BBBMBBH APOSTOLIC MINISTRY APOSTOLIC MINISTRY SERMONS AND ADDRESSES BY J. SCOTT LIDGETT, M.A., D.D. It LONDON CHARLES H. KELLY TO THE METHODIST PEOPLE IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THEIR PRAYERS AND CONFIDENCE THROUGHOUT AN ARDUOUS YEAR PREFACE IT is with some hesitation that the following Sermons and Addresses are issued in permanent form to the public. Most of them were strictly official utterances delivered by me as President of the Wesleyan Metho- dist Conference. Some others are included which were not strictly official, namely, Addresses to the Wesleyan Methodist Union for Social Service at Ox- ford, to the Wesley Deaconesses at the Annual Dedi- cation Service, to the Southport Holiness Convention, and to the National Council of Evangelical Free Churches on 'The Relative Duties of the Church and the Nation in regard to Poverty.' The volume is completed by the addition of the Presidential Address to the National Free Church Council in 1906, and the sermon on retiring from the Presidency in the following year. The reason for publishing discourses thus delivered on many different occasions, and dealing with diverse aspects of Christian Life and Work, is that they form a connected whole. They are an attempt to show the inclusiveness of Preface the spiritual life, and to set forth the way in which many great causes which appeal to Christians in the present day, notably, Evangelism, Foreign Missions, Social Reform and Christian Reunion, are related to faith in Christ and to the service of His kingdom. They are sent forth in the hope and prayer that they may be helpful to some in reconciling the claims of the inward and the outward, of the Spiritual and the Social, through a clearer and more distinct appre- hension of the meaning of the Christian religion, as the revelation of the love of God and the fulfilment of love in man, through Christ. J. SCOTT LIDGETT. BERMONDSEY SETTLEMENT, S.E. November, 1909. viii CONTENTS PACE I. THE CATHOLICITY OF METHODISM . , 11 II. MINISTERIAL LEADERSHIP 28 III. THE WORLD'S DESTINY CONTAINED IN CHRIST 44 IV. THE SERVICE OF GOD IN THE PRESENT DAY 60 V. THE COMRADESHIP AND THE CAPTAINCY OF FAITH ........ 73 VI. THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 89 VII. THE APOSTOLIC MINISTRY . . . .106 VIII. THE IDEALS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION . . 130 IX. THE SERVICE OF WOMEN . , . . .157 X. THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS . . 167 XI. THE RESPONSIBILITY OF NONCONFORMISTS IN THE UNIVERSITY ..... 187 XII. THE RELATIVE DUTY OF THE CHURCH AND OF THE STATE IN REGARD TO POVERTY . 201 XIII. HOLINESS, THE FULFILMENT OF LIFE . .215 XIV. THE WORLD-WIDE MISSION OF JHE CHRIS- TIAN CHURCH 229 XV. CATHOLICITY THE MARK OF SPIRITUALITY . 264 The Catholicity of Methodism 1 FATHERS AND BRETHREN, The Conference meets to-day for the first time in York. To me personally this fact is of peculiar interest, for it was from York that my grandfather, John Scott, came out into the Methodist ministry nearly a century ago. The history of Methodism in York has, throughout its past, been distinguished for great devotion, and illustrated by names which hold a permanent place on the bead- roll of its history. In particular, its enthusiasm and generosity in the cause of Foreign Missions makes the visit of the Conference specially opportune at a time when we are coming to realize somewhat more fully our duty to proclaim the gospel of Christ to the ends of the earth. My first words on behalf of the Conference should therefore be words of the heartiest thanks to those whose hospitality and care have welcomed us to this city. 1 The Presidential Address delivered to the Representative Session of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in York, on July 16, 1908. II The Catholicity of Methodism Our assembling here is, however, of still wider interest and importance. We meet under the shadow of the great Minster whose stones form so impressive a monument and enshrine so many records of the historic Christianity of bygone generations. We are in the long- established centre of northern Christianity. The mind and sympathy of Methodists travel beyond the records of ecclesiastical Christianity in York itself to dwell upon the yet nobler and more congenial achievements of the early missionaries of lona and Lindisfarne. The story of the humble yet heroic and inspiring labours of Aidan, Chad, Cedd, and Cuthbert is eloquent to us of the close kinship between those who confronted and transformed the heathenism of the north in the seventh century of our era, and the equally epoch-making work of the evangelists of the eighteenth century. Had the earlier preachers combined with their glowing zeal the practical genius of early Methodism, it is possible that the history of our northern Christianity might have been widely different, and in many respects truer to the ideals of evangelic Christianity than that which inevitably followed when the authority of Rome was established, and the head quarters of the Church fixed at the centre of civil government. Yet we are here to-day humbly, yet confidently, to affirm our share in the great Catholic inheritance 12 The Catholicity of Methodism of the past. Who, save ourselves, can separate us from it ? Its spirit is within us. The governing conceptions of its religion and theology fashion the forms in which we conceive and express the meaning of the gospel. The inspired utterances of its devo- tion thrill and uplift our hearts. As we look out upon history and upon the world, it is with the same vision of all things in Christ which dominates the perception of all believers, without distinction of age, or race, or Church. Not a saint, a thinker, a hero, or a martyr of the Church, but we claim our share in his character, influence, and achievements by confessing the debt we owe to the great tradition which he has enriched by saintly consecration, true thought, or noble conduct. On the other hand, we are here to affirm that if without the great historic tradition of which this city is eloquent, "Methodism could not have come into being ; yet without the mighty evangelical inspiration of which Methodism was so pre-eminently the organ, the vital force of historic Christianity in this country would have wellnigh perished in the eighteenth century of unbelief and callous neglect of duty on the part of the Church, of brutal indifference and degradation on that of the people. The creation of Methodism by the living Word and quickening Spirit of God meant little less than the 13 The Catholicity of Methodism re-creation of Christianity in England and the re-establishment of civilization. In short, the careful study both of the past and the present reveals to us the interdependence of all the great forms of Christian life. With all their imperfections, who would obliterate a single Christian Church? Each, 'according to the measure of the gift of Christ,' embodies distinctive aspects of august and catholic truth which is too large to find complete expression in any one ; though each can only make good its claim to a permanent place in the economy of the gospel, so far as it is seeking more adequately to experience and set forth the truth 'as truth is in Jesus.' There have been ages when it has been necessary, in the interests of truth and in the service of the kingdom of Christ, to accentuate differences, in order that neglected aspects of truth might be reasserted, and that the force of deadening custom and of grievous error might be destroyed. Even the antagonisms of the past have enriched the Church of the present. Many of the battlefields of the . Church militant are now so radiant with the glory ' of the Church triumphant, that we can observe how Ithe ancient combatants may be reconciled in the larger synthesis of a reasonable faith which holds together the separate contentions that kept them apart. Would it not be a pity and a shame if this 14 The Catholicity of Methodism unifying process should extend only to the thoughts and strivings of bygone generations, and should not reach out to influence the differences and contro- versies of our own times ? It is the task of our age to exhibit our agreements and our differences in their true proportions and relations. The beliefs, the ideals, and the duties of our common Christianity should be far more powerful to unite us than our differences to estrange or divide us. Indeed, the true secret of Christian life will not have been learnt in these days until, on a basis of the closest fellow- ship, we have learned to find in our minor differences an assistance and not a hindrance to intimacy and co-operation, as is the case with well-marked indi- vidualities in family life wherever mutual good-will prevails. If such a mutual understanding and appre- ciation be needful in the interests of Christian thought and devotion, it is certainly not less so in order that the practical mission of Christianity may be fulfilled in regard to the vast problems of the twentieth century. The unifying of Christendom for work, in order to realize the kingdom of God on earth is the primary object which faith sets before an enlightened Christian statesmanship. Where there are no differences our watchword must be union ; where they are comparatively slight, federation ; where they are more serious, yet not destructive of the 15 The Catholicity of Methodism fundamental agreements of Christianity, co-operation in order to defend and promote the supreme interests and applications of our common Christian life. The schismatic is always a traitor. Most of all is he such in the present day. Methodism, if true to its original spirit, will not look askance upon this great work or stand aloof from it. It will not fear a closer partnership with 'all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity.' It will represent alike in its corporate action and in the influence of its individual representatives the divine energy of brotherly love which will take no denials, bear with many disappoint- ments, and run all risks in order that the spiritual meaning of our Lord's prayer, 'that they all may be one,' may be fulfilled. We are not here to justify our existence. Life jus- tifies itself by living. Its new beginnings are always stamped by freshness and individuality. Order does not create life. On the contrary, life creates order and carries order within itself as the secret of its vitality. And life carries its immanent order out beyond itself, so that, while maintaining its own distinctive pecu- liarity, it co-ordinates itself with all other life and being. Thus, as it finds itself in individuality, it loses itself in the larger life, only thereby to return to itself in greater vigour and fruitfulness. What is true of all life is true of Methodism as a form of the highest The Catholicity of Methodism spiritual life, owing its origin, development, and energy to the creative presence of the Spirit of Christ. Methodism must respond to the Spirit, leaving God to justify its existence by its fruits. It must never stand on the defensive ; it must ceaselessly act on the offensive, both in thought and deed, against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Our business is simply thus to hear, to believe, and to obey the living voice of the ever-present Christ, the Head of the Church and the Director of all its history. This Conference is the representative Council of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. We have a great Church to represent ; a Church that is only half conscious of its potential greatness. Therefore we have need of a great spirit. The highest ideals, the most courageous resolution, entire consecration are needed if we are to fulfil our office as the trustees and leaders of the whole Church. We are the in- heritors of a great past. We can only possess it so far as we are the creators of a yet greater future. We must think and act from beginning to end in terms of God's purposes for His Church and Kingdom throughout the world. We must so deliberate and decide that in days to come we may look back and say of this Conference what was said of the first Council at Jerusalem, 'It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us.' If this is to be the case our B 17 The Catholicity of Methodism proceedings must be bathed in unceasing prayer and conceived under the mingled influence of enthusiasm, courage, and wisdom, welded together by mighty faith. The Conference has many special problems to deal with. In the first place we have to consider the vital question of our Church membership. Such a subject above all must be kept clear of controversy or party spirit. Let us look upon ourselves as engaged together in a common effort to preserve or to restore the intimacy of our Christian fellowship and to enlarge both the theory and practice of our Church life. We must seek the remedy of existing evils by means of restoration. This work of restoration must not be artificial, but represent a true and living development of the faith and the brotherhood of the Church. Ours is a prophetic task. We are called, not to galvanize lifelessness or to standardize worldliness, but to bring home to our people the glorious ideal of the Church as presented to us in the Epistle to the Ephesians, and to engage them in a solemn and sustained effort to realize it in and through the forms of the Methodist Society. As we do this we shall not only summon them to an intenser Christian fellowship, but invite them to take a fuller share in the counsels and re- sponsibilities of the Church. Upon this work of deepening, enlarging, and establishing our Church life the whole future of Methodism depends. 18 The Catholicity of Methodism The work of Foreign Missions again claims our most serious consideration. We must not only main- tain the increase of the last two years, but must prepare for a steady and rapid advance. When we celebrate the centenary of our Missionary Society five years hence, the ordinary income of the Society must have been raised to at least 2 50,000 a year if the call which God makes upon Methodism is to be obeyed. If this is to be the case the Church must lay itself out for a much more comprehensive effort to arouse and educate the enthusiasm of the young, to raise the standard of sacrifice, and to enter into more effective alliance with all the forces which are seeking to evangelize and civilize mankind. This twofold solicitude for Church life and world- evangelization will not weaken, but strengthen, our sense of the importance of the great administrative problems with which we have to deal. The most urgent of these is to provide in the most efficient way for the training of the ministry. Our outward expansion will, indeed, be of little value unless the best of our sons are attracted to the holy ministry, and unless the Church supplies to those who are thus attracted a mental, moral, and spiritual equip- ment which will make them true prophets and great soldiers of Jesus Christ. In the same spirit of aggres- sive zeal and wisdom we must pass to the problems 19 The Catholicity of Methodism which confront us in home missionary policy and in regard to our work for the young. We shall organize a great service of national evangelism, shall search out the causes of weakness and decay which are manifest here and there among our Churches, and shall take heed to the serious warnings which force themselves upon our attention that the work of our Sunday schools must be greatly developed and im- proved if it is to satisfy the standards and meet the needs of the present time. When we consider the relation of Methodism to the national life two questions stand out as of peculiar importance. The difficulty in regard to national edu- cation is as yet unsolved. Methodism has resolved that, so far as in us lies, national education shall be Christian in its inspiration, national in its administra- tion, and progressive in its spirit. We will not abate or forgo one of these demands. We shall not abandon Christian teaching, acquiesce in sectarianism, or tole- rate inefficiency. Despite disappointments and delays, we will not harbour the counsels of cowardice or despair. We believe that only good sense and good will are wanting to bring this controversy to an end in a way which will commend itself to all reasonable men, give adequate safeguards to freedom and liberty, and bring about peaceful co-operation between all those who truly care for the education of the people. 20 The Catholicity of Methodism The worse will it be, in the judgement alike of the Church, the nation, and of history, for any who make such a solution impossible, whether by narrowness, bigotry, or party spirit. The other national subject of outstanding import- ance is that of the Licensing Bill. The Conference has lived to see the day when the whole of its own resolutions and demands are embodied in a Bill before Parliament. The Government has accepted the mandate of the Christian Churches and of the friends of temperance instead of hearkening to the wire-pullers or trembling before a mighty and cruel monopoly. By this course they have raised for the moment politics to morality, and have made the most constraining appeal for the support of all those who seek the triumph of morality and humanity in our national life. Especially have they established their claim to unswerving support from those who, knowing their own responsibilities, urged them to undertake the policy upon which they have embarked. Methodism throughout the land has responded to this challenge. It will continue to do so through the weeks and months of conflict which are yet before us. We are not concerned with the details of this great measure, but with its main principles. We demand that the nation shall control the drink traffic in order to reduce the overwhelming 21 The Catholicity of Methodism temptations which threaten alike the physical, moral, domestic, and economic well-being of the people, not to speak of their spiritual salvation. The Conference will endorse what has already been done. We shall call all our forces into the field for an unwearying campaign, until the final victory which awaits us is triumphantly won. To do less than this would be a betrayal alike of Christ, of the nation, and of Methodism. By their action in this crisis, the virility and humanity of the Churches will be tested as by no other issue which has arisen in recent years. The subjects which have been touched upon enable us to summarize the duty of the Conference. In the first place, we have to supply our share of prophetic leadership to our Church and to our times. Both in our thought and action we must be in advance and not in the rear. We must take the lead and not wait to be driven. We must not be disobedient to the heavenly vision. We must risk all rather than fail our Master when He bids us sound the advance. We must see to it that our armoury and organization are of the twentieth century, and not either of the eighteenth or the nineteenth. The War Office of the Church stands in perpetual need of reform. In the second place, we must adopt the world- embracing standpoint of the gospel of Christ. The insular is as inadequate, both to Christ and to our 22 The Catholicity of Methodism times, as the parochial. To become the willing and devoted instruments of God in making the twentieth century the greatest era in the advance of Christianity that the world has ever seen, this is the calling which the providence of God, the genius of Methodism, and the appeal of our generation make upon us. The federation of the whole world is a wellnigh accom- plished fact. The British Empire and British energy affect it, and are affected by it, at every point. It is for us to realize and make known the deeper spiritual meaning of this great fact. We must call our people to respond and to secure the higher and larger ends which God is revealing, by the ceaseless prosecution of missionary evangelism, of international goodwill, of human emancipation and uplifting. Our opportunities of evangelizing the world are unique. They are quickly fleeting. Let us lay hold of them by a splendid consecration. Thirdly, we must concentrate our energies on secur- ing the true outcome of evangelism, the practical establishment of Christ's kingdom upon earth. In these days social problems crowd upon us. It is time they did. Who that looks upon the vast mass of human wreckage which surrounds our present national and economic structure can feel complacency in regard to our present civilization ? What shall we offer to inquiring minds in the Far East as the 23 The Catholicity of Methodism practical results of our Christian profession ? Shall we show them our unemployed and unemployable, the sweated workers of the East End, the homeless dwellers in the city slum ? Shall we let them see the tables of our infantile mortality, which tell a story of a daily and hourly massacre of the innocents ? Dare we speak to them of the cruelty of unbridled speculation, which gambles with the lives of men, or bid them watch the blind play of economic forces which we have never sought to subjugate to humane and moral principles ? We turn, perhaps, with honest pride to point out the volume and multiplicity of our philanthropic undertakings. Will the inquirer not reply to us that if these give evidence that we are well-meaning, they show equally that we do not mean well enough ? We palliate results rather than grapple with causes. All such questions are our questions, to be looked at in the light of the gospel, and to be solved by the forth-putting of Christian life in the energy of self-renouncing devotion. Old- fashioned Methodism understands the remedy for all social wrong. It lies in the full experience of the old religion : ' Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength/ and ' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' The love of God will save us from sordid greed and selfish 24 The Catholicity of Methodism ambition. The love of our neighbour will keep us from treating him as a tool or making him a victim. Thus religion will cause us to hold our wealth as a divine trust, to apply our citizenship to securing the indispensable conditions of spiritual, moral, and brotherly well-being. All these relations of our economic, civic, and national life are but the exten- sion of our individuality, the organs of our contact with the world. By the full Christian use of all these relations, with the supreme object of securing the triumph of the kingdom of our Father in the brother- hood of man, we must win for ourselves the up-to-date verification of our Christian discipleship, ' By their fruits ye shall know them.' Who is sufficient for these things? We can only fulfil our task by the simplicity of an entire and joyful consecration, by the comprehensiveness of a true spirituality which lifts all things into the light of the life of Christ, and by the strenuousness of a Christian service which looks upon all life as a campaign in behalf of the kingdom of God. Our greatest need is of an unworldly Methodism. True unworldliness is not an affair of paltry negations, but of mighty affirmations, of consuming zeal for God and man. In presence of such enthusiasm, frivolity, luxury, Mammon-worship and half-belief die away. Let Methodists throughout the land set the example 25 The Catholicity of Methodism of plain living, high thinking, and strenuous service which the age demands. Let none of us wait for men to demand it. Rather let us take the great saying of our Lord as the watchword of our own detachment from the world, ' No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself.' We have had a year of great activity ; yet one of numerical decline. We shall no doubt search into its causes. There is no need for depression, though every reason for renewed dedication and waiting upon God. I prefer simply to remind you of the continuous presence and of the all-availing power of Christ, and to bid you discern the signs of His guidance and the earnest of His help. The promise of a revival is already given to us. Men bewail the neglect of prayer, the failure of our Church fellowship, the mechanical narrowness of our aims, our lack of sympathy with the multitudes, our too frequent satisfaction with deadening routine. These, we are told, are the causes of our comparative failure. I point you to the signs of a new spring. I would bid you give attention to re-awakened desires for prayer, to the larger evan- gelism which is bearing gracious fruits throughout the land, to the new ideals which bid us restore to Methodism the Society Meeting of the first, to the great Foreign Missionary revival, to the awakening here and there of humane sympathy and to its fearless 26 The Catholicity of Methodism expression, to the zeal for adaptation which marks our best and most influential minds. The combina- tion of all these is the divine remedy for our need, the means by which we shall be enabled by God's blessing to make the manifold appeal of Christ influential in this generation. These signs, it may be, are as yet comparatively feeble. The combination of all these influences, which is so essential, is as yet, it may be, rare. Yet this advance to a larger life in Christ is real, and it meets the pressing needs of our times. ' Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea like a man's hand ! ' Let us look upon it and then go forth to tell our people everywhere that there is the promise of 'abundance of rain.' Brethren, 'sanctify yourselves, for on the morrow the Lord will do wonders among you ! ' 27 II Ministerial Leadership l FATHERS AND BRETHREN It is impossible to exaggerate the respon- sibility resting upon us as representing the ministry of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, or the immense spiritual possibilities of our gathering. The eccle- siastical history of Wesleyan Methodism contains many records of the way in which the authority of this Conference and the powers of the ministry have been safeguarded and enforced. The united pastorate of the Wesleyan Methodist Church through- out the past century has watched over the prerogatives of the ministry with ceaseless vigilance, and has shrunk from no risk in order that the conditions under which the responsibilities of the pastoral office may be fulfilled shall be maintained. Whatever else may be said upon the subject, it is clear that this consistent line of action has imposed immeasurable obligations upon us. In securing the 1 The Presidential Address delivered to the Pastoral Session of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in York, on July 23, 1908. 28 Ministerial Leadership rights of the pastoral office we have emphasized and multiplied its duties. Our guardianship of the pastoral office is only justified as a means by which an apostolic ministry may be fulfilled in abounding devotion and self-sacrifice. The supreme condition by which such a ministry can be accomplished is to be found in leadership. Such leadership has two parts. In the first place, we must lead our people in ceaseless endeavours after the spiritual life. Whatever our position in the Church may be and however manifold may be the calls upon us, we must be marked above all as men of God, ceaselessly pursuing for ourselves the way of holiness, surpassing others, by God's grace, in the simplicity, fullness, and energy of our consecration to Christ. Such intensity in the life of evangelic experience will touch every power with its ennobling and enlarging influence so that we become the leaders of our people in all the efforts by which Christ's kingdom is established in the world. It is essential to dwell upon these two governing considerations in this the first hour of our Pastoral Session. Many attractions have brought us to this Conference. Many interests both within and without this assembly will appeal to us while we are here. Some among us, it may be, are weighed down with heavy burdens of personal concern, and come to our 29 Ministerial Leadership deliberations preoccupied by anxiety. Our first duty is to seek help from God that we may be enabled to rise above all these lower and narrower concerns. We must give ourselves wholly to prayer and to the most earnest and dignified deliberation on the great subject that is before us. I say the great subject advisedly. Many matters call for our attention. The administration of the great Church to which we belong becomes more complex each year, and leads to an ever-growing division of labour. This complexity is to be welcomed and regarded as a sign that the manifold claims of ministry in the present age are being more comprehensively discharged. Yet among all these questions there rises one supreme subject which unifies our most varied functions and gives direction to all our activities. Our supreme problem is, How may the twentieth century become the greatest age of the Faith which the world has ever seen, and how should we, by the help of the Holy Spirit, play our part in securing this great result ? That is the profound and searching question which is addressed by Christ Himself to every member of this assembly. It is quite true that this great end which is set before us can only be secured by the gift of divine grace, and by the exercise of the 30 Ministerial Leadership sovereignty of God. However wise may be our plans and unceasing our efforts, 'the times and the seasons' are set by the Father 'within His own authority.' The accomplishment of the great things for which we hope and pray will be by ways and means largely unforeseen by the most far-sighted among us. The Church of the twentieth century will re-echo the exclamation of all great ages of spiritual revival and progress, 'This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.' Yet the obvious truth and the religious importance of this reflection by no means entitle us to banish reason, both theoretic and practical, from our forecasts and preparations. We rest our confidence upon the divine facts out of which has sprung the apostolic commission of the Church. These facts reveal the eternal purpose of God in Christ for mankind. While the single events of history appear conditional, that supreme purpose which gives the law and inspires the meaning of all history is unconditional. We are conscious, furthermore, of the abiding pre- sence within us of the Holy Spirit of Christ. Christ is the President of this Conference, and every stirring of hope, every splendid resolve, every offering of love is the result of His direct and immediate inspiration. In the light of the historic facts of the Christian religion, and of the abiding sense of Christ's presence Ministerial Leadership and power in our hearts, we are not only entitled but constrained to look out upon the indications which our age contains that God is preparing to reveal Himself in spiritual signs and wonders which will afford new demonstration of the universal sovereignty of Christ, and of the all-sufficient power of His gospel to meet the utmost needs of mankind. The opening of the twentieth century assures us that this age carries within itself the possibilities of unexampled greatness. To whatever sphere of human interest we turn, we find the promise that the narrow limitations of the past will be set aside in ways which will surpass the most dazzling imagination. We are witnessing day by day the amazing growth of more intimate international relations between all the peoples upon earth. The life of our own nation reveals to us that if this is pre-eminently the age of collective action, it is equally an age in which the individuality of the ' dim common multitude ' is being awakened as never before. The growth of knowledge is unprecedented, and the application of knowledge to the arts of life is proceeding in a way that is unprecedented alike for its rapidity and power. It is true that the difficulties, problems, and tasks which confront us in this age are on a scale that is commensurate with its possibilities. It is true, also, that gigantic evils rise up against us, and insolently 32 Ministerial Leadership threaten to bar the spiritual progress of mankind. Further, it is true that our difficulties are increased because great multitudes fail to perceive or to lay to heart the destructive nature of these evils. The moral sense is too often blunted, the conviction of sin is weakened. It is, therefore, more difficult to call either the community or individuals to repentance, or to secure a response to the more spiritual elements of the gospel message. Any one can be a pessimist in regard to these admitted evils. It is not difficult to dress up such pessimism in the garb of Christian faith so that the Satan of unbelief is arrayed as an angel of light. In answer to all such representations I will freely admit that the evils which afflict this country to-day are, both in kind and degree, suffi- ciently like those which destroyed the civilization of Rome, to bring about a similar result in the twentieth century, were it not for the combined influ- ence of Christianity, of science, and of a democracy permeated by Christian ideals. And of these, the spiritual influence of Christianity is by far the most influential factor. Yet, what are difficulties but occasions for Christ ? They give a glorious opportunity to His followers in union with Him. The magnificent possibilities and the enormous difficulties of our spiritual task combine to create for the Christian churches both the occasion C 33 Ministerial Leadership and the call to a heroic faith and devotion unexcelled in any preceding era of Christian life. It is clear what the triumphant progress of the Faith will involve. In the first place, the outlook of such an age will not be backward-looking. Faith is creative, not imitative. According to the classic description of it given in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Faith not merely realizes the unseen, but anticipates the future. While founding itself on the sure facts of revelation and redemption, it leaps forward to lay hold of the larger prospects which are bound up with the purposes and promises of God. It embraces in its sweep the future, not merely of individuals, but of communities. This forward look has marked alike the pilgrims, the heroes, and the martyrs of the faith. Faith is of one substance with hope, and therefore reaches out to, and prepares the way for, the larger future which God has in store. This essential characteristic corresponds with our present needs. Every day presents us with spiritual, moral, social, and world-embracing problems, as to which no adequate guidance can be obtained from the experience of the past. We need a larger vision and a deeper insight into the bearing of the Faith upon these problems and a more courageous spirit in applying its principles to their solution. In the second place, an age in which the Faith 34 Ministerial Leadership wins great triumphs will be an age of emancipation, both ecclesiastical and civil, and not of servitude. On every hand there are the signs of widening liberty. The extending and more powerful activity of the State is not destroying freedom, but securing the conditions under which it can be more widely and completely enjoyed. The popular movements of our times, the temper of the young, and the mental and moral conditions which are essential to efficient life in the world, all bring home to us the truth that authority can only make good its claims to confidence and obedience so long as it breathes the spiritual inspiration which calls forth intelligent and willing co-operation with it. These governing conditions must mould the temper in which we handle the concerns of the Church both in the pulpit and outside it. The following notes will certainly mark the present age if it witness the triumphant progress of the Faith. In the first place, the divinely-given certitude which rests with whole-hearted belief on the gospel of Christ. Growing out of this there will be the evan- gelic note in all our preaching and teaching. Such an experience of Christ, such loyalty to His gospel, will sustain an unceasing temper of evangelistic aggression, which will realize with equal vividness the claims of the whole world and the needs of the multi- tudes at our doors. And lastly, we shall recognize 35 Ministerial Leadership not merely the universal range of the sovereignty of Christ, but the intensive and comprehensive meaning and power of His kingdom. Just because it is world-wide and spiritual it must regenerate, order, and inspire all the ends of truly human life. Our faith must unify the world. It must give depth, simplicity, and objectivity to our spiritual life with all its ideals and endeavours. It is often said that this is an age of shaken certitude, not only in regard to the dogmatic state- ments of the Christian Church, but in regard to the spiritual realities they are intended to express and the moral principles which they justify. Undoubtedly the changes of thought and the accumulation of knowledge which mark the present generation have led men to adopt new points of view, critical, scientific, and philosophical. Probably we are only at the beginning of such changes. Some of the new conceptions have established their claims. Many of them are problematical, others are impossible. Yet what is happening by means of these transitions of thought ? In the first place, the unshakable reality and the transcendent importance of the historic and spiritual Christ are being brought out as never before. It is impossible to belittle Christ. The result of all attempts to do so is eventually to 36 Ministerial Leadership magnify \Hirn. It is impossible to reduce Him to the ordinary proportions and standards of humanity. Such endeavours only the more impressively show how firmly He is established at the very centre of the world's life, as revealing its meaning and realizing its end. The foundations of the Faith have been strengthened, its materials have been enriched, and its outlook enlarged by the whole course of controversy throughout the past century. In the next place, the shaking of customary and conventional half-belief has thrown us back on the verification of the gospel by spiritual experience. Religion and philosophy unite to assert the import- ance of this test. Viewed in the light of recent thought, how modern as well as scriptural is our Methodist hymnology ! The things unknown to feeble sense, Unseen by reason's glimmering ray, With strong, commanding evidence, Their heavenly origin display. This was the answer of Methodism to the unbelief of the eighteenth century. This appeal to experience has by this time established its validity not only within the communion of saints, but before the tribunal of reason itself. Hence our faith is called out into creative affirma- tion. Imitation and routine are insufficient. Faith 37 Ministerial Leadership is a deed, a venture, an appropriation. It has to win its costly victories in thought as well as in life. Nor does it shrink from the task that is imposed upon it. The searching criticism of scholastic thought and of ecclesiastical ideals will in the long run promote reconstruction and enlargement on a more spiritual and truly Christian basis. The eternal verities of 'the truth, as truth is in Jesus/ cannot be shaken. The sovereignty of Christ will be as fully manifest over the forms of modern thought as over those which prevailed in the fourth century