow his own calling. Let parents in the country do all they can to keep their children there, rather CLERK-LIFE. 113 than send them to swell the competing horde of ill- paid London clerks ; and above all, let them never allow their sons to come here " on spec," on the off- chance of getting employment. Better, far better, let them work in the shop or the fields at home. 4. Much may be done in the direction of brighten- ing and elevating clerk-life by the foundation of clubs, open to men and women alike, on the lines of the institution which, as many of you know, I have spent my best years in establishing not far from this church. Most of the societies and institutions for young people fail, to my thinking, owing to the narrow and dis- trustful lines upon which they are conducted ; pro- viding rather what their promoters think young people ought to want, than what, as a fact, young people do want. I trust that the success of the St. Nicholas Club may lead to the establishment of many like institutions. But they must be small, not too large, or they will fail of their main objects. I have given a lecture rather than a sermon. But I do not think that, on that account, what has been said is out of harmony with the aim and objects of a Christian Social Union, or with the teaching of that Divine Master, Who spent the greater portion of His earthly life in ministering to the common needs of His human brothers. CIVIC DUTIES. BY THE REV. CANON BARNETT, M.A., Warden of Toynbee Hall. " Jerusalem is built as a city which is at unity with itself." Ps, cxxii. 3. I. A FOLLOWER of Christ is always duty bound. He is here to serve. He is a man with a mission. A Christian cannot say, "I will do what I like with my own ; I can enjoy my life or end my life." Christians glory in being their brother's keeper, and are always about their Father's business. Christians, because of this consciousness of social membership, have always looked on to a kingdom, a church, or a city. Buddhists look to dreamless ease, to release from the toil of loving ; Mohammedans look to a paradise, a garden of delight, an eternity of being served ; Christians look to the new Jerusalem, to the city of God, with its busy crowds, its complex duties, its grandeur and its glory. What men hope for, that they become, and men are what their aspirations are. What men look for, that they work for, and prophets try to establish their own prophecies. CIVIC DUTIES. 115 Nations whose golden age is in the past make no progress, and history concerns itself only with people who strive to reach ideals beyond their grasp. c< Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." Christians who hope for a city of God, who look to a society whose members will live by loving Christians with this ideal are always trying to make a state, a Church, a city, after its likeness. They vote, they serve public offices, they are generous, that they may make London, Bristol, Manchester, their city, like the city to which they look. They, when they are about the city's business, are about their Father's business. But many who call themselves Christian neglect civic duties. They serve, perhaps, their Church, they are members of some charitable society, but they are indifferent to the city government. This neglect is, I believe, largely due to the absence of a social ideal. Practical modern men have no visions such as those of Isaiah, St. John, or Rienzi. They have no modern equivalent to the holy mountain where the lion and the lamb lie together, or to the city into which nothing enters that defileth or maketh a lie. They have no pattern city in the heavens, and therefore do not strive to make its likeness on earth. Modern teaching does not sufficiently cultivate the imagination. It holds that the chief thing is to be practical ; that the boy of fifteen must take up the technical or business training of his life ; that there is no time to develop powers of dreaming, and that the use of the imagination, in pictures, music, and poetry, is a luxury for the rich and idle. Art has no place in industrial education ; it is not taken seriously. The teaching is wrong ; the imagination has a ma- terial use. " It was for want of imagination England ii6 A LENT IN LONDON. lost America," and it is for the same want that mer- chants and workmen now miss their opportunities. In commerce the visible is not the eternal result. It is by faith that business is made, and haste for immediate gain often destroys trade. It is, too, for want of the trained imagination that so many Chris- tians neglect their civic duties. They have no social ideal to which Christ directs their march, no city in the heaven carefully fashioned by thought. Some, therefore, waste their strength as they cry for a state possible perhaps in the moon, and elabo- rate schemes which shrivel up under a moment's cross- examination. Such good people sacrifice, indeed, their Isaacs and hinder God's promises. Some settle in suburbs far off from the call to duty which rises from the ill. housed and the ill fed. They think most of their rights, demand the service of the local boards to secure their quiet, and keep off hospitals and the poor from their doors. They take short leases, and escape trouble by moving. "A modern city is the embodiment of indefinite change, and citizens make idols of their domestic privacy and private luxuriousness." Many do no civic duties, and satisfy Christ's inspired instincts by gifts to the poor more or less carefully adjusted to their income. And of the few who nobly serve the city, many find the service dull and weary. They serve because it is a duty, not because they are constrained by an in- visible power to an invisible end, and "he gives nothing but worthless gold who gives from a sense of duty/' The failure comes because modern Christians have not elaborated an ideal of Christian society. They use old ideals formed in other times, and talk of a Church, of a heaven, but are not moved thereby. Ideals must be fashioned out of present experience. The city in heaven must rest on the earth. Things CIVIC DUTIES. 117 we hope for must be made out of things we know. The imagination must work with the actual. Let us, therefore, spend a few minutes in thinking out a society, a city, in which men with our experience and our knowledge might live Christ's life. If we see beyond the bound of the waste, the city of God, we shall surely work to establish London in its likeness. We shall serve our city. Our civic duties will be our religious duties ; our liturgies will be not only those sung by choirs, but, as in the Greek city, liturgies will again mean the performance by the citizens of public duties. A pure liturgy, as St. James says, is others' service. How, then, shall we think of the city of the future ? It is a city which is at unity with itself. i. Its past will be at unity with its present. They who walk the streets in one age will be familiar with those who, in past ages, shaped the streets and wrote their thoughts in stone. They will know how the city grew by what enterprise, by what suffering, by what sacrifice, by what failure. They will move about the streets encompassed by a crowd of witnesses, de- termined themselves to do something worthy of their surroundings. They will talk of Caesar, Charlemagne, Alfred, and Cromwell, rather than of athletes, mil- lionaires, and music-hall singers. Their bookstalls will be loaded with books which chasten and kindle, rather than with " bits " and " sketches " which con- found, their intelligence. They will be interested in the growth of thought, and keen to admire what is beautiful. Their minds will be nourished on the Bible, on Shakespeare, and on Plato, rather than on the writings of the realists of the human dustbin. They will be concerned that their public buildings and monuments shall be noble and impressive, their private houses pure and simple ; so that every one, in the common possession of splendid and historic IJ S A LENT IN LONDON. monuments, may have the self-respect which comes to a citizen who is of no mean city. In the Christian ideal society there will be no ignorant classes, no division between the educated and uneducated ; none low for want of a high calling, none mean for want of noble traditions, none dull for want of interest. Knowledge will flow over the whole as the waters cover the sea. 2. The city will have its parts at unity with one another. The East End and the West End will be equally attractive, equally well lighted, cleansed, and built. Every part will have its bountiful streams of waters flowing through the public baths, and making lakes in the parks. Everywhere the air will be so clear that flowers will bloom on the window-ledges. Every child will have its playground in the sunshine, and every old person his season for quiet enjoyment. Workrooms will be as healthy as drawing-rooms. Hospitals will be arranged for the convenience of the sick ; libraries, museums, and music-halls for the recreation of the strong. Unity in a city is im- possible where, as in East London, the buildings are mean, the streets ill kept and ill lighted ; where children have to play in the gutter, and the old linger in the dirt and noise-laden air ; where cleanli- ness is an impossible luxury. In the Christian city there will be no division between east and west, between the washed and un- washed, no rich or poor quarter ; all the citizens will have equal opportunities for growth, for enjoyment, for cleanliness, and for quiet. 3. The people of the city will be at unity together. All will co-operate in its keeping and making. It will no longer be that some will give and others take ; that a few leaders and officials collect and direct the expenditure of taxes, while the mass of the citizens are absorbed in private concerns. In the CIVIC DUTIES. 119 Christian city all will give of their thought and their time workmen, professional people, merchants, tradesmen, women. They will thus feel that the city is their own ; they will see in its grandeur and activities their own wills writ large. Each individual will have a dignity, a moral and religious fervour, as, having given his service, he looks around on the glory and says, " This is mine." There will be in the Christian society no governed and governing classes. No outside body like the slaves of the ancient city, like the melancholy hands who pass from factory to sleeping-place along the streets of a modern city. In the Christian city each will be bound to all, and all to each. Thus I suggest, as a Christian ideal fit for the time, the thought of a city at unity with itself. But I suggest only that you may think. A man's own thoughts are better than those he borrows. Think, therefore, you who acknowledge yourselves to be members of Christ ; you who, as His followers, are sent to be saviours and helpers " to create a household and a fatherland, a city and a state." Shape in your minds the city where Christ will reign. Piece it together out of your greater knowledge of men and manners, of wants and remedies, of ways and means, as St. John out of his limited knowledge pieced together the new Jerusalem. Build in thought, out of the materials which lie around, an ideal of a Christian society. What you look for, that you will try to make. The artist is constrained to force out of the hard marble the vision which is before his mind. If you have before your mind a pattern city, then you will be constrained to make this city its copy. Civic duties will become religious duties. You will give up private ends to work on boards and councils, repeating in your hearts that cry which has always moved the world, " I must ; it is the will of God." i2o A LENT IN LONDON. II. Yesterday I tried to draw the thoughts of my hearers to a city at unity with itself. I encouraged them to imagine using the material around an ideal city. Virtue, as Jowett says, flows from ideals. " But," he adds, " most men live in a corner, and see but a little way beyond their own home or place of occupation. They do not ' lift up their eyes to the hills ; ' they are not awake when the dawn appears." Yesterday I tried, from the tower of speculation, to suggest the city of the future. It was good for the disciples to see their Master transfigured. It is good for us to see our city transfigured, its organization and its govern- ment fitted to the Christian life. But it is not good only to stand and gaze. Below the mountain where Christ was transfigured were His mean and suffering brother-men. In front of disciples pleading to stay and worship, was the dull drudgery of daily doing. It is not enough to have ideals ; we must act. A vision is good for stirring the pulses, for rousing the enthusiasm, but it is work which wins the victory. Love precedes labour ; but if love is worthy, labour follows. Early in the century a few workmen saw a vision of trades unionism. They felt the impulse and started a great movement ; but the victory of trades unionism has been won by painstaking and detail-loving secretaries and officials. Dante and the poets saw in their dreams United Italy. They roused the hopes and passions of their countrymen ; but it was the daily doing the hard drudgery of Cavour, Mazzini, and Garibaldi which made Italy. We may have visions of an ideal social state, we may be roused by the thought of a society in which Christ will live ; but it is quiet doing patient CIVIC DUTIES. 121 reformers plodding patriots, who will make the new city. For many reasons, steady, dull work has become distasteful. Burdens once borne by men are now borne by machinery ; pain has been eased by skill ; life has been made smoother. There is not the same call to effort, the same stimulus to activity ; there are more attractions for leisure, more possibilities of pleasure. Men regard work as hardship ; they resent the restraint of daily doing, and look for short cuts to idleness, and heroic remedies in difficulties. A real danger of our time is dislike of drudgery. Citizens let go the helm of government, because it is trying to hold on through long seasons of calms. They will not patiently day by day go into details, because the work is dull. Now, the whole force of religious motive has gone into sweeping a room, and made the act divine. And the whole force of religious motive may also go into the smallest and meanest of civic duties. Christians inspired by Christ look for a city where there will be room for loving, and they are driven to take it by force ; but Christians are also restrained by Christ. They are made to watch and wait ; to gather up the fragments ; to go home and be subject to its common duties. Christ who rouses and makes men glow, is also Christ who holds men back and puts the would-be hero to serve a child. He constrains and He also restrains. The Founder of the kingdom of heaven is the Preacher of the Beatitudes. He who wore a crown bore a yoke. We are Christians in a Christian land. We are eager to live our Master's life keen to shape a city where nothing shall hinder, and all shall help, that life. Fire is in our hearts, passion is aglow, as we think of what may be, of what shall be. But 122 A LENT IN LONDON. that fire and that passion must be put into daily drudgery. What must we do ? 1. Every one should learn about the government of his own city. Few here, I expect, could pass a simple examination in the functions of guardians and vestrymen, or in the work of London boards and coun- cils. Few know the powers in their own hands to straighten the path of the poor, to open the eyes of the ignorant, to heal the sick and comfort the sad. Every one, therefore, should master one of the many books which give the information ; every one should ask questions till he knows who is responsible for making the city pleasant for habitation, and a help to its inhabitants in living a Christian life. If every one had this knowledge, strength would not be wasted in vain grumbling at neglect or at abuse. Every one knowing his part in the government, the grumble would only awake the echo, " Thou art the man." Neither would strength be so often diverted to sectional efforts, religious or philanthropic. They who knew their power to shape a state would not so readily start a society, or dissent from the nation to make a Church in the nation. The masters of the whole country have no need of preserves. Let, then, Christians set themselves to learn how the city is governed. The duty is not duller than that done by saints who copied manuscripts ; it is not greater drudgery than is done by missionaries who learn the Chinese alphabet. Let Christians whose thoughts glow, thinking of what they will do, just quietly learn what they can do. 2. Let every one consider what qualities are wanted in city rulers. Integrity, industry, intelligence, good will, perseverance. Yes, but rarer and more important are business qualities. A strange com- bination is the good man of business. There are CIVIC DUTIES. 123 many imitation business men. These put punctuality before charity, accuracy before truth, doing before service. They pay regard to figures, and treat reports as sacred ritual. They are ready to measure up heaven with a foot-rule. They have put on some of the business man's clothes ; but the real good man of business is he who by adventure and caution, by spending and by saving, by use of imagination and by care of detail, by knowledge of men and by power of control, creates and directs vast operations. These are the men who have made the wealth of England. These are the men who made the greatness of the mediaeval cities, who directed their broad policy and ordered their magnificent growth. Such men are still in our midst, but rarely among the city rulers ; and it is, perhaps, bad business rather than a bad system which makes local government so costly and improvement so difficult. Artists and artisans, professional men and traders, men and women of high purpose, are wanted ; but Christ calls also the merchant princes to leave their own offices, and put some of the power by which they make fortunes into making a city. He calls those to whom he has given talents for organizing and for creating, to use them on boards and councils. He calls the successors of the Canynges, the Heriots, the Greshams, to establish a city in the twentieth century worthy of the world's greater knowledge and more worthy of our Christian profession. 3. Every one must be willing to fill a city office. It is often remarked that the same names recur as justices, guardians, councillors, vestrymen. A com- paratively small number of persons fill all the offices of government. This ought not to be. This would not be, if Christians felt called by Christ to civic duties ; if they looked to a city where men and things would be ordered according to His will ; if they heard 124 A LENT IN LONDON. Christ telling them to be vestrymen, guardians, coun- cillors, as plainly as St. Paul heard the call to preach, or Luther the order to take his stand, or Joan of Arc the command to arm and lead the soldiers of the king. Christ does so call. He opens our eyes to see at hand a kingdom of heaven, a city of God. He rouses us, as we watch the melancholy faces of the poor, as we hear the cry of the unemployed, as we walk the depressing streets of East London and meet broken men and women human beings crushed in human machinery to force the way for a society in which His spirit may have full play. He kindles our hopes for a city in which all shall speak thoughts learnt from God, and all see visions revealed now only to the few ; in which there shall be no more an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days ; in which none shall hurt nor destroy. Christ shows us what may be. At our doors are the means of making the may-be the must-be. A place on a local board, or membership in a society, is the weapon ready forged for the knight of modern days. With this he may cut down abuses and open the way for what is good. Any one can take up such a weapon. Christ calls from His city, and pointing to the road He trod and the cross He bore, tells us in patience to do the next thing, to take up the weapon which is ready, the duty which lies at our hand any humble service in shaping the city we live in to be the city of His people. 4. Above boards and councils is public opinion. Every individual is its maker. By his talk, by his acts, by his thoughts, each individual is helping to raise up a ruler who will bless or curse his city. It is not Acts of Parliament, nor boards, nor councils, which now rule ; it is the conduct, the words, the deeds of citizens, the makers of public opinion. CIVIC DUTIES. 125 The civic duty, therefore, which lies on every one is to think clearly what is wanted if the city life is to represent the Christian life ; to restrain himself from all extravagant talk in abuse or in hope ; to live decently, soberly, and honestly; to be reverent in the presence of things above, of things equal and of things beneath ; to despise no one and to be despised by no one; to take' no bribes and surrender no rights; to protest against smoke, dirt, ugliness ; to boldly rebuke vice ; to help with heart and purse some one neighbour who is wretched and poor. Thus may every one make a public opinion more powerful for righteousness than any king. And if, hearing this, some one says, " O Lord, I would do some great thing, upset some abuse, inau- gurate some reform ; I would exalt Thy name," the answer surely comes, " Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these, ye did it unto Me ; " and the loyal fol- lower will go home to set there an example of godly life, and for others' sake try " to think clearly, feel deeply, and bear fruit well." Enthusiasm and drudgery are the means by which great ends are achieved. Christ from the right hand of God rouses enthusiasm, Christ from the cross points to the long path of drudgery. Christians stand- ing on Immanuers land look into the city where their Master rules, and then take up their cross. Christians are at once kings and servants, enthusiasts and drudges. There can be no advance to that city, no realization here of the Christian society, unless Chris- tians endure hardship, rebuke, and disappointment as they try to fashion things that are after the likeness of things that shall be. But they who believe in their Master have the enthusiasm which can endure the drudgery of inconvenient meetings, of weary commit- tees, of working the heavy machinery by which the city is slowly improved. They have the faith which 126 A LENT IN LONDON. can transfigure civic duties into religious service, and patience into passion. They will go down from the mount of transfiguration, from the vision of the glorified and glistering city, not to cry and shout, as if abuses would fall as the walls of Jericho fell. They will go rather to take up some neglected duty, some unnoticed work, and persist, without praise or profit, without striving or crying, content if they may add some one out-of-sight brick to the city, which under the Master's hand is surely and silently growing. WHAT THE CHURCH MIGHT DO FOR LONDON. BY THE REV. STEWART D. HEADLAM, B.A., Author of " The Laws of Eternal Life," etc. WHAT the Church has done for London might perhaps have been a better title. For we want no new or sensational methods, only for the Church to persevere in her own proper work. I. The first thing, then, the Church has to do is, in the face of competing sects and class distinctions, to bear witness to the essential equality and unity of the whole people. This she does by means of her sacrament of Infant Baptism. She asserts that the Head of every man is Christ. That it is Christ Who is the Head, and that it is of every man that He is the Head. Every little human being born into London is claimed as being the equal with every other little human being. No matter whether the parents be rich or poor, good or bad, pious or worldly ; the little baby, simply on the ground of its humanity, is claimed to be a member of Christ, the child of God, and a present inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. Religious people who would separate men into sects grounded upon certain opinions as to Church govern- ment or Christian doctrine, are borne witness against by this simple sacrament. So, too, are those who 128 A LENT IN LONDON. would divide Londoners into classes a lower class which is brutalized, a middle class which is vulgarized, and an upper class which is materialized. And this witness to the essential equality of our people is borne, not merely by advanced clergymen with all sorts of new and liberal views, but by the quietest, most humdrum pastor who ever stuck to his parish work and never went on platforms, provided he searches for the babes of his flock, and has them brought as infants to the font. Our unhappy divisions into religious sects and social classes stand condemned in the light of this sacrament. The best thing the Church could do for London would be for every minister to be diligent in ad- ministering this sacrament, and for the people to be active and intelligent appreciators of it. 2. The second thing which the Church might do for London would be to continue to make much, and much more than it has during the last three centuries, of the Holy Communion. To restore it to its own proper place as the one great central Christian service. The service not merely for the specially religious or the ultra-pious, but for ordinary work-a-day men and women. For this great sacrament, as the Holy Communion, tells men that they are brothers, not merely at church or in religion, but in politics, labour, and life generally. As the Lord's Supper, it calls upon them to be active in every emancipating work for mankind, just as the yearly Passover supper was the festival of the Hebrew emancipation ; as the Holy Eucharist, it tells us that our God is a God of joy and gladness, it sanctifies amusements, and conse- crates the amusers ; as the Mass, it tells us of sacrifice, and unites us with our fellow- Churchmen throughout Christendom. And so what the Church might do for London would be for her parish priests to be giving them- THE CHURCH AND LONDON. 