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. They would 
 be glad as Zacharias on the day when his mouth was 
 opened, and his tongue loosed, and he spake, and 
 praised God. 
 
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8 A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Jennings. ECCLES I A ANGLICANA. A History of the 
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 SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE AND STORM : a Collection of Mis- 
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 THE WITNESS OF THE PASSION OF OUR MOST HOLY 
 REDEEMER. Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 \continued. 
 
IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 
 
 Knox Little. Works by W. J. KNOX LITTLE, M.A., Canon Resi- 
 dentiary of Worcester, and Vicar of Hoar Cross. continued. 
 
 THE LIGHT OF LIFE. Sermons preached on Various Occasions. 
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 CHRISTIAN BIOGRAPHIES. 
 
 MADAME LOUISE DE FRANCE, 
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 St. Augustin. 
 
 A DOMINICAN ARTIST : a Sketch of 
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 HENRI PERREYVE. By PERE 
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 ST. FRANCIS DE SALES, Bishop and 
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 RIES. 
 
 FENELON, ARCHBISHOP OF CAM- 
 
 BRAI. 
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 A SELECTION FROM THE SPIRITUAL 
 
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 THE SPIRIT OF ST. FRANCIS DE 
 
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 ST. FRANCIS DE SALES OF THE 
 
 LOVE OF GOD. 
 SELECTIONS FROM PASCAL'S 
 
 THOUGHTS.' 
 
io A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Liddon. Works by HENRY PARRY LIDDON, D.D., D.C.L.,LL.D., 
 late Canon Residentiary and Chancellor of St. Paul's. 
 
 LIFE OF EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY, D.D. By HENRY PARRY 
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IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. n 
 
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12 A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Mercier. OUR MOTHER CHURCH : Being Simple Talk 
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 Molesworth. STORIES OF THE SAINTS FOR CHIL- 
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 RULING IDEAS IN EARLY AGES AND THEIR RELATION TO 
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 SERMONS, PAROCHIAL AND OCCASIONAL. Crown Zvo. y. 6d. 
 
 A REVIEW OF THE BAPTISMAL CONTROVERSY. Crown 8vo. 
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 COUNSELS OF FAITH AND PRACTICE : being Sermons preached 
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IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 13 
 
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 OUR CHURCH AND HER SERVICES. Fcap. 8vo. zs. 6d. 
 
 [continued. 
 
14 A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Oxenden. Works by the Right Rev. ASHTON OXENDEN 
 
 formerly Bishop of Montreal continued. 
 
 FAMILY PRAYERS FOR FOUR WEEKS. First Series. Fcap. 8vo. 
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 Puller. THE PRIMITIVE SAINTS AND THE SEE OF 
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 Pusey. LIFE OF EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY, D.D. 
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IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 
 
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 [continued. 
 
16 A SELECTION OF THEOLOGICAL WORKS. 
 
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YB 2220