or in the sixteenth. Finally, the "modern conditions under which our ministry must be exercised unmask to us our real problem and create for us our splendid opportunity. We must capture the people for Christ by the resist- less power of His Spirit. We must attack the stronghold of personality. Our ceaseless effort on every occasion must be to win a verdict for Christ. We must bring form, substance, and justification to the inchoate Christianity which manifests itself so widely beyond the frontiers of the Christian Church. The supreme question, therefore, for each one of us is, How are we to become in growing measure the instruments of Christ in arousing evangelic faith, securing true conversions, and leading our people completely to realize both in thought and practice 33 Ministerial Leadership the obligations and consequences of their religious profession ? I will venture in a few words to indicate some of the indispensable conditions of fulfilling this task. In the first place, and above all, we must realize the presence of Christ. We must dwell in it. We must be men of unceasing prayer. We must, at all costs, conquer the temptation which ever besets the minister of Christ to substitute a merely official religion for the ceaseless spiritual endeavour of a consecrated life. In the next place, we must live and move and have our being in and for the purposes of Christ as they are being revealed by the events of the present age. We must be men of the twentieth century and not of the eighteenth, of to-morrow rather than of yesterday. All our faculties must be absorbed in seeking to grasp the meaning of the spiritual, social, and world-wide movements of our times. All our energies must be concentrated on securing the triumph of Christ in regard to them all. To be baptized into Christ is to be baptized into the progressive spirit which the historic development of His kingdom requires. Our philosophy of life must be summed up in the great declaration of St. Paul : ' All things have been created through Christ and unto Christ, and He is before all things, 39 Ministerial Leadership and in Him all things hold together.' We must therefore see all things in Christ, and use all things for Christ. This involves ceaseless thought and study. We are called to be prophets and teachers, not merely organizers and administrators. Our hold upon the Church and the position of the Church in the world depend upon the worth, the wealth, and the freshness of our interpretation of Christ. The younger among us must be on the watch against the fatal facility which wins the ear of men without quickening their minds or compelling their hearts. The older must beware of the staleness and unprofitableness of repeating sermons which passed muster thirty years ago. Let it be remembered that while in our presence men advance all kinds of explanations of our numerical decrease, they persistently whisper behind our backs that the pulpit is at fault. We must emancipate ourselves from slavery to things that do not count, in order that we may give our- selves more entirely to the study and proclamation of the word and doctrine. Lastly, we must make our appeal to the faith we would call out. We must assume it, challenge it, and draw it forth. However wide the range of our teaching and preaching, the evangelic note must pervade the whole. While for us the simple gospel 40 Ministerial Leadership is seen to be so comprehensive as to include all the interests and concerns of human life, yet the whole spirit of our ministry must reveal our belief that, except our teaching abide in Christ, it 'is cast forth as a branch, and is withered.' And our life must be in accordance with our gospel. Inexhaustible joyousness and passion must be the mark of our service, and not hack-work. Let it be said of us by our people Ye, like angels, appear Radiant with ardour divine ! Beacons of hope, ye appear ! Languor is not in your hearts, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow, Ye are light in our van ! At your voice, Panic, despair, flee away. Let us be the mouthpiece of a truly Christian optimism ; not the expositors of doubts, dangers, and drawbacks. Let us beware of damping and disappointing enthusiasm. Our business is to attract, inspire, and direct it. An excellent superintendent declared some years ago that he had been sent to his circuit 'not to do aggressive work, but to conserve Methodism.' Such a conception of duty may embalm the body of Methodism, but it will destroy its spirit. We must rise to the leadership to which we are Ministerial Leadership appointed. We must take our place with the fore- most from the first day to the last This must be done modestly and in a spirit of comradeship, but with the firmness and fearlessness which befits our office. Above all, let us beware of pandering to the fears of the craven, and of accommodating ourselves to the mean standards of the selfish and stupid. Let us take our risks, not rashly, but courageously. Let us make a whole burnt-offering of our reputation in the cause of God and in the service of man. There is a wealth of enthusiasm among our people if we know how to arouse it. We must expect the heroic of them. An unconsecrated, worldly, and un- enterprising Methodism is one of the poorest things on God's earth just as true Methodism, with its spiritual fervour and its humane sympathy, is one of the noblest. Let us, in this Conference, rise above the perplex- ing problems of our individual task to realize our partnership in the manifold service of the whole Church. Let us pray that while we are assembled together the holy fire may descend upon every heart in this great ministry at home and abroad. The light and love of such a consecration will make all tasks easy and all burdens light. It will reveal the presence of Christ upon the battlefield, and give us a share in His victorious might. It will enable us 42 Ministerial Leadership to discern the sanctity of all human relationships and concerns, to lift them out of their secularity, and to give them their appointed place in the kingdom of God. Above all, it will so renew our hearts, enlarge our powers, and refresh our energies that we shall go forth to fulfil a truly apostolic ministry for the great Church we love, and for the eventful age in which we are called to play our part. 43 Ill The World's Destiny contained in Christ 1 He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things. EPH. iv. IO. AN atmosphere of deepest peace breathes through- out this epistle. It was written in prison. Hardships beset the apostle. His future was wrapped in uncertainty. Hence there is here a twofold triumph of faith, which is most impressive. First of all, in the perfect serenity which enables the apostle to fix a steadfast gaze upon the supreme realities, undisturbed by cares concerning himself. Secondly, in his utmost confidence in the universal range and the gracious purpose of the sovereignty of Christ. Such peace is only possible when all unsatisfied striving and effort of life are over ; when complete vision has been attained, the work of ministry fulfilled, and spiritual life brought into perfect union with the truth that has been revealed. 1 An official sermon preached before the Wesleyan Methodist Con- erence in Centenary Chapel, York, on Sunday, July 19, 1908. 44 The World's Destiny contained in Christ Clearly the main controversies of St. Paul's life are past. The results, whether theoretic or practical, are no longer contended for, but assumed. The doctrines of Grace have secured recognition. The catholicity of the Church, in which Jew and Gentile meet on equal terms, is an accomplished fact. 'The middle wall of partition ' has been broken down. All this has brought with it calm satisfaction. But there is more. The gift of Revelation has been completely bestowed on the apostle. Its full meaning has been unfolded. The ' mystery of Christ ' has been unveiled, His secret fully told. Both the ground-work and the consequences of Redemption have been laid bare. The venturous faith of the apostle has made the revelation his own. He has triumphed over doubt and hesitation, over contradic- tory appearances, over early limitations. He has become one with the vision vouchsafed to him. Revelation has become insight. Revelation and faith thus conjoined have wrought their own verification. The satisfaction, fulfilment, power which have resulted have made 'the truth, as truth is in Jesus,' self- evidencing. Hence here we have the apostle's final view of the realities of grace. The life ' in Christ ' is sur- veyed. All the familiar truths and experiences are re- stated. Atonement, redemption, forgiveness, sonship, 45 The World's Destiny contained in Christ the quickening of Christ's Spirit, union with Him, sonship, heirship, the catholic purpose of the gospel all are here. They are affirmed, not argued. Nay, rather, they are chanted as a creed, which, if it bring instruction to man, is yet an act of worship before God. But this is not all. Such a life ' in Christ,' such an experience of Him, brings with it the revelation of His world-place and of His world-purpose. The Christ who thus saves and satisfies believers in Him- self is the centre and embodiment of the ' eternal purpose ' of God towards men and towards the world. He is the ideal in which all things have their fulfil- ment, the power by which that ideal is fulfilled. The epistle is therefore inevitable. As the Epistle to the Galatians reaches out to the Epistle to the Romans, so does the Epistle to the Romans reach out to the Epistle to the Ephesians. Yet only Paul could have thus completed his own structure. The epistle is stamped throughout with the results of his life-history. It is the completion of a revelation which is coloured from first to last by his individuality and experience. What is this text, for example, but the final un- folding of what was given to St. Paul in the peculiar experience of his conversion ? There is, first of all, the objective reality of the ascended Christ who 46 The World's Destiny contained in Christ appeared unto Paul. Next there is the depth and abundance of the evangelic experience which followed that appearance. The heavenly Christ had filled him with His Spirit and presence. Then there is the revelation of the world-wide scope of the saving sovereignty which had wrought so graciously in him. Lastly there is the joyous spring, the ecstatic enthu- siasm, the boundless energy, which came to him in and with this revelation, and with the apostolic calling consequent upon it. The last act of Paul is to tell us the universal meaning of the Ascension, as the testi- mony of one who ever since his conversion had sat ' in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.' What, then, is this final message about Christ, His Church and the world ? I. In the first place, the apostle tells 2is t/tat the life-history of Christ determines the life-history of the world. The meaning and destiny of the world are contained in Christ. His history is on its behalf. i. To begin with, it is to be noticed that St. Paul treats our Lord's history as a whole. St. Paul's method of expounding the text which he quotes from the Old Testament to some extent con- ceals the amplitude of his thought. The Ascension is the glorification and the spiritualization of Christ. But, St. Paul argues, the glorification of Christ cannot 47 The World's Destiny contained in Christ be separated from His humiliation. And neither the glorification nor the humiliation can be understood, save in the light of our Lord's divine nature, and therefore of the Incarnation. The Christ presented to the faith and experience of the Church is the ascended Christ the spiritual Christ. It is the presence of the heavenly Christ that saves us, not the biography of the historic and earthly. Even the revelation which He embodies needs the facts of His heavenly life completely to express it. Yet, notwithstanding this, all the facts of His redemptive history His Incarnation, His Cross and Passion, His descent into the realms of death, His Resurrection live for ever in the Ascended Christ, and exercise their influence upon man and upon the universe. Our Lord's own teaching, as recorded in John xiv.-xvii., confirms and illustrates this teaching of the apostle. Our Lord is face to face with death. He is dealing with its meaning and its results.] And yet He never mentions it. He is occupied with His going to His Father, and with His return in the fullness of His Spirit. This is His glorification. And His death is part of that living whole. It is indeed a function and aspect of His abiding and expanding life. So here the Ascension stands out foremost. But in it are contained and implied all the events 48 The World's Destiny contained in Christ and experiences of our Lord's redemptive life and death. 2. The whole of this redemptive life of Christ is first of all set by the apostle in the eternal life of God. ' He ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.' Modern thought speaks much of the transcendence and the immanence of God. The two aspects are contrasted, and from time to time one is sacrificed to the other. Yet in reality there is no contradiction. They are inseparable. But the immanence of God as the universal Life depends upon His transcendence as the creative Source and the Sovereign Lord of all things. So here St. Paul tells us that the triumphant Christ has entered into the transcendence of God, that He may share His immanence. Yet He could only attain that transcendence be- cause it had belonged to Him from the beginning. ' Now this, He ascended, what is it but that He also descended ? ' The redemptive history of Christ, His unique place in the spiritual life of man as Saviour and Lord, His supremacy over and in the world, can only rest upon and be the expression of His eternal Godhead. The Alpha of Divinity is necessary to the Omega of Redemption, and to all that lies between in His wondrous life and work. His immanent relation to the spiritual life is the guarantee of His D 49 The World's Destiny contained in Christ ascension 'above all the heavens.' His universal sovereignty, His immanent relation to the life and blessedness of all that is, are the historic manifesta- tion of His eternal life in and with the Father. 3. And, therefore, the ascended Christ reigns over and shapes the history of the world by His indwelling life. His is the spiritual energy of God. His ascension is not merely to the heavenly home of rest and blessedness. He possesses the universal, sovereign, and pervasive energy of God. 'The Lord is the Spirit.' He fills all things. In one sense His life is rounded into a perfect whole by the Ascension. But in a far truer sense the perfecting of the personal Christ is but the opening of the yet larger history of the spiritual Christ. The 'good pleasure which God purposed in Him' was 'to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth.' He unites the world throughout its manifold and age-long evolution in a spiritual whole. Its life, its law, its end, and its possibilities are all in Him. Hence the gracious purpose made manifest in Christ cannot possibly miscarry. The Divine Sove- reignty is given to the Redeemer of the world. That Divine Sovereignty is effectual because of His divine and spiritual indwelling. The history of the 50 The World's Destiny contained in Christ world is the history of Christ in the world. Thus the guarantee is given that the history of the world shall be worthy of Christ, who is its source and life, its sovereign law and end. Its history must be the revelation of His mind, its struggles must issue in the triumph of His power. Its destiny must be to express His indwelling. Let us grasp this great truth! The doctrine of predestination has come down to us darkened by the unreason and overshadowed by the guilt of man. It has stood for arbitrary will, the negation alike of reason, love, and Christ. Yet this is the epistle of predestination. And here we may learn its true meaning. God's predestination is Christ, and the glorious destination of man and of the universe in Christ. Christ is the witness of a com- prehensive and not of an exclusive purpose. He, the Lord of Life and Grace, ascended far above all the heavens 'that He might fill all things.' His work is not an episode or an experiment. It carries within it the eternal purpose and the infinite resources of God. And God is Father that men may become His sons. We cannot do without this sovereign and sure purpose of love to explain and justify the world. We have learned this truth by revelation. The flash of divine illumination was given to Paul. To 5' The World's Destiny contained in Christ him it was given to see earth ensphered by heaven, and heaven radiant with the glory of God in Christ. But all subsequent history contains the opening yet continuous verification of his vision. The story of the ages, despite its record of sin and imperfection, is the witness of Christ's lordship. To-day, faith, philosophy, civilization, religions bear witness to His supremacy. The opening decade of the twentieth century is on every side bright with the promise of His universal sway. And the life of faith carries within it the assurance of this truth. For faith there is no pessimism. Christ is alive ! Christ is King ! Christ shall reign ! This is the threefold cry of faith. And faith is the gift of God. II. Of this divine purpose in Christ, St. Paul treats the Church as the witness and the instrument. It is filled by Christ, and therefore becomes 'the fullness of Him who filleth all in all.' The Church has been made God's 'heritage* in Christ (i. n). Its whole life has been appropriated by God. The meaning of the Christian religion is set aside or remains unfulfilled except in so far as the Godward relationship is supreme, embracing and moulding all the rest A brotherly secularism, even if practicable, and however beneficent, misses just what is most distinctive of the religion of Christ. 52 The World's Destiny contained in Christ Could it exist apart from Him, it would be but as a branch torn from the living tree. The citizenship of heaven is the primary condition of creating a new social order upon earth, The sonship and service of God constitutes and safeguards the brotherhood of man. No more fatal mistake can possibly be made than that which sacrifices the mystic life in Christ above the world in order the better to secure its practical consequences in the world. And that which sets the Church apart to God is the grace of His self-giving in Christ. Its appropria- tion lies in its filling by Christ. The apostle alters the ancient text in order to make this clear. The triumphant Lord did not 'receive gifts from men/ as the psalmist said. He 'gave gifts unto men.' One great saying governs the whole of the epistle : ' The riches of His grace.' Redemption, quickening, sonship, fellowship, power, love all these spring from the 'riches of His glory,' and from the indwelling of Christ in your hearts through faith. And the source of salvation is also the source of ministry. ' He gave some to be apostles and some prophets ; and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers.' The divinely sovereign and immanent Christ is the direct and only giver of the life, the order, the ministry, and the health of the Church. Therefore its life is only limited by the infinite 53 The World's Destiny contained in Christ possibilities that are in Him. The riches of Christ are 'unsearchable,' and they are not intended to lie idle. He dispenses them freely to those who apply for them. Hence the first need of the Church is ' the spirit of wisdom and revelation ' that believers may know 'what is the hope of His calling/ the infinite prospect set before them in the gospel, 'what is the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,' the divine resources by which the heavenly calling is secured, and ' what the exceeding greatness of His power* toward them, measured by and expressed in the resurrection and exaltation of Christ. And the life thus freely and boundlessly bestowed is in order to a ministry of giving. The life of the believer is set apart to God. But it is not self- contained. It brings its possessor into the common- wealth of the Church, into the fellowship of giving and receiving in its common life. The individual is only perfected in and by and for the Church to which he belongs. And the same law of giving governs the life of the Church as a whole. It is a ' holy temple,' the shrine of God's abode among men ; the sacred centre from which He manifests Himself to them. To receive the gift of the Divine Self-giver is to enter into His life of self-giving. The vitality of the Church is measured by the extent to which it 54 The World's Destiny contained in Christ becomes in very deed Christ's Body, ' the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.' Its life is 'energy of Love.' It is the organ for accomplishing His pur- poses in the world. III. Hence, lastly, the apostle teaches that no limits can be set to the all-embracing life and purpose of Christ, which is manifested and served by the Church. Christ ascended 'that He might fill all things.' There is a wonderful exuberance about St. Paul's thought throughout the epistle. Almost every sen- tence might be quoted to illustrate this. Three thoughts inspire this temper in his faith and teaching. First, the inexhaustible riches of the divine life. The Godhead is the home of all imaginable perfection of power, wisdom, holiness, and, above all, of love. That which God seeks to realize in the world He possesses eternally in Himself. Secondly, the glory of God's grace in Christ. In Christ ' all the fullness ' dwells. His ministry of redemption reveals that the life of God is that of self-giving. His per- fection is not self-centred, but self-communicative. It is love which goes forth in grace. And, thirdly, the unity and coherence of all things in Christ. The universe is one. It is spiritual in its source, meaning, and end. It exists through Christ and for Him. Its fundamental mark, therefore, is its capacity to receive Christ and to be glorified in Him. Hence the epistle 55 The World's Destiny contained in Christ gives a yet nobler utterance of the truth of the Psalm, 'Whither shall I go from Thy presence, or whither shall I flee from Thy Spirit ? ' The apostle's knowledge of Christ will brook no restrictions of His presence, power, and inspiration. He is universal in His range, all-pervasive in His intensity. He has triumphed over all exclusiveness of race. 'The Gentiles are fellow heirs. 1 Nothing less than mankind will serve for receiving the ' full- ness ' of Christ. No race is too lowly or too depraved to become partaker of Him. No form of civilization can be reared on principles which exclude Him. What people shall sink beneath Him, rise above Him, or live apart from Him ? St. Paul's experience, reproduced again and again through the ages, is the original of the Methodist lines The arms of love that compass me Would all mankind embrace. Yet even this is not enough. The grace that reaches out to all men must include all that is human, and even overflow to all that is natural. ' That He might fill all things* The sweep of the expression is in- tended to prevent human narrowness from excluding anything that exists by the will of God in heaven or in earth, from the sway and from the life of Christ All relations, all interests, all faculties are His. Nay, things are more than things, for they exist in Him, The World's Destiny contained in Christ and are part of the organism of His universal life. To treat Him as absent anywhere is unbelief in religion, unreason in thought, narrowness and inade- quacy in ideal. The opponents of Christianity are accustomed to contrast the narrow limits of the universe, as con- ceived by St. Paul, with the infinities revealed to thought and imagination in modern times. Does any student of this epistle imagine that a fuller unfolding of the immensities of space and time to the apostle would have belittled his thought of Christ, or altered a single feature of his Christology ? On the contrary, he would have rejoiced in the in- creased vastness and wonder of the universe, as a more fitting sphere for the sovereignty of his Re- deemer and Lord. The doctrine of Christ's relations to the world has been determined, not by the absence or by the inadequacy of science, but by the tran- scendent experience of His glory, given to the heart. Hence the form and content of our faith defines the meaning of our holiness and the range of our endeavour. True spirituality does not retreat from the world, but annexes, embraces, and finds expression in it. What shall be treated as alien from or indifferent to Christ ? Shall we look askance upon the strivings of thought and the creation of knowledge ? That 57 The World's Destiny contained in Christ would be to exclude Christ from 'all things' as the objects presented to the mind. Shall we abjure the realm of economics, the sphere of citizenship, the con- cerns of politics ? That would be to exclude ' all things ' as the field of human endeavour, the necessary conditions and instruments of human, and even of spiritual life. Such exclusiveness is falsity. It is a belittling of Christ, a blight upon religion, an im- poverishment of life. The depth, breadth, and strength of the spiritual life dwindle and waste away when it retreats within itself and fails to find Christ as Author, Redeemer, Consummator, throughout the whole range of life and being. The gift of Christ requires us to recognize, assert, and make good His lordship throughout the height, the depth, the breadth, the length of 'all things.' Herein is the final fulfil- ment of the catholicity of Christ. The vision of the apostle is the supreme need of Methodism and of Christianity in this age. It must inspire our faith, broaden our sympathy, direct our endeavour. We must embrace and bear witness to its glorious certainty. No half-belief will do. We must dwell in and set forth its grandeur. We must enter into its overflowing expansiveness. Here is the remedy for worldliness, narrowness, cowardice. Here is the truth and promise which fills the spirit with a satisfaction that all the mysteries of 58 The World's Destiny contained in Christ life cannot destroy. Without this, life is a contra- diction. Christ in the heart is an enigma, and will be treated as a dream, unless we go forth to discover Christ in the world. Then, according to our faith it will be done unto us. Our faith will find everywhere the verification of Christ's lordship, as we stake our all upon its reality and its boundless consequences. The failure to do this is the mark of our emptiness. Let us, representing the vast Methodist Church, bring our emptiness to Christ that He may fill it. Then let us go forth with confidence to proclaim with the glorious strength of faith, courage, and consecration, renewed in Him, that Christ has 'ascended far above all the heavens, that He may fill all things.' IV The Service of God in the Present Day 1 DEAR BRETHREN AND SISTERS IN CHRIST JESUS, It is my great privilege and responsibility as President of the Conference to address a New Year's greeting to Wesleyan Methodists throughout this country, and to our missionary churches throughout the world. Grace, mercy, and peace be to you all from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ. May the year upon which we are entering be to you all one of the richest spiritual benediction ; one in which the Word of God shall run and be glorified among all the nations of the earth ! My ceaseless journeyings throughout this country during the past few months have enabled me to see much of the work which the Wesleyan Methodist Church is carrying on, and to form some judgement of the temper which prevails. Everywhere I have found 1 A letter addressed to Wesleyan Methodists on New Year's Day, 1909. 60 The Service of God in the Present Day increasing activity and an intense desire to secure the efficiency and success of all our organizations and agencies. The spirit of hopefulness and expectancy is widespread. Higher and larger ideals of Christian service and of the relation of the Church to the king- dom of God are making their influence more powerfully felt. Above all there is awaking an earnest yearning after a deeper experience of Christ and a more joyful consecration to His service. The difficulties and dangers of our times, so far from bringing discourage- ment, are causing our people to turn with increasing confidence to the all-sufficient grace of God in Christ, and to search their hearts afresh that by His mercy they may be enabled to receive of His fullness, and thus to discharge a prophetic and saving ministry to our generation. The loyalty and steadfastness of humble men and women who are serving God faith- fully in obscure places, and sometimes against almost overwhelming odds, call for devout thanksgiving to God. Multitudes are seeking a return to the sim- plicity and sincerity of early Methodism, and are finding in its characteristic temper the offensive and defensive armour by which the allied forces of unbelief, mammon, and self-indulgence may be overcome. Let us enter upon the New Year with redoubled prayer that this reviving spirit of consecration to Christ, with the abounding love to God and to man which 61 The Service of God in the Present Day spring from it, may everywhere prevail ! Let us devote the first Lord's Day of the New Year, its public worship, and especially its Covenant Service and Holy Communion, to united thanksgiving and intercession, that Christ's people everywhere may be enabled 'to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that they may be filled unto all the fullness of God.' The chief need of the Church is to realize its heavenly and supernatural resources in God. The wisdom, ability, and material wealth of men are, taken by themselves, a sorry equipment for the work of Christ. The Church which makes its boast of them has ceased to be a Church. It has sunk to the level of a merely secular institution. It will hinder and not advance the kingdom of God. It may entrench itself in orthodoxy, may exemplify minor and self-regarding moralities, and may unite its members for a while by the bonds of ecclesiastical discipline. It may have a name to live, but it is dead. It has ceased to breathe the ampler air of God. The test of our well-being is to be found in our power to discern the real presence of Christ, and unceasingly to derive from Him the full salvation and the ceaseless enthusiasm of service His presence conveys to faith. Our real leaders must be found 62 The Service of God in the Present Day in men 'full of the Holy Ghost.' Our Church life must be that of unceasing and triumphant prayer. Let us, as individuals and as communities, make fuller proof of the supernatural. Let us venture upon the boundless sea of the Spirit with the joyful courage of great explorers. 'This is the victory which overcometh the world, even your faith/ the faith which bears us far from the fever- laden shores of greed and frivolity, out of the shallows of a con- ventional religion to the ocean of God's love. A great opportunity for this new venture of united faith awaits us at the outset of the New Year. We are about to summon our Societies to meet through- out the country to elect their representatives to the Leaders' meetings. This solemn convocation of the Societies, if it be undertaken in faith and prayer, may well prove to be the greatest event of modern Methodism. For the first time for many genera- tions, and in a fuller sense than ever before, the responsibilities of our local churches as a whole will be brought home to them. Their election of men and women to take their place in the pastoral councils of the Church should be carried out everywhere with as earnest prayer and holy seriousnesss as marked the ordinations of the Apostolic Church. Let these meetings be arranged with the utmost care. Let every member feel bound to attend them. Let their 63 The Service of God in the Present Day proceedings be an act of worship. Let all who take part in them recognize Christ as presiding over them, and confidently expect the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Then will our bonds of fellowship with Christ and with one another be knit closer. Then will the fountains of living water gush forth in spiritual blessings, and those who go forth from these momentous gatherings will be inspired for the new and more glorious evangelism which is the greatest need of our age. This need, no less than the essential spirit of Methodism, constrains us ever to keep in view that the spiritual well-being of the Church is a means to evangelic activity and success. The age in which we live has within it the possibilities of unequalled greatness. It may stand out in history as the era when the spiritual sovereignty of Christ gained recognition by all the peoples of mankind. It may become memorable for the fearless and successful application of the principles of Christianity to the crying and intolerable evils from which our civiliza- tion is suffering. It may witness the rise of a nobler Christian theology, which shall more adequately express the meaning of revelation, and shall convey it with more commanding evidence to modern thought. These three possibilities are vitally con- nected with one another. They are trembling in 64 The Service of God in the Present Day the balance. In respect of them all, we seem to be standing before the golden promise of the morning. Yet there are clouds upon the horizon. The immediate forecast is uncertain. Will the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in His wings, or shall His triumph be postponed to more distant days because the earthborn clouds of unbelief and selfishness hide His rays from men ? There is no difficulty in perceiving whence these threatening clouds arise. Vast multitudes are living in a state of half-belief, which in practical conduct easily darkens into disbelief. The curse of our modern life is its imprisonment in the hard-and-fast externals of material interests and its consequent insensibility to the uplifting and enlarging influences of God and humanity. Old restraints are passing away before the clamant demand of new impulses and the more powerful means of gratifying them. If the fear and love of God be weakened, the deadly germs of greed and self-indulgence prey upon a constitution enfeebled by the loss of faith and of the sense of duty. Hideous forms of selfishness stalk abroad in the noontide, and the diseased eye of society sees them beautiful. Then property counts for more than humanity. The vested interests of the few withstand the urgent needs of the many. Men are scared from the precepts of Christ by Mr. Worldly Wiseman. The multitudes, E 65 The Service of God in the Present Day losing hope and seriousness, plunge into excitement and frivolity. Material enjoyment counts for more than divine ideals, and man seeks to live by bread alone, instead of by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. It is easy to be a pessimist, with all these signs of evil in view. They affect the Church as well as the community. Nay, the weak- ness and disrespect into which the Church has fallen is due to the fact that she has too often absorbed the evil of the time. Yet the prophetic spirit is not dead. Spiritual life is awaking, and in our experience is preparing Christians everywhere for the vast tasks which await them. They discern that great events are impending. The marvellous transformations of the recent past have shown us that great spiritual changes may well come in the twinkling of an eye. The East, so long stationary, is suddenly taking its place in the ranks of progress. Mohammedans themselves are throwing off the baser elements and restraints of Islam. In presence of such astounding facts, who shall deny the probability of a spiritual revival unequalled in the history of mankind ? Of one thing we may be sure. The cure of all the evils we deplore would be found in the renewal and extension of the enthusiasm for God and man which was the mark and power of early Methodism. If Methodism in the eighteenth 66 The Service of God in the Present Day century averted a revolution in the evil sense of the term, it effected a revolution in the beneficent sense. Let us realize our responsibilities by reason of the great traditions of our past, and wait upon God that He may use us in the present generation to make good its spiritual prospects, and to overcome the evils which threaten it. If, however, we are to play our great part in securing this result, our religion must have not only spiritual depth but courageous expression. Our Lord has taught us this truth by setting before us the establishment of His kingdom on earth as the goal of our prayer and effort. ' As in heaven so on earth ' is the watchword of any religion which seeks con- formity to the Lord's Prayer. To renounce the trans- forming of the kingdom of this world into the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ is one of the worst forms of infidelity. It not only denies effective- ness to our religion, but it destroys its sincerity at the root. To play with the religion of Christ is to lose it. To be thrown upon the defensive is to be worsted in the fight. Methodists ought not to need this reminder. That which prepared the]way of the Methodist Revival was the determination of the Holy Club at Oxford at all costs to take their Christianity in earnest. Hence it is necessary that we should weigh well our responsibility for giving effect to our 67 The Service of God in the Present Day Christian faith and principles in regard to the prac- tical tasks of our age. I will venture to single out certain great subjects which must receive our most ungrudging support. First of all I place the cause of Foreign Missions. There are signs that the advance of the past two years is being checked. If this be so, no serious contribu- tion whatever will be made to meet the marvellous but quickly fleeting opportunities of the present hour. If Methodists, who are never tired of quoting Wesley's saying, 'The world is my parish/ fail to respond adequately to the urgent call of Christ in this matter, they will pass spiritual sentence of death upon them- selves. The income of our Missionary Society must promptly be doubled if our duty is to be fulfilled. Let each one at the opening of the New Year con- sider this matter afresh, and at whatever cost of self- denial bring his contribution up to the standard that is required. Such devotion to the cause of Foreign Missions must be accompanied by ceaseless vigilance in regard to all the claims of humanity. The sup- pression of the Indian opium traffic with China ; the treatment of the natives not only of the Congo and in Portuguese West Africa, but throughout the British dominions ; and the endeavour to promote modern civilization in India and China, are only samples of the urgent questions which must ever be kept before us. 68 The Service of God in the Present Day It is necessary to turn in conclusion to the im- mediate problems which await us at home. Methodism, during the past year, has been concerned in a struggle on behalf of a great moral issue with an intensity of conviction and general agreement never before equalled. The strength of the Church was put forth on behalf of the Licensing Bill. Its governing principles were affirmed with practical unanimity by the Conference, were supported again and again by its Synods, and were demanded by nearly a million of our adherents throughout the country. We deliberately adopted these principles before any political party was committed to them, and pressed them with all our influence upon the Government of the day. The measure has been the object of our ceaseless prayers and efforts. The House of Lords refused even to consider the Bill. As The Spectator , no party witness, has put it, the Lords ' went out of their way to invest their rejection of it with every circumstance of contumely.' By that act they stamped themselves the guardians of every interest save that of public morals. They turned a ready ear to brewers and financiers, and were deaf to the solemn appeals of the Christian workers and the social reformers of the country. While passing from self-regarding and party motives other measures of which they declared their disapproval, they had no fear whatever that they 69 The Service of God in the Present Day would be visited by the indignation of the country if they flouted the demands of the Churches. We have never insisted that the Lords must needs pass the Bill as it stood. We demanded that they should respectfully and carefully consider it. In the eyes of Christian reformers, an institution which is guilty of such betrayal of moral interest has committed an unpardonable offence. The Wesleyan Methodist Church stands by its principles and adheres to its demands. Those who know the ravages of intemper- ance in the ' congested areas ' of the slums will not tolerate this refusal to bring so dangerous a traffic under more effective control. We do not rely exclu- sively or mainly upon legislation in this matter, but our laws and administration must reflect and not out- rage the conscience^of the nation. Let us have the courage and determination of John Wesley in this matter. Let us vow before God that we will not rest until the nation obtains ample reparation for this wrong. I need only allude in a few words to the subject of national education. The hope of a settlement by consent has once more been postponed, but men of all sections of religious and political thought recog- nize the skill, tact, and courage with which the subject has been handled by the Minister of Education. The failure of his Bill will not alter the principles or policy 70 The Service of God in the Present Day of Wesleyan Methodists. We will continue to strive for a completely national system of education set entirely free from denominational tests and interests. On that basis it will be our paramount endeavour to maintain the Bible in its present place in the schools of the country, to secure the due exercise of Christian influence in moulding the character of the children, and to deal sympathetically with the convictions of all sections of the community. We shall not give heed to counsels of despair, nor accept the so-called secular solution. Despite the failures of the past, we are still prepared to strive for agreement on these general lines. The old year ends in commercial depression which inflicts upon great numbers of skilled and unskilled workers the acute sufferings of unemployment. It is expected that this subject will receive legislative treatment during the next session of Parliament. One primary object is set before us. It is to secure the essentials of economic well-being to the least favoured of our fellow-citizens. We cannot remain indifferent while our brothers are disinherited, and at the mercy of every adverse influence in the world of industry and commerce. We have to be our Master's agents in securing the fulfilment of the prayer He taught us, ' Give us this day our daily bread/ and this at all sacrifice to ourselves. Otherwise He will turn The Service of God in the Present Day from us in that day and say, ' Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these My brethren, ye did it not to Me.' The truest test of spirituality is to be found in unselfish brotherhood. ' He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen cannot love God whom he hath not seen.' The work of the Wesleyan Methodist Church for the State is clearly marked out. It is identified with no political party. It must stand for no selfish concerns. It must strive to secure the supremacy of moral ideals and the triumph of brotherly relations alike in national, civic, and economic life. It must assist in rallying and uniting the forces of truth and righteousness for these great ends. May God so empower us by His grace that we maybe able to do all these things in Him that strengtheneth us 1 The Comradeship and the Captaincy of Faith 1 Looking unto Jesus the Captain and Perfecter of our faith t -who for the joy that was set before Him endured the Cross, despising shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. HEB. xii. 2. THE writer of this epistle treats the Christian religion as the fulfilment of all true religion. The followers of Christ are the heirs and trustees of all the glorious traditions of saintly heroism which have given eternal meaning to the past and afford unfailing inspiration to the future. Hence our text must be considered in its vital relationship to the great chapter on the nature and achievements of faith which has gone before. When this broad survey is taken, it will be seen that three general features stand out with the greatest impressiveness. In the first place, true religion, and Christianity as its fulfilment, always raises human life to the heroic. There is nothing commonplace in its history. If it 1 An official sermon preached in Cork before the Irish Methodist Conference, on Sunday, June 20, 1909. 