129 selves continually to this very thing not relegating it to a corner, or letting it be supplanted by eloquent sermons, or glorified Matins, but making much of it in every way ; and for her people, the whole body of the baptized, to be crowding to their Communions three times a year, and bringing themselves, their joys and their sorrows, their private, their social, their political life, as often as may be, into the Real Presence of Christ. It is curious that all sorts of experiments for the regeneration of London have been tried teetotalism, mothers' meetings, drum-and-fife bands, and what not ; but that even still in very few churches has the Eucharist been put into its proper, prominent, legiti- mate place. 3. And next, the Church in London might see, as of old, to the shepherding of the lambs of its flock. The Catechism and its rubrics make it abundantly clear that it is the business of the Church to see that the full definite principles of the Catholic Faith are taught to the children. This is a matter which the Church in London lately has grossly neglected ; instead of attending to it, a majority of her members have been urging the State to take into her un- commissioned hands the manipulating of our holy religion, and have rejoiced unspeakably in that they have got the State to undertake the duty of teaching one and a half of the great Christian doctrines to her children. This cannot possibly give permanent satisfaction. And therefore, if London is to become a real city of God, while the State rightly claims her right to give secular schooling to the children, the Church must also claim her right, which the State is perfectly willing to concede, of teaching them the great principles of the Catholic Faith. Ail your material reforms ay, even if you again have salmon in the Thames and London clean cannot K 130 A LENT IN LONDON. be permanent, I doubt even whether they can be achieved, if the Church neglects this paramount duty to all her children. Think what a different London we should have had by this time if it had been taught effectually to all alike, that it is the duty which each one owes to his neighbour to learn and labour truly to get his own living ; if London, instead of consisting of beggars and robbers living on the workers, was a city of healthy, happy workers only. The manipulated Christian religion leaves these truths in the back- ground. The Church bishops, clergy, and people alike if they really want to help London, should arouse themselves to active mental fight and organi- zation, in order that they may make the education of the young in the principles of the Catholic Faith a primary charge on their time, money, and energy. 4. I have called your attention to these three elementary functions of the Christian Church, these three primary duties which the Church has to every city in which she is planted, because there seems to be a serious danger lest their paramount importance should be overlooked, or lest men should be led to think that the social work of the Church could in any way be separated from them. If the Church neglects her duty to London in these matters ; if she does not make much of the two greatest of the seven sacraments ; if she leaves to an uncommissioned School Board the duty of teaching the principles of the Christian religion to her children ; the Church can never have that emancipating influence in London, or anywhere else, which she is intended to have. But when this elementary, primary, paramount work is done, the rest follows as a matter of course, and, as a matter of course, men and women are found to hand to do it. On the other hand, if all sorts of schemes and THE CHURCH AND LONDON. 131 plans for material or social reform are put before the making much of the sacraments and the mainte- nance of definite Christian doctrine, then I fear the schemes and plans will be wanting in coherence and permanency. Men will first try this and then that ; they will have kindled their own fire, and have walked surrounded with the sparks which they have kindled, but finally they will lie down in sorrow. It is more important for the Church to be giving to Londoners a reasonable, permanent, theological basis for their emancipating work, than even to be taking an active part in the details of that work. We have a right to call upon men to face the question as to what foundation their work rests upon ; as to why they should go on working for the democracy, when the people for whom they are working appa- rently care very little for them ; or spending their lives for progress, when half their colleagues identify progress with petty personal interference and tyranny. The sacramental and theological foundation of all this is laid in every Baptism, every Holy Communion, and in the simple teaching of the Church Catechism. The laying of this foundation is the most important thing which the Church can do for London ; there- fore many a parish priest or quiet congregation, who would not dream of joining the Christian Social Union, is co-operating with us. And on the other hand, no amount of ecclesiastical or social fireworks will bring as much benefit to London as the laying of this sacramental and theological foundation would bring. On the other hand, every kind of emancipating work should be built on this foundation. It is the business of the Church in London to help to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. The organization of labour, the sweeping away of slums, the providing of open spaces, the purifying of our 132 A LENT IN LONDON. river, all these and such-like matters the Church will take an active part in supporting. The injustice under which the enormous value given to the land in London by the community, by industrious workers and traders, is monopolized by a few, will be per- sistently attacked. The early age at which children leave school, the too-long hours for which they have to work, and the dangerous way in which for a few short years they thrust the elder adults out of the labour market, and then, having only been taught, say, to make the twentieth part of a chair, or the tenth part of a boot, they sink into the ranks of the unemployed, soon after they are married, and other youngsters take their place, these are matters to which, for the sake of London, the Church might devote serious thought. And the blackleg, too, with all your zeal for organ- ized industry, he must not be outside the Church's sympathy ; for what is he but the victim of land monopoly in the country, forced off the soil, imported into London, to ruin, if it may be, organized labour ? The emancipation of all these, and of their organ- izers or employers, who are themselves competing one against the other, it is for the Church to bring about by thinking clearly and acting fearlessly. It is easy enough to dream beautiful dreams of what London might be, it is too fatally easy to fling wild words against this or that individual or class ; what the Church has to do is to recognize that we are all more or less in a tangle, to seek out the cause of it, and to work very steadily at the removal of the cause. But the Church's emancipating work must be seen in other spheres besides the industrial. The misery caused by modern anarchic systems of industry, and by the monopoly of the great means of production, is terrible ; but there are plain signs that order is THE CHURCH AND LONDON. 133 beginning to take the place of anarchy, and that the monopoly is doomed. It is the Church's work to help to bring about that order and to hasten that doom. But it is also the Church's work to deliver men from others who would bind on them heavy burdens grievous to be borne ; and some of those who are most eager about industrial emancipation are equally eager to enforce a personal interference with the lives and pleasures of the people which may soon become intolerable. From this the Puritan tyranny it is the duty of the Church to help to deliver London. The Puritan attack on the public-house, the music- hall, and the frank though restrained life of the senses, is obviously the result of a non-sacramental training ; and the Churchman is bound to say, " The singers and the dancers, yea, and all my fresh founts of joy, shall be in Thee." A spiritual as well as an industrial emancipation for London would thus naturally follow from a loyalty to the Church's doctrines and sacraments. CHRISTIAN CHARITY. BY THE REV. PREBENDARY HARRY JONES, M.A. " Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor . . . and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." I COR. xiii. 3. THERE are many words which bear a double sense. Two are attached to "charity." St. Paul, in my text, speaks of one which prevailed in his own time, and has survived to ours, often to the exclusion of any other, viz. the bestowal of alms, in the shape of money, food, or clothing. This is the popular meaning given to the word now. It appears in such terms as "charitable institution/' "charity school," " charity blankets," and " charity sermon," which is an appeal for money to help the " poor." Indeed, so widely is this sense of the word accepted, that we have a " Charity Organization Society " (an excellent one, by the way) formed for the purpose of enabling generous people to relieve such as are in real distress. The Bible has much to say about this kind of charity. Some of it appears in sentences read from the Old Testament before a collection of the offertory in church, and we hear of it plainly from the lips of our Lord Himself. No one denies the value of material donations to the needy, nor the duty of making them, especially by those who (as people say) are " blessed " with the good things of this world. But St. Paul, in an exhaustive definition of charity, CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 135 takes an extreme case, and puts the popular meaning of this word on one side, as imperfect. He gives another sense to it. The bountiful donor, imagined by him, who lacked charity, would hardly be welcomed by the Judge in the day of Doom. The Apostle, indeed, be it remarked, does not decry a bodily helping of the poor. He himself laboured with his own hands that he might minister, not merely to his own necessities, but to those of such as were with him. But he looks at the motive of the giver ; and surely this must involve a perception of the best way in which we may benefit the receiver. Thus we may come to apprehend the nature of " Christian charity/' The love of God is not shared by the donor unless his help be given " cheerfully," without grudging complaint at being asked to give, or protest against the exacting troublesomeness of the poor as being to blame for their poverty. He must help with some exercise of His spirit Who knows what things we have need of before we ask Him. Now in inquiring how we should give, several thoughts suggest themselves. Let me dispose of at least one. All allow that sometimes help has un- avoidably to be given openly, or on a large scale, when contributions are invited towards the support of some good work which ignorance of details, or want of personal opportunities, prevents a man from helping in private. In this case, moreover, he may receive praise of men, without forfeiting his right to be acting with true charity. This was recognized when distribution was made to the needy at Jeru- salem, and givers laid their money at the Apostles' feet. The donation, e.g., of Joses, a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus (they called him, indeed, the " son of consolation "), was openly made, and specially acknowledged by the Church. Nevertheless, in most cases, the rule of Jesus must be remembered, and 136 A LENT IN LONDON. how He said, " When thou doest an alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth." This secrecy has a double use. It bars an appetite for praise in the donor, and spares the self-respect of the recipient, who is led to look on the gift as the act of a friend, not that of a patron. Moreover, it is advisable, as checking greedy clamour for alms, and thwarting a concourse of beggars. But, in the face of permanent destitution, very little good seems to be done by the most generous of donations, whether made in public or private. This is a stale admission. Some people, however, have gone on filling the sieve of beggary, in the kindliest spirit, to find it empty again. Others have used discriminating schemes of distribution, and relied on the practical discernment of the Charity Organi- zation Society. Thus, indeed, they may feel to be protected from encouraging imposture, and that certain of the "deserving poor" are helped by their gifts. This is well, so far. Many of the most needy are thus aided. But (as my old friend Hansard used to say) you cannot organize the Holy Ghost. When all is said and done towards saving the most hopeful sufferers from the slough of pauperism, close above its surface there is a film of poverty which the imple- ment of the direct money-giver is unable to skim off. How does Christian charity, even if joined with the bestowal of all a man's goods to feed the poor, suffice to remove or dissipate this layer of industrial privation, and the mass of penury beneath it ? Does the example of St. Martin, who divided his cloak with the beggar, help us ? Or are we sufficiently warned by the fate of Dives, who allowed a pauper to live on the crumbs from his table, till the angels intervened? It was not unkind of him to let a rnenial-fed dependent lie at his gate. We may be sure that another Lazarus filled the coveted vacancy CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 137 before Dives was buried. And an army of St. Martins would have been needed to gratify the swarm which must have envied the good fortune of their comrade. Can Christian charity such as that of this one saint solve the problem before Christians now ? Without finding in its impossibility an excuse for shutting the purse and buttoning the pocket, must we not perceive that charity means far more than a giving to the poor of that which satisfies bodily hunger ? Was Jesus pleased when the multitude sought Him because they ate of the loaves and were filled ? He fed them, indeed, and we may thus learn of Him in times of extremity ; but He looked for a better appetite in them than that which He had quenched. In this, too, He surely teaches us, still more. Should we not think of what the poor ought to desire for themselves? Should we not do all we can to encourage a wish in them for something beyond " loaves and fishes " ? Have not these very words, indeed, been used, in contempt, by the best among the necessitous, as when they sneer at such as profess religion for what they can get in the shape of tickets and doles ? Some philanthropists have come to see the truth of this, and sought to promote " thrift," and a more refined appreciation of human enjoyment than comes through the bodily senses. They have looked beyond the beneficence of hospitals, which train the rich man's doctor while they unquestionably heal the sick poor, and they have promoted "provident dispensaries." They have also set up Polytechnics and the like. They have encouraged the spread of elevating litera- ture, technical education, and hailed the arrival of parish councils. All this, especially the last, indi- cates a wholesome growing perception that the real 138 A LENT IN LONDON. wants of the " masses " are not met by a permanent distribution of alms, however generous and devoutly given, or by gifts of food, fire, and clothing specially needed at times of acute general distress. The un- employed cry for work, not bread without employ- ment. Moreover, beyond a limited appreciation of such philanthropical instructive institutions as I have referred to, even these are felt, somehow, by many, to be outside the deeper needs of those whom they are designed to benefit. They are excellent in their way, and deserve liberal support, especially as they tend to encourage more self-reliance among the care- less. There is, however, a growing desire among the best of those roughly designated as the " poor " for something which has no flavour of " charity," as commonly understood. It is a feeling after such relief or elevation as arises from within themselves, and does not approach them from without, however kind the motives of those who would bring and bestow it. Something like the sap of creation, which lifts the tree whose seed is in itself, and rises, so to speak, with automatic growth. The most intelligently aspiring members of the " working class " crave for that action to be en- couraged which shall recognize more fully their claim as citizens to better the laws under which, unhappily, the present evil condition of so many among the " industrial population " has come about. There are, indeed, not a few who can work, but are not ashamed to beg. And there are some who subject themselves to capricious restrictions when they might fairly earn their bread. But the most self-respecting among those I am thinking of would almost rather starve than be sup- pliants for alms. They resent sheer donative charity with profound repugnance, and ask for remedial measures, constitutionally inaugurated, some of which CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 139 startle political economists. I do not here examine, or indeed plead for, any of the special proposals which are thus made, but (merely as an illustration of the fact that they aim at superseding so-called popular chanty, and without any decrying of material generosity, personally shown by friends) I might point to a sign of the times seen in the popularity of a work lately published, and, with severe signifi- cance, called " Merrie England/' It faces the " pro- blem of life." The book contains more than two hundred pages, is written in a vivid scholarly style, and divided into chapters headed with quotations from Ruskin, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Mill, Adam Smith, and, repeatedly, the Prophet Isaiah. Well, this aggressive but scholarly volume costs only a penny, and already, it is announced, several hundred thousand copies of it have been bought, mainly by " working men." This is more than a " straw " in the wind that has brought the social revolution through which we are passing. And I now refer to it in so far as it involves an utterance pointedly discarding the interpretation long given to the word " charity." And without committing himself to an approval of what this book recommends, for it is in the pro- foundest degree revolutionary, I would ask every Christian to consider well whether St. Paul's plea for that which hopeth, beareth, and believeth all things, should not lead him to look, with a tolerant eye, at any repudiation by the "poor" of the patronizing sense which has been given to the word "charity/' even though their resentment of it be accompanied by statements and proposals referring to matters outside the region of almsgiving. Meanwhile, without attempting to forecast the eventual result of any effort by the working classes to benefit the needy through some legislative action 140 A LENT IN LONDON. (not by any means necessarily subversive of existing order), we cannot selfishly abstain from giving direct help to such as are in obvious distress. But " he that is spiritual judgeth all things," and it is not for the true Christian to turn with final contemptuous distaste from any genuine movement among the masses to elevate themselves ; however crude it may be, and however little he may esteem the nature of the requirements they put forth. When we see symptoms of a desire among the " needy " for something better than " doles," or even usefully instructive philanthropical institutions, we ought to hail it as a sign of social health. There is such a thing as "righteous discontent" which breeds wholesome self-reliance in a nation, though its growth may be mistaken by, and repugnant to, some who look for immediate thanks whenever they do a kind- ness after their own choosing. He who exercises far-seeing Christian charity, though (as things are) he will gladly give to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and warm the cold, must, indeed, be prepared often to have his vital motives misunderstood by the poor with whom he is brought into contact, and to have pleas for their ultimate good ungraciously heard by many who rely upon the virtue of almsgiving. Nevertheless, he will not hide his head in the sand, shrinking from a sight of the fact that thousands of those who form the social stratum above pauperism are being deeply moved with a desire to raise themselves by some legislative remedy, out of that state which causes so many of them to look for relief through external charity. This mostly lowers the recipient, instead of raising him, however sincerely and un- selfishly it may be applied. The far-seeing friend of man will realize all this in a true Christian spirit. He will do what he can to CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 141 give unformulated and exaggerated hopes a right direction, and be fair all round, remembering that Joseph of Arimathea was a disciple of Christ as well as Peter the fisherman of Galilee. Above all, when he has read St. Paul's definition of charity, he will remember that "love" is a name of God, and be enabled to recognize a true flavour of faith and hope in some of His children whom others think to be too self-asserting, and too ignorant to discern what they really need, but are his brethren in Christ ; and, so far as in him lies, to be brought into touch with that Spirit which He promised to guide us into all truth. OVER-POPULATION. BY THE REV. G. SARSON, M.A., Vicar of Holy Trinity, Dover. " So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him ; male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it." GEN. i. 27, 28. "Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary." I COR. xii. 22. THOSE of us who venture to invoke the capacious name of Christianity in the solution of economic problems are periodically informed that we are vainly flapping against the iron bars of nature's cage. We are warned to keep ourselves, as Christians, off econo- mic ground, and not to make of its solid veracities a fool's paradise for ourselves and our dupes. We are, as far as I can discover, never exactly told what the vast overshadowing power, or law, is which we are fated to defy if, as Christians, we venture to meddle with economic questions. But, I believe, the thought at the back of men's minds is that there are too many labourers in the land, too many people perhaps in the world, and that it is unmitigated mis- chief to lead sufferers from this superfluity to believe that they can lift their sufferings from their own shoulders without shifting it on to others in the ranks of the superfluous. Nature, or the universal blind O VER-POP ULA TION. 143 struggle and push, they seem to think, is the wisest chooser as to who shall suffer, when suffer some must, until the supplies of suffering perish simultaneously with the over-supply of population. Twenty-five years ago political economists and scientific philanthropists agreed in declaring over- population to be the chief obstacle to the progress of the working classes. To-day the subject occupies a comparatively small space in the works of such writers ; but the influence of the thought lingers. The change in tone is characteristic of a general change since the days when Charles Bradlaugh was the hero of the most advanced politicians amongst miners and manu- facturing artisans. The aim of Mill and Bradlaugh was to induce the country so to limit its population that labour, no longer superabundant, might command its own price in the market, and be no longer at the mercy of the under-bidding of starving superfluous hands. Mr. Bradlaugh, in his later and parliamentary days, could hardly restrain his fury at the new school of labour leaders who ignore the dangers of over- population, and think that State organization can avail to secure for the masses a larger share of the productions of the country, so long at least as new hands and mouths continue to multiply. Labour leaders seemed to Mr. Bradlaugh rank impostors if they led men to hope for any mitigation of the world's poverty except by so reducing its population that the wages of unskilled labour must be higher because of its comparative scarcity. As a strong individualist, Mr. Bradlaugh based all his reasoning on the case of the individual with work to seek for, and a family to maintain. Undeniably, at any particular time that individual would be more easily situated and well paid, if his family were small, and his fellow- workmen fewer. But we may approach the problem from a point 144 A LENT IN LONDON. of view transcending the personal troubles of the individual, and their tangible causes at any one moment. It may be more scientific to begin not from the individual, but by looking at the masses in the lump. In the crowd of men standing idle in the market-place, shut out from the work-yard gates, we may see not merely an over-supply of labour. In the abstract, there is something self-contradictory in the phrase " over-supply of labour." If these labourers were mere machines, only able to produce one sort of article, and only requiring oil and fuel to keep them going, there might be an over-supply of their particular product. But, in reality, these multitudes of unemployed are made for one another, each de- manding something which the others can produce, the over-supply of each being something with which the others are under-supplied. The misfortune is, not that these men have come into existence, but that they are not producing for one another the things which, between them, all want. The able-bodied have it in them to produce the material and social neces- sities and luxuries which are supposed by the indi- vidualist to justify a man in existing. All that is wanted is capital to set them to work on the raw material of these necessities, and land on which to move their limbs healthily. Is there a dearth of capital, dearness of raw material, scarcity of unoccu- pied land ? If so, there may be natural obstacles to the employment of the unemployed to supply one another's needs. There is at present no such dearth. On the contrary, we are told that capital and land are starving for lack of demanders. Therefore, what is wanted is to bring together all these various elements of production ; to bring together the men who want one another, who demand one another, and can supply one another's wants and demands ; to bring these unemployed men together to the O VER-POP ULA TION. 145 unemployed capital, which also is languishing for investment and employment in their muscles. From the point of view of any single individual, seeking employment in an unorganized society, every other unemployed person adds to his difficulties, and those difficulties are multiplied by the total number of the unemployed. But looked at from the point of view of a society seeking to organize and utilize all its instruments of production, an unemployed indi- vidual's difficulties are not added to, but met, by the existence of other unemployed persons. Every other unemployed person is his potential employer, a demand for his unemployed labour, for which possibly there might be no demand if no other unemployed person existed. Therefore, instead of multiplying the difficulties of the unemployed man by the number of his fellow-unemployed, you may multiply the demand for him by the total number of the unem- ployed. They are all (unless they are rich) in need of something, demanding something, which he can help to make. He, if he is poor, especially if he is destitute, is demanding many things which they between them can make. But, you will tell me, there are already stacks of boots, and stockings, and coats, and hats, and cheap food of all sorts, for which there is no market, and to set these unemployed men to make these things for one another, is to leave these stacks of over- production to throw still further numbers out of employment. The answer to this is, that there may at any one time be an over-production of certain articles of common consumption, but there can never be an over-production of everything. Over-produc- tion of everything would mean free exchange of these things amongst all their producers, and the briskest possible trade for everything. For if every one had over-produced, every one would have superabundance L 146 A LENT IN LONDON. wherewith to purchase the superabundance of others. It might in that case be necessary to burn some of the over-produced things, if there were no room for the things, but every one would be in clover and at leisure if there were universal over-production. Till the world is crammed, over-production and over- population cannot be the causes of poverty and unemployment. It is unorganized production, not 0zw-production, unorganized population, not over- population, which are the causes of partial destitution. But there may yet be some truth at the bottom of the over-production cry. Though there cannot be universal over-production, there may be partial over- production ; there may, e.g., have been over-produc- tion of that stack of boots, stockings, coats, and hats, and cheapest foods, which we imagined might stand unused, if the army of the unemployed were organized to make for one another the most common necessities of life. But what would this prove? Only the difficulties of making a proper start with the un- employed. That there are too many boots, etc., at any one time has been the result of improper organi- zation of production, not of general over-production, still less of over-population. If there had been proper organization of production, the labour which was spent in making those superfluous boots would have been spent in making something else. There must be certain things which would be very welcome to those who have boots enough, and would add to the convenience and comfort of their lives. Such things at present are a little too dear for these well- booted folk. Production, diverted from boots to such things, say overcoats, or watches, or books, would have enabled a greater number of persons to have overcoats, watches, or books. If so, the non-employ- ment of the army of the unemployed has prevented a certain number of persons from having overcoats, OVER-POPULATION. 147 watches, and books ; and has also left unused that stack of boots, hats, stockings, coats, etc., which we imagined, and which their producers may fairly regard at present as so much over-production. We may freely admit that tremendous difficulties stand in the way of such organization of production. We can also conceive that in some things a rise in prices might occur, if there were a cessation of the present process of cheapening things at the expense of a number of unemployed. But it is enough for our present purpose if we can see, in what is called over-population, a potential source of wealth, instead of a hopeless cause of poverty. An enormous drag is at once lifted off our minds and hearts and energies, if we may abandon the idea that " numbers " necessarily spell " poverty." If pessimists tell us that we must so do, we might even reconcile ourselves to having always to maintain a residuum of unemployed from public funds. It would be sad enough to have to believe this, and we need not believe it. But even this would be welcome compared with the covert belief that the unemployed are unemployed because there are too many people in the world. It may be beyond the power of human skill and calculation exactly to balance the different sorts of production, so that all producers may always have employment ; but this is owing to imperfections of our present attainments, not to the very existence of a certain number of human beings. Thus, looked at from the point of view of this or that individual or family, over-population in this or that home may be a cause of poverty to certain indi- viduals. But, looked at from the universal, every increase of population is potential increase of wealth for all, so long as the earth has room and sufficient capacity for producing the raw material necessary for all to live and work upon. 148 A LENT IN LONDON. Those of us who were brought up, a quarter of a century ago, on Mill's "Political Economy/' were taught to regard the possessors of large families as sinning against the future welfare of society at large. Some of you may remember an angry footnote of Mill, in which he denounces the clergy and others for their bad example in this respect For Mill there was little superiority in periods of commercial prosperity as compared with adversity, so long as in pros- perous times the marriage and birth rates increased. His only good hope from prosperous periods was that the standard of comfort of the working classes might be raised in such periods, and that as they passed away, each time they might leave the work- ing classes insisting upon a larger amount of comfort as the minimum for a tolerable existence. And herein he laid the foundation of what his disciples of to-day denounce as so unscientific the idea of " a living wage." But that men should be able to insist upon a living wage any larger than that which is just enough to keep them able to work, seemed to Mill impossible, except by the limiting of the population so that wages should rise through the comparative scarcity of labour. He was right if organization is impossible, organization local, national, international. Mr. Kidd has been formulating as a sine qua non of progress that population should press upon the means of subsistence. If what he says is true, then if individualism prevailed so that the population were regulated by the determination of parents that their children shall easily be as well provided for as them- selves, the elementary conditions of progress would cease to exist As we look at the crowds of children in the streets round about us, Mr. Kidd seems to say to us, although and because these children are a financial difficulty to their parents, they are conditions of progress to the community. Necessary conditions, O VER-POPULA TION. 149 mark ; not necessary causes of wealth and progress. To become causes of wealth and progress, the press of population must be educated producers, organized, and, as Mr. Kidd historically gathers, religious as a body. We have been seeing that what is called over- population is a potential source of production and joint wealth over-addition to the commonwealth. But Mr. Kidd's point is merely that if the pressure of the tendency to over-population is relaxed, nature's uni- versal goad is removed. Mr. Kidd is not, in what he considers the strict sense of the term, a socialist. For him strong competition is the atmosphere that healthy nature universally desiderates. Within this atmosphere, he would have everything that is possible done to give every one an equal footing in the struggle of life. Progress, he argues, has proceeded in pro- portion as religion has induced races to bring ever- increasing numbers of their members within the area of a fairer struggle for the means of subsistence. What is called over-population is, in itself, a sine quti non of progress ; not inevitably productive of progress, and yet potentially productive of wealth and progress, and thus productive in proportion as organization prevails, organization based upon desire to bring all really within the commonwealth. Thus, whatever tendency there may be to over- population, is nature goading men to organize, and to organize religiously religiously, that is, in deference to the ties which bind men together. These ties make mankind an organism. To respond to these ties is to organize, to be religious ; for we can only organize in the Name of the Most High within the human being, and in renunciation of mere self, i.e. in the Name of Christ. We need not, then, be pessimists. There is no justification for blank dismay. The great impedi- ment to progress does not consist in the growth of ISO A LENT IN LONDON. population. We might well be appalled if every baby born were an addition to the sum-total of poverty. On the contrary, every baby born is a potential addition to the wealth of the nation. It is only a source of poverty when you allow the baby to grow up into an untaught youth, leaving school too soon, and doing a man's or woman's work badly as soon as it is big enough to do unskilled work. The boy is a source of poverty when you allow him to earn money so soon that he never learns to become a permanent producer of anything. There the error is again the individualist's error. In pity for the pinched family, and to ease its resources for two or three years, you prevent the boy from learning what will enrich him and the community for life. Perhaps his father, at the age of forty, is finding employment scarcer? Why? Perhaps because his work is being done by some boy of thirteen or fifteen who ought to be at school or a technical school. Of course such boys will be turned into the market at the earliest possible moment, if industrial life is to be a merely individualist struggle. That boy's father will serve other men as other boys' fathers have served him. And so, says the individualist, cheapness prevails, and all have their wants supplied at the least cost. But the process is murderous. And it is the disorganization that is so suicidal. We have left industry to scramble and chance, and then we despair because there are so many to engage in the scramble. If the scramblers were dogs, our despair would be warrantable. Because they are human beings, whether labourers or capitalists, their mutual destructiveness may be turned into construc- tiveness if they will co-operate instead of scrambling. As long as they scramble, they destroy the wealth which lies within themselves as well as the capital O VER-POP ULA TION. 1 5 1 they fight for. If they will co-operate, they will at once multiply their inherent wealth and the capital of the capitalists. We want so to condition life that co-operation may be possible. For this, we must educate, discipline, organize. We can begin to do this as communities and as a nation. We can hardly, as a nation, begin to reduce the population, even if that were the panacea for our social woes. That must be left to individual prudence. And such prudence will grow best amongst organized sur- roundings. If it is imprudence, the poorest are most imprudent in this matter. You will stop their im- prudence, not by intensifying the present scramble, but by the thought and pause which organization brings. And this is hindered, we know not how much, by a preliminary pessimism the profound, though now perhaps partially shamed and silent pessimism, which believes that our main difficulty is one which, to tell the grim truth, could only really be abated by wholesale murder. Of course, such pessi- mism, bred of the belief that there are too many people in the land, makes men feel that the remedies for our woes do not lie in Christianity. When they tell us that Christianity cannot be profitably brought to bear on political economy, they mean that 4 ' Nature, red in tooth and claw, With ravine shrieks against our creed." But we tell them that they take a very partial and limited view of Nature, and that Nature is made for organization, and that those men most ignore Nature who most ignore her capacities for organization at the hand of man. As Christians, it is almost enough for us to protest against this pessimism. It is not our special function to work out the mechanics of the organization of industry, capital and labour. This is the office of i$2 A LENT IN LONDON. the political economist and the statesman. Ours is, in the Name of the God-Christ, to emancipate these workers and their clients from the chains of pessi- mism with which they are tied and bound ; to declare that there is a Mind and Heart at the bottom of creation ; that man is made in God's image still, that he may be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it to his service and God's. If we can thus liberate thought from its bondage to pessi- mism, we shall stimulate economic invention and ingenuity and statecraft, until they achieve for human industry and capital what they have achieved in the past generation for machinery and locomotion. Economic science has too much confined itself to glorifying into impassable barriers the difficulties which life undoubtedly presents. We do not ask that these difficulties may be ignored. But we do insist that ideals shall not be ignored. We do insist that every human problem must be approached under the mighty convictions of faith concerning human society and every human being. In the Marriage Service of the Church of England, the opening address, which some shrink from hearing read, says just what seems to need to be said by reason and faith. There is no breath of dismay at the fact that marriage means children. This intro- duction to the Marriage Office even puts children as the first purpose of the marriage, in terms which hardly any one of to-day would have dared to initiate : " Children to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of His Holy Name" the Holy Name which is the unity of fatherhood, sonship, brotherhood. It welcomes the prospect of children. The only proviso is that they shall be brought up to live for God and not for self. Because children are the first purpose of marriage, therefore it " is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, VER-POPULA TION. 153 unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding ; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God ; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained." The Church fears not increase of popula- tion, but only selfish, unsocial, irreligious nurture of children. It is beyond my present purpose to enforce all the warning, which these words contain against selfish, individualistic, ill-considered marriages. I can only remind any one who would twist anything I have said into an apology for such marriages, that one evil result of the present chaotic scramble for a livelihood seems to be, that marriage is at present " enterprised, unadvisedly, lightly, and wantonly," most of all by those whose nurture has most trained them to regard life as a daily scramble for food. If " all our doings " were more visibly " ordered by God's governance," men and women would be more forced than at present to feel that individualistic desire is insuffi- cient sanction for marriage. We contend that the Baptismal Office and the Marriage Office set forth prime human truths, funda- mental for economic and industrial science as well as for personal holiness. The first thing which the Church of England Cate- chism teaches every child is, that it has been made a member of Christ, a brother in the Divine human family, an inheritor of a kingdom of spiritual influ- ences, powers, rights. The child is taught that it fights against its Divine constitution and environ- ment when it fails to live as a member ; and it is taught that this is what its own private Christian name symbolizes for it and for the Church. At the very moment when we are dwelling on the person- ality of the individual, we are taught, as the first truth 1 54 A LENT IN LONDON. of the Catholic faith concerning the individual, that he is, by his Divine creation and constitution, a member of a vast organism, an integral, vital, perfect part, a limb of a body of which Christ is the Head ; and that he has been divinely born into an inheritance which is nothing less than the spiritual Kingdom. The Christian terminology for describing every individual is essentially organic, economic, social language. We cannot keep our hands off political economy without ignoring the first words of our Catechism, and our fundamental Christian faith concerning every human being. We can only regard a human being Chris- tianly, we can only regard society Christianly, when we see in each human being a member of the whole sacred body, and not a mere excrescence or super- fluity. Our Christianity is an economy, the economy ; it is not a mere salve, or string of texts, for those who are faint or beaten amongst a horde of irre- sponsible scramblers or unprovided-for tramps. True, indeed, "all men are conceived and born in sin." But, greater truth than this, " God, The Son, hath redeemed me and all mankind" And it is to declare this, of all mankind body, mind, and spirit to declare that neither multitudes nor sin are outside the scope and power of the redeemed economy ; it is to declare and effectuate this universal economy, that God the Holy Spirit consecrates and inhabits His Church. ART AND LIFE. BY THE REV. PERCY DEARMER, B.A., Assistant Curate of St. John's, Great Marlborough Street. "For with Thee is the Well of Life, and in Thy Light shall we see Light. " Ps. xxxvi. 9. HOLY Church has, with a strange pertinacity, per- sisted in her attachment to Art, throughout the dark ages of Mammon's triumph in which our lot is cast. The dwellers in Philistia have wondered at her fana- tical conduct : just as they could see nothing but money-making in Life, so they could see nothing but man-millinery in Art. " Why this ridiculous attachment to mediaeval forms and ceremonies ? " they have been crying, "What more can you need in public worship, than a smooth frock-coat and a tumbler of water ? " Churchmen, cankered many of them by the commercial worm, wavered. But Holy Church persisted, in the teeth of prejudice and of persecution. In the greater part of her the old lovely rites continued, with only some loss of their earlier purity ; while in the very borders of the Philistines the ancient spirit flickered on ; and even the Dean of Gath could not do worse than neglect his Cathedral ; even the Bishop of Askelon suffered the incense to rise in silent protest to heaven, under his very nose. And now a change has come over the thought of men. Not that art is yet revived, but men are getting 156 A LENT IN LONDON. to feel that it ought to be revived. It is indeed still lost among us, but we are becoming conscious of our loss. And the result is that men are everywhere getting to be a little ashamed of having reviled the Church for so consistently holding aloft the lamp of Beauty. They are beginning to realize that she has in fact been handing on the light (just as she pre- served classical literature in the Middle Ages), and that she, and she almost alone, has been keeping alive the sacred fire, such sparks of it as may still be smouldering among our people. She could not but do this, because it is her function to maintain the wholeness and oneness, the integrity of the Catholic faith. Not, mark you, that beauty is more than one side of life and religion, but that it is one side, and less than the whole is less than the Truth. It would have been impossible for that Body which has the abiding Spirit of God to fall away from the integrity of truth. If she had, Christ's promise, " Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world," would have been broken. It was not then a mere graceful picturesqueness that Holy Church stood up for amid the ruins of art, but an essential principle : the principle of the integrity of Life ; the principle that goodness and beauty cannot be opposed ; because there are not two gods, but One God, and He is the Source alike of all goodness, all beauty, all truth. " Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." The Church then has to maintain, through evil report and good report, the integrity of life. This is why she has had, in the very interests of purity, to oppose what is called Puritanism. For Purity is that which would make all things pure : Puritanism is that which would make most things impure. ART AND LIFE. 157 And the effect of Puritanism has been, not only to divert its votaries from art, which is worship, to covetousness, which is idolatry, not only that, but Puritanism is also responsible for the reaction against it of school after narrow school of artists, who persist in regarding art as a mere plaything for the well- to-do. Bohemia is but a sabbath-day's journey from Philistia. Puritanism, and the reactions against it, are fundamentally alike : they alike deny our great first-principle of the integrity of life ; they alike refuse to see that the artist is the fellow-worker with God some because they do not believe in art, some because they do not believe in God, and many because they do not believe in either. The false antithesis, which popular religion suffered between goodness and beauty, has in fact driven the artist to Bohemia. Nothing else can explain the difference between the popular artist of bygone days, who " painted upon his knees," and the popular book-illustrator of to-day, whose one aim in life seems to be to exclude from his work everything whatsoever that is honest, pure, lovely, or of good report, and if there be any virtue, or any praise, not to think on these things, or to do them. Indeed I think the danger to-day is not so much from the Puritanism which says that Art is immoral, as from the reactionary Hedonism which says that Art is non-moral. The mawkish sentimentality in painting, for instance, or in music, which was the only kind of art that the self-styled religious world would tolerate a few years ago, has driven many people to suppose that no art is perfect without a spice of devilry. And we find critics reiterating that curious doctrine which has become memorable in one famous sentence "The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose." 158 A LENT IN LONDON. " Nothing against his prose"! Is not this just Puritanism, turned inside out? And this shallow philosophy, this sectional idea of life, that would divide every human being into water-tight compartments, is doing exactly the same bad work as Puritanism. It lowers the value, and restricts the functions of Art. It treats Art as if it were a mere decorative adjunct of life ; forgetting the great principle of Plato, that " Wrongness of form and the lack of rhythm, the lack of harmony, are fraternal to faultiness of mind and character " ; forgetting that decoration is but a means to an end, and that this end is the manifestation of the harmony and loveliness of the world, the grace and power of man, the unity of life, the holiness of God. And, because they will not see that Art is the out- ward and visible expression of that inward mystical grace of Beauty, their foolish heart is darkened. They pursue each his own slender vein of talent ; never broadening, never deepening their work, but content with incessant repetition of idea, they are killing Art by gradual dismemberment. For, though they found no school of promise for the future, they are yet followed by a host of narrow-souled imitators ; and the idle crowd of ignorant admirers pick up the tricks of these poor gifted men, who neither reverence the past nor hope for the future. What is the result ? A complete divorce between Art and Life. So that, in a paper that is supposed to be enlightened, there recently appeared an article on the architecture of London, which began with the assumption (an assumption that no one has since taken the trouble to contradict) that art is only for " that portion of the community which has money to spend." What a grotesque result of the doctrine of "art for art's sake" ! What an irony of fate that, having dissociated Art from God, and therefore from ART AND LIFE. 159 Life, we should now be crying, " Art for Mammon's sake " ! Alas, for the old times when every city reared its cluster of towers and roofs within its city walls, an island of beauty that was worthy of the hills and forests and meadows which surrounded it ! Alas, for the time when a whole city could go mad with delight over one beautiful picture, when the love of all lovely things was so widespread that every village carpenter and every village blacksmith was an artist, and there was not a thing produced by the hand of man that did not tell of the harmony between the common people and the mind of God. Alas for the time ! For now we are promised an art for the rich ; an art that will leave Life untouched with the beauty of holiness ; an art that will confine itself in books and in picture-frames ; an art that will caper in the drawing-rooms of those who live upon the labour of others ; while the towns, where men have to spend their days, are to continue as repulsive, as degrading, as sordid, squalid, and contemptible as ever. And we may sit all our lives " Revant du divin Platon, et de Phidias, Sous 1'oeil clignotant des bleus bees de gaz." My friends, this is not possible. Beauty is an attribute of God : Mammon is not. We must choose : we cannot have both. At the present day, in spite of the wonderful revivals of art among us, there is less beauty, far less, in the world than there was fifty years ago. The greater part of our churches have been ruined by unspeakable restorations ; the fairest towns, like Florence, or like Oxford (where at least one might have expected better things), have been made almost unrecognizable by wanton destruction, or heartless, careless, stupid rebuilding. And nearly the whole of our terrible modern architecture has been perpetrated during the last fifty years. 