73 I The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith find men apparently commonplace to begin with, the first effect of true religion is to reveal and call forth unsuspected possibilities of greatness within those who yield themselves to its influence* This holds good, not only of the past, but of the present. The writer assumes that the most illustrious examples of the past are the divinely-appointed patterns and inspiration for the present. Religion is not a mere adornment, convenience, or means of enjoyment. If it is to be any or all of these, it must be infinitely more. It is a consecration, which summons all human powers to the complete unselfishness and unworldliness of divine and human service. The criticisms passed upon the Christian Church from outside in the present day may often be ill-informed and unfair. In their substance and tendency, how- ever, they are abundantly justified from the New Testament itself. Those who profess to be partakers of the divine nature and to enjoy the boundless resources of God in Christ are thereby enabled and expected to display a greatness of character and aims that are beyond the reach of other men. In the second place, true religion, and Christianity as its fulfilment, reveals and calls forth the heroism of the obscure. The heroic quality is the true con- cern, not the heroic stage. This great recital of the deeds of faith contains some well-known names, but 74 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith it ends by summing up the victories and achievements of multitudes of men and women unknown to earthly fame. Even in the case of the better known, it was their faith that lifted them out of obscurity. For the most part, however, their greatness was not perceived by their fellows. Indeed, this is precisely the dis- tinction of their faith, that it enabled them to live great lives, to brave great dangers, and to make great sacrifices, not only without the incitements of worldly fame and applause, but under influences exactly contrary to these. The same thing is true of the Hebrew Christians. They are called to imitate the sublimest examples of history, not only in obscurity, but in face of hatred, contempt, and persecution. Once more, in appealing to such heroism, true religion, and Christianity as its fulfilment, is able to command the whole range of motives by which human character and conduct are uplifted and en- larged. Not only are the evangelic virtues of faith, hope, and love appealed to and called forth, but a rich variety of other motives are recognized as embraced within their comprehensive sphere. The writer of this eleventh chapter knew the force of the appeal of hero-worship, of patriotism, and of generous emulation. He recognized the importance of invest- ing the struggle of his readers with distinction and nobility. He brought to bear upon them the poetry 75 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith of the ideal amid the depressing circumstances of the actual. He treated all these motives as having their place in religion and their fulfilment in Christ. We too frequently narrow the range of religious motives unduly. The religion of Christ is the abso- lute religion. This must needs mean that it con- summates and comprehends the whole of human nature. It uses all the stops, and calls forth all the music of humanity. Thus great religion goes with great manhood and creates it. Such are the general impressions produced by the whole passage of which our text is the climax. I. The central truth that is set forth is that the Christian community is the community of faith. Herein is found the secret of its heroism. Faith is the grace to which all the motives invoked by our author appeal. Faith is alike the inspiration, the goal, and the ennobling feature of Christian life. The inheritance into which Christians have entered is the inheritance of faith. It is faith, as the author shows, that establishes the identity of the people of God in all ages and under all conditions. Yet it is not, at first sight, easy to be sure in what this faith consists. It must lie deep enough to be exceeding broad. We have to discover just that quality which is common to the great gallery of portraits which the writer has painted 76 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith for us. He is a theologian as profound and as original as any that can be named. The abstract definitions and arguments of theologians too often arouse suspicion and dislike because they seem to cramp human nature within rigid abstractions that are too narrow for the rich variety of life. No such charge can be brought against our author. He does, indeed, start with a definition ; but he illustrates it from history, and as he proceeds the breadth and frankness of his manhood become apparent. He includes men and women of all times, of all ranks, and of all occupations. They are as various in character and temperament as in achievement. Our understanding of what is meant by faith if it is to correspond with the writer's description must be broad enough to unite Samson, Jephthah, and even Rahab with Abraham and Moses. Nothing less, nothing narrower or more special, will suffice. It is clear from these examples that the bond of their union is not merely a formal creed. Some of them, Samson to wit, would be poor students of a catechism. Assent to any set of propositions is therefore in- sufficient. Nor does faith consist in submission to an external authority, for the greatness of some of these men lies just in the fact that they broke free from its restraints. Yet, as we read their story, we realize that they are not brought together artificially, 77 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith but that there is an identity of spirit and achieve- ment between them all, which would enable each to recognize his kinship with the rest. This can be nothing else than a common spiritual attitude, shaping character, and controlling both conduct and experience. If we are to understand what this attitude was, we must go back to the definition with which the eleventh chapter opens, bearing well in mind the examples by which it is illustrated. ' Now faith/ we are told, 'is the assurance of (the giving substance to) 'things hoped for, the proving' (or testing) 'of things unseen.' This means that the life of these saints and heroes was founded on the spiritual ; that they treated it as the only real, experienced it as the only good, and counted upon its prospects as the only certain and satisfying. The unseen and eternal claimed them. It made itself felt within their con- sciousness by the hopes it enkindled in them and the duties to which it summoned them. Ordinary men are conscious from time to time of the surround- ing presence, the wooing call, the infinite promise of the divine. But they fear to embark upon the great ocean that stretches before them into infinity. They will not make the venture. Hence they go without the verification that comes to those who treat the unseen as real and test it by their trust. In contrast 78 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith with these, the saints and heroes of faith are to the spiritual world what Christopher Columbus was to the natural. The passion of the undiscovered continent took possession of him, and consecrated him to its discovery. He laid kings under tribute to his quest. With unwearying toil he prepared his frail barque and launched out upon the high sea. Steadily he steered his course day by day, apparently in vain. The hope of his comrades was turned to despair ; yet Columbus persisted because the unknown land filled his spirit with a prophetic assurance of its reality. At length the cry of ' Land ahead ! ' was heard. The ' unseen ' had been 'tested.' The 'things hoped for' had the substance with which his faith had endowed them. His venture was heart-sustaining from the first, and found its fruition at the last. Such is the testing of the unseen which the man of faith makes in those high moments of spiritual crisis when it bids him break away from the earthly and material in ideal achievement or self-sacrifice. Such achievements and self-sacrifice spring from the faith that the spiritual and ideal is the only real. This confidence may be the momentary flash that enables a great deed to be done. Still better is it when it takes possession of the whole life and carries it permanently into the realm of the eternal. Hope is indissolubly bound up with faith. If faith 79 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith tests the unseen, equally and for that reason it ' gives substance to the things hoped for.' Indeed, this latter is mentioned first, as though to show that faith, like love, casts out fear. The unseen that is revealed to faith is the eternal Goodness which offers the sure prospect of inexhaustible satisfaction to the spiritual aspiration of man. This satisfaction, as portrayed, while spiritual and heavenly, is also social and historical. The men of faith transcended the limits of their own self-regarding interests, and of their own times. How strikingly this was the case is illustrated for us in the example of Joseph. At first sight it seems unimportant that 'Joseph gave commandment concerning his bones.' Yet how magnificent is the lesson that is taught ! Hope in the dying patriarch was so intense, so patriotic, and so unspoiled by the royal splendour of Egypt, that in dying he sends forward his very bones to the promised land, that they may claim his share in the life and blessedness of his people throughout the ages to come. Once more, the faith which tests the unseen and gives assurance to hope is founded on the promise of God. It is not due to natural buoyancy, or to the favourable signs of earthly probabilities. Rather it triumphs most greatly when natural optimism is crushed, and when earthly prospects appear the 80 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith gloomiest. The epistle dwells again and again upon ' the promise ' of God. In this great passage we are told that 'he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that seek after Him.' Moreover, ' by faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear.' The faith of which we read reposes ultimately in God and is sure of Him. It is the demonstration of His truth and grace to the heart which gives the power of that self-surrender through which the presence and proof of the unseen and eternal are found. Such is the spiritual equipment of the people of God. Such is the attitude in which they stand to the world of men and of events. It is in itself an attitude of superiority and detachment These men have revealed to them by the Spirit of God things which ' eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.' Such detachment means opposition. The marks of it are on every one of these saintly heroes. They seem to stand in three classes pilgrims, warriors, and martyrs. Yet the three are one. Even the warriors fight out of the unworldliness of their heart, and with the martyr spirit in all they do and dare. The pilgrim endures a lifelong loneliness ; the warrior F 81 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith wages what seems a forlorn fight ; the martyr yields up his life in obedience to the truth. Yet they are not forlorn or to be pitied. With the supreme art of truth the writer makes us envy them. No gilded chamber ever contained such an aristocracy as did the dens and caves of the earth which sheltered those 'of whom the world was not worthy.' The lonely pilgrim journeyed in the company of his God. The warrior was sustained by His unfailing might. The martyr died out of the fullness of the divine life of which his spirit partook. Hence through their passion they passed to inherit the promises for which they lived and died, although, as we are told, they without us cannot be perfected Thus the heroes of faith are now 'so great a cloud of witnesses,' watching their successors in the conflict or, as the figure changes, in the race. What is all this but to say that the saintly is the fulfilment of the human ? There is no clash of governing ideals. Ecclesiastical ideals, as distin- guished from those of manhood, are morbid and misleading. The victory of faith is seen in the spiritual splendour of the manhood it creates, inspires, and perfects. II. Of this faith we are told that Jesus is ' the Captain and the Perfected As the writer gazes into the heavens, the ' cloud 82 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith of witnesses' melts away, and Jesus is seen as the Sun in the heavens of faith. Jesus is the supreme example, the fulfilment, we dare to say the Hero, of faith. His divinity is manifested in perfect and typical humanity. We have been told of late that we must choose between believing on the Lord Jesus Christ as the supreme object of faith, and treating Him as the first subject of faith. In such teaching the Epistle to the Hebrews seems to be overlooked. Our author seems to know nothing of this contrast. He brings together both alternatives in a more glorious whole. If the first chapter of the epistle sets forth the glory of the Eternal Son, who is ' the effulgence of God's glory and the very image of His substance,' the second shows us Jesus ' made a little lower than the angels.' In His humility the Captain of our Salvation is ' made perfect through sufferings.' He ' suffers, being tempted.' Nay, 'though He was a son, yet learned He obedience by the things that He suffered.' Indeed the writer expressly puts in His mouth the confession, ' I will put my trust in Him.' The Deity and Redeemership of Jesus is not incompatible with His incarnate life of faith. Indeed, such faith is the essential mark of His filial nature. Without it He would have been not more, but less, than man. Moreover, according to the writer, without it He 83 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith would have lacked an essential qualification for His High-priestly office. The glory of the Eternal Son is seen not in His freedom from faith, but in His perfect embodiment of it. The mark of His divinity is in His sinlessness, and His sinlessness is the triumph of an unbroken faith. For this reason we are bidden in the text to look ' unto JESUS,' whose divinity is made manifest in the eternal glory of His unprivileged humanity. It follows that in His ex- perience is to be found the complete fulfilment of faith. He is inspired by its essential spirit, passes through its most searching experiences, and through them attains its final achievement. All that the saints strove to become, He was. Hence, if we examine the text carefully, we shall see that the Captain of our faith recapitulates in His own experience all that has been laid down in the foregoing chapter in regard to faith. 'For the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross.' That joy was the unseen which He tested, the hope to which He gave substance, the promise of the Father which He embraced. As He discharged His earthly ministry, sounded the depths of sorrow and tempta- tion, faced the unspeakable anguish of His Cross and Passion, His spirit was upheld by 'the joy that was set before Him.' Its radiance never faded, save in the awful moment when He cried, 'My God, My 84 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? ' This joy was simply the perfection of faith, for faith and hope are not made perfect until they are filled with the rapture of heavenly satisfaction. Yet while the joy of Jesus was personal, it was not selfish. It was the joy of partnership in His Father's purpose to bring 'many sons into glory/ the joy of the divine Brotherhood which cried, 'I will declare Thy name unto My brethren.' It was the joy of anticipated and fulfilled Redeemership which exclaims, 'Behold, I and the children which God hath given Me.' By faith He claimed the office of kingly priesthood, which awaited His obedience unto death. Thus because of the joy that was set before Him, and in its strength, our Lord faced and exhausted in His Passion the opposition of sin and death and hell. Passively, ' He endured the Cross.' All that it meant of human anguish and of atoning suffering came upon Him because He was the Divine Captain of our faith. The utmost sufferings of the martyrs were as nothing to the agony through which He passed. That agony made itself felt in all its immeasurable fullness. He endured the Cross. Death revealed its meaning to Him as to no one else. Above all, the Cross stood, not for physical torture or for earthly parting, but for the untold horror of sin its guilt, and the unbelief which crucified the Lord. 85 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith Yet Christ was not merely passive in His suffer- ing. His Passion was the supreme deed of history. He accepted it, 'despising the shame.' He made it the means by which He offered Himself to God as the sacrifice for sin. He laid hold of the glory of Redeemership through the shame of rejection by those whom He claimed as brethren. Hence ' He sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.' The faith which made a perfect sacrifice of the Cross was crowned with the glory of endless life and all- sufficient Saviourship. Thus the unique nature and result of the redemptive work of Christ are due to the complete presence throughout it of supreme spiritual and moral value. The mind of the writer of the epistle is occupied with the Jewish priesthood and ceremonial, and with the relation of Christ to them as both fulfilling and superseding them. His fulfilment, however, is not merely official and outward. It lies in the spiritual qualities which He brings to His atoning and priestly work and in the spiritual experience through which He passes. The watchword of the whole is in the entire consecration which cried, ' Lo ! I am come to do Thy will.' In other words, the mediatorial work of Christ is successful because He is the Captain of our faith. But though He is the Captain, He is also the 86 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith Perfecter of our faith. He is not a past example, but a living source of grace. As throughout the New Testament, so in this epistle, the object of our faith is found in the ascended and ever-living Christ. The spiritual victory of His Cross was so perfect and representative that it becomes the means of grace and quickening to all believers. All that He has done and is becomes effectual on their behalf and in them. The faith which He exemplified He repro- duces. His influence in so doing is spiritual. It combines the authoritative claim by which He brings us to complete dependence, trust, and obedience with the inspiration which makes our faith the exercise of perfect freedom. The presence and work of Christ bring a new power to faith and a new allegiance. Yet they do not injure but fulfil its inmost meaning. His followers find in Him the Source of grace, which, while it subdues them, sets them free. Thus if a new obedience appears in the history of faith, it is marked by the perfecting of the characteristic spirit of venture and of courage which enables the followers of Christ to stand to the world and to succeeding generations in the same relation as that in which the heroes of faith stood in the past. If, then, we are to fulfil this high calling it can only be by ' looking away to Jesus.' Many of those who are assembled here this morning represent the 87 The Comradeship and Captaincy of Faith Methodist Church in all parts of Ireland. You are the inheritors of glorious traditions from the past. Yet many of you come from lonely posts where you are called to work amid depressing surroundings, and sometimes in the face of bitter opposition. It is not easy under such conditions to maintain the buoyant hopefulness of faith and an unfailing sense of the great spiritual issues which are bound up with your fidelity and courage. Brethren, look away from the outward and earthly to the Captain and Perfecter of your faith. Rejoice that you are called to follow Him in the way of His Passion and service. Open your hearts to receive the spiritual influence by which He will continually refresh, inspire, and sustain you. Prepare by a renewed act of consecration to Him to go back to your spheres of labour to make new proof of the things unseen, and to give substance to the things hoped for. Thereby you will be enabled through His grace to ' fight the good fight of faith and lay hold on eternal life ' ! 88 VI The Christian Ideal l 'As in heaven, so on earth. MATT. vi. 10. r ~p'HE Lord's Prayer is at once the pattern and the 1 substance of all true prayer. It supports and guides spiritual aspiration by the complete revelation of divine truth. As the growth of the climbing plant is directed by the standard upon which it rests, so our frail desires are raised from the ground and upheld by the unfailing support of the Fatherhood of God, and directed by the essential truths which are con- tained in it. For this support and guidance of spiritual aspiration the words of our text are of the utmost importance. This clause is central in the Lord's Prayer. It is in apposition to the petitions that have gone before. It gives the assurance of an answer to those that follow after. We could not pray, ' Our Father which art in heaven,' with any true belief in the reality and meaning of His Fatherhood 1 An official sermon preached before the Wesleyan Methodist Con- ference in Wesley Chapel, Lincoln, on Sunday, July 18, 1909. 8 9 The Christian Ideal unless we saw in it the pledge that earth is to be transformed into the likeness of heaven. Yet if this is to be the case, it follows as a matter of course that our earthly needs must be met and that our spiritual salvation must be wrought out by the forgiveness of our sins and our redemption from evil. Hence these words are both the goal and the guarantee of faith. They bring together in one the highest truth of our theology, the inmost desire of our heart, and the immanent law of the human history in which we have to play our part. We can only understand these words by grasping the meaning of the Lord's Prayer as a whole. In order to do this two considerations are all-important. In the first place, the prayer assumes that he who offers it has been lifted up to heaven and takes the divine standpoint in all his desires. The prayer is perfectly filial ; it breathes unfaltering trust and unfailing consecration. Trust and consecration have resulted in the perfect vision which sees into the heart of things and looks forward to their issue. All things are seen in the light of the divine Fatherhood. The sole desire is that God's fatherly name may be hallowed, that His kingdom may come, and that His will may be done. The prayer is Theocentric. The glory of the Father is revealed in and reflected by the heart of His sons. Their inmost desires are 90 The Christian Ideal simply for the manifestation and honouring of His Fatherhood in the whole world, of which they are a part. The spirit of sonship must be perfected in us before the Lord's Prayer can be fully prayed as a complete expression of a faith and hope which have no other object than the glory of our Father and the accomplishment of His purposes for the world. To such a filial spirit God is revealed as having His perfection in the self-giving of grace. When we speak of 'our Father which art in heaven,' we express our belief in His divine personality, His infinite perfection, His all-embracing sovereignty, His purposive activity, and His ensphering presence. We do more. All these great elements of theological belief are taken up into, and united by, our trust in His Fatherhood. We proclaim, therefore, that His highest perfection consists in the self-giving of His love. We may go further than the poet who sang Thy majesty did not disdain To be employed for us, and say that God's majesty consists, or at all events is manifested, in His self-giving to the universal ends of love for which He made the world. God is Love ; therefore the underlying reality of all things is the self-giving through which His creation finds alike its The Christian Ideal being and its well-being. Thus the purpose of God and the blessedness of man are shown by the Lord's Prayer to be one. His Fatherhood dictates the prayer. Our sonship enables us to enter into its meaning and to find our blessedness in oneness with it. Hence our text may be treated as setting forth equally the end marked out by the fatherly purposes of God, the object of all true human desire, and the assured climax of human history. The divine source inspires and shapes the human ideal ; in its turn this ideal, quickening and satisfying faith and desire, becomes an inward and sure prophecy of the One far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves. If our prayer is to be true it must be an act of utter trust in His Fatherhood, must bring all our desires and efforts into union with His fatherly purpose, and must assume without hesitation its ultimate result. Viewed in this light the words 'as in heaven, so on earth ' express at once the principle of the self- giving of God, the response of human confidence and desire, and the standard of human conduct and endeavour. I. In the first place, we have here tJie principle of the self -giving of God. Upon that principle the issue of the world depends. 92 The Christian Ideal God being what He is as our Father in heaven, no poorer an issue of the world's history is possible than ' as in heaven, so on earth.' The truth of this great conclusion, entertained by faith, is established upon a threefold foundation. I. In the first place, there is the divine intuition given to faith. Our Lord displays to us what may be called the logic of love. Our knowledge of heaven is small. The conceptions of adult life entertained by a child in the nursery who plays at being 'grown up,' are more adequate than our thoughts can possibly be of the life above and beyond. We can but draw inferences from our present potentialities and what is bound up with them. Imagination does the rest, and the work of imagination must be judged according to the degree of its faithfulness to these governing spiritual conditions. Little as we know, however, heaven stands for the complete fulfilment of our ideal of perfection. It is the fruition of all the promise revealed in our spirit. It is the contradiction of all the hindrances which in our earthly life thwart our spiritual powers and deny our hopes. But heaven is the expression of God. l The Lord God and the Lamb are the light of it.' He is its source. It can only be realized in His presence and in relation to Him. Heaven is the state of fruition and blessedness which consists in the complete 93 The Christian Ideal manifestation and the perfect fellowship of God. And God is our Father. His Fatherhood is not accidental ; it is the expression of all that He is and does. Therefore, if heaven be equal to God manifest and God enjoyed, it simply means that love with its holiness, its life, its fellowship, and all that they imply is eternally triumphant there. But our Father, whose infinite perfection is realized in heaven, has created earth and is unfolding its history. The mystery of creation both engages and baffles thought. Of one truth, however, we may be sure : that the new relations into which God has entered as Creator of the world and Lord of its history are the outcome of the perfect and sovereign love which makes the glory of His heaven. The very fact that He creates and upholds the new sphere in which He manifests Himself means that He remains faithful to Himself. If heaven stands for His transcendence, earth stands by reason of His immanence ; and that which connects heaven and earth is no other and no less than His Fatherhood. Hence heaven, which is the highest, becomes not only the highest above the earth, but the inmost throughout it. God comes out of His heaven to create His earth in self-communicating love. The ends of that love are found in all men and in all things. Therefore the inmost secret of God's 94 The Christian Ideal relationship to earth is to be found in His self-giving. His self-giving sets up a boundless receptivity as the inmost principle of human nature and the means of human progress. Hence the fact of God's Father- hood and of man's sonship make the promise of the world illimitable. Indeed, to limit the possibilities of earthly history and what grows out of it is to limit God, and in effect to deny His Godhead. When His essential Fatherhood is thus seen as the supreme law of history, only one law and one end can be admitted. ' As in heaven, so on earth.' Moreover, this goal must needs be reached by the ceaseless activity of God in and through all the facts, forces, laws, and strivings of the universe. On the one hand, the transformation of earth will not be brought about by merely miraculous or external means. On the other, no merely secular reading of life and history can be the truth. The new creation will be the fulfilment of the promise of the old. Towards this fulfilment all things move in a divinely ordered harmony. This interpretation of the world is contained in the truth of the Fatherhood of God. He who receives that truth by faith will be irresistibly led on to believe in the prospect of the text as the sure promise of His love. 2. This great conclusion of faith rests, however, not only upon the immanent logic of a great intuition, 95 The Christian Ideal but springs from the underlying spiritual experience which bestows that intuition. It is furnished by our Lord's own experience, and is strengthened by our experience of Him. Love was incarnate in Him. He revealed its utmost passion and power. The consciousness of redemptive and transforming power was unfailing in Him. The effects of that power were everywhere manifest in His train. He was Himself the gospel. The evan- gelic power that went forth from Him, in quickening the spiritual faculties, 1 renewed the moral life and thereby extended to the transformation of the social and material environment. The sense of illimitable possibilities was ever present to the mind of Christ. The signs of such possibilities assured the faith and awakened the hope of His disciples. 'All things are possible to him that believeth ' became the watchword of faith. The source and inspiration of our Lord's love and power lay in His filial consciousness and fellowship. He declared this when He said, 'The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father doing ; for what things soever He doeth, these the Son also doeth in like manner ' (John v. 19). Hence the transforming power of Christ's love is the pledge that the transformation of earth into the likeness of heaven is the Father's good pleasure. It is indeed unreasonable to set any bounds to 96 The Christian Ideal the redemptive power of divine love working in and through the spiritual life of men. We are accustomed to the practical triumphs of the mind of man through the sciences and arts of life. Yet what vaster possi- bilities are contained in the spiritual life ! Let that but be redeemed from sin and filled with the spirit of sonship, and all things are possible, The infilling of God would surely bring the complete transforma- tion of earth. Thus the facts of experience supply and establish the intuition of faith. 