160 A LENT IN LONDON. It is not possible ! If we use art as the embroidery of idle selfish lives it will die, as it has always died when put to such use in the past. Love, Truth, Beauty, we cannot separate them, for they are God : we must have all, or none. Art, to be possible at all in any real sense, must be founded upon them. It cannot be a thing apart ; as Milton finely says, " He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem." It can be no exotic, no artificial hot- house plant delicately cherished by wealthy patrons. It must spring from the common soil of the whole people. It must be an atmosphere ; we must drink it in wherever we go, and it must no longer be true that, while God makes the country, the Devil makes the town. For our cities, our homes, our churches must overflow once more with beauty and suggestion, if Art is to take root amongst us. We may paint pictures till the crack of doom, but it will avail us nothing, until we have learnt the paramount necessity of beautiful surroundings for every man, woman, and child on God's beautiful earth. For these, it is, which mould the characters of men. 'Tis our primal need, to have the inspiration of lovely things about us : "The ways through which my weary steps I guide In this delightful land of Faery Are so exceeding spacious and wide, And sprinkled with such sweet variety Of all that pleasant is to ear and eye, That I, nigh ravisht with rare thought's delight, My tedious travail do forget thereby, And, when I 'gin to feel decay of might, It strength to me supplies, and cheers my dulled spright." That is what art is for! Not for the idle and luxurious, but for the weary and heavy laden, for those who their " tedious travail do forget thereby : " not for mere pleasure, but for power and inspiration, " It strength to me supplies, and cheers my dulled ART AND LIFE. 161 spright : " art, not for art's sake, but for the sake of beauty, and of truth, for the sake of God. " Whatso- ever doth make manifest is light." " God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all." Have we not forgotten this ? We talk nowadays about Art, as the editor of a certain religious journal did the other day, who described the wonderfully happy condition of the working-classes by saying that art now abounded in their homes, because of the spread of cheap prints ! And complacently we forget that we have exiled art from our midst. Open, then, your eyes to the fact that we cannot raise the faintest scintilla of art among our people, that we cannot even make a single church thoroughly beautiful, that we cannot even build a single satisfactory public building. And then consider what we have lost. We have lost the atmosphere of inspiration, the subtle exalting influence that Plato valued so highly ; we have lost true " other- worldliness " the con- sciousness of the nearness and reality of the other world of saints and angels ; we no longer understand that the spirit of true religion is everywhere, in street and home, and every day of the week. We have put God out of sight, and out of mind. We have got out of harmony with Nature, which God has made so lavishly beautiful. For God knows that beauty is essential if a people is to be healthy and good ; but we have shut out the very sky in these awful cities of ours, where everything we see is eloquent of Mammon, and silent about God. For us the trees bud and the flowers open in vain. We have destroyed the great refining influence of life ; we have lost tenderness, humility, honesty in work, the belief in the dignity of labour. We have become narrow-souled, and narrow- minded, with vulgar greedy ways of living. For we have split up the integrity of life : so that the Uni- versities know nothing about art, while Bohemia is M i62 A LENT IN LONDON. frivolously unconcerned about the great problems of existence. The freshness and joy are gone from amongst us : " The world is too much with us ; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, Little we see in Nature that is ours ; We have given our lives away, a sordid boon ! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers ; For this, for everything, we are out of tune ! " And, now, I want to lead you on to recognize that no social reform will do any real good without art. Not only because, as we have seen, art is necessary for the support and exaltation of life, but also because it is essential to the dignity of Labour. This truth Ruskin has summed up in one sentence: "Life without industry is guilt, and industry ^vitho^tt art is brutality" The guilt of idleness, the brutality of mechanical work here you have the two main causes of our secular disease. And, as I began by showing our indebtedness to Holy Church, let me draw two illus- trations from the present degradation of ecclesiastical art. What that degradation is, every one knows who has been inside any church, and seen the blatant commercialism of modern church-decoration 1 ; the Brummagem brass-work that is turned out by the great " ecclesiastical art furnishers," who are neither ecclesiastical, nor artistic, nor competent to furnish ; the miserable hangings and vestments, that are with- out character, or suggestion, or beauty of any kind every one, I say, knows, who can realize the melancholy heartless degradation of the whole thing. And those who are sensible to such matters know too how the 1 This is the more inexcusable, since everything beautiful that a Church can need may be bought at William Morris' (449, Oxford Street), where the moral of " Art and Life " is in practical application, ART AND LIFE. 163 soul is untuned by this abounding evidence of greed and vanity and unloveliness. But few realize that all this means, not the degradation of our churches alone, but the degradation of every workman whom they have employed. To my illustrations. Only a few days ago I was called in by a priest to inspect the new side-altar he was having put up in his church. He had employed a well-known firm of church-furnishers, and what had they done ? They had simply turned over the leaves of their catalogue, and had ordered a No. 68 altar ! Could anything be more horrible? Think of the lives of the workmen who spend the whole of their existence making No. 68 altars ! You wonder at the brutalizing of our people ; but what can you expect, when even skilled workmen are employed in this way, with no interest, no pleasure, no chance of im- parting a spark of their own selves to the work ? You wonder at the strange incompetence of modern work- men, at the extraordinary want of intelligence in what they do ; but compare their daily lives with that of a journalist, a lawyer, a physician, compare them with that of a workman in the Middle Ages, and think of the dulness of the one, of the absorbing interest of the other ; and then you will understand how it is there is such a striking difference between workmen and other men, nowadays. You will under- stand what the freedom and strength of the mediaeval workmen was, and why they could be let loose in a cathedral to carve what they liked, and to produce those wonderful creations that we find it impossible even to imitate, even when we import Italian masons to do the work for us. My second illustration bears its moral too plainly for comment. It is this. A few weeks ago a com- mittee of clergy and churchwardens were engaged in discussion as to whether contracts for a new parish 1 64 A LENT IN LONDON. building should be accepted, unless the recognized fair rate of wages were paid. The committee turned for an opinion to the representative of one of our best- known church architects. " Oh/' said he, " my chief never concerns himself with labour questions." Never concerns himself with labour questions ! Here lies, surely, the explanation of the utter deadness of architecture amongst us. For you cannot recover even the art of masonry, while labour is treated with this contempt. You can never have the simplest architecture again until you have free and intelligent and happy workers, never until the architect learns that the workman is an artist, and the artist a work- man. And, what is true of architecture is true of all work. No art will rise in our midst, and no happy society will be possible, till we learn that great Christian truth of the dignity of labour. Thus is art bound up with life. Without leisure and pleasure in work, no amount of culture, or of criticism, or of cant about high art, will be of the slightest use. Leisure, the workman must have, that he may become what he once was, a craftsman, not rest only, but leisure to live, to read, think, converse, and look on the face of nature, leisure that he may have life. And pleasure too in the work itself. Impossible ! you say, as you think of the dull repulsive round of daily drudgery, when men are either machines, or the servants of machines. Why is it impossible ? Just because of our contempt for human life ; because we regard money-making as the end of production ; because we have forgotten that the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment. And yet pleasure in work has only become generally impossible in recent times ; it is not a law of nature. Indeed no intelligent theist could ever believe it to be God's will, that men should sit the livelong day, amid ART AND LIFE. 165 rattling brutalizing machinery, or bending over some office desk, grinding at some paltry mechanical toil, till all the heart and soul, the fellowship, and zest in life, is crushed out of them. And therefore I am rejoiced that, through that wonderful book " Merrie England," our people are at last being taught the value of simple natural lives, the folly of our hideous machine-slavery. For it is deeply, vitally, true, that only in proportion as work becomes more pleasing, more interesting, more noble, will the people come to love their work ; and just as they love their work more, so will they be more industrious, more con- tented, and finer, better, manlier men. Thus is Life bound up with Art. And therefore, in the name of the toiling millions, in the name of Christ, Whose brethren they are, I appeal to you to fight the miserable partial views of life around you. It is we Christians who will have to show the world that all good and perfect things are at one, for we believe in the Divine at-one-ment ; and we know, surely we must know, the infinite preciousness of human life, the dignity of human labour. Thus, having learnt that those men are educated whose work educates them, those men temperate whose work gives them healthy lives and pure instincts, those men free whose labour raises them above the fear of slavery, we shall be able, in labour as well as in leisure, to be imitators of Him, Whose supreme attribute is the powei of creating. We shall worship Him in the beauty of holiness ; and in all our worship we shall not forget that work too is worship, laborare est orare, to labour is to pray. Ah ! it is Life that we have despised, the very art of living that we have forgotten. And yet He came that we might have Life, and that we- might have it more abundantly. PART III. OUR SELVES. A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE. BY THE REV. CANON HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, M.A. " Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly : gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children, and those that suck the breasts : let the bride- groom go forth of his chamber, and the bride out of her closet. Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say, Spare Thy people, O Lord, and give not Thine heritage to reproach, that the heathen should rule over them : wherefore should they say among the people, Where is their God ? " JOEL ii. 15-17. THE trumpet that is blown in Zion rallies the entire people to a public and national act. And the ground of its demand for such an act is that the shame that has brought that conviction is itself public and national. It is the visible disgrace of the Lord's heritage in the eyes of the heathen world. Something is wrong with it as a whole. It stands there, in the face of day, convicted of failure, suffering under inevitable reproach. No one can mistake the signs of decay, of spiritual impotence. The heathen spec- tators, watching round, taunt it, as a thing that is obviously broken, deserted, condemned. " Where is now their God," they ask, " of Whom they made so much ? " A public dereliction ! That is the fact before them. And that implies, at once, a public sin, which has brought the shame about. What is it ? Not enough to search this or that individual conscience ; not 170 A LENT IN LONDON. enough to detect this or that personal lapse. Nay ! the sin is the nation's own, in its integral character. It must discover, confess, bewail it, in its broad unity, through its official representatives, under its tradi- tional and constitutional forms. " Blow the trumpet ! " Startle these people at their business, in their pleasures, in the privacy of their homes, amid all their multitudinous occupations. Tell them that something more goes forward now than their own personal affairs. Wake ! Rouse ! Alarm ! Make them lift their heads, as they toil in the shop, as they chaffer in the market, as they sit round the hearth, as they dispute in the schools. " Blow the trumpet in Zion ! " Bid them swarm from their houses. Everything private must cease. It is the nation that takes precedence. " Call a solemn assembly : gather the people, sanctify the congregation." And because it is a public act, therefore let the elders, the corporate officers, take their appointed places. Let the priests, with whom is lodged the responsibility of national speech, play their due part, at the set spot between porch and altar. Let them cry, on behalf of all, " Spare us, good Lord, spare us ! Spare Thy people ! Give not Thine heritage to reproach ! " A national act! It is paramount over all indi- vidual accidents of interest or happiness. Is this man joyful ? Is that man busy ? Let all this yield and cease. The shadow of the people's penitence falls across the sunlight of man's days, and wipes out all the varied distinction of their many-coloured doings. No private claim can stand in face of the larger, deeper demand. Not even the blessed love of man or maiden newly wed. That might be suffered by kindly Jewish law to excuse a soldier from his service in the field. But now it may not justify its joy. No answer can be tolerated which ventures to plead, " I have married a wife, therefore I cannot come." No ! A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE. 171 it must postpone its delight. " Let the bridegroom come forth from his chamber, and the bride out of her closet ; " " And let them weep between the porch and the altar." Nor is it a matter of the degree of personal responsibility or personal guilt. No one need turn to ask, " How far was I aware of the nation's sin ? In what measure did I partake ? " Nay ! the most innocent fall under the ban. The very children, whose light hearts acquit them of all knowledge of what the sin may be the very infants who have never yet left the warm white peace of a mother's bosom even these are drawn within the range of this black sorrow ; they are sharers, through their flesh and blood, with the deeds that have been done. For the nation constitutes one organic thing : it moves along the lines of its fate, as an integral mass, governed by a single momentum, and all are swept along in the current. The action is collective, is corporate, is organic. It cannot be sorted out, in retail portions of separate responsibility, to this one or to that. All are one, and all are implicated. Gather them all ! Gather the children. " Gather the very babes that suck the breasts ! " That is the imperious, shattering cry of the trumpet which is to be blown in Zion ! Its voice is irresistible. It penetrates every nook and corner. It suffers nothing to escape or be excused. It can permit but one passion to be felt the passion of a pleading penitence. It can allow but one word to be heard in all the holy city. " Spare Thy people, O Lord, and let not Thy heritage be put to reproach. Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is now thy God ? " So positive, so unhesitating, is the Bible in asserting the national and collective character of conscience. It conceives an entire nation engaged in public and concerted repentance for a public and collective wrong. And our Prayer-book, by giving us this 172 A LENT IN LONDON. passage as the keynote of Christian Lent, endorses and emphasizes the reality of the conception. Yet, somehow, we are always being told, we half persuade ourselves, that a conscience can only be individual ; that the sense of spiritual obligation to God, such as is obviously involved in an act of penitence, can only be a private and personal concern of the individual soul ; that it is absurd to demand of a corporate body, or of a nation, a sense of moral responsibility or a consciousness of guilt. Now, I would challenge this statement, that con- science is an individual concern, at the very outset, by asking whether the exact opposite be not nearer the truth. Could a conscience exist at all, if it were merely individual ? Can the mere individual man account for his having a conscience ? If he were quite alone, and had no necessary relationship to any other being, would the language of conscience, of moral obligation, have any meaning? We talk of a man's duty to himself; but we are aware, as we do so, that we are using a metaphor. Duty, obligation, these are binding terms ; they imply that the man is under a moral compulsion; he owns allegiance to a Power that he did not create, and cannot disown. Something outside and beyond him is involved. His life is assumed to have wider horizons than belong to it in its purely self-regarding, self-contained character. Whenever a man solemnly assures us that he is bound by his conscience to do whatever he likes best, or to seek his own highest interest, he is greeted by us with the smile that he deserves. And the ethical systems that start with the individual as such, complete in himself, necessarily set themselves to explain away conscience, as a deposit of past habits ; as a shorthand sign for for- gotten experiences ; as a mechanical result of accumu- lated racial experiments ; as anything but what it is. A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE. 173 No! conscience cannot exist without witnessing to some relationship in which the soul stands to some- thing beyond it. What is this something ? It can- not be anything unconscious, material, mechanical. No one ever felt himself bound by his conscience to conform to the law of gravitation. It is a moral relationship that is implied, and morality exists only for persons. The obligation which conscience asserts can only be an obligation of a person to a person. That is why, if once we become satisfied that such a thing as conscience exists, we have by that very fact arrived at a necessary proof for the existence of God ; since the very terms which we use to express moral obligation are only intelligible in relation to a Personality in which we adhere, and to which we are bound. Far, then, from conscience being individual in its character, it is dual, it is social, in its very essence. It requires two persons, at least God and man in relation to one another, to create a con- science at all. But more : conscience cannot be confined to an act of the soul alone with its God. For, in making its judgment, in becoming aware of its obligation, it is forced to conceive of itself as typical, as represen- tative of all men. Any act that claims to be con- scientious, denies, by that claim, that it is peculiar to any one individual. It must mean that it is such an act as every one would own to be equally obligatory under identical conditions. It must be an act that witnesses to a law which is independent of private and personal varieties. The moral necessity must be recognizable by all as carrying its proper and un- alterable authority with it. The particular conditions under which it occurs may be wholly unique ; it may be impossible for them to reoccur. Yet still we must mean that any man in the world, if he had ever found himself in that situation, must have done 174 A LENT IN LONDON that one thing. Any act that is the duty of one man must be capable of becoming a fundamental axiom for all men ; so that no one can profess to obey his conscience without acknowledging thereby that he and all men have a common identity and a common relationship. Conscience, then, is essentially social. It is the personal confession of our human unity. And, as such, it constitutes the root-force of all civic coher- ence. No society can endure for a moment that has no conscience. This truth is expressed in its lowest and in its most vivid terms by the saying, "Honour among thieves." A gang of burglars cannot carry through a bit of business unless they can secure the stability of a common standard by which their behaviour to one another is fixed. There must be the germ of a spiritual conscience at the back of their common action. So, again, if " a com- pany " had indeed " no conscience," it would not only have fallen below the level of thieves, but it would cease to be a company, for it would be incapable of holding together. Indeed, the inhumanity of " a com- pany," which the phrase is often used to justify, is generally defended on the ground that the directors are responsible to the shareholders for every penny they spend ; which is a plea, of course, that the com- pany has a conscience, and a very rigid one, which it is forbidden to ignore. Conscience, then, is essentially a social organ ; and human society is an expression of conscience. How does it express it? (i) By law, and (2) by custom. (i) The entire body of law, administrative and criminal, is the record deposited by a people of the moral standard to which it has attained in handling its social responsibilities. We all know this, in the broad. We turn back to Egyptian, to Roman, to Mosaic law, and can estimate at once the degree A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE. 175 of sensitiveness with which the public conscience was then alive. We can note its measure of the sanctity of human life, of individual freedom, of neighbourly duties. And so, to-day, our public law tests the virility of our social conscience. It is the evidence of its condition. We find this out in a moment, if we attempt to work a law which is unsupported by the public conscience. It may be the best law in the world, admirably framed, towards the most excellent ends. But it will lie absolutely idle on the Statute-book, it will prove totally inefficient, if it has not behind it, as a motive force, the moral consent of the nation. So, again, if once the criminal law attempts to stamp as a public crime that which the public conscience refuses to condemn, there is an impasse, a dead-lock. The law will not work ; it is discredited ; it spreads demoralization and a distrust of all law. We have, alas ! learned this over and over again, through many an agony, in Ireland. Law does not, of course, attempt to cover the whole field of morality as it affects the personal conscience ; but there is a public moral sense of what it is rightful to attempt under state responsibility, and what not ; and it is this moral sense which is the vital and essential soul of all public law, without which its mechanism will not move. A nation's law is an index of the normal level which the social conscience has attained. (2) And round and about a nation's positive law lies the immense ring of its public customs. These are the richest and most delicate evidence of its social conscience. In these is fixed the indelible record by which we can tell exactly what is the value it sets on the human brotherhood, on women, on children, on labour, on service. We see precisely what, as a body corporate, it honours and what it despises ; what it prizes and what it 1 76 A LENT IN LONDON. neglects ; what are its public ideals and what its public fears. And this, not accidentally, not accord- ing to individual temperament, but according to the recognized moral instincts, which are the common property of the nation at large, and which are realised in their permanent body of custom. English law, English custom, by these, then, this social conscience here in England puts itself in evidence. By these, it submits to judgment. These are not merely protective defences to shield us from dangerous incursions, or to prevent us from hitting one another over the head. They are the positive expression of our belief that England, as a whole, is responsible for the character and fashion of English life ; that she has her own peculiar methods and principles, by which she controls and directs her own development, and shapes it to a worthy fulfilment. Here, in law and custom, all may see and know how England understands her own work, as compared with France, Germany, Russia ; how Englishmen undertake their public responsibilities ; what an Englishman understands by an English civilization. Well, what is it? How does he understand it? What is this scene to which he would invite a foreigner, saying, " Look ! there is what we English- men have made of England ! There is the genuine sample of our free, self-governing community ! Look ! there is a city such as we English build. There is the existence which, by law and by custom, we free Englishmen have laboriously contrived. Let the historian come and note it all down, as the sample of what Englishmen can do to make human society fair and honourable and pure." Ah ! the bitter irony of such a proposal as we look out of railway windows, in our passage to and fro from city to suburb, at that dismal sight, which can never, surely, lose its amazement and its terror. That sordid A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE. 177 monotony of hideous streets into which we look as we hurry through ! Those dingy, dismal, contemptible courts ! The huddled filth of the back yards ! How did it all come about ? How was it that we, by our united efforts, arrived at such a result as that ? What temper was it, what belief, what moral code, that went to the making of it ? What public standard was there at work in the minds of all those who brought it to pass, as to the value of human life ; as to its proper and natural environment ; as to the type of dwelling that was fit for men and women to live in, for children to be born and bred in ? How was it that builders considered these houses adequate for their purpose ; that municipal inspectors were satisfied that they could not require anything better ? How did it come to pass that any one had the face to take a rent for them and a high rent, too ? How is it that a civilized Christian society has failed, by the weight of its moral judgment, to make such things inconceivable, intolerable ? Are not these the ques- tions that storm again at the heart's doors, as we rush along, for instance, in some express through the heart of the Black Midlands ? A train gives us so valuable an outlook, because it shows us exactly what our life would appear to a spectator carried through it, carried close to it, yet so far a stranger that he can retain a free judgment, unswayed by daily familiarity or local prejudice. And as we fly past those degraded ash-heaps, to which men are not ashamed to give names, as if they were human towns ; as we catch sight of the few dirty, rackety boards, loosely nailed together, which are called Stations ; as we see the sodden, naked wastes of rubble where alone the children have space to play and breathe ; as we note the slimy foulness of the canals where the poor boys are struggling to bathe ; as our souls sink under all the wilful infamy of N 178 A LENT IN LONDON. the smoke-burdened skies ; we learn to gauge the contempt for human life of which all this baseness is the embodiment. Contempt ! Public social con- tempt for human beings ! This alone can explain why it was not thought worth while to meet the common human needs with a little more attention, a little more honour. No one who valued the body and soul of a man could have given him such homes to house in. No one who loved a child could ever have had the heart to say, " There ! that black heap of refuse from a coal-pit is all we can afford you for a playground." Yet we English people do love our own children, and in our own homes cherish rever- ence and affection for one another. Yes ! it is not the private standard that is deficient. Privately, we do not despise human instincts and human charities. The English love of hearth and family survives in its traditional strength. But all this kindly moral impulse is arrested, somehow, at the house door. Outside in the ordaining of the public life, in the framing of our towns there is no public conscience that carries into general action the inner mind of the English home, and demands that, in the city as in the house, humanity shall be handled with respect, with reverence, with tenderness, with some touch of delicate affection. Therefore it is that we have suffered these horrible growths to defile the face of fair England, because the social conscience pitches its demands at so terribly low a level. It enforces so pitiful an estimate of what humanity needs for a dwelling-place. It uplifts no fixed standard to which honourable men recognize their obligation to conform. It carries with it so little of rebuke, to shame and to confound those who, in the pursuit of their private interests, have created, or profited by, so ignominious a scandal. Positive law is, indeed, beginning to insist on A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE. 179 some rudimentary decency and fitness in buildings intended for man to live in. But law, unsupported, toil in vain against ingrained custom. Nothing but the pressure of the public conscience can avail to lift our corporate life to a better level. It alone can stem the multitudinous force of private greeds, in face of which we, for all our regrets, find ourselves so impotent. For are we not impotent ? Individually, we, each one of us, bewail what our cities have already become ; and yet we still sit by and permit the same rush of private speculation to reproduce the old intolerable conditions wherever populations are now spreading for the first time. Private regrets have proved powerless to prevent these things. And therefore it is that we bid you come together from out of your own private concerns and affairs in Lent, and consider seriously, urgently, how to rein- force the social conscience which is still so far behind its work. Therefore it is that there is need to sound a loud call in Zion. The reproach is a public reproach. The responsibility is a public responsi- bility. Let us bemoan together a common neglect. Let us face a common task. Let each look out from his own sins, and view the public peril. Let each lay the burden home on his own soul. Nothing will be changed until the public conscience changes its demands. Therefore we say, " Let the trumpet blow, and gather the people, and sanctify the congre- gation. Assemble the elders. Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between porch and altar, saying, Spare Thy people, O Lord! give not Thine heritage to reproach ! Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is now thy God ? " CHARACTER. BY THE REV. E. F. RUSSELL, M.A., Assistant Curate of St. Alban's, Holborn. IT is no longer possible for any of us, on any plea, to stand off and take no part in the great social movement which at this moment is running politics so close for the place of the dominant English in- terest. Things have gone too far to be decently ignored. A new order, like a new flower upon an ancient stock, is opening under our eyes ; a new patriotism, with its new ideals of national greatness, has captured the hearts of large numbers of the younger men, putting dreams there, and the hope of good days to come, and the will to labour for their coming. Whether or no the movement be right in principle and action, to be neutral is to be disloyal to the truth. If we cannot defend, we must attack ; there is no logical resting- place intermediate between the two positions. The pretence of a philosophic caution and suspense of judgment until all the facts are known, weighed, organized, and reduced to a perfect rule of practice, is in most cases but a thin mask to hide mental or physical indolence, or the poor vanity of appearing as a superior person ; as one who, with dispassionate mind, surveys the battle from high ground and be it said is safe ! CHARACTER. 181 To withhold our adhesion to any cause until we are entirely satisfied with all its methods, and are assured that all its chiefs are omniscient and all our associates impeccable, is surely to fail in modesty, and is about as reasonable as to refuse our help at a fire because in our judgment the plan of procedure is not the best, and the pumps not scientific in con- struction. Fire will not wait for us, and human need will not wait. We cannot postpone it to suit our convenience. While we delay, men suffer and die, opportunities pass never to return, and huge evils establish themselves impregnably. With what power and equipment we have, be it small or great, we must bestir ourselves and do something, even though we blunder and get bruised, and seem to spend our strength in vain. To be doing something, that is the great thing. Maybe God may use these Lenten sermons to show us what that " something " should be. In the distribution of the topics of this course, the subject which has been assigned to me may seem at first somewhat beside the mark, for these are to be u Sermons on Social Subjects." As a matter of fact, character is a social force of a very high order, and amongst the most effective of all the contributions that a man can bring in support of the great cause of social progress. It is not enough that the cause be good, and founded on reason and love ; it has to gain an open-hearted, weli-disposed hearing for its argu- ment amidst a host of claimants who contend for men's attention, and not all of whom deserve their trust. Vigorous logic, the swing of eloquence, skill in the clear and lucid presentation of ideas, these may do much ; but in the long run it is character which more than anything wins patient hearing for new and unwelcome truths. Men lower their swords before it, and yield to it the trust which is never 1 82 A LENT IN LONDON. refused to the disinterested. And then in associated action it disposes men to unity, and does untold good as an antiseptic to those dangerous germs of evil which float inevitably in the air of all assemblies of men. All this is obvious enough ; there is, however, one fact concerning character which may more easily escape notice I mean its value as an instrument for the reception of truth. It is sometimes forgotten that the intellect, the heart, the will, are never in immediate contact with the facts, arguments, motives, which may present themselves. "Nous voyons tout," says Joubert, "a travers nous memes. Nous sommes un milieu toujours interpose entre les choses et nous." The naked human intellect, the naked human will, are abstractions which exist nowhere on earth except on paper. Deep down they lie, clothed upon and enfolded within an infinitely complex and elaborate living envelope, the product and resultant of a thou- sand blending and contending forces, some of which have their beginning in the remote past, and some are acting now, a spiritual house which we have built, are always building, always secreting, as a mollusk secretes its shell, out of the materials supplied by our nature and our environment. This spiritual house which -we inhabit is our character, and through its windows all the light from the external world must pass to reach the " hermit-spirit," which lives retired and alone within ; as pure light if possible, but in most cases to be more or less sifted of some rays, or refracted, distorted, coloured, modified, if it be not flung back by an absolute opacity. Ideal character will supply a medium of pure transparency to all the elements of truth, transmitting its light and heat and force unalloyed and unabated to the soul, CHARACTER. 183 How far ideal character is attainable by us is a question which will be answered differently according as we put our question to natural ethics or to Chris- tian ethics. In the outlines of the ideal character there will not be much difference. Why should there be, since both have one origin in the eternal law which is the will of God ? There will be some differ- ence, perhaps, in the order of the virtues ; and to Christianity must be granted the incalculable advan- tage of having, in the place of the "cold moral imperative," its ideal embodied in a living Person in Jesus, the Incarnate Word. One marked distinction, however, lies in the degree of hope with which each system is able to inspire mankind. It is scarcely just to generalize upon a very insufficient acquaintance with the writers upon natural ethics, but to me it seems as if the drift of their teaching was tending more and more to the lower levels of helplessness and fate, as if they held the man doomed to become what heredity and environ- ment may make him. He is in the piteous plight of the condor in Kielland's little story, " At the Fair." " In the hotel garden, beside the little fountain in the middle of the lawn, sat a ragged condor attached to its perch by a good strong rope. But when the sun shone upon it with real warmth, it fell a-thinking of the snow- peaks of Peru, of mighty wing-strokes over the deep valleys, and then it forgot the rope. Two vigorous strokes with its pinions would bring the rope up taut, and it would fall back upon the sward. There it would lie by the hour, then shake itself, and clamber up to its little perch again." In the face of the doctrine of original sin, no one can accuse Christianity of ignoring heredity ; but its protest against an inevitable and irresistible transmis- sion of evil stands recorded on the first page of the Gospel in the genealogy of the Lord, where, in 3 1 84 A LENT IN LONDON. selection out of His human ancestry, the writers are careful to inscribe the names of Thamar and Rahab and Bathsheba. Further, with His own hand, the Lord throws open the highest places in His kingdom, not to the select few, the exceptional natures well endowed and well placed, but to the mixed multitude of men which was wont to follow Him as He moved from place to place the Pharisee and Sadducee, rich and poor, scribes and unlearned, publicans and sinners. "And seeing the multitude, He said, Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." St. Paul hands on the Master's lesson, where in one and the same Epistle he exhorts men, whom he has had to reprimand for flagrant vice, to break with it all, and walk worthy of their vocation to be saints. Upon what does the Christian ethic count to make good this splendid confidence in the possible ultimate success of all men ? Simply upon the Lord Jesus Christ, His Word, His communicated Life, His Spirit. The one preoccupation of apostolic men is to lead men to Christ ; not to His memory, but to Himself, as a living, personal Presence, to find in Him the grace and truth by which all victories are possible. They bid us come to Him, and take His yoke upon us, and follow Him, assuming, as a matter of course, that we can do so ; and they promise to all, without excep- tion, who will draw nigh to Him, that He will draw nigh to them, and will be with them and in them, and they shall become like Him. It is open to us to submit this method of the edu- cation of character to the test of experiment, and Lent invites us to do so. Why should we not do it, and take some pains to learn of the gentlest, wisest, kindliest Master how to become worthier workmen in the worthiest cause ? Early in His ministry He taught men that to see CHARACTER. 185 God we must be pure in heart. Short of this beatific vision there is much else which is visible only to the pure. The pure in heart see man also ; and he who sees man as in his inmost self he is, loves him per- force ; and he who loves him will count it a joy to serve him, and is bound to do him good. THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF SIN. BY THE REV. W. C. GORDON LANG, M.A. " For their sakes I consecrate Myself." JOHN xvii. 19. IF we look with any sort of candid self-examination into ourselves, and follow the path of our past life, we see at once that it is strewn with wreckage. Ail around it, as it spreads out before the mind's eye, are the memories of wrongs to self and others, of meannesses untold, of base and unworthy surrenders, the more ignoble often because so petty. It seems clear that along with us on the journey of life has travelled some malignant power, some force of habi- tual perversion, which has turned effort to failure, hope to disappointment, love to selfishness, good to bad. We have struggled with it, sometimes over- come it ; but there, in that long line of wreckage, is the evidence that we have oftentimes been worsted. Now, what is the feeling which this review of the road of life arouses within us ? It is one of bitter- ness, of self-contempt, of shame, of remorse. And yet, why should it be so ? If this malignant power which has accompanied us be some unthinking mechanical force, affecting us as the force of gravity, for example, affects our bodies, then the thought of its past victories may justify indifference or stimulate to defiance ; it will not fill us with remorse. If we have suffered merely from some unfortunate physical THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF SIN. 187 tendencies, which we did not create, for which we are not responsible, then I can imagine the feelings of resignation, or resentment, or despair, but not of re- morse. Has it been merely my natural imperfection, the immaturity of my self-development, then I might be conscious of regret, of disappointment, of im- patience ; but, again, not of remorse. Once again, am I to think of this remorse itself as only one more strange excitement of nervous tissues, gendered by an impassive physical evolution of which I myself am but a phase ? It cannot be ; it is impossible to con- ceive that such a blind force can produce a conviction which criticizes, accuses, despises itself. No ; the experience of remorse is a witness to the truth that for this companion-power of perversion I am myself responsible ; that it is part of me ; it is myself whom I accuse. Let me rail as I please with indignation at the iniquity of Fate, or physical con- struction, the prophetic voice of conscience impera- tively rejoins, " Thou art the man." I know that there was that in me which was all along capable of goodness, equal to the combat. It was I who resisted, when I might have wholly been, this better self; and it is this knowledge which begets remorse. Let us look out of self to society. There, again, the path of social history is strewn with a like wreckage. The human race itself and not least that part of it which we call civilized has been plainly " implicated in some great disaster." And there, again, if we think it out, we know that the dis- aster has been wrought, not by the inevitable pressure of blind force, not by the mere weakness of imperfec- tion, but by the action and reaction upon themselves, and upon the conditions of nature in which they have been placed, of perverse individual wills. We know it is a knowledge which every develop- ment of thought and discovery of science makes 1 88 A LENT IN LONDON. clearer that as no man liveth, so no man sinncth, to himself. I do not speak only of those gross offences which plainly violate social order and security, and which society punishes in its own way, but also of the sins of the secret inner life. There also sin is social. It is so, first, positively. We see this most clearly in the fact of the influence of heredity. The evil tendency which has not been resisted and checked in the individual life becomes the strong bias in its progeny. Or, again, who can estimate the subtle effects in others of the mere intercourse of character? The germ of a look, a tone, a casual word, may fall into the congenial soil of some other person, and there fructify in fully developed sin. And secondly, negatively, the truth is not less certain. All power for good works through individual men ; and where their inner life is weak and effortless, without dynamic convictions, this power is checked, hindered, thwarted. So many of the possible channels through which goodness can prevail over the world are closed. These indifferent, fruitless, thin, dissipated characters are, indeed, col- lectively a great force of negation a dead weight keeping down the rise of a common good. They maintain and spread that denseness to heroic stan- dards of life and duty, that dreadful callousness which stifles moral effort. The greatest " anti-social " force is thus the sinfulness or the stagnation of individual wills. Now, in our day we are becoming intensely con- cerned about "social evils." This very series of sermons is a witness to the fact, and it is well. But we must remember that these " social evils " are not causes, but results results of the perverseness or poverty of individual wills. A commonplace, doubt- less, but yet one of those commonplaces which we have especial need to reassert. It is precisely the THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF SIN. 189 neglect of this truism which accounts for the depress- ing contrast between the apparatus of social reform and the real advance of social goodness. It is con- stantly forgotten that a change in social conditions, however desirable in itself, may be only a change in the sphere of activity of still perverse individual wills. Thus, e.g., suppose the most complete public control of all traffic in drink, the most effective public sup- pression of all trade in vice. Yet, in spite of this, the evil will, the real root of the disease, may be left untouched. It may only force its operations inward, and reassert itself in domestic drinking or secret vice, and thus work greater havoc, just because it is hidden and insidious. Again, let us remember that a community may hold itself up as an example of " municipal morality " and yet be a community of Pharisees. The sinful will may leave the sins of the flesh, and feed on the sins of the soul. Let us con- stantly remember that it was not the publican and the harlot, but the self-righteous Pharisees, who cruci- fied the Son of man. Or, again, socialistic legislation may erect an admirable fabric of institutions, political and industrial, on the basis of an assumed "social sentiment," and yet ere long the unreformed indi- vidual will may prove the hollowness of that founda- tion. It may intrigue for its own selfish ends through all this network of social machinery. There could be few spectacles more hideous than that of a socialistic state organized in the name of common humanity, and worked in the interests of self-seeking individuals or groups. It would be the perfect type of an " organized hypocrisy." And thus no amount of eager energy in the promotion of social reform must be allowed to drive out of sight that simplest, yet deepest and most imperative problem, how is the individual will to be touched, inspired, sustained ? Let us personalize the problem. We here, I will A LENT IN LONDON. assume, are in our way, and rightly, social reformers. But place a perverse individual will before ourselves, what force have we to change it ? The process of contenting ourselves with public movements, with the efforts of municipalities and committees, and of leaving this individual work to others, cannot go on indefinitely. The laity throw the burden on the clergy, and the clergy are only too often tempted to decline it for the more exciting and encouraging work of creating and managing social schemes and institutions. And yet that perverse will must be dealt with, else the root of the tree remains. Look at the truth from another aspect. Society- it is another of those commonplaces which the cen- tury neglects is, after all, only the men and women who compose it. The " public conscience," of which we hear so much, is, after all, only the conscience of men and women like you and me. The neglect of this truism is responsible for that cloud of vague rhetoric into which much current social enthusiasm dissolves. It is sternly true that the only prevailing social force is the power of single righteous wills, of individual men who realize in themselves what they hope for others. If Christ is, as we claim Him to be, the Ruler of society, He can rule only through individual men, who know Him and yield obedience to His will, and are trained by His love. There is, then, a real danger lest, in our eagerness to remove social evils, their real root, and the only power which can uproot them, should be forgotten. It is a danger that specially concerns the Church. She is, thank God, awaking to a sense of her mission to man as a social as well as an individual being. But, in the very eagerness of this awakening, there are signs that she may easily forget that her power in society depends upon the personal consecration of her members. She can be effective as a public THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF SIN. 191 institution only when she is primarily a company of personally consecrated men and women " members of Christ," in whom He dwells, through whom He works upon the world as its Redeemer. The danger also affects individuals whose conscience urges them to take some part in the warfare against social evil. In St. Paul's description of the panoply of the Christian knight, the sword, with which the attack against the evil is to be made, is named profoundly a "word" or "spoken thing of God" (prjfjia Gcov). The power of attack depends upon hearing the sum- moning voice of God in the solitary depths of a man's own soul. The true reformer must first of all be himself a prophet ; his motto, " Thus saith the Lord;" a man " in whom high God has breathed a secret thing." Let me quote the words of Dean Church : " The soul has, indeed, to think and to work with others, and for great aims and purposes out of and beyond itself. For others and with others, the first part of its earthly work is done. But first the soul has to know this sublime truth about itself, that it stands before the Everlasting by itself, and for what it is." For the sake of the unfairly hindered or the op- pressed, we need social reforms ; but for the sake of these reforms, we need most of all great characters. It is they, and they alone, who can influence the will of others, and make reform a reality. And strength of personal character is wrought, not always or even best in the stress of social activity, but chiefly in the wrestling of a man's own soul with the unseen God. We look out with ardour on the great social war between justice and injustice, good and evil, and we are eager to take our place within it ; but let us remember that our power to prevail depends upon the issue of that same combat in the arena of our inner self. We can only conquer the sins of others IQ2 A LENT IN LONDON. by the weapons with which God has conquered ours. There is no one to whom the question comes more pertinently than to the social reformer, "What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world " convince overwhelming majorities of the utility of his schemes, and see them everywhere adopted " and lose his own soul ? " The greatest social truth ever uttered was that spoken by the Son of man, as He passed into the great struggle by which He overcame the evil of the world, "For their sakes I consecrate Myself" It was this power of perfect personal con- secration in one single human will which gave the world the gift of redeeming life. And still, the only abiding force of social redemption is the force of single wills surrendered to the will of God. PERSONALITY. BY THE REV. A. CHANDLER, M.A., Rector of Poplar, E., late Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. ' ' What is man ? " Ps. viii. 4. WE know the answer given in the logic books, " Man is a rational animal," an animal amongst animals, and yet marked off from his fellow-beasts by a rational endowment This answer may not be very satisfac- tory, and doesn't take us very far ; but, at any rate, it touches upon that which is the central mystery, the crucial problem, the eternal perplexity of man namely, his twofold nature. Body and soul, man is in some way or other a compound of the two. We may give prominence to whichever element we please. We may call him either a rational animal or an incarnate spirit. Whichever way we put it, the fact remains the same, that man consists of two elements, utterly distinct and heterogeneous, and yet inseparably fused together and interacting in a way that defies analysis. Body and soul, most philosophers start by recognizing the two, and yet almost invariably end by snubbing, ignoring, or denying the reality of one. And so they range themselves into opposite camps materialists and idealists, sensationalists and transcendentalists and o 194 A LENT IN LONDON. stand out as the champions respectively of the body against the soul, or the soul against the body. Now, the great characteristic of the Christian view of man is, that it is free from this one-sided, partisan, sectarian character. The Christian theory of man is catholic and comprehensive, true to the facts, ex- pressing all, garbling none. Ideal and transcendental? Certainly ; Christianity is that. Man, she declares, is a spirit, made a little lower than the angels, made in the image of God, endowed here and hereafter with an eternal life which flesh and blood cannot inherit. But does it follow that the body is of no account, and worse than none ; that the body is an accident and a nuisance, irrelevant and deplorable ; that whilst living in the flesh the soul is chained to a corpse, from which death is a welcome release ; that only after death does man gain his true freedom and achieve his ideal nature as a disembodied spirit? " No," said the Christian Church, in a strain of thorough-going materialism "no; I believe the body is not bad, but good ; the body was meant to help the soul, and not impede it ; it is the adoption or redemption of the body, not its destruction, that is wanted ; we don't want to be disembodied spirits, and don't believe we shall be, for we believe in the resurrection of the body." Body and soul are united in a close sacramental union. Each element has its own reality, its own function, its own value ; the outward and visible body moving and working as the delicate instrument, the sensitive medium, for an inward and spiritual life breathed into it by God Himself. This Christian doctrine of the equal partnership of body and soul in the same person has important applications, i. The sacredness of the body itself. As long as the body was regarded as something separate and disconnected from the soul, the neglect and PERSONALITY. 