3. Seen in this light, the world itself furnishes a prophetic confirmation of this hope. We need only read the Sermon on the Mount to see how our Lord finds everywhere the presence of love, and delights to note its expansiveness. The sun shines upon the evil and upon the good, the rain falls upon the just and the unjust, the lamp gives light unto all who are in the house. Our Father feeds the birds and clothes the grass of the field. Earthly parents, though they are evil, know how to give good gifts unto their children. Despite all their frailty and their sin, the presence of love in the home reveals the power of the divine, and transforms selfishness by self-sacrifice. Such grace of earthly love carries with it the certain inference, ' How much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him ? ' Upon this fact and the inference resting G 97 The Christian Ideal upon it is based the Golden Rule, ' All things, there- fore, whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them : for this is the law and the prophets.' What men see in the world is largely determined by their character. Our Lord, filled to the full with perfect love, sees the presence of love working in nature, redeeming evil hearts from sin, and capable of accepting new standards of human conduct. All these prophetic signs have their explanation in the ' How much more ?' of our heavenly Father's eternal love. Hence the promise that is manifest in the world brings the final con- firmation of the divine principle, ' as in heaven, so on earth.' Thus we have traced out slowly and imperfectly the sources of the great assurance which filled the spirit of our Lord with an immediacy of revelation that came from the depths of His filial life. II. In the second place, the text expresses the response which human trust and desire make to the self -giving of God. It is the utterance of boundless hope, based upon the revelation of God. The only ground of such hope must of necessity be in God. If He be unknown and unknowable, we must for ever remain uncertain as to the issue of the universe, and can only faintly trust our highest aspiration. If He be conceived as 98 The Christian Ideal less than love, our ideals of the future will be darkened. But the divine revelation which proclaims His Father- hood brings hope in its utmost breadth and intensity into the service of religion. No bounds can be set to it or to the largeness of its expectation. Hence the New Testament is everywhere full of hopefulness, and treats hope as one of the most vital elements of true religion. Every great writer of it is at one in this teaching. St. Paul even tells the Roman Church, 'By hope were, we saved.' Indeed, Romans viii. is the greatest exposition in the New Testament of the meaning of our text. The central fact of Christian experience, 'Ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father/ is so infinite in its promise as to involve not only our own full deliver- ance, but that of the* creation itself 'from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.' No limits can be set to the redemp- tive work which begins in redemption from ' the law of sin and of death,' or to the hope which springs out of it. Hope so high, so deep, so universal, turns life itself into a ceaseless prayer for its fulfilment. Thus hope brings with it the perfecting of religion. How great the contrast between our ordinary prayers and the Lord's Prayer ! With us evil is too often in the foreground, possessing our spirits, tormenting us with fear, and paralysing our faith. For Christ, 99 The Christian Ideal evil is in full retreat before the revelation of the Father in the coming of His kingdom. Hence, ' deliver us from the evil one ' is the last petition, and its answer is guaranteed to us by all that has gone before. Prayer is breathed in faith, not in fear. Confident expectation replaces deprecation. The vision and experience of love has brought full assur- ance to faith and exultation to hope. The entrance of hope enlists reason, social affection, aspiration, and activity in the service of religion. The variance, or at least estrangement, between religion and all these great human qualities passes away. All are called forth, united and inspired by the filial response to the Fatherhood of God. Hence- forth perfect spirituality means perfect humanity. Full consecration brings with it the complete inherit- ance, into which the sons of God enter when the slavishness of false or imperfect religion passes away, and the filial life becomes supreme. This, however, involves the complete transforma- tion of desire. Prayer is ineffectual unless it be the inmost expression of desire. The heavenly is for God the fatherly ; for man the filial. Hence our desires must only be for the holy; and in human expression the holy becomes the brotherly. Holi- ness means our consecration to God, our uplifting to fellowship with Him. Its earthly sequence and 100 The Christian Ideal expression can only be in the complete brotherliness which desires nothing whatever but the fulfilment of His fatherly purpose ; the manifestation of His fatherly heart in love and righteousness and redemp- tion. Thus full salvation is necessary before our hope can be brought into such complete oneness with the divine Will that we have no desire whatever, save for the transformation of earth into the likeness of heaven. Herein lies the passion and self-sacrifice of all truly Christian optimism. It rests on brother- hood, and encounters the opposition of all that is selfish in the human heart and life. It means that we find this brotherhood in all its glory through the surrender of all the lower and self-regarding interests of life. Thus regarded, our text becomes not only the inspiration, but the searching test of hope. III. Hence, finally, we have here the standard of human conduct and endeavour. The object of our prayer must needs become the principle of our con- duct; otherwise it is incomplete nay, it becomes hypocritical. Our life in all its relationships must be set to realize heaven upon earth. If this be so, our conduct will have four outstanding marks. I. It will embody the highest. ' The State of which we are citizens/ says St. Paul, ' is in heaven.' We are called inwardly to submit ourselves to its highest 101 The Christian Ideal laws, and outwardly to stand for them in all our relations to the world. The total effect of our life must be that the heavenly is declared and realized in it. Mere feeling is insufficient We must embrace the principles of heavenly life, and set them forth in courageous and self-denying action in every walk of life. There must be a splendour in our fidelity, and a far-reaching thoroughness and consistency in our temper and action, which make men conscious of the indwelling presence of heaven in us, not only when they meet us in church, but if they have dealings with us in business, politics, and social life. If Christ's religion is good for anything, it is good for everything. 2. This carries with it the social spirit of our religion. It is significant that our Lord's Prayer never speaks of ' me ' and ' mine,' but always of ' us ' and ' ours.' The ' I ' is not suppressed thereby ; it is enlarged and perfected in the whole. There is no true contrast between individual and social interests. We are individual that we may be social ; social that we may be truly individual. It is the task of the Christian religion to save men from the one-sided influences, which in theory or in practice would sacrifice either half of this whole truth, and thereby reduce what is left to falsity. 3. Further, the life of heaven on earth must be pervasive. Courage is as indispensable as elevation 102 The Christian Ideal and sympathy. In presence of the great ideal which is the revelation of our Father's purpose, we dare not limit the range and possibilities of the triumph of love. If our Lord's words mean anything, they unfold to us the inmost secret of the universe. They assure us that no element or aspect of earthly life can refuse to conform itself to the mind of our Father which is in heaven. The life of faith is a ceaseless challenge to the universe to submit itself to the loving purposes of God. True, the final consummation is far distant. There is no saying what far-reaching changes its advent will involve. Our Lord and His apostles did not shrink from declaring that it meant a remaking of the world. Yet we are not idly to wait for such a miracle. Our faith is to reach out to it, and pre- pare the way for its accomplishment. To say of any earthly interest or relationship, or even of the material order itself, that it cannot t become subject to the mind of Christ, means spiritual cowardice and treachery to our Lord. Courageous comprehensiveness, unshaken by the mysteries of life and undaunted by its diffi- culties, is needful to the integrity of faith. 4. Hence, finally, there must be something illimit- able in our character and spiritual energy. The power which will remake the earth must be stored up in our lives and manifested in our influence. By complete surrender to God in Christ, each one of 103 The Christian Ideal us must become the home of His infinite and all- conquering might. The full resources of His Father- hood must be seen acting in and through us for the salvation and renewal of the world. It was the realization of this fourfold spirit that made the greatness of early Methodism, as of every other great spiritual revival. To fail at any point, whether it be in elevation, in sympathy, in courage, or in spiritual energy, is a sign of declension and decay. Our age is waiting for a new unfolding of this power of the divine Fatherhood in human lives. It doubts the gospel, because its glory is too splendid for our narrow thoughts and impoverished concep- tions. It hungers for a truth in which it dare not believe which, therefore, it cannot verify. Hence its failure of hope ; its inability to accept the loftiest ideals and courageously to pursue them. When the higher loses its commanding and self-evidencing power, the lawlessness of unchastened desire is let loose. Men can only be reached and renewed by their faith. If faith fail, not only the Church, but the nation perishes. Yet the riches of our Father are unsearchable, and are available for us in Christ. Let us seek His grace that we may be enabled to rise to the greatness of this revelation, to embrace this hope in entire consecration, and to set ourselves anew to the spiritual task for which it supplies 104 The Christian Ideal unbounded power. Then Methodism will renew its youth and enable the men of the twentieth century once more to accept with joyful faith the watchword of divinely appointed progress, ' As in heaven, so on earth ! ' 105 VII The Apostolic Ministry 1 Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ ; and to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery, which from all eyes hath been hid in God who created all things. EPH. iii. 8, 9. MY BRETHREN IN CHRIST, It is difficult adequately to describe, and it is certainly impossible to exaggerate, the solemnity and the spiritual possibilities of this great occasion. You have come here after a long and searching preparation and probation. In anticipation of this day you have, I trust, waited upon God in prolonged meditation and prayer. Your answers to the questions that have been put to you have been as truly vows to God as avowals before His Church. All the highest susceptibilities of your being have been reawakened, purified, and uplifted. Under these conditions you have received a spiritual gift of the Holy Ghost through the laying on of the hands of the Presbytery. 1 The Ordination Charge delivered in Wesley Chapel, Cork, on June 22, and in Wesley Chapel, Lincoln, on July 28, 1909. 106 The Apostolic Ministry You, are, therefore, spiritually enabled in this most sacred and momentous hour to apprehend the highest and largest ideals of the Christian Ministry, humbly and yet joyfully to embrace them, resolutely to set yourselves to the life-long and ever-growing fulfilment of them. To what, then, should your attention be directed in these priceless moments, when you are being girded by Christ Himself for a service which commands every faculty and energy of your being, transformed and empowered by His Holy Spirit? There can be only one answer to this question. You must steadfastly behold the noblest and most authoritative examples of Christian Ministry, seeking our Divine Master's help that the life which He Himself created and sustained in them may be reproduced in you, and that you may be enabled throughout all the days and years to come to keep company with those who offered ' the utmost to the highest. 1 Of these shining examples the most commanding and comprehensive is St. Paul. Moreover, of no other is the self-revelation so vivid and complete. I bid you, therefore, to follow me in an earnest endeavour to find in the apostle the illuminating disclosure of the truths, principles, ideals, and endeavours by which the whole course of your future ministry should be shaped. 107 The Apostolic Ministry The great passage from which our text is taken supplies us with ample guidance for our task. It sums up and describes the apostle's ministry at the moment of its culmination. It is the calm and triumphant expression of the motives and intuitions which inspired it from first to last. It is of the utmost importance to observe at the outset that the characteristic grace given to him is seen by St. Paul to consist in his apostleship to the Gentiles. The distinctive mark of that apostleship is its purpose to share, on equal terms, the highest blessings of the gospel with those who have hitherto been most remote from the privileges of the people of God, and have been deemed incapable of sharing them. That is to say, the man whose early life had stood in and for the exclusive election of Israel, and had counted this as the outstanding mark of divine favour, now, on the contrary, has so come to apprehend the love of God and His universal purpose in Christ, that the crowning gift of grace consists for him in the power to rise above all these narrow limitations of pride, prejudice, and early training. His glory is that as preacher, teacher, combatant, and worker, his life, in its spiritual power and passion, has become, not only an assertion, but an expression of the inmost heart and the world-embracing design of eternal and infinite love. The grace of ministry is that it enables 1 08 The Apostolic Ministry its recipient to pass for ever, through Christ, out of the paltry narrowness of nature into the magnificence of 'the Father, from whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named.' This determining quality of the apostolic grace has a sevenfold manifestation. 1. In the first place, St. Paul preaches 'among the Gentiles.' His sphere is never narrower than man- kind, and his first endeavour is to reach those who are outside. No restricted, parochial, or even partial conception of ministry can satisfy him as he becomes one with the yearning of the Heart of God. And as his ministry knows no restriction, so it tolerates no reserves. The offer to the Gentiles is of the ' un- searchable riches of Christ ' in all the wealth of their unexplored infinity. The impassioned zeal, which seeks the last and lowliest of mankind, will offer to them nothing poorer than 'the breadth and length and height and depth.' 2. Secondly, this offer is made on the strength of a deep, ever-growing, and illimitable experience. On no other ground is it possible to speak of ' the un- searchable riches of Christ.' There are three stages of this experience. First, Christ : personal acquaint- ance with and apprehension of Him, as Redeemer, Lord, and Life. Then, the riches of Christ, as contact with Him brings to the spirit the wealth, power, and 109 The Apostolic Ministry satisfaction that are in Him and are shared by Him with those who are joined to Him so as to become one Spirit. Lastly, the unsearchable riches of Christ, as the intimacy of unbroken fellowship leads on and on, till the believer finds that the source from which he is continually enriched is boundless as God Him- self, and rewards a pursuit extended to the infinite and eternal. 3. Thirdly, the ministry is one of illumination. ' To make all men see.' It assumes, appeals to, and satisfies a divine capacity everywhere present. It counts upon the divine grace to awaken this capacity ; to open the eyes of hearts, which hitherto the god of this world has blinded. The ministry is sight- restoring and sight-satisfying. This vision of Christ, furthermore, brings men into such acquaintance with the secret, 'the mystery' of God, that God, the universe, and history are revealed and explained by the fulfilled purpose of saving grace. The demands which reason, hope, and aspira- tion make of the universe are satisfied. Men fore- ordained, called, justified, and glorified in Christ Jesus enter into the heritage of confidence and insight which can only be based on knowledge of the heart and mind, the end and way of ' God, who created all things.' 4. Further, in and through this ministry the Church IIO The Apostolic Ministry is established and built up as a fellowship of believers. It is so heavenly that it makes known ' in the heavenly places ' ' the manifold wisdom of God.' Yet this heavenly fellowship is so human that it is the first- fruits of mankind, ultimately to be united in the citizenship of the saints and the household of God. The preaching of the gospel attains its end and acquires its indispensable instrument in the edification of the Church, as the living embodiment of and witness to the redemptive grace of God in Christ. 5. Again, in accomplishing this ministry, the apostle is joyfully conscious that he is serving the central purpose of God the end which alone explains and justifies the meaning and process of the world. His task is not accidental or subordinate. The ministry of grace consummates history, unifies all the divine forces that govern its evolution, and gives to the whole the spiritual value which alone answers to the Idea of God and to the immanent possibilities of man. 6. Once more, the prosecution of such a ministry involves the joyful acceptance of a vicarious passion. 1 Wherefore I ask that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which are your glory.' The crown of a ministry which gives expression to the grace of God, and has fellowship with the atoning Christ, is that it involves, and is capable of braving labours, hardships, in The Apostolic Ministry oppositions, beyond those of ordinary men. Without them apostolic ministry comes short of its character- istic filling up of ' that which is lacking of the afflic- tions of Christ ' on behalf of His Church. The grace of ministry is so abundant as to reproduce the Cross in those who fulfil it, and to make this essential experience, not only a matter of expectation, but of rejoicing and thanksgiving. 7. Finally, the spiritual power and passion of this ministry pass on into and are perfected by ceaseless prayer and intercession. 'For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father.' The apostle's very per- sonality has become uplifted to God and enlarged to include the Church. Hence, his sense of the unsearch- able riches of Christ, and his desire that they should be enjoyed, expand into an intercession which is the highest fulfilment of ministry. And this intercession, rising out of the exultant experience of grace, passes into the enraptured doxology, which celebrates the boundlessness of the power of God, not as an abstract conception, but as already energizing in the Church. Such is the glorious nature and spirit of the apostle's ministry the fruit of the grace given to him by God. It is founded in spiritual experience. It apprehends the universal purpose of redeeming love, and gives expression to it. It builds up the Church by untiring devotion and joyful suffering on its behalf. It 112 The Apostolic Ministry breathes throughout the spirit of ceaseless interces- sion, in which the apostle becomes one with the Father to whom it is offered, with the blessings of spiritual power, of Christ's indwelling and of heart-filling love which he seeks, and with the whole company of the Church for whom he seeks them. This ministry is the type of all truly catholic ministry throughout the ages. You are familiar with two faulty, because superficial, ways of interpreting the catholicity of the Church. The first understands it by means of the system of dogmatic truths, which its ministry affirms, teaches, and imposes. The Catholic faith is the sum of these truths. The Church, as to its active function, exists primarily to inculcate them. Passively, the Church is the com- munity of those who accept them. The governing type of its ministry is the doctor, the authoritative teacher. The second regards the Church as the sphere within which divinely delegated authority is exercised for the dispensing of ordered and external means of grace, and for the guidance and control of human conduct in all its interests and relations. The Church then becomes actively the organization empowered to exercise this authority, and passively the community of those who submit to it. The dis- tinctive type of its ministry is the priestly ruler, H 113 The Apostolic Ministry dispensing the mysteries of God and subduing the spirit of men. Here, however, is the revelation of a deeper and more vital catholicity. It consists in the fellowship of a great spiritual experience. Adoption as sons, redemption through Christ's blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, hope in Christ, a spirit of wisdom and revelation, the sense of quickening and of heavenly exaltation, reconciliation with God, access through Christ and in one Spirit to the Father, the know- ledge of the love of Christ, fellowship with the saints through the common access to God, these are the marks and aspects of this great experience as successively stated in this epistle. This experi- ence conveys the substance of the truth in a living revelation. It supplies also the self-evidencing con- firmation of the Truth. Herein are contained both the source and the standards of an authority which sets free and uplifts, instead of subduing, those who yield themselves up to it. The dispensa- tion of this experience cannot be fettered by any narrow and external regulation. Its breadth and freedom correspond to the breadth and freedom of God's love. The distinctive type of ministry on behalf of this the true catholicity is neither the doctor nor the ruler, but the preacher. Under that compre- hensive calling are included the special yet kindred 114 The Apostolic Ministry offices of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. All these several functions are the means of conveying and perpetuating the spiritual experience which constitutes the Christian and Catholic life. Into this great ministry you are entering. This conception of your office is at once most glorious, most constraining, and most exacting. 'Your high calling of God in Christ Jesus ' is to bring men, by His Spirit, into the fellowship of the divine life of redemption and satisfaction, to which this epistle is the guide-book. It is necessary that you should surrender yourselves entirely to this great end. The end, however, dictates the means. Many subordinate disciplines are needful to an effective ministry. They embrace the training to full efficiency of every faculty and aptitude which will be employed by you as preachers, teachers, pastors, and leaders of the Church. But, above all, you must be equipped with the spiritual means by which the evangelic experience is continuously received and transmitted. You must live in constant and complete self-surrender to the heavenly and spiritual Christ, who will convey this experience to you in all its fullness. You must ex- plore with untiring and comprehensive study the nature and conditions of this experience as they are set before you in the Holy Scriptures and in the con- sciousness of the Church as revealed in its history. "5 The Apostolic Ministry You must venture with fearless and self-renouncing faith wherever Christ leads you through your studies, believing that you are shut out from no experience vouchsafed to the saints. You must learn to bring this pursuit into harmony with the many-sided in- terests of life, so as to exclude nothing which is ordained by God to serve the being and well-being of man. Finally, by becoming Christ-possessed, you must receive that pervasive inspiration which will transform all your powers and use them to open up an approach to the inmost heart of those to whom you appeal. Such are the supreme concerns of a truly evangelical ministry. It is important, however, to study the order and proportion of this ministry more closely. Everything depends upon the spiritual experience. The practical aims of the apostle's life are given to him, not as detached and external directions, but as part of the living unity of his fellowship with Christ. It follows that, in a sense, his life and experience are higher and larger than his work. Strenuous and ceaseless as is St. Paul's devotion to his task, yet this is not the first impression made upon us by a careful consideration of his writings. In his earlier days the justification he gives of his behaviour towards Gentile converts lies in a fact of personal experience. 'I have been crucified with 116 The Apostolic Ministry Christ ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me : and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself up for me.' As his ministry draws towards its close, he tells the church which is most intimately bound up with him, ' One thing I do : forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.' First and foremost is the sustained apprehension of Christ a glorious and unspeakable intimacy with Him. This pursuit, union, and fellowship is, by its nature, profoundly personal. But it is not, therefore, self-regarding. The only terms of such communion are, that he who rises to it should leave behind all self-contained or self-seeking desires, and come into correspondence with the universal love of the Saviour of the world. Yet it is in and through Christ that the apostle seeks and finds mankind. The all- comprehending relationship to Christ is, therefore, supreme throughout. The complete realization of that relationship involves the fullest and freest play of all his faculties of spirit, mind, and heart. How vast is the world in which St. Paul moves as an enfranchised citizen in Christ! How wonderfully it calls out all the manifold content of his nature in the attempt 117 The Apostolic Ministry to explore it and set it forth! How he expatiates within its illimitable realms ! Narrowly practical minds are apt to ask impatiently, ' To what purpose is this waste ? ' as they fail to follow him in the soaring of his thought and in the exuberance of his feeling. Yet without this transcendence of the spirit there would have been no apostleship to the Gentiles. Ye ministers of this catholic experience of grace, be not lowered, narrowed, or mechanized by your work ! Such externalism is fatal to its highest ends. Seek, above all, to have ' understanding in the mystery of Christ.' 'Be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth.' In the next place, the sphere of the apostle's work is larger than the Church. He has a world-embracing aim. This follows of necessity from the fact that his first relationship is to Christ 'who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.' In range of confidence, sympathy, and purpose, the disciple must not be narrower than his Master. Any such narrowness may be treachery, and is certainly misrepresentation. Witness must be borne to our sovereign and spiritual Lord by the absoluteness of our claim, the breadth of our sympathies, and the scope of our efforts on His behalf. Your environ- ment must be the world, your concern mankind, your 118 The Apostolic Ministry ideal universal conquest and transformation by the forces of redemptive love. Not even ' the care of all the churches ' must limit your outlook or exhaust your spiritual energies, any more than it did in the case of St. Paul. Your work will be special and particular ; yet its setting and motive must always be the world-embracing purpose of Christ. Once more, the transcendence of the apostle's experience and the range of his endeavour magnified instead of belittling his concern for the Church. The Church springs out of, expresses, and protects the transcendent life of fellowship with Christ. It is the firstfruits, the promise, and the means of the universal triumph that is to come. Every detail of its life and work is sacred. Every member of it deserves and claims from the apostolic ministry a personal sympathy and service, which are enriched by all the fruits of the heavenly fellowship and all the breadth of the world-embracing end. To sub- ordinate the Church to these two is in very deed to exalt it. Neglect of the pastoral needs of the Church cannot be excused by the intensity of spiritual devotion, the absorption of theological speculation, or the claims of universal service. All these, if truly pursued in Christ, will result, not in abstractions, generalities, and distractions, but in a ministry that is individnal and painstaking in its efforts, human 119 The Apostolic Ministry in its sympathies, tender and conscientious in its loyalty to the Church. Thus St. Paul became the organizer of churches, the guide and friend of all their members. Let us for a moment survey the ends of ministerial service as they are presented to us here, and see how they bear upon the special needs and possibilities of our age. The objects of your ministry, as we learn from this epistle, may be variously described as the fulfilment of the divine purpose of Grace towards mankind, the glorifying of Christ as embodying and realizing that purpose, the redemption and perfecting of men in Christ, and the spiritual transformation of the age. All these are different aspects of the glorious whole. See what is involved in them ! First and foremost, the proclamation of a saving experience of grace, as of universal application. Next, the explanation of the world by a spiritual end, which satisfies the reason by meeting the inmost needs and aspirations of the heart. Thereby confidence is established in the meaning of the universe, and in the worth of the spiritual faculties to which its meaning is disclosed. This God-given assurance and inspiration, while exalting men to realms above the earth, is of un- speakable moral power, and therefore embraces all the relationships of life, excluding none, but raising 1 20 The Apostolic Ministry all to a higher power. Finally, as the message is world-wide, so all its results, in the fullness of their spiritual, moral, intellectual, social, and political con- sequences, are equally universal in the gracious purpose of God. All this and more is contained in ' the truth, as truth is in Jesus.' Think, then, of the urgent needs of this age in regard to all these things ! It is immensely difficult to estimate the spiritual condition of any age, and, above all, of the age to which we ourselves belong. We cannot, however, be misguided in attempting to mark some of the salient features of our time, and the bearing of an apostolic ministry upon them. We are often told that the consciousness of sin is fading out, and there are those who rejoice that this is the case. It is clear, however, that both the antecedent and the consequent of this loss of the consciousness of sin are the weakening of the con- sciousness and the impoverishment of the idea of God. Alike, His personality and His perfection become uncertain. Opinion oscillates between Pantheism and Pluralism. Men lose the sense of the gracious approach of God to them, and allow the desire after holiness to perish within them. The result of the loss of deep consciousness of God becomes at once apparent. There is a withdrawal of external re- straints, unaccompanied by any positive inspiration. 121 The Apostolic Ministry Restlessness becomes the predominant characteristic of life, concealing and often suppressing the deep-seated craving for higher satisfaction, the possibility of which frivolity excludes. Men accustom themselves to lower standards of conduct. Great ideals fail to exercise the force of motives, and may even become unintelligible to them. In the end, the theory of man is accommodated to his practice. The postulates of morality follow the presuppositions of theology, and men who have renounced or despaired of their citizenship of heaven, are prepared to treat them- selves and their fellows as being in all their thoughts, affections, and volitions the mere products and powerless reflexions of material force. Associated with such religious decay is the growing sense that the universe is a baffling and heart-breaking mystery, because it reveals no satisfying end, no creation and preservation of spiritual values, which are worthy to justify its existence, its processes, and, above all, the poignant tragedy of its history. Its enigmas, serious enough in themselves, are multiplied and exaggerated, because acquaintance with the spiritual forces which transmute them is wanting. The light is withdrawn by which the evolution of spiritual order would be revealed the process by which eternal worth is being fashioned by righteousness and love by means of the apparently ruthless machinery of time. 122 The Apostolic Ministry Consequent upon this failure of faith and vision goes paralysing distrust of the competence of human faculties and of the veracity of the highest deliver- ances of the human heart. When the prospects upon which men have gazed throughout the ages are pronounced to be but a mirage, discredit falls upon the powers which have thus mistaken illusion for reality. And, speaking broadly, the last consequence of all this is the failure of great humanity, the enthu- siasm by which human society is to be so transformed that mankind, in the victims and the outcast of our race, shall at last come by its own. All these influences directly affect the Church of Christ. They tend to darken its prophetic vision, to weaken the confidence and courage of its witness, to destroy the unworldliness of its spirit and the heroism of its endeavour. It is possible to discern all these signs of evil without overlooking the good, or becoming a pessimist as to not merely the remote but the immediate prospects of the Christian religion. Yet how are these the admitted evils and dangers of our age to be turned aside ? How are the gloomy forebodings to be falsified of those who see the marks of disintegration and decay upon all our civilization ? I know no answer, save that all depends upon the maintenance and communication of the evangelic experience which enables man to apprehend 'the 123 The Apostolic Ministry unsearchable riches of Christ.' Now, as ever, that experience is essential to the redemption and self- realization of men, to the interpretation and justifica- tion of the world. Now, as ever, this experience, and this alone, can give full confidence to human thought and endeavour, the inspiration of a great enthusiasm to progress. All this and more can be done if you, my brethren, and the vast body whom you represent, ceaselessly pursue the full meaning of the great experience of Christ, which has opened upon you, and make it the one business of your life to declare in word, deed, and influence the fullness of its signifi- cance. Everything depends upon this, and upon your realizing that your mission is ' to make all men see ' what is the dispensation of this divine mystery, now revealed in Christ. You must serve the Church above all by serving your age. And you will serve your age by being so ' filled unto all the fullness of God ' that you supply to it in apostolic witness the authoritative proclamation, guidance, and inspiration that it needs. Pursue then, the fullness of this divine life in Christ, and set forth, according to your gifts and opportunities, all that is contained and implied in it, alike of theological truth, of philosophic principles, and of ethical and social ideals. What methods ought you to pursue in order to fulfil this great ministry? Sufficient has been said 124 The Apostolic Ministry to show that its first condition is that of ceaseless prayer and consecration directed by constant medita- tion on the Holy Scriptures, which are the report to us of the travellers who have gone before us. Without such sustenance your ministry will wither. In the next place, you must be untiring students. The ministry that ceases to grow in thought and knowledge loses its grip upon the Church and upon the age and this because it loses something of its hold on God and truth. The enjoyment of both is on condition of unflagging pursuit. There never was a time when it was more important to manifest the joint service of faith and reason in religion. Each of you must inspire confidence in his congregations, as a man who knows and thinks, who has measured the bearings of what he affirms. Your simplest statements and simplicity is the highest excellence should rest upon and reveal adequate knowledge and assured thought. And this, not as a means to merely abstract instruction, but, under spiritual conditions, as the only way of leading the people on to the knowledge of God in Christ. The foremost and unending object of your study must be the Bible, accompanied by all the apparatus which modern scholarship provides for its elucidation and exposition. Yet, of all books, the Bible can least of all be separated from the texture of life and 125 The Apostolic Ministry thought which the whole history of humanity has woven. At every point religious, theological, his- torical, literary the divinity of the Bible carries you out to the humanity with which it is involved, to which it appeals, and by which it is moulded and conditioned. The fruitful study of the Bible will, therefore, largely depend on the extent to which it leads you out to the Book of Man, so that you return to interpret the revelation of God with an ever-growing knowledge of the great context of reality to which it inseparably belongs. Side by side with this arduous pursuit you must equally cultivate a genius of friendship with all your people, frank, disinterested, and sympathetic, so that you may instinctively learn the art of conveying to them, both in public and in private, a full share of all the light, satisfaction, and power you are receiving from God. You must cultivate the closest fellowship with those whom you are to lead into the Promised Land ; and, above all, with the poor. All this means the most strenuous industry and the most vigilant self-discipline. You are called to be the most hard-working men in the whole circle of your acquaintance, and withal the most cheerful and the most accessible. Above all, under these conditions, guard and strengthen your courage, and let it pervade your 126 The Apostolic Ministry thought, speech, and action. Many a ministry fails through cowardice, with its attendant vices of in- sincerity, conventionality, and time-serving. Never rash or overbearing, let all emergencies and calls reveal the man in you, dauntless in venture, tireless in effort, unfaltering in your witness to the truth you have received of God ! The result of all these influences and endeavours will be the growth of a holy and all-pervading enthusiasm of service. You too will be enabled to say, 'My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to accomplish His work.' You will ' flourish, unconsumed, in fire.' At the risk of repetition, let me sum up, by way of a final exhortation, what should be the governing characteristics of your ministry, as shaped by the apostolic example and addressed to the needs and possibilities of this age. i. In the first place, guard the experimental meaning and fullness of the Christian religion. Make ceaseless proof of it yourselves. Then you will foster it in all who are committed to your care and in the churches which you serve. Make it a primary concern to stimulate and guide the life of prayer and fellowship, till it becomes the distinctive note wherever your influence is felt. Of all failures and ruins a secularized church is the most pitiful and shameful. 127 The Apostolic Ministry 2. Let the evangelic note be fully and for ever sounded in your ministry. Make Christ, in all His fullness, its unfailing theme. Then grace, forgiveness, conversion, full assurance, regeneration, the holiness of perfect love, will keep the place they have always held in Methodist, because in apostolic, preaching. Then exposition will be edifying, history will give up its inmost meaning, ethics will become inspired, social effort will be dictated by the vital interests of the kingdom of God. 3. Realize the world-wide meaning of the gospel. Call your people out of self-centred and parochial limitations into partnership with the universal designs of God. You will find herein the remedy for much that is at present unsatisfactory in the condition of the Church. The spiritual possibilities of the present age are in every way bound up with the cause of foreign missions. No ministry can attain to prophetic and apostolic qualities which does not discern and set forth this as the most noteworthy sign of the times and the most commanding call made upon the Church. 