195 misuse of the bodily life was very natural. People around might starve and freeze and agonize, but these things touched the body only ; they might and did issue in death, but then death was only the deliverance of the soul from its prison-house. Why interfere with such a blessed consummation ? Why not rather see in it a sign of Divine providence and mercy ? And so philosophy turned " procuress to the lords of hell," and supplied the well-to-do with a good excuse for doing nothing for the misery about them. And, again, what could it matter what use they them- selves put their bodies to ? The body was only a brute beast, without any share in the splendour of human personality. A brute beast which might be treated in different ways according to the tempera- ment of its owner ; it might be indulged and humoured by the Cyrenaics, or it might be scorned and neglected by the Stoics. But in either case philosophy condemned it as an outcast, degraded and disinherited. The body was a beast ; drunken- ness and lust were only natural to it. Let the body, then, wallow in these, whilst the soul pursued the even tenor of her way, and, undisturbed by the brutalism of the body, lived her own rational and spiritual life. But to the Christian, who understands the elements of his faith, this treatment of the body in himself or others is for ever impossible. The creation of man was a sacrament celebrated by God Almighty a sacrament in which the material was taken up into the spiritual, in which body and soul were knit together in a union which it is sacrilege to put asunder. That sacrament was repeated when the Word was made flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, and is continued by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in His temple of man's body. Any injury, therefore, which stunts, or starves, or maims 196 A LENT IN LONDON. man's body is an injury to man himself, and is an injury for which, in the solidarity of the human race, our manhood is responsible. Christ, the universal Man with human body, is fasting over again in the wilderness, and thirsting over again on the cross in the bodily hunger and thirst which we allow our brothers and sisters to suffer from ; hunger and thirst which are bodily indeed, but which also assault and hurt the soul by robbing it of faith in goodness, human or Divine. We Christians dare not, then, be indifferent to the bodily suffering of others. Such indifference would be sheer blasphemy against all the Persons of the Blessed Trinity, each one of Whom has taught us, by creation, incarnation, and indwelling, the sacredness of human flesh and blood. And so with the misuse of our own bodies. The degradation of man's body is the degradation of his manhood. To treat our body as a brute is to brutalize ourselves. The body has no animal in- dependence of its own ; it is saturated with the soul ; it is interpenetrated with the life and impulses and aspirations of the soul. To think that the body can be brutalized by self-indulgence or impurity, and yet that the soul can remain in communion with God, is an absurdity, a lie. Man is one ; his whole nature must rise or fall together. With the bru- talizing of the body there goes also the blinding of the soul. The "carnal" man becomes also the " natural " man, who has lost his higher perceptions, who jests at religious enthusiasm, to whom spiritual things are foolishness. Here we see the meaning of the fasting, the discipline, and the asceticism to which Lent calls us. The object of these things is, not to pour contempt upon the body by unmeaning self-denial, but just the opposite to make it worthy of its high position ; to keep it in tune with the spirit ; to remind it that even in this life it is a PERSONALITY. 197 "spiritual body," and that, therefore, the spiritual life is natural, and sensuality is unnatural ; to save it from becoming merely an " animal " body ; to prevent it from asserting a spurious independence of its own, which is really its own degradation, and at the same time the corruption of the spirit. The natural soul and flesh are one man, and that one man cannot and must not be rent asunder. 2. And the other point I wanted to suggest to you is, that the Christian doctrine of human personality (that the rational soul and flesh are one man) enables us to form a definite idea of a futztre life. Nearly every philosophy and religion has taught that a part of us is immortal, that the soul in some form or other survives the death of the body. But as we question them about the nature of this life beyond the grave, it seems to dwindle away to nothing. Is it a life, we ask, in which we shall remember the existence which went before? Shall we recognize there those whom we knew and loved here? Will the human affections survive and be continued ? No, say the philosophers, there will be no memory, no recognition, no affection ; for in all of these the bodily senses have their part, and there is no body in the future life. Any message, says Aristotle, which reaches the dead from this world, reaches them as a faint confused murmur, a tale of little meaning, though it may be a tale which treats of the fortune of their nearest and dearest friends. What does survive, then ? Something very vague and shadowy ; a mere form of personal identity without any sub- stance or reality. Thus, according to these thinkers, there is no real personal life continued beyond the grave ; and the reason is, that in this real personal life as we know it, the body is an integral element ; and that, therefore, if the body does not rise again, we shall not be the same persons in the future life 198 A LENT IN LONDON. that we are in this. Without the resurrection of the body there can be no personal immortality. We see a suggestion of this in Homer. When Ulysses descends to the lower world, the ghosts gather round him eager and curious ; but they are powerless to recover their memory or tell him their stories until they have drunk of the blood of the sacrifice which he had offered. No ; unless the body survives, it won't help us to insist on the immortality of the soul : that may only mean that the soul is reabsorbed into the universal life of the world an unconscious immortality which is in no sense a continuation of the personal life which we know. But the Church of Christ is in earnest about this personal future life, and with a true instinct insists t on the necessary con- dition of its reality. Assuming the soul's immortality as a truism too familiar to need asserting, she boldly and calmly declares her belief in the resurrection of man's body. In this way alone, when the soul is re- united to a body, can there be a real continuance of personal life. Then, and then only, shall we be the same people, with those human affections and memories which make up so much of the life of each of us. As to the nature of that resurrection-body we can only form vague conjectures. St. Paul tells us that it will be related to the body laid in the grave in the same way as the fresh blade of wheat is related to the seed that has been sown in the ground. Different from the old, yet organically connected with it. There is sown a natural body, there is raised a spiritual body a spiritual body which shall be the appropriate partner for a cleansed and purified soul. Such, then, is the Christian doctrine of personality in this world and the next ; a perfect union of soul and body ; a sacramental union in which the body is in this life sanctified and called to a spiritual service, PERSONALITY. 199 and so prepared and made fit to be raised again as a spiritual body, a member in a perfect personal life in heaven. And one word in conclusion. Christ insists that the body shall be a yokefellow of the spirit in the same sense in which Christians are now insisting that trade and commerce and the other institutions of society shall be made amenable to the ordinary principles of morality. It is sin which makes the body independent of the spirit, or business transac- tions independent of morality. Business has its spiritual side, from which it cannot be divorced with- out ruin and degradation. The body the busy, active, outward and visible body must be ruled and regulated by the soul. But Christians who aim at such a purification of business, in points where purification is still required, may start the work on a smaller scale and nearer home. Let us see to it that our own bodies are in harmony with the promptings of the soul ; that no sectarian independence is allowed to the animal nature, but that the spiritual is supreme throughout. Then we can go out with clean hands and a pure heart to take part in the larger work outside ; to insist that social institutions, which are "body" on a larger scale, shall likewise be regulated by spiritual and moral principles, and that the kingdoms of this world shall throughout and in every department be the kingdoms of God and of His Christ LOSING THE SOUL TO SAVE IT. BY THE REV. PREBENDARY EYTON, Rector of Holy Trinity, Upper Chelsea. " Whosoever will save his life shall lose it : and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it." MATT. xvi. 25. AGAIN and again in the New Testament is this paradox forced on our notice in praise of unselfish- ness. Where the life or soul (for the word is the same in the Greek) of man is concerned, we are told that the words losing and gaining, keeping or flinging away, saving or abandoning, become inverted. There is a saving which is losing, and a losing which is the only lasting saving. And this way of speaking is not meant to puzzle us. There is nothing in the New Testament which is merely intended to startle or to be used for sensa- tional effect ; every surprising statement has an object which cannot be attained in any other way. So Christ's words here are not meant merely to make us experience an emotion, but to make us think, ponder, and consider. What is that losing which is a saving ? That is our question. There was a day when the answer was easy ; cir- cumstances made it easy to the first disciples and their converts ; there would be no difficulty then in understanding what kind of losing the soul or life LOSING THE SOUL TO SAVE IT. 201 that was which would save it. There was a losing which often came very near them, and their willing- ness to lose their life or soul in that fashion, whenever tested, admitted of no doubt or hesitation. There was suffering and shame, the stake and the sword, on the one hand ; and on the other, immunity and com- fort. To them the choice was simple : would they choose death that they might live the only life worth living the life of faith and of holiness ; or would they choose life that they might die the worst of deaths the inward death of the apostate and the coward. Then the alternative was simple and easy to understand ; the paradox ceased to puzzle ; it be- came full of lucidity. And so now sometimes there is an application of the words which so far corre- sponds to that one, that the difficulty is not felt, at any rate, seriously. There is sometimes an apparent losing of the life by honesty, or truth, or honour, by preferring these to self-interest, and gain, and false- hood, which is felt to be the only real keeping, just as there is a keeping of life by dishonesty or con- cession of principle, which is felt to be, owned to be, the most absolute loss. The man who buys ease with dishonesty, or popu- larity by giving up his principles, as certainly loses his real life in trying to save it, as the man who sets his face like a flint, and refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, assuredly keeps it. There is no difficulty here ; when we take the paradox out into actual life, we see how imperative it is that man should often seem to lose his soul by self-abandonment and by self-conquest, if he is really to save it. But go a little further, and the difficulty recurs, the paradox begins to baffle again. Here is the religious man of a certain type ; he is nervous and anxious about himself; either he has got a taint of 202 A LENT IN LONDON. the dark side of Puritanism in his blood, or he has inherited from a succession of pious forefathers their view of God, that He is a hard master, only to be propitiated by a rigorous round of prayers, and penances, and fastings, and religious exercises ; he thinks that if he can persevere with these he may somehow wriggle into heaven. And so he takes a thoroughly valetudinarian view of the whole matter of soul-saving ; he shuts his soul up in a sick chamber, and he doses it with spiritual exercises ; perhaps he hates fasting, but he dreads the future too much to refrain from it ; perhaps prayers are a weariness to him, but his nervous terrors force him to pray, be- cause by it he will " save his soul ; " and all the while in spiritual vitality his soul pines and sickens. Should any one make a claim on him for service, his instinct is to refuse ; he tells himself that he is very sorry he cannot help, but he is afraid of risking his own salvation ; he must watch himself, and if he goes into the thick of common, human, irreligious life, if he goes among the publicans and sinners, he might be infected by their bad example, he might become one of them. So he shuts his soul up in a warm, close, devotional atmosphere, and lives, as he thinks, to the glory of God, where there are no chill blasts of worldliness or of common interests blowing upon him he will save his soul. And yet do we not feel, with his poor, thin, deteriorating character, that every day he is losing it ? Or, again, there is the mechanical religionist, the man who is not merely frightened by nervous emo- tion, who does not think of God as being so much a hard master, as a merely mechanical being. He has a quantitative theory of devotion, and a mecha- nical theory of life ; he will do so much church, so much prayers, so much self-denial, so much alms- giving, all as a matter of hard duty. He will keep LOSING THE SOUL TO SAVE IT. 203 a bit of his soul curtained off as a kind of sanctuary there is his religion and with that and its obser- vances nothing shall interfere, but the rest of his life is his own ; he may be a harsh father, a bullying advocate, a bitter enemy, a swindling director, a taker of fees for which he does no work he may be all this, he may be losing day by day every vestige of honour and generosity, and yet he may all the time be believing, and even be firmly con- vinced that, because of the religion which he keeps so carefully shut off in its water-tight compartment, he is saving his soul. We cannot have kept our eyes open if we have not known such cases ; we may even be such people ourselves. The worst of it is that, if it be so, we are likely to become so adept at self- deception. No one seems so morally and spiritually hopeless as the man who has a little dried-up religion in a bit of his life ; he keeps it like a pea in a box, and if some day some wandering evangelist gives him a pang of discomfort, he shakes his box, the pea rattles, and he is in a blaze of triumph. " Why, there is my religion ; I fast twice in the week, I go to church, I pray morning and evening, I keep from bad company, I believe in God's Revelation ; I am saving my soul." All the while the soul, the life, the character, the self, sickens and pines and dies under such treat- ment ; the religious element is dried up by being divorced from the real interests of life, and from the love of the great Father. The child-feeling towards God, by which man grows, is deadened by nervous fears; the attitude becomes, "I dare not though I would," and at last the soul is lost by being saved. These are the failures. How, then, are we to grasp the inmost teaching of this paradox to lose the soul in order to save it ? The soul must brace itself by vigorous exercises ; 204 A LENT IN LONDON. it lives by free air and sunshine, as the body does ; it must commit itself to the vicissitudes of life, to the toss and tumble of this common life ; it must be jostled and bothered by human unreasonableness, and saddened by human distress ; it must learn to bear roughness and uncultivated ways ; it must spend and be spent ; it must lose itself that it may be saved. It must do something for others, and for those others who need it most. It must not say, " I live for the glory of God," unless it can say also, " I live for the service of man ; " and to serve man brings one into difficulty, for man is often hard to serve. He is not always lying in bed anxious for your visit, willing to let you talk and give him your blessing and your shilling and let you go. He is in trouble. He is bothered about how he is to live physically, or he has got into trouble by his own fault, or he is such a weak molluscous creature that you cannot find a firm bit to grasp him by. You don't know what to be at with him. The only thing he does not seem to want is to give you a chance of really helping him. If you might give him a shilling to get rid of him, and let him get drunk in your honour, it would be easy ; but then you would be saving yourself, and pushing him into deeper damnation. Or he comes to you with his sad story of low wages and long hours, and your dividends boil in your pocket ; you feel that somehow you have saved yourself by losing him ; but how are you to help it ? You mutter some economic principle about competition, or buying in the cheapest market. You do not see where you individually are to come in. Or your better self prevails, and you begin to cast about for ways to help, and you make your voice heard at company meetings in favour of the oppressed. Of course, everybody hates you, and looks on you as an impostor and a sneak, but some- how there rises up within you a conviction that in ur rue ( VNlYERSfTY } ^^nSVlt /FORN\^>^^ LOSING THE SOUL TO SA VE IT. 205 flinging your soul into these hopeless enterprises you are finding it more clearly, and building it up more securely, than you ever did before. You find that the habit of taking trouble to understand others, and discarding prejudices, and looking facts in the face, is freeing you, is bringing you forth into a place of liberty, and undoing the burden of sin which has pressed you down. For if you want to save your soul by helping your brother-man, you must part with all your desire to help him as you think he ought to want to be helped, and you must go to him where he is. That is often the only way of losing your soul so as to save it at this present hour. You must find out where your brother is, and sacrifice yourself for him there. The failure of so much religious effort in these days lies just in this that it does not try to find people out where they are. Everywhere the same law haunts you : you must lose your soul to save it. It may be sorrow has come to you ; death has darkened your home, or undeserved shame has come to you ; your children have proved ungrateful, or your friends fail you. You would shut yourself up and stiffen into stone. You say all is vanity friendship and gratitude ; only let us keep our religion ; and lo ! you find it, too, gone as a source of comfort and help. Ah ! go forth, and try to help others ; there is no such cure for sorrow as to share the burden of others ; no such salvation from trial as to lose your soul in deeds of mercy. You must fling your soul into the sorrows of others if you are to bear your own, as our Master did. Or, you have fallen into sin. The gratification at the time was sweet and alluring, but the retrospect is dark, bitter, and loathsome ; a stained and spotted manhood, a lost self-respect, a torturing remorse all is bitter. In the darkness of despair, in the agony of self-condemnation, you drain the loathsome dregs of 206 A LENT IN LONDON. that bitter cup. What must you do ? Surely there is no salvation for you, too, but in losing your soul in works of love. Spend Ash Wednesday in repent- ance ; weep before Eternal Love ; but go to-morrow and lose your soul in some energetic work ; spend yourself in alleviating some misery, in undoing some oppression, in reforming some vice. Fling your soul away that you may recover it after many days purified, strengthened, renewed. " There is no gain except by loss, Nor glory but by bearing shame, Nor justice but by taking blame." Only in strong, resolute, manly effort to help your fellow-men will strength come back ; only because you love much, and show your love by sacrifice, can your many sins be forgiven ; only thus will the sovereign power of the Divine paradox become clear and vivid to you : " Whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it." CHRIST THE SOCIAL RECONCILER. BY THE REV. T. C. FRY, D.D., Headmaster of Berkhamsted School. " There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female : for ye are all one man in Christ Jesus." GAL. iii. 28. OUR class division that is just another name for the social question. Men talk at times as if even to speak of such a thing as class division were to create it ; as if it were to stir up to strife the lion and the lamb who would otherwise have lain down together. But it is the social conditions themselves, and not the references to them, that create the strife. The agita- tor may embitter the strife, but he does not create the strife, nor create the conditions ; it is the con- ditions that create the agitator. Nay, more : so long as the conditions exist, is not the Christian himself bound to be in some sense an agitator, if by that we mean a man who refuses to remain silent, because silence is least disturbing? At all events, none can deny that wide divisions exist : angry workmen over against angry employers ; cities of the poor, grimly monotonous, beside the quarters of the rich ; large bodies of labour brought by a sudden frost to famine, while capital cannot find employment ; whole tracts of human beings of the same blood, the same faith, the same country, without insight into each other's 208 A LENT IN LONDON. fears and hopes : here are the divisions, fruitless and deepening, created by our civilization, half ignored by our politics, calling aloud to our religion. The divisions exist, palliate them as we may. The causes, no doubt, are manifold. Some evils are self- caused ; no one class is entirely to blame. But, when the flood is on us, it matters little who broke down the dyke. The flood must be stemmed ; so the divisions must be reconciled. How shall we do it ? Some men think to reconcile us to them by optimism in figures : the national wealth is growing, they say. But that only intensifies the sense of injustice, if ours, for all our struggle, lessens. If the national wealth has grown faster than the population, and yet this abyss of poverty lessens not, then distribution must be inadequate, and organization deeply at fault. If, again, it is an inexorable law beyond our ethical control that the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong, then farewell, once that is fully realized, to the well-being of a more fortunate but selfish few. If the poor are better off than their grandfathers, yet, we may ask, in proportion to the wealth they have helped to create, are they as well off as justice demands? If it is essential to point out to the poor how loss of character creates loss of skill, is this a just utterance, unless we also tell the monopolist, the rackrenter, the ground landlord, the licensed victu- aller, that they help, one or the other of them, to suffer or to create, for their own personal profit, the environment that makes character decay ? No, indeed ; the logic of the beati possidentes y the " inexorable laws " of older economists, the analogy of lower nature red in tooth and claw, the statistics of the Board of Trade, the eidola of the legal mind, will not reconcile the long estrangement of a human family, of men who should be brothers, of sons of a common Father. CHRIST THE SOCIAL RECONCILER. 