4. Maintain and set forth the permeating and transforming power of Christ as universal in its scope, and all-sufficient in its power. Let no one silence you in giving this testimony. Pour all the vials of impassioned scorn on those who would exclude 128 The Apostolic Ministry any province of life from the sphere of Christ's sovereignty and from the field of your endeavour. Allow no one to dwell unconscious and secure while his life is divided into separate realms, which are governed by incompatible principles. Let men know that their economic, commercial, social, and political relations must all be subordinated to the authority and inspiration of Christ on pain of treachery and hypocrisy. The cause of humanity must be safe in the hands of Christ's Church. 5. Thus uphold the loftiest standard of unworldli- ness by absorbing and subordinating to Christ and His kingdom all the influences of the age, all the relationships of life, and all the treasures of man's heritage. At this moment Christ approaches you, and with His pierced hand commits to you ' the Faith ' as a sacred trust, to be used in ceaseless service to His Church and to mankind. Only thus can it be kept for Him, and restored to Him at His coming. So pray, labour, and quit you like men, that when once more He appears to ask an account of you, you may be enabled by His grace to say, ' I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the Faith.' 129 VIII The Ideals of National Education x MY DEAR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, It is my great privilege, as President of the Conference, to follow the example of my pre- decessors, and address to you a few words of con- gratulation, admonition, and encouragement, as you start out to fulfil the noble calling which you have chosen as your life-work, and have accepted, I trust, as a divine vocation. The first thought that is brought home to all our minds this morning is not of those who are present in our assembly, but of one who, at least in bodily form and manifestation, is absent from it. We miss the venerable presence of Dr. Rigg, for so many years the distinguished Principal of Westminster Training College. His influence upon the ecclesi- astical history of Methodism during the last half- 1 A Valedictory Address delivered to the students of Westminster and Southlands Training Colleges at the Wesleyan Church, Battersea, on June 28, 1909. 130 The Ideals of National Education century, his manifold services to all its institutions and almost all its characteristic activities, have had suitable tributes paid to them on many recent occasions. What concerns us at this moment is to recall with thankfulness the distinction which he brought to the office he so long held by his com- manding ability as a thinker and writer on educa- tional questions, and by the influence he exercised on the public administration of education during the time immediately succeeding the eventful year of 1870. Our gathering is also saddened by the death of Mr. Thomas Barnsley, the Lay Treasurer of the Wesleyan Education Fund, a man whose Christian character, sustained loyalty, and many-sided services to Methodism throughout a long life have won for him a high place in the esteem and affection of the Methodist Church throughout this country. Our deepest sympathy goes out to-day to his wife and family. On the other hand, past and present students of Westminster College will welcome with pride and satisfaction the well-earned honour which his Majesty the King has been graciously pleased to bestow on Mr. J. H. Yoxall, M.P., a distinguished student of the College, and one who has rendered great services in Parliament and else- where to the cause of national education. The Ideals of National Education You will not only forgive me, however, but approve me, when I say that my own mind is carried back to-day to the memories of my childhood and early youth. I find myself once more in the presence of that distinguished and devoted band of colleagues who laid the spiritual and intellectual foundations of these colleges so strong and broad. Their sense of vocation, elevation of character and aim, enthu- siasm/ sustained and informed by great seriousness, wisdom, and sympathy, set a lofty standard to all their successors, as well as to the successive genera- tions of students who fill the colleges year after year. The passing of James Bailey and Charles Mansford removed from us the last survivors of that goodly company, who had, in immediate association with them, William Kitchin Parker, the great biologist, and James Smetham, the artist and poet-saint The bond that held all these together was found in a great personal influence, which established fellow- ship in a noble and generous ideal. You will not be surprised if, in preparation to speak to you to-day, I have sought light upon that influence and ideal by turning to the 'Addresses on Education' delivered to the students at Westminster from 1854 to 1867 by my grandfather, John Scott, the Founder and first Principal of the College. If you will turn to the volume in which these addresses are published and 132 The Ideals of National Education despite all the changes of more recent times they have not lost their value you will find the permanent educational ideals of Wesleyan Methodism presented and expounded by a singularly lucid and judicious mind. The following are the main impressions that are conveyed by these addresses. In the first place, there is to be found in them an extremely spacious ideal for the education and training of the teachers themselves. It is assumed that the disinterested pursuit of the widest knowledge and the free, vigorous, and unceasing exercise of thought are the necessary preparation for and the lifelong condition of success- ful teaching. The workman must be larger than his work if the work itself is to be efficiently carried out. In the next place, it is laid down that the Christian religion must hold the first place in the concerns of education, and must have free play both upon teachers and upon taught if the highest results of education are to be secured. Further, the utmost stress is laid upon the vital importance of character, as the highest qualification of the teacher and as the end to be sought for all those who are taught This being the case, it is assumed throughout, and from time to time enforced, that the true teacher will be marked by an unworldliness of spirit which will be manifested in unselfish enthusiasm for his 133 The Ideals of National Education work, an inspiring sense of its importance, and patient thoroughness in all its details. Finally, a most generous programme of education for the industrial classes is expounded and defended against both the parsimony of Parliament and the selfish jealousy and fears of the wealthier classes. The claim is made that this generous, fearless, and progressive spirit in regard to popular education is the distinctive characteristic of Wesleyan Methodism. This view was elaborated in the remarkable address delivered at the beginning of 1862, when the famous controversy was raging as to the Revised Code, which, by withdrawing financial aid from more advanced subjects, . tended to restrict the range of elementary education to reading, writing, and arith- metic, and instituted in regard to them the pernicious system of payment by results. It is important to note that the Wesleyan Education Committee, by special Resolution, directed that this address should be circulated as widely as possible. This feature is of such importance that I shall take leave to illustrate it by ample quotations. The title of the address was 'The Working] Classes entitled to a Good Education.' After dealing with the training of Teachers, Mr. Scott proceeded ' This brings me to the SECOND point which I wish to settle in your minds, namely, that the education 134 The Ideals of National Education provided and offered in Wesleyan schools must be good, and that it cannot be too good for those who are to receive it. 'The children of your, schools, though of the labouring class, are not machines, made to work in the fields, in the mines, at the forge, or in the mill, but which, being human, may work all the better if able to read a newspaper, write a fair hand, and do a rule of three or practice sum. They may, and probably will, have to work, but they are the children of men. We wish you to have a just conception of man as man a thorough sympathy with human feelings and human interests, irrespective of worldly condition. Is a child less rational, less capable of intellectual and moral improvement of living an orderly, creditable, and useful life in society of serving God, and insuring a blissful immortality, because his parents are poor, obliged to work hard six days of the week, and perhaps for small wages ? What reason can be assigned, of which the person assigning it ought not to be ashamed, why a poor man's child ought to have only a poor education ? The ' humble classes ' are represented as having ' con- tracted minds,' into which it is the business of education to 'throw some glimmering of light and knowledge'! Are the minds of children of the poorer classes, as a matter of fact, more contracted 135 The Ideals of National Education than those of the more affluent classes ? Take a poor child, born in a hovel, of the poorest parents ; and when you educate him, place him in equally favourable circumstances, you will find his mind open and expand, as kindly, receive instruction as readily, and retain it as tenaciously, as a child of higher birth. Afford him the same right tuition, and his heart will unfold as noble and generous affections, his taste and manners will form to as correct a model, in the one case as in the other. We do not propose, because we are not able, to place him in equally favourable circumstances ; our argu- ment is, that in his education we ought to do the best for him that we can' (pp. 211, 212). He goes on ' Is this carrying the education of the labouring people of the country too far? Must that largest class of children, to whom "the Lord, the Maker of them all," has given capabilities equal in every respect to the children of the classes above them, be restricted to something much humbler ? We answer, No : our opinion remains unchanged ; and every year's observation, every day's reflection, more fully satisfies us that such an education should be given to every child whose parents will allow him to remain long enough in the school to receive it. Will a labouring man's home be less happy and less loved, 136 The Ideals of National Education when, after a day of toil, he can read at night a few pages, more or less as his fatigue may permit, of a good book to an intelligent wife, who has, like himself, received a good education ; their children, as they grow up and are educated, being as much interested in what is read as themselves ? And will he work the next day less cheerfully because he can ruminate on what he read last night ? ' (pp. 213, 214.) The following emphatic declarations are made on behalf of Wesleyan Methodism ' It has never been the manner of our community to call Excelsior I to the upper or "lower middle classes," content to leave the crowd grovelling below. Through the century or more of their existence, their great aim has been to promote the upward and onward progress of society, by directing an enlightened attention to the masses. Once they were nearly alone in this aim ; they rejoice that now they are joined in it, and in active exertion to attain it, by a multitude of others, not of their own denomination ' (p. 220). 'In this momentous matter of school teaching, I have no fear for our denomination. Their consistency will not forsake them ; they will prove themselves to be, as they have ever been, the true friends of the people. If the improvement in the humbler classes oblige the middle, and even the higher classes, to do 137 The Ideals of National Education something further for their own elevation in the social scale, the Wesleyans will the more rejoice ' (p. 220). The conclusion enforced by the Principal is thus stated ' Our second conclusion, then, is legitimate, not- withstanding all objections, and I wish you to fix it in your minds, That as good an education should be given to tJie poor as their children can receive. And be assured that the Wesleyan community will not grudge them the best that you can give ' (p. 223). It is impossible not to feel, on reading such con- tentions, the eloquence of which is enhanced by the weightiness and moderation which underlie them, that the history of popular education in this country, during the last half-century, has been more than a little disappointing. The Churches have largely failed to entertain and to contend for such progressive ideals of education because they have come short of the large faith in the worth and capacity of ordinary human nature that can alone inspire such ideals. The sacred principle 'that as good an education should be given to the poor as their children can receive ' has too often been hindered by the Church, neglected by the State, opposed by the well-to-do, and not demanded by the poor themselves. Cer- tainly, any concerted action of all these interests to secure this great end has yet to be attained. The 138 The Ideals of National Education Church has too often belittled the religious signifi- cance of so-called secular education and retarded it. The community has grudged the money that is spent on it. Selfish and short-sighted interests have sought to cripple it. The multitudes have not entirely ceased to resent the coercion of it, and come to perceive the advantage of it. Moreover, the ordinary conceptions of popular education still swing too much between a sterile interpretation of its primary religious and moral concerns on the one hand, and a narrowly utilitarian aim on the other. The religious ideal needs liberal- izing ; the secular needs humanizing. The formularies of Churches do not constitute religion ; nor does the preparation for a narrowly technical education con- stitute efficiency. The clash between these two inadequate ideals, not less than the contests between Church and State, has prevented Christian religion from shedding inspiration upon the whole range of educational effort and the State from filling in the civic and humane content of religion. The result is the threat that each should be compelled to go its way alone so far as education is concerned, to the great detriment of both, and, above all, to the nation itself. Further, the advance of education, despite all these difficulties, has revealed its limitations. The most strenuous and devoted efforts of the teachers 139 The Ideals of National Education have brought out what might have been supposed to be the obvious fact, that there are other influences, earlier, later, and more constantly in the field than those of the school. The community itself must be the educator, through the entire environment and all the relationships of life, if the school is to attain any full measure of success. The endeavours of educa- tionists have not proved the panacea for social evil, or the 'open sesame* to economic well-being, that the early pioneers of popular education too confidently supposed. Hence, whether judged from the religious, moral, intellectual, economic, or political standpoint the results are, at first sight, somewhat disappointing. The present moral and mental condition of the nation revealed by education as never before, made operative by democracy, and judged by standards which the educationist has created tends to bring home rather the limitations than the possibilities of education. And yet, how much has been accomplished ! The enthusiasm and devotion of the idealists of the early Victorian period have borne abundant fruit. Even where their work seems to have failed, it has been the provoking cause of the more comprehensive efforts upon which the nation bids fair to enter. Stimulated by the influence and efforts of the more disinterested Christian educationists, and, in 140 The Ideals of National Education later days, quickened both by material necessity and by the rebuking example of more 1 efficient nations, the State is steadily, though slowly, awaking to its responsibilities. The volume of educational effort has infinitely increased and is still growing. The whole of the coming generation is now at school. The methods and equipment of education have been immeasurably improved. The work of correlating all stages and types of education, and of providing a possible passage upward from the lowest to the highest is steadily proceeding, though, no doubt, not without checks and drawbacks here and there. New types of education are springing up to meet the special needs of minorities, whether created by ex- ceptional mental endowment, or by exceptional dis- advantages, that were neglected before. Practical experience has accumulated a vast wealth of material for the science and art of education. An ever-increas- ing community of experts is engaged in reflecting on these results, in order that the work of education may be made more ' conformable to nature ' and to the manifold needs of life. The true conception of education, as the drawing out of the powers of the co-operating child, is replacing the old attempt to enforce upon him, by authority and drudgery, the hard and cramping notions of his masters. The new spirit is gradually spreading to our Sunday schools, 141 The Ideals of National Education Above all, whatever may be the disillusionment, or the inertia here or there, no sane or effective body of opinion can be found to turn back on the road we are travelling. The vital forces of the nation, though greatly hindered by the stupidity, the shallow- ness, and the class-selfishness of various sections of the community, are steadily tending to remove the defects of popular education by mending and not by ending it. In short, there is a growing sense that not only the well-being, but the being of the nation depends on calling out into full realization and into vigorous play all the potentialities of mind and spirit which make up the true wealth and strength of the nation. The teacher may, indeed, rejoice that the limita- tions of his work are coming to be recognized, and that the recognition is gradually bringing about that wider co-operation of civic and social effort which alone can secure a fair chance either to teacher or scholar. No effort on behalf of man can succeed in isolation, or prove a panacea for human need. The work of education is overflowing the walls of the school, and enlisting the services of all workers for the common weal. Although each child brings a latent personality and a wealth of raw material to the teacher, yet in another sense he is a manufactured product. Prenatal conditions, home influences, material 142 The Ideals of National Education environment, physical health, social surroundings, economic position all play a part so powerful in his evolution, that any one of them by itself, and still more the whole of them in combination, may be either the most effective aid of the teacher, or may reduce him, despite the most enlightened and untiring efforts, almost to despair. The municipal reformer, the temperance legislator, the officer of health, the doctor and the nurse, the home visitor, and the economic leader, are coming to stand side by side with the teacher, in an offensive and defensive alliance to save the child, and to give him his divinely appointed place in the heritage and service of mankind. The past half-century has seen the creation of all these separate arms of the service of mankind, and their independent advance on the great battle-field. The coming half-century will witness not only their alliance, but their strategic combina- tion in a common plan of campaign, and under the generalship and discipline of the community. Yet, the more extensive and powerful the array of authorities and influences that are to act upon the child, the more pressing is found to be the problem of the child himself. Home, street, school, church, city, workshop, home again the home that he will eventually create these are only some of his simultaneous or successive environments. It is 143 The Ideals of National Education his personality the secret of his continuous and expanding life that gives to them their unity. They will all affect him for good and evil. But he will react upon them all. He is creator as well as created, so far as all these relationships are concerned. It is almost equally fatal to neglect either the one aspect or the other. But if an educator is to neglect one or the other, he had better overlook the influences which act upon the child, than the personality which is to react upon them all. Everything, then, depends upon the character of the child. There is once more coming to be a great consensus, not only assenting to, but proclaiming this most vital truth. The minister of religion, the moralist, the statesman, the commercial, industrial, or labour leader, the patriot concerned for the progress or the safety of his country, the teacher all vie with one another in insisting on this self- evident proposition. The leading educationists of the world left the methods and mechanism of their art and assembled in London last autumn to discuss the moral education of the young. In the long run it is character, and character alone, that counts. Many influences con- tribute to retard or impair its function. Yet character the complete realization of true personality in and for all the relations of human life this is the one thing needful. 144 The Ideals of National Education And the child, though having all the possibilities of character, is yet only a candidate for its possession. He alone can acquire it, but it is the sacred office of all his guardians, and pre-eminently of his teachers, to assist him in this supreme task of life. How is their work to be conceived, and by what means can it be fulfilled ? Let it be borne in mind that all faculties in the child are to conspire in this supreme quest. Not one of them is either so high or so low or so accidental as to have no part in the great pursuit. Herein will be found the ethical justification of the most liberal education. Character can only be seized as the prize of free choice. And what freedom seizes, self- discipline must hold fast. Yet both the choice that apprehends and the character that is apprehended are a response. And they are a response, not to outward stimuli important as are these subsidiary helps but to the highest, which is also the inmost. It is the ideal which appeals to, draws out, and stamps its image on the spiritual energies that result in cha- racter. The ideal must be true, must be clothed with sanctity, and irradiated with splendour. It must be set forth before and embraced by faith. It must be justi- fied by reason. It must be inwrought into the inmost tissues of the spirit, and displayed in all the outermost details of conduct by unswerving and joyful fidelity. K 145 The Ideals of National Education The ideal is sovereign. It must be lofty enough for worship. We live by admiration, hope, and love, And even as these are well and wisely fixed, In dignity of being we ascend. It must be comprehensive enough to ensphere the whole of life, and permanent enough to inspire and fashion its unending development through all its distinctive stages. It must be vital enough to lay hold on and call forth all powers, and constrain- ing enough to overcome all oppositions. It must be a governing and abiding suggestion, not special to the home, the school, the workshop, the State, or the Church, but capable of realization in and through them all. What is all this but to say that it must be a spiritual and religious intuition and influence ? What, then, can give to the child such an ideal for the whole of life ? Our first answer, probably, is duty. The first effort of the moral educator is to bring about, if possible, the revelation of duty to his scholars in all the glory of Wordsworth's vision of her Stem lawgiver ! Yet thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignant grace, Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face. 146 The Ideals of National Education Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads ; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong. In an age impatient of external restraints and seeking enjoyment often of a frivolous and selfish kind, we cannot too persistently endeavour to set duty before the eyes of children, alike in the sternness of her authority and the benignancy of her grace. But duty must have content, must direct conduct and desire to an end. What is this to be? The first answer is that we all belong to a great com- munity, and that the ideal of life is the sense of membership of that community, and the desire to render service to it. This also is of the utmost importance, and can hardly be too constantly and impressively enforced. Yet it raises questions still more vital and urgent than it answers. Our relations to the particular community to which we belong do not exhaust our relationships. Not only do these stretch out to mankind, but they include the universe. Moreover, the claim of service to the community is not only vague, both as to range and as to the nature of the service to be rendered, but also it asserts a claim, and relies upon a fact, the ground 147 The Ideals of National Education and reason of which are not explained. After all, the consciousness that we are individuals is as real as that we are members of a community. The legitimate claims of this consciousness must be satisfied ; its illegitimate demands set up the most formidable difficulty that moral and social progress has to overcome. Again, it is wellnigh impossible so to extend the principle of service to the community as to make it effective over thoughts, desires, and imaginations which may appear to have no social application, or, even if essentially wrong, to lead to some immediately advantageous social application. Further, under all these limitations, it seems im- possible to show that the principle of social service, taken by itself, gives any complete expression to the authority, both transcendent and immanent, which is contained in the sense of duty, or explains the self-condemnation which accompanies its trans- gression, even if attended by apparent social advan- tage. Nor does it contain either definiteness of ideal or the illimitable expansiveness of a religious enthusiasm. Finally, it is not sufficiently lofty and comprehensive at once to guard and emphasize the transcendence of moral consciousness, and yet to unify its subject, not only with mankind, but also with the universe. 148 The Ideals of National Education Thus, we are driven back to the religious explana- tion if we are to find a rational justification of the sense of duty or an adequate inspiration and guidance to social service. God, as infinite and sovereign perfection, manifest in Christ, and both transcendent and immanent in His Fatherhood, alone provides us with the necessary satisfaction. Sonship, as the relationship in which men ideally stand to Him, alone supplies the relationship sufficiently spiritual and comprehensive to call forth all noble motives, to restrain all that is unworthy, to conciliate indi- viduality and social service, to bring the ideal to the support of the practical, and to unify human nature within itself by the apprehension of the unity of the universe in God. No doubt it is the calling of the Christian Church fully to explicate the meaning of this fundamental presupposition of morality. Yet in this country, raised by ages of progress to apprehend and respond to the indispensable presuppositions of a Christian civilization, it is essential that the teacher should be authorized to expound them, if willing to do so, and should be free to appeal to them, subject to certain safeguards, for the guidance and inspiration of his scholars. To that view Wesleyan Methodism has adhered in the past with practical unanimity. Nothing that has recently happened can change its 149 The Ideals of National Education convictions. No solution of the education difficulty can be tolerated which excludes the religious sanction from education. And this, not in the interests of churches, or even in that merely of religion, but in order that education may attain its ends, and may contribute, not merely to the intellectual efficiency, but to the moral integrity of the nation. In this connexion let it be remarked that the whole spirit, method, and substance of what is called secular education has been, for the English people, profoundly influenced by this great religious conscious- ness and idea. What has become secular as a result has been spiritual as a process. The banishment of fear by a large confidence that rests on faith, the conviction of the worth and possibilities of human life, the 'growing ascendency of humane ideals all these represent the conquest of Christ in our civiliza- tion, as any dispassionate and broad Oriental student of our national life instantly perceives. It is true that Roman civilization, Teutonic energy and hopefulness, the renascence at the Reformation of the human spirit, long depressed by an ascetic interpretation of Christianity, have all played their part. But the influence of Christianity has been present throughout, utilizing all these influences and securing the pre- valence of a temper and the ceaseless enlargement of a spiritual inheritance that cannot be explained ISO The Ideals of National Education without the vital factor of spiritual faith, or maintained without its persistence. The guarantee, however, of all such higher in- fluence in the school lies not so much in formal lessons as in the character of the teacher. In every sphere of life, personality is the most effective influence, but in the school it is all-important. Children are affected, one way or another, much more powerfully by contact with their teachers than in any other way. If noble suggestions and elevating ideals are to possess and mould the life of a child, it will be for the most part because they so live in the teacher as to be conveyed, both consciously and unconsciously, to the children. Each one of you is called to be a representative personality, concentrating in your character and influence the highest ideals of those who send you forth Christ, the Church, the nation. Much depends on what you know ; more on what you are ; most of all on what you are becoming. In all men character is the supreme concern. But especially is this the case for those who stand in a pastoral relation to others. Teachers pre-eminently stand in such a relation, and towards those on whom its effects are most momentous. To be indifferent to your own character is therefore treachery alike to Christ, the nation, and the children. To pursue all the means by which your own character is enriched, The Ideals of National Education ennobled, and enlarged will be to render the most sacred and successful service to every interest you are pledged to advance. If your first duty is to press towards the mark of the highest excellence that is set before you, your second is to endeavour to command every affection, aptitude, and condition by which you may gain stimulating access to each scholar committed to your care. Many scholastic disciplines must be steadily pursued by you. But, above all, you must cultivate the utmost unselfishness, unwearied freshness, growing breadth of view, and boundless sympathy. Every child must be studied, and not least of all the more backward and least promising. Some distinct virtue must go forth from you, not only to the class, but to every member of it. It is for education authorities to ensure to you the general conditions under which your devotion may be set free, and may spend itself with most effect upon your charge. It is for you to utilize all such advantages with the most generous and genial devotion. You may well tremble before the responsibility which lies before you. You must needs seek the utmost grace from the Good Shepherd that you may be faithful in your tendence of His flock. Let me, in conclusion, set before you as the result of many years of life among the poor, some of the 152 The Ideals of National Education main results which your personal influence should seek to produce. 1. In the first place, endeavour to arouse the spirit of wonder and of worship. These two lie at the heart of all real education. Their healthy activity is vital to all well-being. Yet the conditions under which vast multitudes live tend to destroy both these essential conditions of intellectual and spiritual growth. The nation will be starved of its highest satisfaction and stunted in its growth if these adverse tendencies prevail. Use all the means in your power to counteract this deadly blight. 2. Assist your scholars to live in the company of noble ideals, embodied in the greatest lives. And illustrate the lessons taught in the great examples of history by the homelier heroism of humble lives, so that your children may feel that the highest virtue is within their reach. Remember that Truth embodied in a tale shall enter in at lowly doors. 3. Bend all your efforts to kindle the love of knowledge. Make learning, and still more the exercise of thought, attractive. Seek to combine in suitable admixture the discipline of strenuous work with the exhilaration of a joyful and even entertaining pursuit. 4. Use the joy of pursuit and attainment thus 153 The Ideals of National Education awakened to prepare your scholars to find inspiration in their work throughout their after life. One of the evils of the present age, at least in this country, is that owing to a multiplicity of causes with which I cannot now deal the majority seek their joys outside the work of life, and not in the intelligent and dutiful discharge of their main tasks. 5. Seek always to bring home the sense that the higher is within reach. Use the possible attainment of the higher stage to assist the struggle of the present. Above all, take all measures to see that the scholars that leave your care pass on to various forms of continuation education, so that the great perils of early adolescence may be successfully sur- mounted. I trust that before long the application of compulsion by the State to continuation education may somewhat relieve the present difficulty of pre- serving and developing the costly, yet often fleeting, results of elementary education. 6. Try to cultivate the taste for restful and humanizing pursuits out of school hours. Educa- tion must embrace the activities of leisure and play, as well as those of the schoolroom, if the inanity and wastefulness of popular amusements and excitements as at present carried on are to be overcome. 7. Seek to inspire the spirit of comradeship, and 154 The Ideals of National Education of self-sacrifice on behalf of the various social units to which your scholars belong. 8. Try to instil and train the sense of self-respect, strengthened by faith in the nobility of life. Teach the children to abhor the vulgarity which disfigures so much of English life. 9. Prepare your scholars, as they grow up, to exercise self-discipline and self-criticism. Yet do this so wisely and gently that they may not learn to distrust and despise themselves, and thus become too fearful to run the risks that moral courage involves. Remember that in these days of crowds moral courage is the most indispensable, yet the hardest of virtues. 10. Such detailed exhortations can only single out a few of your preoccupations, and such as lie beyond the more technical and external ends that will be set before you. In all these great matters, make the fullest and most reverent use of the Bible. Utilize its place in the schools, and still more in the reverence of the English people, for all you are worth. The future of the people depends upon the living inspiration which comes to it for all purposes of life from the Book of books. Enough has been said to show that your devotion to the service of national education should above all be an act of personal consecration to Christ and to 155 The Ideals of National Education the supreme interests of His kingdom. Under this joyous influence it should become a life-long enthusiasm, drawing out all the powers of your being in sustained and harmonious activity. It is yours, each one of you, to give your best to main- taining the Christian character of the nation, to developing the spiritual, moral, and intellectual powers of coming generations which are the true wealth of the nation. May it be given to you by God to play a noble part in realizing the vast possibilities of a Christian civilization which reveal themselves to our spiritual vision, and in averting the manifold perils which endanger the fulfilment of our highest hopes ! 156 IX The Service of Women l I DO not propose to address to you any very lengthy remarks in seeking to illustrate and to emphasize the solemnity of this great act of your dedication to this noble service. We are gathered together in the presence of the representatives of Christ's Church. You are here in the midst of your companions of this growing and successful community. Especially we welcome here to-day those who have borne long years of true and faithful service to the Church in obedience to the instructions which this Order of Deaconesses has imposed upon them. I need hardly remind you that the work of women is growing in range and importance throughout the community. The sphere which women fill will be enlarged according to the general estimation in which they are held by the community, and according to the capacity that God has entrusted to them, which 1 Address delivered at the Consecration Service of the Birmingham Convocation of the Wesley Deaconesses, May 24, 1909. 157 The Service of Women happily, in these days, will gradually overcome all restrictions that are contrary to their nature and contrary to the well-being of the community. It is fixed also by the special needs to which women alone can minister, or to which they can minister with greater influence and success than men. In the Church of Christ the sphere of women has always been recognized, and most fully just in proportion as the Spirit of God has been actively and powerfully manifested in the Church. It was the great apostle, St. Paul, who taught us that 'in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female.' Every great spiritual revival which has brought about the emancipation, the uplifting, and the fresh anointing of men, has been attended by a similar influence, and a like emancipation, among women. Whenever such great movements of the Spirit have taken place, whether in apostolic times or other of the successive ages of the Church, upon that great inspiration there has always followed a period when practical service has been organized after the example and under the influence of the great leaders of the new devotion, the recipients of the fresh experience of God in Christ. We think of such organizations and of their attempts to combine spiritual enthusiasm with order and 'method. The success of their endeavours has been determined by the depth and persistence of a 158 The Service of Women great spiritual inspiration, and by the general con- ditions, spiritual, moral, and social, under which such great organizations have flourished. Now, we may safely say as to all these great efforts that the influence of the Church is truly prophetic. When the Spirit of God comes with mighty power upon the Church, and when, as the result of His activity, great spiritual, moral, social, and even public changes inevitably take place, then we may see in these special movements and results the heralds and harbingers of a time when the standards, the inspirations, and the in- fluences set forth by them will have passed into the general standards of mankind, and will be permanently appropriated as part of the order of a divinely guided progress. I cannot venture to say much to you either upon the work of women in the Church in general, or upon your service in particular. Its principal aims have been brought before you in the address to which you have just now listened. It is obvious that the sphere of Sisters and Deaconesses must specially be found wherever there are women and children who need their help. I would, however, go further and say that wherever sympathy, devotion, tact, and the power to focus high and holy influence in sympathetic and personal contact with individual men and women are called for, there the ministry 159 The Service of Women of women can be carried out to the glory of God and the salvation of men with pre-eminent success. I need hardly point out to you that the great qualities by which, under God and the inspiration of His Holy Spirit, your work can successfully be done, are the qualities first of all in your youth, of a true and deep, unfailing and untiring sisterliness. By-and-by, in that future when you will have added, by God's blessing, not only the word 'True,' but also the word ' Faithful ' to your badges, then perhaps you may exchange the gifts of sisterliness for those of motherliness towards all with whom you come in contact. Now remember and I would urge the Church as a whole to remember that your work has an original stamp. You are not intended to relieve the ministry of all its drudgery, to be the servants of ministers, doing things they ought to do themselves. Nor are you intended by your service to drive out the voluntary work of the members of Christ's Church, and thus to stimulate laziness and self-indulgence. I do not think you need to be told this so much as the community as a whole, and I venture to hope my words may reach some members of that community outside, in order that your work may be stamped, in the presence of the Church, with its true features as having its distinct individuality 160 The Service of Women as being a divine extra of the Church, and not merely an official substitute for those natural forms of service and redemptive activity which must be free and full wherever real and vigorous spiritual life is found. Your service is to be for every one of the dis- tinctive purposes of the kingdom of God. We have rightly and truly singled out its individual feature, the message of personal salvation through Jesus Christ, upon the reception of which your own calling rests, and which you carry with the glad and happy tongue of those who have 'tasted and seen that the Lord is good.' Yet what is distinctive of your work lies behind the message of evangelism, and is necessary to the success of that message. You have to help people, overwhelmed with sordid care and gross temptations, to overcome evil and choose the good. You have to bring, as naturally as possible, as unostentatiously as you can, at the critical moment of countless lives, help and comfort which may make all the difference between shipwreck and the safe reaching of the haven of peace and victory. You have to extend a friendship to those among whom you work that will enable weak and inexperienced people to realize at the moment when the powers of heaven and hell are fighting in them, that they can be enabled, through your human sympathy, to find a divine strength in which they may range L 161 The Service of Women themselves on the side of God and Christ, of the angels and the saints. Some of us have a knowledge of what these critical moments are in our crowded populations the moment when sore sickness invades the family; the moment when the gaunt spectre of unemployment darkens the door ; the moment when the family which has made a brave fight for respecta- bility, for temperance and integrity, is about to sink irrevocably into the abyss. It is spiritual and moral succour in the moments of these crises of human tragedy that counts so inestimably, if we did but know it ; it is just at that moment, and for that purpose, that your help is most essential. I would have you to reflect most earnestly upon the close connexion between your service for the Church and those primary objects of the State for which statesmen, philanthropists, and social reformers are coming to care as they never cared before. It is for you, in many ways, if you are equal to the task, to assist the mother to realize the standard of motherhood and the responsibility which rests upon her, and to try to give to many who have plunged into these holy relations without adequate preparation and solemnity, something of fitness to discharge their paramount duties. It is for you to assist to strengthen the idea and the realization of home, threatened in many cases by disintegrating 162 The Service of Women conditions which tend almost entirely to destroy it I will humbly suggest to you that you would be wise to enter, if possible, into the closest relations with the wider movements of Sunday-school reform. You will find here and there in your ranks just the workers who are needed to carry out the beautiful ideas of the Cradle Roll, to welcome the little child as it comes into the world, to bring the influence of religion to bear upon its first and earliest days, and at once by your care to prepare the child for the school, to strengthen and inspire the mother, and, by your interest in them, to unite the whole family to the Church. I would not forget to urge upon you to meditate deeply, to study carefully, and then to work sympa- thetically, as far as you have opportunity, upon the problems of adolescence, and especially to help the girls who come within your range, and who, at the time when impulse is strongest and knowledge of the world is weak, pass out into all manner of temptations to scenes where everything that is precious to their girlhood and womanhood is often threatened, and may be destroyed before they know what it is to have the restraining, guiding, uplifting influence of a wise, refined, devoted Christian woman. You will see at once that your supreme method and resource is just what I will venture to call 'the 163 The Service of Women genius of friendship.' You will succeed just in so far as in all your plans, spiritual, moral, intellectual, and even physical, you are prepared ungrudgingly, with unwearied heart, mind, and power of adaptation, to be the friends of those among whom you work. Your service must not be mechanical or stereo- typed. It must be individual in its thought and in its sympathy. It must not represent the patronage of the Church from above to those who are below, nor even the somewhat superior bounty of the dis- penser of alms. It must be human, it must be sisterly. Above all, be sure that every part of your work is quite thorough and quite sincere, that no one can question the integrity and directness of purpose with which you minister to the ordinary wants of mankind. Now, with regard to the special dangers incurred in your work. The greatest is that of becoming mechanical. It is very much the same sort of danger as that to which ministers are exposed, and is to be met chiefly by unfailing consecration. Whatever you do, guard the sacred moments of preparation for the work of every day. Go out to the many tasks which will await you having once more entered into allegiance to and fellowship with your Lord, and having used this Book l which we have presented to you, not merely as your great weapon for work, 1 The Bible. 164 The Service of Women but as the great storehouse of refreshment and guidance for your own heart. Education is another important matter. I would wish you to have always at hand some informing book, not too closely related to the needs of your work, for the refreshment of your mind. You must not become a drudge, uninteresting to everybody ; you must let your outlook be wider than your work. Whatever you do, keep your freshness, and, so far as it is in you to determine the matter, try to give definiteness of range to your work, both in the area which it covers, and in the societies which it creates, or to which it ministers. You have dedicated yourselves to God ; you have been accepted and consecrated by the Church ; and yet you have not placed yourselves under what are known as religious vows. That marks a total differ- ence of relationship and outlook, in your case, to life as a whole, to the Church, and to your influence upon the people. You belong to human life do not suppose that your special calling in any way separates you from it ; you belong to the Church, not as a separate Order in it, but as a representative of its most sympathetic and devoted service; and you belong to the people you are not separated from them by the halo of an artificial saintliness. Never admit, even in the moments of weakness, that 165 The Service of Women spirit which has attacked all orders in Christ's Church throughout history, tempting you so to magnify your office that you separate yourselves from the Christ who calls you, from the Church which gives you its fellowship, and from the people to whom you are belonging in the utmost fullness of a natural and human sympathy. Magnify not your distinction from all of these, but your oneness with them. Use all the great opportunities that are given to you. Move with the times so far as womanhood is concerned. While keeping out of controversies, lift up your work to that level on which it profits by enlargement of scope and range, and by the recognition which society affords you. You have a great work as great for the com- munity as for the Church, as great for the people as for both. May Go4 bless you with health and strength to be used in the service of your Lord ! When you come to His table, may He feed you upon His body. May He enable you in all your ministry to bear about you 'the marks of the Lord Jesus/ and to show the power of His resurrection in a Spirit-filled life which enables men to 'see your good works, and to glorify your Father who is in heaven.' 166 X The Church and Social Problems 1 IT is my great privilege, as President of the Wes- leyan Methodist Union for Social Service, to offer a hearty welcome to those who have come fresh from the Commemoration of the Passion and Resur- rection of our Lord, to spend Easter Week in studying the social principles of Christianity and their appli- cation to some of the most pressing problems of the times. In no place could we so fitly meet together for this great object as in the Wesley Memorial Church at Oxford. Here, above all, we are inspired by the memory of the ' Godly Club,' which associated earnest inquiry into the meaning of the Christian religion with fearless and devoted pursuit of its practical beneficence. From the fundamental con- viction that the Christian life is to be sought in God that it may be manifested on earth, sprang the desire after and the capacity to receive those deeper 1 Presidential Address delivered to the Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Union for Social Service at Oxford on April 13, 1909. 167 The Church and Social Problems experiences of grace which created the Methodist revival. The new fellowship with the crucified, risen, and spiritual Christ was indissolubly bound up with the restoration to its place of the example of Him 'who went about doing good,' and with the accept- ance of the supreme principle of His life, ' It is more blessed to give than to receive.' Because of this vital union of evangelic experience with social practice, we have opened our proceedings by the celebration of the Lord's Supper, not only as a solemn avowal of our belief, but as a means of renewing and deepening such union with Christ as will enable us to serve His redemptive purpose to the utmost of its meaning for mankind. Naturally, therefore, the first subject to occupy our attention is that of the relation of the Christian Church to the social problems of our time. The distinctive feature of the present age is the new prominence that is given to social questions, and the more thorough-going way, both intensive and extensive, in which they are handled. It is true that the social prospect is now and again blotted out from view by sudden storms of international suspicion and warlike passions, or swept by the tidal wave of anti- social reaction. These adverse influences, however, are short-lived. Such paroxysms are violent, but for that very reason they are passing. What, by God's 168 The Church and Social Problems blessing, will prove permanent is our sense of shame for existing social evils, and the growing vision of the possibilities of social redemption that are within our reach. A yet more distinctly marked peculiarity of our age is that social problems are approached by means of legislation and administration. Never, indeed, was private enterprise more active. Yet the more adequate it is in conception, and the more efficient in its efforts, the more steadily conscious it becomes that its complete success must depend on great organic reforms, touching the constitution of society as a whole, and carried out by the will of the people. Private action creates standards which, as they come to prevail, must secure public expression and safeguards. On the other hand, democracy is beginning to feel its feet. Every stage of its growth is marked by a development of social consciousness, and of the State as its embodiment and instrument. Man's collective triumphs over nature beget the confidence of similar victories over social evil, and still more over social wrong. Men seek to go down to the causes of evil instead of palliating their results ; they perceive that the task is too great to be undertaken spasmodically by sympathetic groups here and there. It must be dealt with by the nation and ultimately by mankind. 169 The Church and Social Problems Not only well-being is at stake, but even race- preservation. Thus social idealism and 'the present distress ' join hand in hand in enlarging the functions of the State, not only as the guarantee of individual freedom, but also because of this and in order to it, as the instrument of universal co-operation. The new temper affects all parties in the State. Of course there are important differences of outlook. Many accidental circumstances and some unworthy motives make social legislation frequently contro- versial But the social demands of the nation are so strong that all parties are forced in some way to recognize them. Temporary defeat becomes, there- fore, but an incident of progress, as has been seen lately, for example, when the House of Lords, after its contemptuous rejection of the Licensing Bill, penitently passed the Exclusion of Children from Public-houses without a division. The advance of public sentiment can be measured both by what it attempts through Government legislation and also by the measures which are passed by universal consent. This new attitude towards the State as the agent of social reform has only been reached in this country late, and after a long struggle. The ideal of personal liberty is a great one, and has had much to do in shaping what is best in our national character. It has been established by stupendous efforts and I/O The Church and Social Problems sacrifices. Its maintenance, however, like that of many other great principles, has not been without much incidental loss. In particular, it has caused a rooted dislike to realize through State action many vital conditions of well-being which private action is powerless to secure. In England the extension of the activities of the State has been due, for the most part, not to the demand for efficiency, but to the passion of humanity. And humanity, as a powerful motive in the national life, is the child of the Methodist revival. It could not but be that such a spiritual movement should have such consequences, and that they should extend far beyond the range of its most decisive influence. The great experience of the grace of God in Christ turned the truth of God into the ideal of human conduct, fused faith and sympathy. The very individualism of the appre- hension of God as Love brought home the univer- salism of the gospel, established righteousness and mercy as the supreme ends of God's universal dealings with mankind. The new sense of union between God and man enveloped man in the fires of the Divine Love. The new witness of sonship made those who received it the filial agents of the Divine Fatherhood for all its ends in the world. The sinful objects of the Divine Love were invested with a new sacredness because of the unlimited 171 The Church and Social Problems possibilities of grace towards them. Moreover, reflection on the meaning alike of the Incarnation, of Redemption, and of the Spirit has, in due course, justi- fied and even necessitated, on rational grounds, the humanitarian breadth which first came to sympathies deepened and enlarged by the love of God. It is impossible to exclude any faculty, interest, or re- lationship of man from the sphere of a salvation of which the human Christ, the reconciling Cross, and the quickening Spirit are the inseparable factors. Hence all abstract doctrines of spirituality must give place to the concrete reality of the gospel. God is transcendent in the infinite grace of His holy, righteous, and merciful love. Man finds the tran- scendence of spirituality only as he becomes one with that love in its purity, its universality, its sacrifice! and its untiring energy. Spirituality raises men into the life of God that they may realize His kingdom on earth in all its meaning and consequences. The life of holiness consists in union with our Father who is in heaven, and its expression is in the faith and furtherance of the supreme ideal, 'As in heaven, so on earth.' Hence while the first concern of evangelical religion must be the establishment of true relations between God, in Christ, and the indi- vidual man whom He redeems from sin, yet for that very reason no limits can be assigned to the 172 The Church and Social Problems social application of the life and truth thus divinely received. Spirituality is more than humanity by the whole content of its filial response to God. The life of the Spirit, even in its human manifestation and application, is vastly wider than the realm of political and economic relations. Yet the manward expression of spirituality is in humanity. The truth and fullness of a man's life in God may be tested by the height and breadth of his ideals for man. Those who dwell in God come to share and to act upon His purposes of love in their ' breadth and length and height and depth.' Social reform as a material result cannot, of course, be identified with the kingdom of God. Yet the impulse to effect it is an essential feature of the spiritual life which manifests on earth the love of our Father who is in heaven. If this be true of the individual Christian it is equally so of the Church as a whole. The standards and influence of the Church as ' the company of all faithful people' cannot be lower or narrower than those of the individuals of which it is composed. The Church exists as the fellowship of those who hold the faith in common for united service in the world. Its office is to preserve, to inculcate, and to express the truths, principles, sympathies, and aspirations which grow out of the revelation of God our Saviour. 173 The Church and Social Problems While the weight of average humanity within it may often cause its corporate influence and action to fall below the level of the saints, yet its ideals, as authoritatively set forth, must interpret the mean- ing of the gospel by conforming to it at all costs. Its spiritual and social witness must be greater than that of its individual members if it is to train and inspire heroic spirits for the service of God in the world. These must be considered as the recognized exponents of its life, and not as brilliant departures from it. They must be able to count upon its sup- port. The Church must standardize its conduct by their shining examples. Nay, more. The Church as a great missionary agency urges its heathen converts, at all risks, to become the witnesses and pioneers of a Christian civilization. It can only aim at such results abroad so long as it is animated by a like spirit at home. The clearest evidence of spiritual decay is the decline of the heroic temper in the Church the inability and unwillingness to offer anything but the commonplace to God. That Church is doomed which will not rally to the support of its most courageous spirits in their warfare for the kingdom of God. If all this be true, it disposes at once of all a priori limitations of the functions of the Church where the interests of humanity are concerned. We 174 The Church and Social Problems cannot restrict the Church to the narrow limits of voluntary enterprise. That would be to exclude it from participation in the forward march of the nation, would confine it frequently to the sphere of the second-best, and would multiply occasions of dispute between it and the nation as is unhappily the case, at present, in regard to elementary education. Such a Christianity would, under the conditions of modern life, rest upon its humane achievements in the past, instead of multiplying them in the present. It would be the last refuge of a receding past, and not the herald of a higher and larger future. Nor can we confine the Church, on all occasions, to the exposition of principles, leaving its individual members to grope after their applications. The worth of a principle is measured by what we are prepared to venture on its behalf. A principle is a principle of action. The Church must never so treat a principle as to reduce it to imbecility, and thereby to involve itself in hypocrisy. An institution which was guilty of such practice would be the most untrustworthy on earth. It will not avail to reply that our Lord confined Himself to the revelation of principles and took no cognizance of the affairs of the State. In the first place, it is not true. His purification of the temple shows that there may come a time for The Church and Social Problems public action, and even for punitive action, when the enforcement of spiritual principles requires it. His injunction, ' Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's/ must have its content continually revised as the connotations of ' Caesar ' and of the things that are his are transformed and enlarged. In so far as the statement is true, it must be interpreted in the light of our Lord's immediate task, and not of a hard-and- fast abstraction. The first necessity was the revelation of the body of principles by which all ages are to be guided. Our Lord's abstention from action furnishes our equipment for action. Unless we are prepared in all respects to equalize His action and ours, His age and the present, all such deductions must be fallacious. Principles differ from rules, and fidelity to a principle involves flexibility of method in giving it effect. Hence there is no valid ground for denying that the Church, as a whole, must be held generally bound to promote those great social ends which it is the duty of individual Christians to seek. Directly, therefore, it is realized that many ends that are indispensable to the Church can only be secured by the effective co-operation of the law, and that social reform is becoming the concern of the nation, and not merely of Churches and voluntary societies, it becomes clear that the Christian Church, as such, cannot evade the duty of bringing its influence 176 The Church and Social Problems to bear upon the State in order to secure the preva- lence of Christian ideals and of the Christian temper in the national life. Yet it needs but little sagacity to point out the risks to which such action is exposed. The Church may sink to the level of a worldly institution, alternately becoming subservient to or seeking to dominate the State. It may become involved in the various entanglements of party strife. It may surrender the purity of its ideal witness and accommodate itself to the exigencies of secular affairs. It may lose the spiritual temper in handling temporal issues. It may sacrifice the transcendent concerns of religion in securing for it immanent expression throughout the whole range of human conduct and relations. It may thereby lose its comprehensiveness by the subconscious substitution of a political for a theological creed. Finally, it may defeat its own immediate objects by treating public questions with impracticable enthusiasm instead of with business capacity. Let all these dangers be admitted to the full. Yet the true way to avoid them is not by negations of thought or abstentions in practice. We cannot protect our ecclesiastical premises from the evil spirit by keeping them ' empty, swept, and garnished.' Nothing can be worse than the supposi- tion that what is said in church is not to be treated seriously outside, or that men should be allowed to M 177 The Church and Social Problems pass their lives in swinging backwards and forwards between totally incompatible principles of action in Church and State, without the inconsistency being brought home by the prophetic witness of the Church. The remedy must be found in a great increase of spirituality, and of spirituality not as a negative restriction but as a positive and living principle, which shall shape all our actions and solve all our difficulties by the energy and organizing power of its more abundant life. In short, the Church must more fully realize the supernatural in order to deal with its growing tasks. The evangelic spirit, in its fullness, must supply both the inspiration and the safeguard of all its social effort and public activity. The first essential is such an entire surrender to Christ as will put all faculties, relationships, and interests whether social, economic, or political unreservedly into His hands for the realization of His kingdom in us and around us. This being effected, the way becomes clear for us to draw all our principles of action in every sphere direct from Him. The Church must be Christ-centred and Christ- inspired. If this be so there can be for us only two principles of continuous action, ' Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength,' and, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as 178 The Church and Social Problems thyself.' Together these raise us above a self-centred life whether personal or ecclesiastical and make for each one of us and for the Church ' Mine ' equiva- lent to ' God's and Ours.' In combination they make righteousness and mercy the two supreme considera- tions in every province of human life. They substitute brotherhood for variance, co-operation for competition, self-sacrifice for self-seeking, as the root-principles of Christian action. They supply, therefore, the spiritual and moral conditions of all material progress, the tests by which both the present state of affairs and all proposals to change it must be judged. Practicable reforms must be judged according as they manifest and apply such a spirit of fellowship as will go towards securing for all the indispensable conditions of spiritual, human, and progressive life. According to this ideal, none is to be sacrificed as a victim and none is to be pampered as a favourite of fortune. The material must be growingly subordinated to the spiritual, the elemental must be moralized, the selfish must be transformed alike by social affection and by social requirement. Each member of the community must be inspired by the spirit of dutifulness, which will make him a willing and conscientious contributor to the common weal. The ship of the community must carry no idlers or mutineers. It is clear that such must be the governing ideals of a truly spiritual 179 The Church and Social Problems Church looking out upon the world of human life. To take any other view would be to deny the significance of outward life, and this may be either Brahmanism or Buddhism, but not Christianity. If this be the spirit in which the Church approaches the social questions of the times, the dangers with which we are threatened will not arise. Its whole attitude will then be too unworldly to fall into the various degradations of temper and confusions of judgement into which particular Churches sometimes fall, and which, still more, are feared for them. On the contrary, it may be objected that from such a body of principles no practical guidance can be given to individuals, and no effective influence can be exerted by the Church in regard to social reforms carried out by the State. To this our answer is that the fuller unfolding by the Church of these social prin- ciples as an essential part of the content of the gospel would do three things that are of utmost moment. In the first place, it would establish and fulfil the prophetic office of the Church. It would make clear that the Church is called not merely to counsel individual souls, and to witness to eternal realities, but that it is commissioned to set forth the truth which it has received as the spiritual foundation of society, the guide to its progress, the law, which condemns both transgressions and shortcomings. 1 80 The Church and Social Problems Men cannot with consistency both lament the un- spirituality of the age, and at the same time with- hold from it those spiritual principles of social action which are necessary both to illuminate and inspire it. The Church of Christ is called to supply the spiritual conditions upon which social reform may be securely based, In the next place, it would furnish a standard of judgement and an incentive to action to the members of the Church. Individual Christians need to be taught more constantly and effectively that there is no sphere of life that is not subject to the law of Christ, none where spiritual and moral considerations can be left out of account or reduced to a subordinate place. They must learn the inclusive and concrete character of a spirituality which holds the world- supremacy of Christ and the all-pervasive energy of His Spirit. There must be a Christian instruction in regard to the duties and ideals of citizenship, as of every other relationship which God has ordained for the manifestation of His glory. The truth must be brought home that anti-Christian conditions are the result of the collective will, and that all Christians are bound so to use their individual influence and voli- tion as to transform this collective will till it accepts the standards of Christ. And lastly, the steadfast enunciation of the social principles of Christ will supply the Church with the basis for corporate 181 The Church and Social Problems action, when called for in regard to the affairs of the State. To begin with, a truly prophetic ministry will destroy all possibility of claiming mere institutional authority, such as has disfigured the history of the Church when priestly claims have been substituted for prophetic witness-bearing. In the next place, it will limit the action of the Church to cases where, in its clear judgement, the interests of the kingdom of God are at stake. It is clear that such action can only be taken when a consensus of opinion exists that a vital interest of the Christian religion is involved. The fuller enun- ciation and sincerer acceptance of Christian principles would in some directions multiply and in others diminish such occasions. At any rate, there could be no suspicion that the matter was determined by party considerations. On the other hand, it will secure that effective action shall be taken when necessary with the courage and self-denial of faith. There are times when parties and Governments merit the condemnation of the Church. The Church must no more quail before democracies or legislative assemblies than before tyrants. We cannot refuse to condemn a sin because it is national, or to secure righteousness because only the State can carry it out. We cannot abate demands 182 The Church and Social Problems for reform which we hold vital to the gospel because interested sections or parties throw themselves into conflict with us. We owe it to the State that in such crises the whole pressure shall not come from the world, the flesh, and the devil. For the salvation of the State, it is necessary that the Church should be fit to welcome and support an Isaiah in his crusade on behalf of God, righteousness, and humanity. But it is objected that Christian principles are for the voluntary acceptance of the Church, and that it is tyranny to apply them to the State. As to this, two things must be said. First of all, if Christian principles are to be so limited in their application, in many cases, they cannot prevail at all. Men's lives are passed in the great tissue of secular relationships. In them they are servants rather than masters. Only within very narrow limits can private standards prevail, except at the cost of martyrdom. That being the case, it is clear that voluntary agreements affecting social relations will never be made within the Church, or will be broken. This solution would, therefore, in most cases, leave the members of the Church agree- ing to mere sentiments when under its influence, and transgressing them, willingly or unwillingly, in every- day contact with the world. The other part of the objection impeaches the 183 The Church and Social Problems justice of all legislative reform from which a minority happen to dissent. On this view, progress becomes impossible. If lower demands may secure enactment, why not higher, as the moral consciousness of the nation becomes able to bear them ? If higher in- fluence be withdrawn, lower pressures will prevail. The changes that are essential to universal righteous- ness and humanity are in the sight of God as much in the eternal interests of those who appear temporarily to suffer by them as of any others. There need, therefore, be no hesitation to use legitimate influence in order to secure them. Undoubtedly there are differences of view in regard to many matters of social reform. These are not to be simplified by being treated as caused by good-will on one side and ill-will on the other. The seductions of party will not always account for them. Differ- ences of temperament and experience, a differing calculus of the elements and probabilities that are present in the case, differences as to the means of reaching agreed ends, all play their part. It is well that all these facts should be recognized, and should bring both comprehensiveness and caution to the spirit in which the Church, as a whole, approaches the social problems of public life. The Church must be careful not to confuse ends with means, though it must will the social ends of the kingdom of God so strongly 184 The Church and Social Problems as to find means for giving effect to them. The Church must carefully weigh and examine before committing itself to corporate action in regard to public affairs in general and to social reform in particular. It must judge by the highest principles, and welcome the assistance of all men of good-will in reaching its conclusion. Above all, it must seek and depend upon the influence of the Holy Spirit to this end, as implicitly as it does for the conversion of individual souls. If this process be carried out the Church may trust that the results are given by God Himself. It will go forward in the service of humanity without shrinking. It will expect its members to show similar courage and detachment. The minority in its ranks, should one exist, will, if governed by the same spirit, no more resent being overruled on such an issue than on any other. Great human and moral causes will be rescued from the ravages of party spirit. The Church will then be recognized in days of social change as the champion of humanity in the might of God. Let us not only recite our creed but act in the faith of it. ' I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the prophets.' That living inspiration is still available. We have the promise 185 The Church and Social Problems of Christ Himself. ' Lo, I am with you always, even unto the consummation of the age.' Let us commend ourselves and the Church to His holy keeping. Then let us go forward, confident that agreement in the promptings of hearts consecrated to God and to the service of humanity will reveal to us His holy will for our service of His kingdom. 186 XI The Responsibility of Nonconformists in the University 1 COMPREHENSIVENESS is the distinctive note of University life, as is indicated by the very name. In order to fulfil this note it is not sufficient that every great subject should be taught, and every great mental discipline pursued. After a long struggle Nonconformists have secured admis- sion to the full privileges of the ancient Universities, with the important reservation, however, that the faculty of Divinity still remains exclusively in the hands of the Established Church. Despite this serious drawback, which is as harmful to the study of theology as it is to the complete catholicity of the University, the abolition of religious tests has secured a twofold end. In the first place, it has opened the Universities to the nation as a whole without restriction of creed. The inevitable conse- quence of this is that, with the exception already mentioned, the University becomes the intellectual home of all schools and tendencies of religious faith 1 An Address delivered to the Nonconformist Union and the University Wesley Society at Cambridge, on Sunday, Nov. 15, 1908. I8 7 The Responsibility of Nonconformists and philosophic thought. Henceforth each is called upon and is enabled to make its distinctive contri- bution to the collective mind of the nation. Each, moreover, in its turn is exposed to the influences of all the rest, so that the free exchange of thought in an intellectual atmosphere and in close personal contact, should naturally tend to the destruction of all narrow provincialism and sectarianism of thought, and the substitution for it of a wide and generous catholicity. In this process of enlargement and com- prehension both intellectual and sympathetic Non- conformity has much to give and much to gain. It is needless to dwell at length upon the present position of Nonconformity in the national life. Numerically the Free Churches of this country repre- sent at least half the active forces of the Christian religion. Roughly speaking, there are said to be two hundred members of the present House of Commons who are connected with various branches of historic Nonconformity. The most momentous of recent political events has been the organization of a distinctive Labour Party in Parliament. Most of its outstanding leaders have received their training in one or other of the Free Churches. It is needless to adduce any other evidences of the present position and of the great influence of Nonconformity in the life of the nation. 