209 "Sirs, ye are brethren/' That is the keynote of restored harmony. Brethren can only be reconciled by the pressure and force of love. All else must fail, is failing ; this alone, where success is, is the cause of it : " Sirs, ye are brethren/' Because you are brethren, you must meet, confer, talk it out : those who can, out of larger purse or greater leisure, must form a bridge of living personal sympathy between west and east or south ; university settlements must multiply; more employers, with the old Franciscan self-devotion, must live amongst their people ; Chris- tian men of wealth, young men whose hearts are not stiffened in money's mould, must give "all they have " to found, so to speak, Familistires with labour as copartner. The copartnership of labour, in every possible form, that is the next step in fraternal evolution. After all, beside our common brother- hood, in Christ's Name, what else can have a claim on you ? You would die together for your wives and children in some new mutiny ; you would go down together, ennobled by mutual faith, on the deck of some new Birkenhead ; and are you to fight a bitter agelong battle for vested interests in social life alone, when human nature, duty, God, are your joint ideals in any scene of danger or daring beyond the common ? Yes, the reconciliation of estranged men that is the first thing we have to work for. It is not impossible to formulate conditions of reconciliation between estranged men. There must be, to create the very desire of peace, an overmastering attraction of motive ; there must be a spring of sympathetic feeling, the magnetism of personal contact, a belief in character above all material issues ; an unqualified acceptance of mercy, justice, love ; a community of hopes fostered on a plane high above the material plane, which is the scene of conflict. p 210 A LENT IN LONDON. In other words, you must on both sides wish for social peace; you must feel for the stress of the other side ; you must quicken your sense of brother- hood ; you must wish to have and to share the essential conditions of a higher manhood ; your ideals must be of nobler stuff than those of the old cash nexus. And how are these conditions to be satisfied ? We answer fearless of contradiction in Christ alone. Realize your common brotherhood in Him, and you crush yourself; you will see Him, you will serve Him, in the humblest of His members ; you will, after Him, "empty yourself" to bless thereby the sunken, the fallen, even the less happy ; in Him you cannot labour for the " meat that perisheth," save that with it you may create for yourself, and no less for others, at least that material minimum without which religion itself can scarce find foothold in the bodily life. We cannot be unmerciful, whilst we enjoy ; unjust, whilst we reap ; unloving, while others harden for want of sympathy and brotherhood. These are Christian principles, embodied in the Divine Manhood. Thus was He reincarnated in His members, in the martyrs, the great Orders, in the earlier and higher ideals of guilds and hospitals and brotherhoods. And, to save society, we just must go back to the old fountain-head of Christian sacrifice. Rank is nought, wealth nought ; brotherhood is all. Let us make up our minds that great changes are coming, are inevitable, are just, and let us surrender the moth and the rust. "Welcome," let us say, " many changes, if thereby we may rid England of social hate and social wrong." You can spare, let us say to the well off, a good deal yet, without touch- ing the environment that creates character. In fact, your character will be better and purer for less self-indulgence. And even of what is left, as CHRIST THE SOCIAL RECONCILER. 211 well as of what is taken, you can still share in much that makes life happy in common, and not arrogant alone. It is possible that the work of reconstruction may carry us far beyond the horizon of the changes that we think we now can see. We may easily learn hereafter to accept or even welcome changes that would seem revolutionary to-day. All that is now essential is that we should lay aside the love of our individual or class supremacy, that we should look straight at our social needs, suspect the spirit of hate and division, and manifest in all ways, single and common, our sense of brotherhood in Christ, the social Reconciler. Do not let us deceive ourselves ; society is certainly going to be largely reconstructed, or evolved which you will. It is essential to its continuity. An organism must grow or die. The question is not, " How can we stop as we are ? " That is impossible. Rather it is this : " You have an alternative before you : which will you work for?" Disguise it as we may, the choice will soon be seen to be between materialism and Christ. There is no third alternative. If, as a man, you believe in nothing beyond the struggle for existence, those below you will not believe in aught else either. A faithless many will overpower the faithless few, and the result will be the wreck of both. If you obstruct the growing health, education, and happiness of the community, because you have to pay a larger share of the cost than you expected ; if you ally your name as a Churchman (say) to unsanitary schools, or sweated teachers, or long hours of labour ; then the children of the workers will grow up with less belief in your presentation of your Master, or perhaps in your Master Himself. A belief in a prac- tical philosophy of mammon, closed by a struggle for spoils, will issue in a policy of extreme secular 212 A LENT IN LONDON. socialism, with its autocracy in education, its liber- tinism in the family, its denial of the Divine. That is the alternative to Christ. Christian socialism, then, that looks to Christ the Reconciler, is just a faith in the growing reconcilia- tion of the needs of society. It is not revolutionary, but progressive ; it means the ruin of none, but the unity of all ; it looks for compromise ; it calls for sacrifice ; it emphasizes freedom of conscience, but a necessary community of interests ; it advocates all forms of co-operation ; it sets no final limits to just social reconstruction ; it strives to effect most through the awakened spirit of conscious brotherhood. On individual wealth, on mere rank per se> on mere standards of society, on sectional politics dare I add, on ecclesiastical supremacy ? it sets no store. Christian character, with equal opportunities for all, is its ultimate aim. And this faith, this aim, this ideal, is ours because we humbly believe it to be the outcome of what Christ said and did. Christ alone is the social Reconciler. This, then, as we seem to see it, is His abiding social work. Because much in the times is evil, through His Church, if she be faith- ful, Christ " buys up " the social " opportunity." "If she be faithful!" Yet how hard to decide the limits and claims of faith! Indeed, in social matters, it is one of our chief difficulties to bring to common agreement those who earnestly seek to be faithful to Christ's teaching, but who yet differ as to whither His guidance leads. But, surely, if Christ be the social Reconciler, it is above all amongst His own disciples that unity in social reconciliation will find its natural home. We shall, at least, as Christians be one in principles. Justice, mercy, love, sacrifice, will to us at least never appeal in vain. Even where we differ in programmes, our criticism of one another will be CHRIST THE SOCIAL RECONCILER. 213 generous : we shall be sparing of charges of in- consistency, seeing that, in dealing with a growing and complex organism, our schemes and plans must necessarily seem often inconsistent, if they too are to change with our growth. On the common ground of Christian service and Christian principle, we shall strive, each according to our conscience, to judge every programme proposed. And, indeed, it would appear that, just now, when England and her Church seem really to have awakened to a sense of the problems that beset us, it were the pressing need of the moment to reconcile to common discussion and effort the cautious and the eager, the timid and the overbold. In the service of Christ was found room for very various types of character, even in the limited circle of His disciples : in the solution of our social ques- tions, room must still be found for all. No party politics, no religious newspaper, no opposed type of Churchmanship, should keep us asunder. O un- common ideal for a civilized community is the supremacy of Christian character : to achieve this is a task not impossible to the Christian Church, if her members be one ; not impossible, else were her very birth illusive. But to be one, and so to achieve this ideal for civilization, we need, above all things, to be reconciled in Christ, our common Master, to the faithfulness of one another's hopes and purposes, and to be willing to discuss, where now we are often only willing to dispute. Thus only can Christian principle leaven the future ; thus only can we deliver ourselves from fruitlessness, and the world from loss. DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT. BY THE REV. A. L. LILLEY, M.A. " He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls." PROV. xxv. 28. THAT is to say, the man who is not master of him- self is in a fair way to become the slave of others. Not to be master of one's self is to be defenceless, and open to all attacks. The man who does not know his own mind has no criterion of value by which he may appraise the convictions of others. And so he is the prey of every mind with more grip and tenacity of conviction than his own. He is the man carried about by every wind of doctrine. Or the man who is wanting in firmness of will, in stability of purpose, has no criterion by which to estimate the importance of his own experiences, of the events in the world outside him which affect his life. He is always attaching a quite undue importance to the shocks and assaults of fortune. He is the man of moods. Fortune seems to assail him more bitterly than others, not because fortune is really fiercer in its assaults upon him, but because he is weaker than others to resist them. Or, again, the man who is without the spirit of order, who has no instinctive plan of life arranged on lines of clear design, is with- out a criterion of value among the claims made upon his thought, or his feeling, or his action. He does DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT. 215 not know where to yield and where to insist. He is obstinate where he ought to make allowances. He is facile and yielding where he ought to be firm. We say of him that he has no judgment. In each case alike is it true that the man who is not master of himself is on the way to be a slave to others. The man who does not know his own mind will most certainly be the slave of those who do. The man of moods is the miserable slave of his own impressions. The man who lacks judgment is the baffled slave of events rather than their master. " He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls." That is the vision of failure and defeat and despair in the individual life. And the vision of success and mastery in the individual life is the contrast to all this. Success is to the man who knows his own mind, who has a firm will and a steady purpose, whose judgment is sane, who has rule over his spirit. Self-government is of the very essence of success of all success, and especially of the highest spiritual success. To be able to evoke order out of the world's disorder, you must first have established some kind of order amid the complex tangle of motive and desire which you feel within. But when you have become ever so slightly master of yourself, when you have even begun to rule your spirit, you have a kind of magical effect upon the world without you. It is not so much that you laboriously seek to do the things you desire, as that the things you desire get themselves done because you are there, with your clear insight, and your keen judgment, and your absolute certainty of what you want. Even on the highest plane of human activity, success depends not so much on great gifts of intellect, or on great gifts of heart, or on great powers of mere endurance, as on a singleness of aim, a directness of attack, a unity of purpose 2i6 A LENT IN LONDON. among even moderate gifts of intellect and of heart and of work. It is the youth just emerging into manhood who thinks that the whole world is open to the man of mere intellect, and who despises every practical suggestion which does not answer to the most rigid intellectual tests. It is the young man in the first glow of enthusiastic ardour for a noble cause who thinks that his mere enthusiasm must carry all before it ; that there is a limitless power in deep and sincere emotion. But the man of riper wisdom very soon discovers that the real secret of strength is a strange gift of self-knowledge and self- mastery which defies analysis ; that the world is in some degree taken by storm by the man who can rule his own spirit. The highest spiritual faculty is not intellect alone, is not heart alone. It is self- government. It is the possession of one's self, the transcendent gift of an easy and perfect mastery of the powers of mind and heart one has. It is the single eye which fills the whole body with light. It is that true might which alone can create, and which creates only the true right. Carlyle was never more fatally misunderstood and never more worthy of being understood than when he insisted with cha- racteristic vehemence that might was right. If God is in this world at all, in it effectively as the Spirit that fills it with life and assures it of victory, then assuredly that which has in it the greatest power of success must have in it also the greatest force of right. The man who is lord of himself is God's man of might. He must be also the man who can best work out God's plan of right. And what is true for the individual life of each of us is true also for the life of the state, and pre- eminently for the life of the democratic state. Indeed, I ought not to distinguish between them, for the democratic state is only the state come of age, the DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT. 217 state just entered into the full heritage of manhood. The history of political development so far has been only the history of the liberation of all the elements of the national life, the giving free play to all the forces that make up the national character. The ideal of politics has been an insistence upon and a struggle for the rights of subject classes. But now the state has finally emerged. All classes in the state have become articulate. And so the old political ideals have become obsolete. With the advent of the democratic state, a new keynote must be struck in politics. A new idea of government is already dimly getting itself formulated. Government is no longer what it has been the rule of one part of the body politic by another ; a rule met with endless protest, and finally successful protest. For the future govern- ment will be the attempt of the nation to rule itself, to get to know its own mind, to brace its will and steady its aims, and to acquire an instinct of sane and ready judgment. Our imaginations have hardly got hold as yet of the fact that government in the true sense, self- government, is only just beginning for the modern state. In a kind of dim way we have come to realize the dangers without having at all caught the inspiration of this new political fact. And the dangers are all too real. There is, first of all, the danger of our altogether failing to appreciate the change, of our clinging to antiquated notions of government, of our looking upon it as somehow hostile and foreign to us a thing to be assailed by claims of rights and privileges. That is to say, there is the danger of our not seeing that the democratic state has arrived. But even when we have learned something of the extent of the change, there are dangers still. The democratic state may not aim at ruling itself at all. Self-government may be the very last ideal it will 218 A LENT IN LONDON. set before itself. Almost certainly the state will follow the development of the individual. Heady youth will be for it too, most probably, the season of the pride of intellect. There are signs of such a tendency among us even now. There is too great a tendency, perhaps, among the most ardent spirits of the new movements in the sphere of politics to pin their entire faith to cut-and-dried systems which have been elaborated in the schools, which, as Walt Whitman says, "may prove very well in lecture- rooms, but may not prove at all in the open air/' Such a danger, however, is not really serious, for the very obvious reason that the ordinary democracy, like the ordinary youth, is not severely intellectual. But there is a real danger of the state in its new self-consciousness being driven into perilous courses by great moods of passion or emotion. Emotion may be the cheapest thing in the world, and it is the most satisfying to that higher vanity of the spirit which we all find it so difficult to get rid of. There is a great deal too much of flabby sentiment, already in the process of degeneration into a hideous semi-reli- gious cant, mingled with the movements which repre- sent our nascent national self-consciousness. And it is dangerous not only because it is so cheap, and makes us so self-satisfied, but also because it is uncontrolled and irrational, and may sweep us as readily into evil courses as into good. And, above all, sentiment so easily becomes unreal, so easily degenerates into sentimentality and especially in public life. Each of us is for himself ashamed of pretending to a sentiment he does not feel, or of pretending to it in a degree greater than he does feel it. The more genuine our personal emotions are, the less likely are they to emerge in any self-conscious parade, the more likely to be hidden away as the silent secret springs of action. But in public life we easily lose DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT. 219 that nice quality of self-respect, that fine temper of emotional sincerity. It is not nearly so difficult for us to persuade ourselves that we share in a sentiment which is in the air. Epidemics of spurious emotion and crazy sentimentalism are all too possible in the democratic state. And they are only destructive. They are the fevers of the body politic, infectious and deadly, leaving it limp and feeble and ex- hausted. The state-life, indeed, needs sentiment. It wants to be permeated through and through with a sentiment which is sincere and noble and per- manent. In order that any life the life of nation or of individual may grow to self-mastery, it must have an ideal which can satisfy the heart and focus and inspire the highest energies. But such an ideal cannot be forced. It cannot be built up by mere verbal insistence, by the noisy rant of even well-inten- tioned reformers. The Fabian method is the only sure and certain one in building up a great national ideal. . Patience sometimes seems, to hearts on fire for the reform of some crying injustice, an act of cowardice. But the patience which never gives way, which works and strives, which ever hopes, and knows no touch of despair, is the very condition of possessing one's soul. Enthusiasm, patience, faith, these will gradually build up a true national ideal. But let me say it once more such an ideal can never be forced. And it is on the possession of such an ideal that the possibility of self-government depends that self-government which is the true function of the democratic state, for which it has come into being and which it must live to effectuate. That is, in my mind, the real inspiration of the new political move- ments. They raise the state at once to the higher spiritual plane. They lay upon it the great business of ruling over its own spirit. They suggest new 220 A LENT IN LONDON. vistas of government, in which the ideal will be no longer the rule of one part of the state, of one class by another, but the attempt of the state to discover its collective consciousness, to know its own mind. What seem so clearly to us the dangers in the way are quite real dangers. But they are the dangers incident to youth. They are the dangers which must be passed through and overcome before the full responsibility of manhood can be attained. In spite of all the crudities, the insincerities, the youthful vanities and foibles of the new democratic move- ment, the modern state is building up for itself an ideal, is marching steadily towards the self-mastery and self-possession in the power of which it will be able to work out its ideal. Nay, these crudities and foibles are themselves but the evidence that under- neath the healthy life is working itself out and trying to discover a method of freely and adequately expressing itself. What that method of expression may be, what will be the new forms of government in the democratic state, I do not know, and I hardly care to know. They may be modifications of the present forms ; they may be quite new and changed forms. At any rate, they will be the forms through which the new state-life can best express itself. They will be the forms of the self-government of a free people. For us the important question is not how the forms of government are changing, but how the consciousness which creates these forms is changing. Are we alive to the fact that democracy is nothing in itself if it does not lead us on to this great and difficult but inspiring work of self-govern- ment, just as the ardours of youth are nothing if they do not lead us on to the fruitful powers and activities of manhood? Are we alive to the fact that the state-life, the life of the whole nation, is for the first time in history emerging upon the plane of the DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT. 221 highest spiritual endeavour, where the watchwords will be not rights and self-assertion and sectional conflict, but duties and self-mastery, and the recon- ciliation and harmony of all sectional interests ? If we are, we are reading the signs of the times aright. THE CHRISTIAN SENSE OF BEAUTY. 1 BY THE REV. W. C. GORDON LANG, M.A., Fellow and Dean of Divinity of Magdalen College, and Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford. " Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name : bring an offering, and come before Him : worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." I CHRON. xvi. 29. THE subject of which we have to think this after- noon seems at first sight remote from the subjects of close practical interest which have hitherto engaged your attention. But in reality there is no subject on which it is of greater importance that those interested in the well-being of society should have some clear principle, and none in which it is more difficult to find such a principle, and to apply it. It comes before us in a hundred complicated, practical shapes. Ought picture-galleries to be open on Sundays ? Is all good music in itself religious ? Is this picture one which a Christian ought to admire, irrespective of its subject, merely for the sake of its form ? Does the cleverness or the power of this drama cover its unsavoury morality ? And so forth. These are questions which come before us daily. Modern life is so varied, so rapid, and so intense, that our senses are quickened ; and in response to this quickening of the senses there is a constant 1 Taken from shorthand notes. THE CHRISTIAN SENSE OF BEAUTY. 223 supply of new, and even surprising sensations, which fascinate and delight before we can summon any first principle for their criticism or control. The one thing needful, then, is to pause in the midst of this pressure, and endeavour to fix upon our minds some one guiding principle which shall regulate the Chris- tian's sense of beauty. At present it is impossible to do more than suggest such a general principle ; you must apply it to circumstances as they arise. The principle, then, which guides the Christian in the control of his sense of beauty is simply the Incarna- tion itself, the Word made flesh. This involves that the body with all its senses, which in different degrees crave the beautiful for their satisfaction, can be so consecrated as to be worthy of the indwelling of God ; and that the senses at once can and ought to be as really as the spirit a way to God. If we follow this guiding principle, the quest of the beautiful through the senses becomes not merely a possible object of Christian endeavour, but one without which it is impossible to realize the fulness of that Godward life which was manifested in Christ. For God is the ultimate Source and Satisfaction of our capacity to seek and to know the Beautiful. When we see the rich colours of a sunset, or when we are thrilled by the sound of music, we are conscious at once of a sense of exquisite delight, and also of a strange yearning for something only hinted, not disclosed. It is difficult to know whether the sense of delight or the sense of yearning is the stronger. And the reason of this is, that beauty as we feel it is only partial ; that it is at best but " the pledge " of some " beauty in its plenitude." It is something more than the mere passing pleasurable excitement of certain nerves ; it is the momentary insight into a vaster beauty of which that which we feel is but a partial revelation. Now, this perfect beauty can be none other than God 224 A LENT IN LONDON. Himself. " We must believe," as Mr. Balfour has said, "that somewhere and for some Being there shines the unchanging splendour of beauty, of which in nature and in art we see, each of us from our own standpoint, only passing gleams and stray reflections." If, then, this perfect beauty be God Himself; and if, as is manifest, there cannot be two absolutely perfect beings in the universe, then perfect beauty and perfect goodness are ultimately one. God Himself, then, is the End of the quest of the beautiful ; and in God there is complete identity between the beautiful and the good. Thus, there cannot be any final divorce between beauty and goodness. If, then, we find that the ultimate tendency of any form of art is to under- mine in the artist, or in the person who delights in the product of his art, what we know to be the best in human nature goodness, in short then we may be sure that it does not represent the highest order of beauty. Pressed to its issue, it would involve the divorce between the beautiful and the good, which in the truth of things is impossible. But this control of the sense of beauty, in harmony with the law of goodness, cannot be achieved by repeated questions of the conscience in each particular case. It must be by the general direction or set of the central principle within us which regulates the senses that is, the personal will. The security for the sense of beauty is, then, a will which is in obedience to the law of goodness or to God. Mr. Bridges has finely said "All earthly beauty hath one cause or proof To lead the pilgrim soul to heaven above. . . . Joy's ladder it is, reaching from home to home ; The best of all the work that all was good, Whereof 'twas writ the angels aye upclomb, Down sped, and at the top the Lord God stood." To maintain this upward reference of beauty to God Who is its ultimate perfection, that is the work THE CHRISTIAN SENSE OF BEAUTY. 