188 The Responsibility of Nonconformists It is at least equally important to bear in mind the influence which Nonconformity has exerted, not only on the religious life, but on the general character and constitution of the nation since the Reformation. To begin with, the influence of Presbyterianism can hardly be exaggerated. If, for example, the Re- formation, so far as the Established Church is concerned, has meant vastly more than the mere denial of the jurisdiction and authority of the Pope, important as was that decisive act, it is largely due to the enormous influence from without of the Presbyterianism of the Reformed Churches of the Continent and of Scotland. Their influence from without profoundly affected the Reformation settle- ment in England. The influence of the great Re- formers, and notably of Calvin, is obvious not only in the history of the Westminster Assembly, but in the Thirty-nine Articles and in the balanced com- promise between Rome and Puritanism set forth in Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. This positive influ- ence, as distinct from a mere purging of gross abuses, exerted at the most critical period must be largely attributed to the pressure directly and indirectly exerted upon the Episcopal Church, and especially its statesmen, by the influence of the surrounding Presbyterianism. It is needless to enlarge upon the part which 189 The Responsibility of Nonconformists Independent Puritanism played in the great struggles of the seventeenth century by which political freedom was won, the Tudor and Stuart absolutism destroyed, and the main principles of our modern constitution once for all laid down. It is equally impossible to exaggerate the national influence of the Methodist Revival. In addition to its vast spiritual influence, more narrowly defined, and to its beneficent effect upon the moral life of the nation, Methodism evoked and fostered an enthusiasm of humanity out of which most of our great philan- thropic institutions and social reforms have arisen. At a time when the objects sought hitherto by private benevolence are being taken up on broader lines and with ampler powers by the State, it is needful to bear in mind that the new conceptions and efforts had their birth and their first tentative applications in the ideals and efforts of early Methodism. The services thus rendered to the nation by the main types of British Nonconformity stood in vital relations to their distinctive theological beliefs ; above all, to the religious experience and ideals that were bound up with their beliefs. Both the political struggles and the humane endeavours of Noncon- formists were due not to accidental causes merely ; in the case of Puritanism, for example, to the disabilities 190 The Responsibility of Nonconformists imposed upon it, and in that of Methodism to its close contact with the poor. They were the direct and necessary expression, in the sphere of national life, of the governing ideas of God, of man, and of their mutual relations which formed the bond of their religious and ecclesiastical union. Hence the national service of Nonconformists can only be understood in the light of their religious faith and their theological doctrine. The Puritan demanded liberty in the State as the correlate and consequence of the relation in which each man stood to God, who revealed in direct spiritual access to each individual an absolute sovereignty which will tolerate no earthly despotism. The claim of God required a free obedi- ence which no tyranny, however tempered, must be allowed to thwart. Freedom for the highest purposes involved freedom for all the purposes of life. In the same way, the Methodist enthusiasm of humanity sprang out of a lively and experimental apprehension of the universal and redemptive love of God in Christ. These fundamental principles of belief and springs of action moulded in both cases a great Theology which, while drawn from the Scriptures and in large measure derived from the earlier teachers of the Christian Church, took on a characteristic shape from the immediate influences of spiritual life. It may further be affirmed that the preservation 191 The Responsibility of Nonconformists of the effects upon the national character which sprang from these religious movements depends largely on the continued vitality and influence of the faith that gave birth to them. The life of a nation is only moulded by its historic past in so far as the principles which shaped it remain living. No doubt particular results and events of the past constitute the particular tasks and problems with which the nation has to deal at the present day, and furnish both the standpoint from which they are approached and the means of dealing with them. Yet if these are to remain, not as limiting and dead conditions, but as plastic forces shaping the present evolution of national life, it must be because the faith of the past still lives, and secures in the present complete expression and interpretation. Few will be found to deny that the national effects of Non- conformity, which have been described, need to be perpetuated. The freedom of the individual and the humane sympathies of brotherhood are equally precious, and in combination must give direction, not only to our religious, but to our political and our economic relations. Yet if this is to be the case, the influences upon which they depend must be preserved. This can only be if these become intel- lectually articulate an 1 command their proper place in the higher thought jf the nation. It is this necessity 192 The Responsibility of Nonconformists which defines the responsibility of Nonconformists in the University. The fault of the so-called Catholic movement in this country has been its fatal lack of real catholicity. Since Newman it has founded itself upon the canon of Vincent of Lerins, 'Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus.' No doubt, if we could discover what has been believed always, everywhere, and by all Christians, much light would be shed upon the meaning of the Christian faith, though even then it might prove almost impossible to disentangle the general agreements from the diverse forms in which they have found expression. There remain, however, two more serious difficulties. First of all, who are the * all men ' whose agreement and belief is to count ? Secondly, how is the authority to be consti- tuted which shall examine and decide upon the evidence that is produced ? Both these questions have been decided in the most arbitrary way, not only in past times, but in particular by the repre- sentatives of the Anglo- Catholic movement. Even if the canon were really available for practical pur- poses in the days of Vincent, what possible applica- tion can be made of it in the present time, when distinctive formularies abound, and when there is no general recognition of any one authority for ascertaining the sensus comrmmis of the Christian N 193 The Responsibility of Nonconformists world ? Yet this impracticable formula has been used to justify the ignoring of all great contributions to Christian thought and Christian life which have been made outside the pale of the Episcopalian Churches. The effect of centuries of proscription in the National Church has been that vital contributions to the national faith and to the enrichment of our religious history have been scarcely recognized, seldom studied, and often misunderstood. It is simply lamentable, for example, to find how little knowledge the most eminent leaders of the Established Church possess of the religious life, the theological beliefs, and the ecclesiastical history of the great Nonconformist Churches. All these vital matters, affecting one-half of the religious life of England, were entirely ignored in their University life and in their theological training. Such ignorance not only narrows the outlook of those who suffer from it, but occasions many pre- ventable misunderstandings, and postpones the advent of Christian union. This evil can only be overcome in the Universities. Here men are brought into the closest and frankest intercourse with one another at the most receptive period of their lives. Hence a great task is laid upon Nonconformist members of the University. They should remember that they are the trustees and interpreters of a great religious faith and tradition, by which the religious and 194 The Responsibility of Nonconformists national history of England have been largely shaped. It is theirs to secure that the meaning and ideals of the faith which they represent should be under- stood and appreciated by those who will furnish in time to come many of our national leaders both in Church and State. Yet this task must not be attempted in an aggres- sive or sectarian spirit. If Nonconformists are called to be teachers and givers, they are equally called to be learners and receivers. The old Catholic ideal has hopelessly broken down, owing to the narrowness of its conception and the intolerance with which it has been carried out. The plain facts of religious history are too strong for it. All sincere and spiritual minds recognize the characteristic signs of grace far and wide beyond the bounds of Episcopalian Churches. It is the task of our times to transcend the old differences and divisions in a great spiritual endeavour to realize a new and larger catholicity. The present age affords many advantages for undertaking this task. New spiritual influences of many kinds are at work in all the Churches alike and upon every section of Christian thought. A general transforma- tion in the abstract conceptions by which the universe is explained is taking place. The shattering of old forms of thought enables all men to apprehend a richer substance. The strengthening of the scientific 195 The Responsibility of Nonconformists spirit in its application to religious life and history affords a new basis of co-operation and forces upon all parties the revision of old results. The achieve- ments of exact scholarship in all fields of religious investigation are equally important. All branches of the Christian Church are confronted with the same practical tasks and problems. As the result of all these changes, old controversies have been largely superseded, or, if they survive, must be carried on under new spiritual and intellectual conditions. New tendencies are everywhere manifest ; new cleavages may possibly replace the old divisions. It is im- possible, for example, to study the Modernist move- ment in the Church of Rome, or the appearance of what is called the New Theology in this country, without recognizing the possibility that new stand- points may be adopted in the near future which will bring about new combinations. The rise of Pragmatism is only one sign among many that the period of transition through which we are passing will be attended by many changes in the philosophical outlook as it most closely affects the problems of theology and religion. It is certain that all these changes must necessarily cause the breaking up of the old isolation and the establishment of a wider and more intimate fellowship. Such fellowship will bring about the sharing of spiritual treasures on 196 The Responsibility of Nonconformists equal terms by Christians everywhere. Nothing that was essential in the historic witness of any of the Churches will pass away. It will remain, however, in a larger synthesis which will give fuller expression to the complete whole of Christian truth. Only as this intellectual process is carried on can Christian unity be effective. Neither sentiment nor practical co-operation is sufficient, although both these are important. In addition to both of them, and in large measure by their assistance, a deeper insight and a fuller comprehension of thought must be attained. Each great type of doctrine and spiritual tendency must make its contribution to this end. They must not remain apart or spend their strength in mutual annihilation. They must minister according to their several values to the attainment of this more adequate realization of the truth. For such efforts the time is ripe. One of the most cheering signs is the strengthening among Anglicans of the disposition to recognize the hand of the Spirit of God in the history and work of the Nonconformist Churches. This has been recently illustrated in the resolutions of the Lambeth Conference. It is for Nonconformists to make suitable response. Where should this be done more fittingly and effectively than in the Universities ? One other aspect of the subject must be named. 197 The Responsibility of Nonconformists The relation of the Christian religion and of the Churches to human society occupies at present a foremost place in public attention. We are coming to recognize that we owe to the State a strenuous and united attempt to realize a Christian civilization. The manifold evils of our present social condition weigh heavily upon our conscience and heart. The nation is passing from the stage in which it was deemed sufficient to attempt to palliate the effects of social wrongs and shortcomings by the voluntary endeavours of philanthropy. The responsibility of the State so to organize the life of the community as to secure the indispensable conditions of well- being, is coming to be accepted by all parties in the State. There is much difference, however, both as to means and ends. Surely it is one of the primary duties of the Christian Church to bring inspiration and guidance to the accomplishment of this work. As this call is heard with growing clearness, the long- obscured doctrine and promise of the kingdom of God is regaining the prominence that belongs to it both in the Old Testament and in the Gospels. To be the agent of God in bringing about the spiritual and social state which realizes and expresses His Fatherhood revealed in Christ and the brotherhood which springs from it, is seen to be the supreme end for which the Church exists. Moreover, the world- 198 The Responsibility of Nonconformists expansion of the last generation is teaching us that this mission must be carried out not merely on a parochial or national, but on a world-wide scale. The union of all Christian forces is essential to such a colossal undertaking. Happily the sacred enthusiasm of the Student Volunteer Movement has perceived this great truth, and is giving practical effect to it The Universities are, therefore, playing a great part in bringing about the reunion of the Churches and in applying the spiritual resources union conveys to the redemptive work of Christ throughout the world. In all this work Nonconformists, both in the Universities and in the larger world outside, should take a leading part. Throughout its history Non- conformity has stood in closest and most sympathetic relations to the people. We are of the people. This natural relationship should enable Nonconformists to be a connecting-link between the Church and the nation, interpreting the needs of the people to the Church and the ideals of the Church to the people. Further, Nonconformity has always stood for the sanctity and importance of the individual ; yet we have come to see clearly that the abstract individual neither does nor can exist. To the development of individuality social relations are necessary. So far from the individual and the social being in opposition they imply one another. At a time when much 199 The Responsibility of Nonconformists confusion of thought exists upon this subject, Non- conformists should play their part in bringing about a clearer understanding of the truth. They must protect the individual by far-reaching social trans- formation and by arousing individuality everywhere to take part in it. Democratic freedom is their fundamental political principle ; social enthusiasm the passion by which they must turn such freedom to practical account Lastly, Nonconformity has been distinguished by its emphasis on the duty of personal service. The members of its Churches have been expected to be workers. In particular, the Methodist revival organized a vast army of lay workers, and thus gave the first impulse to what has since become a most noteworthy development of religious and philanthropic life. During the last generation the Universities have been greatly moved by social enthusiasm. For all the reasons that have been named, Nonconformists are bound to take their share in the movements thus initiated. By dis- charging their duty to the full, they will at once serve the larger catholicity, secure the continued influence of all that has been most vital in their faith during the past, and assist in shaping a nobler destiny for the nation in the time to come. 200 XII The Relative Duty of the Church and of the State in Regard to Poverty l r ~[~"'HE question as to the relative duties of the 1 Church and the State in regard to poverty is obviously only part of the larger question of their general relations to one another and to the problems of humanity. The principles we adopt and the ten- dencies we discern in regard to the particular subject that is now before us are much more extensive in their range. It may turn out, for example, that the solution of the special problem that is raised in regard to poverty may so illustrate and enforce a state of mutual relationships and a course of mutual action as to produce a temper of the public mind which will necessitate the settlement of the Education diffi- culty on similar lines. In all such discussions it is impossible to isolate the problem. It is clear in this case, as in all others where 1 A Paper read at the National Council of Evangelical Free Churches in Swansea on March 10, 1909. 2O I The Church, the State, and Poverty disputed frontiers between Church and State are con- cerned, how the question arises. The primary object of the Church is the establishment of a universal order of spiritual well-being. The primary object of the State is to secure a universal order of social and material well-being. Yet neither of these orders can exist without the other. Moreover, there is an inner relation between the two. Spiritual principles demand the fullest and widest expression in social action, while social and political endeavours, even if deter- mined in part by lower and accidental motives, depend in the last resort upon spiritual ideals. It is evident that Church and State must be brought into close contact in regard to poverty, whether we understand by the term economic poverty, due to insufficiency of work and wages, or whether we understand the poverty of adversity, due to sickness, misfortune, invalidity, or old age. Historically, we shall see, it has always been so. Both Church and State have responsibilities towards the same persons, if for different ends. Unhelped poverty is, of course, a physical, economic, and political problem. Equally it is a spiritual problem. Its existence is a tolerated contradiction of the kingdom of our Father in heaven, whose Spirit not only prompts the prayer, ' Give us this day our daily bread,' but guarantees the answer, if His will be done 'as in heaven, so 202 The Church, the State, and Poverty on earth.' Speaking broadly, though the absence of personal riches is favourable to spiritual well-being, the presence of acute and unhelped poverty is hurtful to it. Above all, the tolerance of such unhelped poverty is destructive to the spiritual well-being of those who callously assume its necessity, idly despair of any remedy, profit by its continuance, or are un- willing to make the necessary sacrifices to secure its removal. Hence both Church and State are equally com- pelled, by their primary principles and interests, to deal effectively with poverty. What should be their mutual relations in regard to this great task ? The answer must be found, not by abstract speculation or in haphazard makeshifts, but by careful study of the course of evolution, as revealed in the history of the past and in the tendency of modern progress. Our investigation of the past must begin with the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. At the dawn of the Christian era the Empire was suffering from the economic impoverishment which inevitably follows great wars. Though enormous fortunes had been made by the few, the country-side was denuded, and a system of large holdings and of slave-labour had dispossessed the old peasant popu- lation. The cities and towns were congested by an excitable and demoralized army of the unemployed. 203 The Church, the State, and Poverty Distributions of corn maintained the popularity and safety of the Government, and relieved the outer physical distress. From that time onward for two centuries renewed prosperity set in. The establish- ment of peace enabled the resources of the Empire to be developed. Just and capable administration, the revision of taxation, and the carrying out of great public works diminished unemployment. Trade and benefit societies assisted the artisans, masters were in a measure responsible for their slaves. No duty to provide for the poor, however, was acknow- ledged by the State. Consequently no machinery existed for such a work, save so far as the corn dis- tributions were concerned. No public care was taken of the poor as individuals, whether unemployed, infirm, or aged. The rise of the Christian Church introduced a new temper and principle of action within the limits of its influence. A large proportion of its members were found among the poor. Within its fellowship the most intimate comradeship existed. The indi- vidual, as such, was invested with a new sacredness. The gospel of the Incarnation invested humanity with a new dignity. Hence the philanthropic temper was born. The Church organized a ministry of care for its poor and suffering members. As its influence grew, its charitable efforts were enlarged to embrace 204 The Church, the State, and Poverty those still outside the pale of its membership. Even- tually it inspired a new temper of humanity in Imperial law and government. When the Western Empire fell, the Bishop of Rome succeeded to the old Imperial influence. He received the homage accorded not only to his spiritual office, but to his position as representing the great city whose majesty overawed even the conquerors who destroyed the Empire. The Church became the educator and civilizer of new nations only slowly emerging from barbarism through the course of centuries. The forces which both asserted the authority of Rome and carried on its more humane activities were found in the religious orders. In so far as they obeyed the evangelical precepts they fed the hungry, ministered to the sick, and offered an asylum to the oppressed. So far as this country was concerned during the mediaeval period, the action of the State was limited to the repression of vagabondage by penal statutes, while the Church relieved distress and, incidentally, manu- factured beggars and paupers. The dissolution of the monasteries made an end both of the good and evil of this system. The State was forced to under- take new responsibilities towards the poor. In 1601 the first great Poor Law was passed. This Act, while enforcing wherever necessary and possible the liability of parents to provide for their children and 205 The Church, the State, and Poverty of children to provide for their parents, contained the following main provisions : (i) ' For setting on work the children of all such whose parents shall not be thought able to keep and maintain them ' ; (2) 'For setting on work all such persons, married and unmarried, having no means to maintain them, and who use no ordinary and daily trade of life to get their living by ' ; (3) ' For providing a convenient stock of flax, hemp, wool, thread, iron, and other ware and stuff, to set the poor on work ' ; (4) ' For the necessary relief of the lame, impotent, old, blind, and such other among them, being poor and not able to work.' It will be seen that the distinction is here set up between the infirm and the able-bodied poor, and that in regard to the latter the duty, if not the right, to work was established, and means were to be provided by which this duty could be fulfilled. It is impossible now to trace the steps by which the demoralization of the early part of the nineteenth century was produced. The decay of the old magis- terial power to fix wages, the prohibition of combina- tion to raise them, the exhaustion of great and almost unceasing wars, the pressure of excessive, protective, and unwise taxation, all played their part. Under such conditions the rise of the modern industrial system intensified the misery of the industrial workers. The State adopted a system of relief which, while 206 The Church, the State, and Poverty inadequate and ill-considered, supplemented wages, pauperized the population, and put a premium on improvidence. The severity of the new Poor Law of 1834 was essential if this state of things was to be remedied. Its main principle, that relief was to be made unattractive and its acceptance to be stigmatized and visited by disabilities, together with its abolition of out-door relief for able-bodied persons, formed a necessary stage in the emancipation of the industrial classes. But two immediate consequences necessarily followed. Firstly, the rise of trade unions for securing a living wage, with the repeal of the laws preventing such combinations. Secondly, a new task was set to charity. The Churches and voluntary societies formed under religious influence found an enlarged sphere in the relief of distress. The Evan- gelical Revival prepared them for this service by the quickening of humane sympathies, which, if they did not extend to the removal of the causes of degrada- tion, urged Christian men to mitigate their effects. The State was mainly occupied with the task of securing political emancipation and economic free- dom. The Church sought to protect its members from the hardships and reproach of legal pauperism, to mitigate the lot of the poor so far as voluntary charity and the maintenance of the established order of things permitted, and to discharge the 207 The Church, the State, and Poverty general duties of humanity so far as it understood them. The great campaigns which resulted in the passing of Factory Legislation, of the Elementary Education Act of 1870, and of the series of Irish Land Acts, not only extended the sphere of State activity but transformed the conception of its functions. The advent of democracy has completed this beneficent evolution. The State stands for the united citizen- ship of the country. Its duty is not merely to maintain abstract liberty and to enforce order. It exists to secure the indispensable conditions of social well-being. It has both the right and the duty to concert all needful measures for this end, and to restrict all individual liberty which interferes with it. Hence, so far as poverty in the strict sense of the term is concerned, it is the first business of the State to take all possible means for its prevention. Its primary policy must be to close the roads that lead to pauperism and not merely to alleviate its results. In carrying out this task a combination of courage and far-sighted wisdom is necessary. We must not lose the moral note of Christianity, nor throw away the permanent value of the individuality to which Christianity has made its appeal, and which it calls out and directs to the highest ends. But let it be remembered that pauperism is the extreme result 208 The Church, the State, and Poverty of a long process of misery and demoralization. It is not merely the consequence of individual wrong- doing or worthlessness ; it is also the symptom of social disease, the culmination of social wrong. Easy is the descent from under-employment to unemploy- ment, and thence to unemployableness. It is possible so to overweight men with hopeless conditions of life at the start, that courage, self-discipline, and deter- mination are crushed instead of being called forth. The results of unregulated competition are worse than those of the battle-field. They wound not only the individual combatant, but the home ; the babe in the cradle, nay, in the womb ; the child whose life is saddened by the ceaseless fear of destitution ; the mother who is crushed by the burden of an impossible task. All sink together to the abyss of those who have resigned themselves to defeat. Hence, while the State must bring reason and humanity to the relief of those who have been reduced to hopeless poverty, it must, above all, so improve the conditions under which vast masses of the population live that such poverty may be averted. It must secure adequate education and equipment for the work of life, must protect youth from the labour which demoralizes at the start, and leads eventually to the hopelessness of casual labour. It must take means to secure greater stability of employment, insurance for the reserves o 209 The Church, the State, and Poverty of industry, a living wage, provision for invalidity. It must provide means for dealing with the crises of trade depression. For those who are unworthy or unfit it must establish treatment that shall be at once disciplinary and remedial. Eventually, there- fore, the State treatment of poverty will be reduced to care for the sick, provision for old age, treatment of the unfortunate, and correction of the undeserving. Those who have watched the course of legislation in the present Parliament, or have read either the Majority or the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, are well aware that this is the trend of social reform at the present time. So far its ideals are not acutely controversial. All parties in the State are pledged to Social Reform. The conscience of the community is awaking to demand it. The crux of the question lies in the preservation of the sense of personal responsibility and of the stimulus to exertion, as the sympathy and care of the State grow both in the range and in the effectiveness of their operations. It is clear that this change of attitude and this increase of activity on the part of the State involve great changes in the duties of the Church in regard to poverty. The ambulance service of humanity will still be required ; but the calls upon it, we may well hope, will be reduced, and large tasks hitherto thrown upon the Church and private charity will become 210 The Church, the State, and Poverty needless, or will be undertaken by the State. It is unnecessary to illustrate this statement by particular examples. What, then, remains for the Church to do in regard to poverty ? Three things. First of all the Church must stimulate and guide the State by giving a specifically Christian direction to public thought and activity in regard to poverty. It must uphold and enforce the Christian ideal of humanity. The essential dignity and the spiritual possibilities of all men, the moral responsibilities of each, the brotherhood of love and service which should establish a true community in all relations these are primary articles of the Church's witness. We hear much in the present day, and rightly, of the demand for justice and not charity. But how shall we fix the standard of justice ? What is each man's due ? Only Chris- tian love can answer these questions, for it alone can inspire the passion of righteousness and exalt the standard of humanity, just as love only is the true meaning of charity. Such love is not only the offspring, it is the content of true religion. Without its diffusion all the evils which doctrinaires, econo- mists, and social experts fear will undoubtedly be brought to pass. Men will grow nervous of the tendency of social reform, or treat the burdens it imposes as a hardship. Those who receive assist- ance may pass from the inertia of hopelessness to 211 The Church, the State, and Poverty that of dependence upon the State. It is impossible to save the nation by any other way than that of true religion and morality. Except in so far as social reform is the last result of a spiritual and ethical inspiration, it carries within itself the potentialities of evil. But where such an inspiration is present, its healthfulness is preserved, and its incidental mis- takes will be minimized in practice and corrected by experience. Hence there is need, in an era of social reform, for the teaching and influence of a great prophetic Christianity, which will stir the State to adopt the highest ideals of humanity, will deepen and extend the sense of brotherhood, and will safe- guard the moral principles that are essential to sound progress. Political and economic principles are no more sufficient to guide the State than physical con- ceptions are adequate to explain the universe. Both alike must be governed by the higher truths, ideals, and relations to which the Church is the divine and abiding witness. The Church is called, however, not merely to inspire the State in its efforts to deal with poverty. It must also render to it active assistance. If administration is to be efficient in the future, increased oppor- tunities must be given for able and trained persons to co-operate with public authorities. The old idea that when public activity begins voluntary enterprise 212 The Church, the State, and Poverty may cease must be brought to an end. The admini- stration of education has in many cases derived great advantage from the association of voluntary workers with the practical work of local authorities. It is perfectly certain that such co-operation must be brought about if the relief of poverty is to be carried out with the sympathy, intelligence, and practical helpfulness that are necessary. The leading principles of the Elberfeld system may well be adopted and applied with modifications in this country, as has already been the case here and there. The Churches should supply trained workers for such assistance ; their appointment, however, not depending on de- nominational connexions, but on proved capacity. Indeed, the first step to be taken by the Churches, if they are to occupy a position of real influence in regard to poverty, must be to divest charitable agen- cies of all sectarian bias or propagandist purpose. Interdenominational committees should everywhere lift charitable relief high above narrow restrictions, sectarian competition, and interested motives. For, lastly, the Churches will still be called to supplement the action of the State in the service of the poor. However enlightened and efficient the State may become, various misfortunes will occur and needs will abound that cannot be dealt with, directly or indirectly, by public authorities. There will remain, 213 The Church, the State, and Poverty therefore, a wide field of ministry, which should be organized more thoroughly in proportion as Churches and other philanthropic bodies are relieved from the tasks with which, at present, they have to struggle. Yet the first business of the Church will be to demand and inspire such ceaseless efforts after a Christian civilization as will abolish the evils of poverty by a fellowship and co-operation which shall be co-exten- sive with the State, and lifted to the ideals that are embodied in the teaching and spirit of Christ. 214 XIII Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life 1 / pray not that Thou shouldest take them from the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth : Thy word is truth. As Thou didst send Me into the world, even so sent I them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they them- selves may be sanctified in truth. Neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on Me through their word ; that they may all be one ; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that tJiey also may be in Us : that the world may believe that Thou didst send Me. And the glory which Thou hast given Me, I have given unto them ; that they may be one, even as We are one : I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected into one ; that the world may know that Thou didst send Me, and lovedst them, even as Thou lovedst Me. JOHN xvii. 15-23. DURING the past twelve months it has been my official duty to travel throughout the length and breadth of the land, and to take part in the advocacy of many great causes evangelistic, moral, philanthropic, and social. I am deeply convinced, however, that the object which brings us together to-day is the most important of them all. The 1 An Address delivered at the Southport Holiness Convention on July 9, 1909. 