225 of the will of man. As such, it is a work not merely consistent with religion, but a real part of religion itself; it is involved in the dedication of the whole man to God. Religion has in the past given witness to this truth. In the Old Testament the beauty that appealed to the senses was again and again used as the symbol of the majesty and holiness of God. The tabernacle was clothed with the richest colour, and adorned with the choicest embroidery. The prophets beheld God seated on a sapphire throne. The temple in Jerusalem was to be exceeding magnifical, as a worthy symbol of the glory of God. So in the New Testament. Our Lord Himself was not only in His Being the perfect union of the Divine and the human, but expressed repeatedly in His parables and in His illustrations the truth that the things seen are symbols of the things unseen. Nature to Him as it appeals to the senses was the sacrament of unseen realities. It is most remarkable that when St. John beholds in a vision the Man Who had been his familiar Friend, He is clothed in all the beauty that could entrance the senses His head white as snow, His eyes as a flame of fire, His feet like fine brass, His voice as the sound of many waters, His counte- nance as the sun shining in its strength. In that same vision the beauty and the glory of God and of His Church are described to us as mirrored and revealed in the beauties of the gold, the pearls, the jewels, of the heavenly city. It was a significant and a true instinct, which led the early Christians, when once they dared to represent the human form of our Lord, to represent it as one in which the highest goodness and most perfect human beauty were joined. The great thinkers of the Alexan- drine school maintained, as one of their first principles, the intrinsic goodness of beauty and the beauty of Q 226 A LENT IN LONDON. goodness. Even in the ascetic ages of the Church, the monks could not refrain from representing their sense of God in the most beautiful churches, the richest colours, and the most perfect development of musical sound. And yet, though religion has given this witness, it cannot be denied that, on the whole, she has been timorous of the full use of the sense of beauty. And this is natural. Beauty, unlike goodness, appeals to us through the medium of the senses, and the senses are, on one side of them, closely allied to the lower physical nature of man. Thus, without the strongest effort of the will, it is difficult to prevent the sense of the beautiful from ministering to the lower lusts. Some of you will remember the great fable of Plato, wherein he describes the soul of man as a chariot drawn by two steeds. One of them is white, upright, cleanly made the follower of true glory, guided by Reason, who stands as the charioteer. The other is crooked and coarse, " with grey and bloodshot eyes." And when the charioteer beholds some vision of beauty, the strong coarse steed plunges forward in order to satisfy the lower lusts. The other struggles to keep true to the guiding charioteer ; and so it is not without wrenching and struggling and forcing that the lower nature is curbed, and the soul is able " to follow the beautiful in modesty and fear." Pagan societies looked at the beautiful with the bloodshot eyes of the steed of lust. This downward drag of the sense of beauty was almost inevitable, because there was no force, no conviction which could main- tain the upward reference of the will to the perfect beauty Who was also perfect goodness. And thus the pagan sense of beauty became in truth " procuress to the lords of hell," and minister to bodily lust. The early Christians were familiar with this degrada- tion of the sense of beauty, and it was not unnatural THE CHRISTIAN SENSE OF BEAUTY. 227 that it should fill them with suspicion and fear. Material beauty was to them a thing surrounded with the memorials of the shame and the ruin that it had wrought, and they feared to sully their purity by approaching it, even in the name of the Word made flesh. And thus there was need of a redemption of the sense of beauty, of a revelation given to man which was adequate to nerve the will in an upward raising of the senses to God. The will of man must first be redeemed from that set towards evil which had dragged down beauty in its course, and then it must be sustained by a power which could keep the beauty in touch with the goodness of God. It was this gift of a power which at once redeemed and sustained the will of man towards God which was given to the world in our Lord Jesus Christ. But and this is where Christian thought has often failed to make the necessary advance when re- demption has been accomplished, then the appropria- tion of beauty in the Name of Christ should begin. It is when the will has been redeemed, and is, in the strength of Christ, set towards God, that it can trust itself to the fullest enjoyment and cultivation of the sense of beauty. This is the truth of the saying that " to the pure all things are pure." It is involved in the beatitude, " Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit the earth." "The meek" the surrendered will it is this which has the right to embrace in its fullest variety and richness that world of beauty which responds to the senses which God has given. Thus there is perhaps no Christian work in our time which is more necessary than to follow Christ in the redemption of the sense of beauty. We have need of a new knight-errantry, which shall rescue the sense of the beautiful from the false tyrants of lust and sin, who have so often enthralled her, and shall bring her out into the freedom and the purity of Christ. For 228 A LENT IN LONDON. the individual it is a real failure to realize the fulness of life if he does not, so far as he can, and as God has gifted him, train, perfect, and discipline the life of the senses. Increase in the power of appreciating beauty ought to be a real mark of advance in the Christian life. And socially, the Christian must seek everywhere and at all times to redeem, not to stifle, or to thwart, or to suspect, the craving for the beau- tiful which is so widespread in our time. It reveals itself how can it be otherwise? often in the poorest and, indeed, most vulgar forms ; but everywhere it is a witness of a human need which God wills to meet. If, for example, there be a delight to the hard-pressed business man in the spectacle of that union of the rhythm of music and the rhythm of motion which is the meaning of the dance, this, poor as it may seem to many, is a real sign of the craving for the beautiful. And, just as the Christian will not suspect, but will welcome, and seek to perfect all forms of goodness, however imperfect they may be will make the most of them rather than the least of them so he ought to welcome, not to suspect, these elementary forms of a craving for the beautiful. He ought to make the most of them, to perfect them, to minister to them in a manner that shall lead them on to something higher and nobler and liker God. You will under- stand how impossible it is to apply this thought within the limits of a short sermon to the details of actual life ; but to meditate upon it will keep one true at once to the claims of purity, and to the claims of beauty in those complicated questions which agitate our life to-day. One word in conclusion. It is an act of great boldness for any man to enter thus fearlessly into the quest of the beautiful through the senses. The danger of finding in these senses only the occasion of sin is great and constant. It has caused the wreckage THE CHRISTIAN SENSE OF BEAUTY. 229 not only of great lives, but of great societies. It can be averted only by the most resolute discipline of the will, only by its most complete surrender to the cause of purity and goodness as it is revealed to us in our Lord and Saviour. It demands that a man in his own nature should be redeemed and sustained by the strength of that perfect will of God. He who would enter for himself and for his society the quest of the beautiful has need more, perhaps, than any other, to bring himself to the foot of the Cross of Christ, and there to ask that he may be inspired by Christ's own perfect sacrifice of self to God. DOGMA A SOCIAL FORCE. BY THE REV. CANON HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, M.A. ' ' And even things without life giving sound, whether pipe or harp r except they give a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped or harped ? ... So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken ? for ye shall speak into the air. . . . Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me." I COR. xiv. 7, 9, ii. " ORTHODOXY is my doxy " so the clever phrase runs ; yet that is exactly what it cannot be. If its note lay in its being mine, it could never put out the claim to be orthodox. By making that claim, it asserts that it is not mine, but yours. The word would be absolutely devoid of all meaning if right thinking were merely an individual's own affair ; just as truth would have ceased to exist if it were " what each man troweth." So far as it is this, it is nothing ; it has not begun to be. To use the name of truth is to assert that we can overstep the limits of each man's private trowings, and can arrive at some con- clusion which is independent of who thinks it, and which is common to all who think. If such a result is unattainable, then we have despaired of truth. Nothing, then, can be more ridiculous than to claim orthodoxy for a private opinion. If religion is a concern of the hidden spirit, of course there is DOGMA A SOCIAL FORCE. 231 no such thing as orthodoxy ; each worships alone with his God ; each answers to himself alone, before God, for what he troweth. And there may well be a noble mysticism which recoils from all outward expression of its spiritual communion, too sadly con- scious of its pitiful inadequacy to convey by any language to others, or even to itself, the mystery that is, nevertheless, so solemn and so sweet. Such a nobility of spiritual sentiment speaks to us from the heart of Arthur Clough, who, shrinking from the ruthless and clamorous logic with which W. G. Ward hammered at the doors of his delicate soul, fled apart to murmur, in timorous solitude, that unhymned hymn, which can only allow itself to pray in apologies for praying, and cannot presume to name what it prays to, without withdrawing the very name without which it cannot utter its prayer. " O Thou, that in our bosoms' shrine Dost dwell, unknown, because divine ! Thou, in that mysterious shrine Enthroned, as I must say, divine ! 1 will not frame one thought of what Thou mayest either be or not ; I will not prate of ' thus ' and ' so,' And be profane with * yes ' or * no : J Enough that in our soul and heart Thou, whatsoe'er Thou mayest be, art ! Do only Thou, in that dim shrine, Unknown or known, remain, divine. There, or if not, at least in eyes That scan the fact that round them lies, The hand to sway, the judgment guide, To sight and sense Thyself divide : Be Thou but there, in soul and heart, I will not ask to feel Thou art." So it has all been said, in its most perfect and most manly form. But, then, the very emotion which stirs in us at the reading of such a poem, comes from the fact that the soul which argues on behalf of this wordless 232 A LENT IN LONDON. faith, recognizes and confesses its own pathetic im- potence. Such a religion (as it knows well) is but the uttermost refuge of a wistful soul that cannot quite abandon itself to despair of God. It is aware of all that it has lost ; it can but humbly apologize for what remains ; it offers no gladness, for it cannot "go up with the multitude that keep holiday;" it creeps into some unnoticed corner, under the grey shadows, and tenderly it pleads against surrendering its faint frail hope. Pitifully it is conscious of the misery of " Fingering idly some old Gordian knot, Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave, And with much toil attain to half-believe." Yet, seriously, tragically, it will still go apart, in silence, and will bend itself in a prayer that must, perforce, be speechless, to One " Who, not unowned, yet shall unnamed forgive ; " or be content, in prayerlessness, to work, so that the work itself may become the prayer that it cannot pray ; dumbly trusting that perchance rare moments may fall upon its clouded life 6 ' When, while the work it plies, Unsummoned powers the blinding film shall part, And, scarce by happy tears made dim, the eyes In recognition start." So tender, so touching, the appeal ! And the pity of it lies just in this that such a religion must, perforce, abide secreted and unshared. "It abideth alone." Only by speech can it shatter the dismal solitude. It must discover some word which can embody for it its belief, if it is ever to convey it to another. A wordless faith is a lonely faith. But, my brethren, surely religion has almost for- sworn itself if it has abandoned its claim to lift men DOGMA A SOCIAL FORCE. 233 out of loneliness. Religion is, in its vital essence, the spirit of unity, of combination, of brotherhood. Its primal office is to overleap the barriers that shut men's souls off from one another. In religion, if any- where, men must find their common identity. Its entire aspiration is set that way ; and that is why the whole religious movement of mankind, being an effort, an impulse, after spiritual unity, attains its true consummation in the revelation of "one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all." A religion that cannot bring together even so much as two souls into a common faith, is but the vacant ghost of a religion, haunting its own melancholy grave. It has ceased to retain the office and character that stamp a religion. Yet a religion that cannot name its God is powerless to arrive at a brotherhood even of two. The sole bridge by which we can pass across the gulf that sunders spirit from spirit, is speech. To co-operate, to associate, we must speak. Destroy faith's power of speech, and you reduce it to the impotence of Babel. Our tower that should rise to heaven tumbles into ruins the moment combination ceases ; and combination ceases as soon as language fails us. Here, then, is the alternative set before us. If we deny the spiritual belief its power to express itself; if we repudiate the formality of words in the secret communings of the soul ; if we shrink from all outward expressions of the mystery that we would nurse to ourselves alone ; if we prefer some dumb, inarticulate, powerless cry of the soul, and shrink from all attempts to " name the ineffable Name ; " then, while cherishing our own freedom from the dust and heat of theological dispute, while hugging our own personal spiritual purity on which no spot or stain has fallen from these wild wars that rage around holy things, we have all the time 234 A LENT IN LONDON. dropped out the heart of the matter ; we have ex- punged from religion its innermost significance ; we have surrendered its main hope ; for we have stripped it of the only instrument by which it can fulfil its supreme office of knitting men together into a brotherhood, into a body. We have won our peace at the cost of finding it a solitude. No ! every religion that is true to its primal instincts must offer to combine men together ; and, to combine men together, it must take all the risks of formulating a speech which its followers understand : a speech by which it can convey to itself, and to others, that which it believes. And Christianity is, above all religions, bound to have gained this power of speech, because not only does it profess (i) that combination is of the essence of its creed, so that the faith only exists in a corpo- rate form as a society, a kingdom, a family, and to believe at all involves belief in a Catholic Church ; but (2), also, by offering to make this association world-wide and universal, it drops out all those adventitious aids to combination which religions could rely upon as long as they were national or local. The tie of blood would serve to bind men into a religion so long as the religion and the race were coterminous. But Christianity has thrown over these incidental ties, and it must rely, therefore, for its corporate coherence on the purely spiritual acts which constitute the common speech of its united peoples. Now, I would use speech, first, in its widest sense, as meaning all outward acts, which embody and con- vey abroad an inward intention. Such sacramental speech, in the deepest and highest sense, is to be found in the fixed actions of a common worship. Acts of public worship, done all together, by mutual agreement, conveying united assent, these form the DOGMA A SOCIAL FORCE. 235 primary, the most permanent, and, in some ways, the richest language in which a communion in belief becomes articulate, and finds determined and intelli- gible expression. And so Christianity took for its elemental speech the liturgy of the common Feast, of the one Altar the Eucharist. Fixed acts, fixed formulas, these held together, by public rehearsal, by public declaration, in the public assembly, the entire body corporate of believers. In these unchanging and catholic forms every one understood the same thing; every one realized, through these outward expres- sions, his identity with his brethren, in the one Body and the one Blood. Through these sacraments the invisible Church attained to visible unity. Souls mingled with souls, spirits touched spirits, as they, under set ritual, eat of one loaf, as they drank at one cup. Here was the high language that released the spirit from its loneliness. It had found its proper speech ; it was made one with its fellows. But mere outward ritual could not be enough. This speech of liturgical actions was bound to in- clude the fixed use of selected and intelligible and definite words. For a Christian's ritual could not lie at the level of some miserable pagan magic, which asked no one to understand it, if only it were formally correct. A Christian must offer reasonable, intelligent service, with his mind and with his spirit. He must know what he means by his acts ; he must follow his public worship with a reasoning assent, with a thoroughly qualified understanding. This is the unique note of Judaism and of Christianity that they alone, of all religions in the world, demand of every worshipper that he should think about what he is doing, and should bring his mind into full play in his worship. To fail in this was to fail in loyalty to Him Who is "the Word "the reasonable Will of God. From the very start, 236 A LENT IN LONDON. therefore, every catechumen must have passed dili- gently through the intellectual training of the cate- chetical schools before he could take his place, as baptized and confirmed, in the corporate worship of the society. In these schools he learned to apprehend the authoritative, dogmatic words gradually sifted out, deliberately chosen, through which the society secured and maintained its coherence. He learned to name the God in Whom he had believed by the Name in which the associated and united worship of the entire Church made its appeal before the Throne. The Name of the Lord ! That of old was the force that made Israel a people. And the Name given to our Lord, which was above every name, was the force which held together the Church, and constituted all believers to be one people. The Name named ; the Name understood, disclosed, laid open, comprehended, pronounced, declared in intelligible words ; this is that which knits all members to the one Head ; this is that through which, by joints and bands, the entire body, articulated and combined, " increaseth with the increase of God." And then, as debates and disputes raged keenly round the Name in which the worship ascended, the Church, if she were to cohere at all, if she were to abide as an enduring society, found herself obliged, perforce, not only to select her liturgical language yet more carefully, but also to state yet more precisely what she intended by it. So grew her dogma. But note what dogma means. Not speculation, not metaphysic, not theological explanation. Dogma does not explain or argue ; it only asserts asserts facts verified through the collective experience. It asserts what already is believed. It asserts what it already intends by its familiar worship. Dogma is the de- claration of what faith means by its faith. It has no authority over unbelievers, and claims none. It is DOGMA A SOCIAL FORCE. 237 the simple assertion by Christian believers of what it is that they in common do, as a fact, hold and believe. Dogma, then, is the act of the Body of the believ- ing, worshipping Church. For it is the answer to the question, What is it that the Christian Body means by worshipping Jesus Christ in its public assemblies, in its liturgical acts ? As a Body it does so worship ; does it in one way, everywhere, always, in corporate eucharistic actions, which must have a valid and uni- versal significance to those who so unite in them. What is that significance ? Does it involve this ? Does it imply that? How can Jesus Christ be wor- shipped ? What is His Name that it should be a means of approach to the Father ? So the immense intellectual discussion of the fourth and fifth centuries delivered its challenges. And the dogmatic creeds are the answers given by the Church. In them she announces the mind with which she habitually wor- ships. She fends off doubtful terms and hazy ex- pressions, which would wreck her power to pray to God through Jesus Christ in her historical and unde- viating forms, as she had always done. That is her dogma. And, note, to deny her this right and capacity to dogmatize, can only mean the denial of the Church's power to say what it is that she believes, and what she understands by her wor- ship. It is to say that her faith must be inarticulate, must be unthinkable, unintelligent, dumb, below the level of natural things. It is to say that reason can have no part or lot in the Christian's worship, and that no one can convey to another brother in the faith anything of what he understands by believing. Of course, this may be true ; only if it is if faith must remain a buried secret, a blind emotion, hushed up in the hidden recesses of the individual spirit, unable to emerge into public view in any rational 238 A LENT IN LONDON. language then the existence of Christianity as an organic society, as a coherent body, as a social force that can combine into any consistent movement so as to tell on mankind at large, is at an end. This is the simple issue. In dogma, Christianity declares what it itself means by its belief. If it cannot say even to itself what it means, then it has no capacity for com- bination ; its members cannot associate in united action ; its corporate construction falls away into ruins. My brethren, that is the issue, and it is serious. For all men are turning their eyes to-day anxiously to see whether, in the midst of our social State, strained as it is by industrial perplexities, wearied, overbur- dened, beclouded, there be, present here on earth, a holy society in which God has set up His throne, whose members, trained and fashioned in a heavenly city, can bring to bear upon social difficulties the mind of those who know what corporate citizenship and the responsibilities of a brotherhood should mean. You and I believe that such a city of God exists, and that its citizenship is the one and only school in which we can learn how best to serve our earthly city, and to love our fellow-men. But such a society, if it is to be what we imagine, cannot base itself, as so many fondly imagine, on the elimination of dogma. Such a society cannot cohere if it do not possess a constructive, unifying mind which can animate the body with a fixed purpose. Such a society cannot cohere if its members cannot communicate with one another ; cannot share together a common faith, which is intelligible, and can be con- veyed in a common speech. They must, if they are ever to have any social force as an integral mass they must be drawn together and compacted by the know- ledge of Him in Whom they have believed. There must be a Christian language that passes between DOGMA A SOCIAL FORCE. 239 Christians, by which they can realize their knowledge, and can name together the everlasting Name. Such knowledge adds nothing to the faith ; it only expresses what is already believed. But it does add power to the faith, just because it enables it to know itself, and to combine in one all who share it. Faith in Jesus Christ may exist without the power to speak, but it must then exist to itself alone, and abandon all hope of winning the swing, and move- ment, and honour, and force of associated action. But if (as we hold for certain) Jesus Christ intended to act on the world through a kingdom through the weight of a gathered Church then He intended the Church to speak, to understand its own meaning. And that understanding, that authoritative speech, is dogma. There may be those here to whom such speech is honestly denied. Let them bear this burden as bravely as Zacharias, dumb for a season, because he could not wholly believe the vision. Only let them believe that, if that dumbness broke, they would find their capacity for service doubled ; they would step up into their place in that ordered creation where all voices are organic and distinct ; they would strike hands with their brethren in the faith. 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