215 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life personal pursuit of holiness is the indispensable con- dition of success in all the outer realms of Christian endeavour. Only as the Church of Christ is united in this great quest can it receive the power to dis- charge its ministry for the world. I rejoice, therefore, that at the conclusion of my year of office, I am per- mitted to take part in these meetings, and to bear my witness to this most important truth. We are met together for the promotion of holiness. Several general conditions must be laid down upon which our success will depend. To begin with, we must treat the Bible as our guide-book. Let me give you a simple illustration. I am hoping to leave for Switzerland shortly. With this object in mind, I have been studying Baedeker's Guide. As every one knows, it gives wonderfully complete information, not only as to every object of interest, but as to every route, road, and even path of the country with which it deals. The distinctive mark of it is, that it was written by one who has been there, for those who are intending to go. Each of these two parts of the description is important. To begin with, the descriptions rest upon direct experience. In the next place, they are intended to help the reader to repeat that experience. It is true that the descrip- tions of the guide-book may bring to us refreshment in hours of weariness, although we have no present 216 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life expectation of being able to travel. Such a use of the guide-book, however, only imperfectly fulfils its object, and even this inadequate use of it only brings us pleasure because we imagine ourselves to be in the midst of the scenes of which we read. Now, we cannot use the Holy Scriptures aright until we treat them as a spiritual guide-book. Their object is to set forth great spiritual experiences, and the way in which they have been reached, in order that those who read them may follow after and become partakers of the divine satisfaction they set forth. It is essential, therefore, that we should treat them in this way, and that they should not only exercise our thought and imagination, but that we should intend to go whither they lead. In the next place, we must do justice in thought and life to the comprehensiveness of true religion and of its treatment in the Holy Scriptures. Just as there are many routes to the Continent, so God has many ways of leading men to the promised land of spiritual life. We must not sadden and perplex sincere and godly hearts by any unreasonableness and narrowness, which contradict the great variety of God's dealings with men. The careful study of the Bible will save us from making this mistake. Again, the true pursuit of holiness will enable us to unify life, not by the suppression, but by the 217 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life reconciliation of all its interests. Holiness is not a mere negation, but a positive fulfilment and inspiration. It is inclusive of all that is true ; only exclusive of that which is false. Acetic acid will not make a saint. It is of the utmost importance to bear this in mind. The earthly order of things brings to us a stubborn challenge, and rightfully claims recognition. Let us beware of the risk to spiritual sincerity and unselfishness which consists in ignoring it. For example, we have all known those who have seen no danger to their own holiness in moving to a larger house, in setting up carriages and abandoning them for motor-cars as their earthly prosperity increases. Yet if some of us spend our strength in securing better housing and cheaper transit for the dwellers in a city slum, these men are sometimes apt to object that we have turned aside from the way of holiness to secularity. Yet it would be far better for us in the Day of Judgement that we had risked our own holiness, were this possible, upon the service of the least of our Lord's brethren, than in the pursuit of our own comfort and luxury. The life of holiness, therefore, must find room for all powers, interests, and relations under the inspiration of love to God and love to men. Once more, our pursuit of holiness must do equal justice to both sides of the divine life, its uplifting to 218 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life God, and its complete expression in the conduct that manifests Him to men. Of this twofold aspect of holiness, the Lord's Prayer is the perfect embodiment. It represents a spiritual exaltation to the heavenly and universal standpoint of our Father who is in heaven, yet it is equally concerned with the manifes- tation of His life and the fulfilment of His purpose in the world. ' As in heaven, so on earth,' becomes not merely the infinite aspiration of prayer, but the fixed principle of conduct. The great passage which has been read as our text will afford us sufficient guidance as to all the con- ditions that have been laid down. It is the central passage to be found in the New Testament on the subject of holiness. To begin with, it has the highest authority, that of our Lord Himself, as reflected by the beloved disciple. In the next place, it was uttered on the most solemn occasion, on the eve of the Passion of that departure to the Father which was to result in the sending forth of the Church. Further, it contains the fullest teaching on the subject in all its aspects that the New Testament contains. We must take a brief survey of its general teaching before proceeding to a closer examination of its most important elements. Our Lord prays for His disciples, 'sanctify them.' He has just described their distinctive spiritual calling and position. ' They 219 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.' Yet it is impossible for them of themselves to take up and maintain this position upon which their whole future depends. The Father must 'keep them from the evil one.' He must consecrate them to Himself; separating them from the world by a gracious act of appropriation. Their holiness as a quality depends upon, and exists for, their relationship to God. That relationship can only be created and sustained by Him. The element in which alone this sanctification can exist is ' the truth.' This is the atmosphere and environment of their spiritual being. The truth is revealed by God : ' Thy Word is Truth.' Yet, as the whole context shows, the truth consists, not merely in abstract propositions presented to the intellect, but is the whole world of spiritual reality which subsists in God and influences men by the energy of His Spirit. In short, it is made clear that the Truth consists in the whole range of living relations with God, with Christ, with one another, and with men, into which believers are brought by the Spirit. Hence the element of fellowship pervades the whole. The sanctification which separates from the world brings men out of the darkness and bondage of selfishness, first of all into fellowship with the Father, and, through that fellowship, into a new and heavenly fellowship one with another. In this fellowship lies 220 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life the fulfilment of personality for each one who enters into it. We are too much accustomed to think of personality as something which shuts us up with our- selves. Throughout this passage we have exactly the opposite teaching. The Father's life is fulfilled in the Son, and the Son's in the Father: 'even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee.' It is in this interpenetration that the Son glorifies the Father, and the Father gives His glory to the Son. So our Lord says, 'the glory which Thou hast given to Me I have given to them,' and its end is ' that they may be one, even as We are one ; I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected into one.' More- over, even this unity of the Church is not in and for itself, it has a mission for the world : ' that the world may know that Thou didst send Me, and lovedst them, even as Thou lovedst Me.' This is the life of the Spirit Personality is perfected by passing out of isolation into the communion of perfect life and love, in which the individual both loses and finds himself in the larger whole. This is the law of God's life. It is the law of ours as derived from Him and returning to Him again. Such are the general out- lines of this great prayer. The governing word of the whole is 'sanctify.' By adopting it our Lord takes over into the New Testament the highest and most distinctive feature 221 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life of the Old. Holiness was the watchword of the true Israel, their challenge to the world. All the processes of revelation and history had converged upon the two great truths of holiness and grace, which were en- shrined in God's covenant with Israel. The two are interdependent. The holiness of God is gracious in that, if it demands holiness from men, it bestows it upon them. His grace is holy in that its purpose is not to forgo but to fulfil the claims of holiness in men. Indeed, grace ceases to be grace except as springing out from holiness. It is the perfect holi- ness of God which makes His relationship to His people not a bond of nature, but a sovereign and loving condescension and election. The term holy is first of all applied to God. He is the Holy One of Israel. Originally this signifies His apartness. In His divine personality He stands above the world of nature and of man. He is not to be confounded with the greatest of its objects or the most marvellous of its processes and phenomena. He is its Creator and its Lord. It follows that He is apart from the gods of the heathen, with their various forms of nature-worship and idolatry. This apartness, however, consists in the supreme spiritual and moral perfection of His character. He is not merely the power to which men submit or the wisdom at which they wonder, but the unapproachable 222 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life purity which awakens all that is highest in them to worship and aspiration. Because He is thus holy He awakens awe, reverence, and humility in His worshippers. His service demands the highest spiritual and moral purity. Religion thus becomes a discipline, and not a degradation. The holiness of God lays down the meaning of the holiness of His people. In their case also the term signifies apartness. They are sanctified or made holy that is to say, they are separated from the world by God and to God. Such separation, however, must be in keeping with its divine source and end. Man, therefore, becomes holy in so far as he seeks and attains spiritual and moral perfection. This is the true purpose of religion. It is not merely a ceremonial ; it exists to bring about, and to express, community of heart, and life with God. To emphasize this great truth was the mission of the prophets. What the prophets enforced by teaching and exhortation the Levitical ordinances sought to impress by all the pictorial suggestiveness of ritual. This revelation of the meaning and obligation of holiness is the very heart of the Old Testament. Our Saviour here adopts and fulfils it as the per- manent note of His religion. His disciples are called to experience the sanctifying power of the all-holy God. He consecrates them to Himself by imparting 223 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life to them the excellences of His own character. Thereby they are raised from the life of the flesh into God's eternal life. They are separated from the world, not artificially or by their own action, but by the uplifting of a God-implanted life. That life manifests itself in triumphant warfare against sin and in the spiritual power which rises above it and casts it out. There is danger lest amid the distractions and material interests of the present age the distinctive note of holiness should be weakened or even lost. The whole life and work of the Christian Church depends upon this being preserved in all its teaching and throughout its life. We must not, however, allow ourselves to become abstract in our treatment of the subject. It is time to turn to the concrete teaching of the text. We are to be sanctified 'in the truth.' Sanctification is brought about and subsists in a fourfold relationship i. In the first place, to Christ 'I in them.' The whole of our Lord's finaL discourse and of His High- priestly prayer dwells upon and sets forth this great relationship. The teaching herein contained should be set side by side with that of St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, where the complementary and yet equivalent expression ' in Christ ' is used. We must consider carefully who the Christ is in whom believers thus dwell and who dwells in them, He is not the 224 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life Christ only of the earthly ministry, or of the Cross, or of the Resurrection, or of the Ascension. Both our Lord and His apostle set before us a Christhood which is completed in and through all these elements, and carries their full meaning and efficacy into His heavenly and spiritual life. It is the consciousness of this which gives the wonderful sense of satisfaction, peace, and power which marks the Epistle to the Ephesians. We are so united to the living Christ that all the influences of His life and death, of His resurrection and exaltation, flow ceaselessly through- out our being by His spiritual presence. He, our glorified Lord, is thus the sphere of our being, inspiring, moulding, nourishing, and satisfying all our activities. He is triumphant in the heavens, and His triumphant power enters into us. Sanctification is the direct and necessary result of the complete self-surrender which thus enthrones our atoning, spiritual, and all-victorious Lord in our hearts as the source and power by which we rise above the world and sin and death. 2. Further, the relationship by which holiness is caused and conditioned is that of sonship to God. The indwelling of Christ brings about this new relationship to the Father. 'I in them, and Thou in Me.' 'For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves may be sanctified in truth.' The P 225 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life glory of our Lord's consecration and obedience is not for Himself alone. It is on our behalf, in order that through His atoning work we may enter into the same relations with God that He Himself enjoys. He is, if the illustration may be permitted, a multi-millionaire who keeps nothing of His wealth to Himself, but shares it all with the very least of His brethren. Hence, through Him, the life of holiness is the life of sonship. It is inspired through and through by the spirit of trust, of dependence, and of joyful obedience. The boundless satisfaction of fellowship with our Father is opened up to us. With it comes the joyful sense of inheritance. With the experience of sonship, as St. Paul has taught us, comes the knowledge and enjoyment of heirship. Even sorrow and suffering are transmuted by our fellowship with the Father. Christ's indwelling enables us to enter spiritually into His relation to the world. All things are ours in Him and for Him. Hence the notes of joyousness, liberty, and power which mark the temper of the apostles, despite all the hardships of their earthly lot. 3. The glory of this experience is for the mutual fellowship of the Church. Its end is that they may all be ' one thing.' There is no attempt to narrow the Church or to cripple the free play of individuality within its borders. On the contrary, the boundless 226 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life meaning of the gospel can only be realized in a fellowship which is at once broad, free, and intimate. Yet the common experience of life in the Spirit triumphs over all that is self-willed and cross-grained. It makes the free unfolding of many-sided diversities tend to the expression and achievement of deeper and larger unity. The practical test of our holiness is in our relations one to another. The Church is the home and training-ground of love. Love has its proof, not in gushing sentiment, but in the generous contact of thought and concert of action which brotherhood in a common experience brings about. Filial love displays itself in the brotherliness which transcends all self-regarding distinctions and makes all that is individual minister to the greater fullness of common life. There is a spurious holiness which is separatist and censorious in spirit. True holiness is as social as it is spiritual. 4. Yet the social life of holiness is not limited to the Church. It has its mission to the world. Our Lord's prayer for His disciples is completed with the words, ' That the world may know that Thou hast sent Me.' The Church as a whole is Christ's evangelist. It proclaims His gospel, not only in word or even in deed,' but in the self-evidencing splendour of its heavenly life. In this last relationship to the larger life of humanity holiness has its complete fulfilment. 227 Holiness, the Fulfilment of Life What does all this mean, save this that the life of holiness reveals the supremacy of love ? of love in God, who gives Himself to us in Christ and takes us up into the inmost secret of His heart ; of love in us, who by His grace are enabled to live on earth as His sons, nay, more, the supremacy of love in human nature itself, which despite its selfishness has the infinite capacity of being won by the Church to the life and love of God. Hence, because the life of holiness is the life of love, it is raised to transcendence above the world and yet is endowed with lordship over it. It becomes pervasive in its attempt to transform all relations and interests till they serve its highest ends. It has the note of distinction and victory, being raised above all that is mean and vulgar in temper and conduct. The end of our pursuit of holiness is that we may reveal the glory of God's Fatherhood. He commits His love to us as a sacred trust. Our response to it is incomplete, save as we gain strength to manifest it to the world in all its breadth and length and height and depth. May the grace and power of this holiness be ours in Christ Jesus ! Amen. 228 XIV The World-wide Mission of the Christian Church l IT is with great pleasure that the National Council of the Evangelical Free Churches gathers for its Annual Meeting in Birmingham. The history of this great city calls to mind alike the struggles and the triumphs of the past. The foundation of its greatness was laid by the settlement within it of our proscribed ancestors. By their energy, strenuousness, and love of liberty they built a city whose history throughout the greater part of the last century was that of progressive civic ideals and of the champion- ship of the cause of freedom in Church and State. For Free Churchmen of this generation the city is associated above all with the revered memory and the great inspiration of Robert William Dale. Dale of Birmingham may almost be said to have embodied the highest ideals of modern Free Churchmanship. 1 The Presidential Address delivered to the National Council of Evangelical Free Churches in Birmingham on March 6, 1906. 229 The Christian Mission World-wide He did so by a rare combination of spiritual fervour and profoundly evangelical faith with masculine cha- racter, comprehensive grasp of great principles, and fearlessness in his application of them to all the problems and tasks of public life. A Christian politician, his Christianity contributed ideal, ethical, and social inspiration to politics. He sought to make them the manifestation of eternal righteousness in the affairs of time, and not the bitter or professional strife of mere party faction. Faithful to his principles, he was yet catholic in his sympathies. His influence transcended the narrow limits of denominationalism, enriched all the Churches, and won for him the esteem and friendship of many to whose ecclesiastical principles he was strenuously opposed. In all these respects he represented the positive, prophetic, and constructive spirit of Free Churchmanship. His depth and breadth of spirit set a standard for us alike of broad participation in the public issues of our time and of the great spirit with which that participation should be so carried out that even fidelity to principle may act in the end as a uniting and not a divisive force. Our regard for Birmingham is intensified because it nurtured and found a con- genial sphere for so noble and Christlike a man, thus showing that the city can be a suitable environment for the deepest and loftiest spiritual life. 230 The Christian Mission World-wide This is not the first visit of the National Free Church Council to Birmingham. A meeting was held here in the year 1895, under the Presidency of the lamented Dr. Charles Berry. On that occasion the Congress, as it was then called, took the first steps towards framing a Constitution, and appointed to the Secretaryship the Rev. Thomas Law, to whose organizing ability and devotion the Council owes so much. How great has been the growth since then ! It was in the following year, when the Council met at Nottingham under the Presidency of Hugh Price Hughes, that its Constitution was adopted. Until that time the movement had been practically without organization. The Congress had been merely an occasional assembly for the expression of mutual sympathy and for the discussion of great spiritual and social problems from the standpoint of the Evan- gelical Free Churches of this country. To Charles Albert Berry and Hugh Price Hughes the movement will ever owe an immeasurable debt for services which laid its foundation deep and true services rendered with such consuming devotion as to have shortened the days of those who so freely gave them. From these beginnings has proceeded a rapid and con- tinuous development, which has covered the whole country with local Councils, has multiplied our activi- ties year by year, and has united the whole in an 231 The Christian Mission World-wide organization at once so strong and so elastic as perfectly to combine central direction with local freedom. The National Free Church Council is now established as, in some respects, the most powerful and coherent spiritual organization in this country. The temper which has made this advance possible has been one of almost boundless good-will and magnanimity on every side. Above all, the progress of the movement has been due to the deeply spiritual aims and the intense evangelical spirit of those who have guided its councils from the beginning. By their union in this Council Free Churchmen are giving concrete expression to their ideal of catholicity. We are united in the prayer of Christ, ' that they all may be one.' We understand that our unity must have visible expression in the fellowship and service of earthly life. We are not content that it should be only a mystic secret hidden in our hearts, or a heavenly ideal reserved for the life to come. If it is this it will become more. Yet the source and inspira- tion of our union does not lie in any theory of the Church. It is incompatible with the belief that any particular form of ecclesiastical organization is exclu- sively divine. Its bond is in common faith in Christ, in discipleship to His mind, and in loyalty to His authority. Our common experience enables us to discern the presence and power of the Holy Spirit 232 The Christian Mission World-wide throughout all our organizations. It compels us to recognize the hand of God moulding all the great forms of historic Christianity which have sprung up in the past, to profit from the contributions which each has made to the interpretation and service of Christ, and yet to seek their closer union in a mani- festly catholic whole. Such an effort is, therefore, part of an endeavour to promote Christian sympathy and fellowship, which cannot ultimately be confined to the Free Churches alone. Profoundly as we differ in many respects from certain embodiments of Christianity outside the Evangelical Free Churches of this country, we long for the time when the causes of separation and estrangement shall have passed away, and when the whole force of Christian faith, hope, and love found throughout the community will be absolutely united in common effort for the realization of the divine life on earth, and for the overthrow of the enemies of the kingdom of God. We believe that what appears to outsiders as a merely negative protest on the part of the Free Churches is absolutely necessary if this deeper and wider catholic affirmation is ever to be brought about. We are relentless foes of any theory which identifies Christianity with a particular form of ecclesiastical constitution, or which unduly mag- nifies the office or prerogative even of the sacred 233 The Christian Mission World-wide ministry, because of loyalty to our experience of the deeper spiritual and eternal reality. We rejoice that in this nation we are called to represent the cause of Protestantism on its positive and constructive side. To us that great name stands for freedom alike in Church and State, for the infinite responsi- bility and power of each individual, for his direct and unmediated access to God in Christ. But we believe that Protestantism has yet to reveal the full glory of its spiritual meaning and comprehensiveness, and that the Evangelical Free Churches in union have been called by God to learn and to express this meaning as their great service to the Redeemer in the twentieth century. In a time when religious differences make them- selves felt in sharp controversy, both ecclesiastical and civil, it is well that we should comfort our hearts and arm our courage by reflection on the vast spiritual issues of our great conflict, and should re- member that the cause not only of God and truth, but, therefore, of real catholicity, may best be served for the present by means of difference and through the strain of controversy. No individual man, no separate Church, completely apprehends the abso- lute perfection of God in Christ, or adequately expresses His meaning and purpose in thought and endeavour. 234 The Christian Mission World-wide Our little systems have their day ; They have their day and cease to be : They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they. Yet we do not make nearer approach to the final comprehensiveness of catholic Christianity by be- coming nebulous in our thought and indeterminate in our affirmations. Our service to catholicity and union lies in the ever completer expression of the truth and life which are given us by God. We must seek the indispensable spiritual conditions of receiving and expressing divine truth and life by freely acting and reacting upon all the great influences of our times. Many factors which are essential to the final interpretation of Christ can only be so evoked and maintained as ultimately to secure universal recog- nition under the pressure of spiritual conflict. Hence we may with true catholicity rejoice in the reawaken- ing under controversy of many of those Free Church principles which in slack times had tended to fall into abeyance. But while we are faithful to the light given to us, and strenuous in contending for our principles, we must combine with that spirit the deepest humility, patient gentleness, and, above all, the love which delights to recognize Christian brotherhood beneath theological and ecclesiastical differences. Let us be 235 The Christian Mission World-wide swift to discern and reverence goodness wherever it exists. Let us ' sit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus/ so that we maybe able in and with Him to recognize, despite all differences, and to rejoice in a common divine sonship and loyalty to Christ struggling for expression through the imperfect creeds and stereo- typed efforts which human limitations impose upon us all. The supreme concern of the Free Church Council is the apprehension and proclamation of Christ. It is impossible to exaggerate what a true and far- reaching revival of the spirit of apostolic Christianity would mean for the national life. The hearts of Christian men are sorely grieved at the spiritual evils of our age ; at its vulgar materialism, its love of luxury at one end of the scale leading in many cases to selfish shrinking from duties upon which the integrity of home and society depend at its abject hopelessness at the other. There is a wide- spread lack of faith to make those great Christian affirmations as to the worth and responsibilities of human life which are as essential to healthy manhood as they are to spiritual well-being. Hence the fevered excitement and frivolity which manifest themselves in the manifold forms of intemperance, impurity, gambling, and speculation. Hence the lack of duti- fulness which has caused so much wasteful inefficiency 236 The Christian Mission World-wide and so much self-seeking in the temper alike of individuals, classes, and of the nation as a whole. A great revival of religion would restore the value, the ideal ends, the true proportion, and the blessed fellowship of human life. Let us, above all things, seek to call the nation to the eternal Fount of satisfaction, crying to high and low, ' Ho ! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.' Thank God that during the past year there have been the welcome signs in many directions of such a revival! The great occurrences throughout Wales, the spirit of expectation and intercession in all branches of the Church, the reverent and often wistful interest shown by vast numbers outside the Churches, are among these signs of a renewal of faith and of the rekindling of spiritual fires. We rejoice that the Archbishop of Canterbury and our late president, Dr. Horton, united in calling the Churches of this land to prayer for this blessing last Whitsuntide. The Conventions which Dr. Horton has held throughout the country have been of the greatest service in awaking desire and prayer for this blessing, while the success of our evangelistic Missions and the wide circulation of such devotional books as Dr. Horton's The Open Secret and Dr. Rendel Harris's The Guiding Hand of God, issued by our press, are a token both of our dominant interest and of the response of our people throughout the land. 237 The Christian Mission World-wide Our union in Christ is alike a condition and a sign of enlarged and deepened spiritual life. Our united prayer will be the means of bringing to us a new sense of the immediate and gracious presence of the living Christ, will purge and strengthen the vision of our faith, and will enable us to see all things in its light, apprehending the realities and selecting the ends of life under its inspiration. Thus we shall go on to discern the presence of Christ in the inmost heart of all men and in the great movements of our times. We shall be enabled to undertake a fresh and more persuasive evangelism. We shall receive strength to give in our practical service a manifesta- tion of Christ alike in the sacrifice of His Cross and in the power of His Resurrection. In His Spirit we shall grasp and exemplify the principle of His Incar- nation until our religion becomes co-extensive with human life, embracing all its relationships and serving all its interests. The social transformation for which our age is waiting would become possible at once if under such an influence the spirit of St. Francis were once more manifest and became infectious. The enthusiasm and rapture of an absolute self-surrender to our crucified Lord would enable us to realize the redemptive power of His Cross in all provinces of human life. May God bestow upon us the fullness of this blessing ! 238 The Christian Mission World-wide In the light and power of such an experience the Council may undertake with confidence three great tasks which await us. I. The first is the fresh interpretation of Christ in terms of the highest modern thought and aspira- tion. The greatest ages of religion have been the greatest in creative theological thought. The teachers of the Church have then used the best forms of thought of their day and have served themselves of the latest knowledge in interpreting Christ to their fellow men. A study of the history of many a more or less superseded system of theological thought reveals the fact that at the time when it was com- posed, it represented the highest venture and the noblest poetry of faith in thought. Faith attained its completest victory in seeking the truest reason. Many a great example of this spirit remains since the time when the introduction to the Gospel of St. John and the Epistle to the Colossians gave, under the highest inspiration, an example of the duty of setting forth Christ as the very heart of the meaning of the world, and as manifesting in His history and work the eternal realities by which the universe and man become intelligible. The spirit thus manifested and sanctioned led in subsequent times to the great creations of Greek theology, to the profoundly spiritual thought of Augustine, to 239 The Christian Mission World-wide the splendid poetry of Dante, as well as to the noblest efforts of the great Protestant theologians. Systems thus produced were not bonds of slavery, but were expressions of freedom. The worst use we can make of them is to be satisfied with them. The transformed thought and enlarged knowledge of the present day makes other such ventures almost overdue. By whom can the way of such effort be better prepared than by the National Free Church Council, seeing that its chief motive lies in the endeavour to draw men away from the restrictions of a too exclusive denominationalism to the centrality of Christ, and of Christ as related to, manifested in, and served by the whole range of truth and life ? The successful effort which gave us the Free Church Catechism should encourage us to unite our common experience and thought in a new effort to exhibit the spiritual and immanent Lordship of Christ as the revelation of the divine meaning of the world and life. Our union must be deeper and larger than one of emotional sympathy with one another, or of practical activity in the pursuit of common aims. The Christian religion has nothing to fear from the enlargement of philosophical thought, from the advance of science, from the tested conclusions of historical criticism, or from wider acquaintance with and truer appreciation 240 The Christian Mission World-wide of the religious thought of non-Christian nations. All these are providing us with new materials, are shedding light upon the Christ, who, because He is 'the Way, the Truth, and the Life/ in whom 'all things consist/ is not limited in meaning by the decisions of ecclesiastical assemblies and the efforts of theological doctors in the past, or by the ecclesi- astical limitations of the present. There is need of the larger meaning of the world, of the accumulation of truth from every quarter, of the grander conception of the ordered march of history, and of the wider and more intimate exchange of thought, if Christ is to be adequately set forth. Many of our mechanical notions are being broken up. But they will be replaced by vaster and more vital conceptions. If the relationship of God to nature occupied the foremost place in the theological discussions of the nineteenth century, the relationship of God in Christ to the spirit of man will be the central point of interest for the twentieth. The former point of view tended to treat spiritual life as a mere annexe of nature. The overshadowing of the physical daunted men from making those spiritual affirmations which are essential to human life. To make good the supremacy of the spiritual as revealed in Christ and in His relationship to the higher life of man will be the supreme task of Christian thought in the present Q 241 The Christian Mission World-wide century. As this work is fulfilled, a deeper and more comprehensive note will be struck in theology, faith will be strengthened by securing rational expression, and the natural world itself will be illuminated as its relations to the spiritual are better understood. What is above all needed, therefore, is that our spiritual aspiration should become intenser, our evangelic ex- perience richer and deeper, our thought more radiant in wisdom and courageous in expression. And we must bring these qualities into the common fellowship and use the distinctive inheritance of each denomina- tion for the enriching of the whole. 2. In the next place, the Council is called to mani- fest the wholeness of life in the comprehensiveness of its Christian service. We are sometimes asked to draw a complete distinction between spiritual and social concerns above all, to exclude political ques- tions from the range of united Christian effort. It is impossible to affirm too strongly that social problems are in themselves spiritual. It is fatal to a true con- ception of Christ's religion to treat them as acci- dentally obtruding themselves into the sphere of what should be a celestial religion. Our economic difficulties are compounded of spiritual and material factors, but the spiritual are the more important and influential. The spiritual concern which lies at the back of practically every social problem is the 242 The Christian Mission World-wide establishment of right relations between man and man by means of righteousness, inspired and sustained by love. Every one admits that Christianity, as embodied in the life and teaching of Christ, supplies principles of the highest importance for social well- being. All Christians worthy of the name admit that the Church is called diligently to study and fearlessly to proclaim those principles. This is, indeed, its prophetic ministry to the age. But if a prophetic ministry is to be fully discharged, it must pass into executive action. The full proclamation of a prin- ciple lies simply in its practical application. How bitter is the laughter of the sufferers from countless forms of social wrong, while Christian men, who believe themselves to be trustees of the thoughts and purposes of Christ, spend their time in cowardly and time-serving discussions as to how far they shall turn these principles into action ! The cause of Christianity at home and abroad depends upon the extent to which we are prepared at all costs to abandon this futile attitude, and to insist that because Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords, the Sermon on the Mount is the only practical politics for the world. Heaven and earth do not represent opposite poles. They are not even essentially remote. The Sermon on the Mount is indeed too ideal and infinite for complete temporal expression. It needs the eternal 243 The Christian Mission World-wide for its complete fulfilment. Yet this is not to say that it is impracticable. On the contrary, all truly spiritual life, because it is not abstract but human, is an attempt to realize it on earth. In pursuit of this ideal, Christian men must diligently explore the causes of social evil instead of trifling with effects ; must deal with conditions, not conse- quences ; must treat righteousness, and not conven- tional charity, as the highest expression of Christian love ; must seek brotherly relations with the people, and not offensive patronage. It must be clear that we are anxious to find remedies and not palliatives, the best and not the second-best. We must inspire our people to the largest social service instead of encouraging them to isolate themselves in a merely ecclesiastical environment. We shall be told that we are neither economists nor statesmen, and that the solution of the graver problems must lie with the statesmen under the guidance of the economist. There is a measure of truth in this objection. Christian reformers must frankly welcome the advice and criticism of econo- mists, and must recognize that statesmen have in this life often to feel their way towards the imme- diately practicable. But the business of the Churches is to supply the categorical imperative of Christian principle, to arouse the nation to obey it, and to 244 The Christian Mission World-wide summon both statesmen and economists to give progressive effect to it. The Church of Christ alone can command the freedom from class and sectional interests which is necessary for the successful accom- plishment of this great task. Shame upon us, if even the most devoted labour leader shows a greater determination to secure truly human conditions of life for the people than do the leaders of the Christian Church ! Christian principle must moralize both the making and the distribution of wealth. It must inculcate the spirit which treats each man as an end in himself and not merely as a means to the ends of others. It must fix the attention of Christians upon the appalling facts of life until they see them not only with eyes resting upon the out- ward appearance, but with imagination realizing the spiritual meaning. We have to show our Churches the sorrowful procession of the disinherited, the unemployed, the unemployable ; of those who are deteriorated alike in spirit, mind, and body by an evil inheritance and an unholy environment. We have to make them see as they gaze upon these ' spirits in prison ' that the Christ is imprisoned with them, and that Christians are called to set Him free. We must unceasingly demand those conditions which are essential to a true spiritual community, co-exten- sive with the national life. It must be the ceaseless 245 The Christian Mission World-wide endeavour of the Churches to bring about at least such a measure of social reconstruction as will secure the possibility of what we understand by a home for every family, with such stability as will prevent its being broken up except by misconduct, and will ensure the supply to all the people of the public institutions and influences which are necessary to educate and satisfy the higher life. In such a com- munity, whatever sacrifice its establishment may cost, will be found the truest wealth alike for the individual and for the nation. The final effect of such a social endeavour will be clearly felt in politics that is, in the affairs of the State. Here is the final expression and a necessary instrument of Christian principle. The doctrine of the essential secularity of the State is unchristian and irrational. It is practically dangerous. The supposi- tion is largely due to the influence of Augustine, and his thought on this subject was shaped partly by peculiarities of temperament, and still more by the attitude of the Church towards the pagan principles and the licentious morals of the Roman Empire. But the City of God is not to be in eternal opposition to the city of the world, still less are the two contending cities to be identified with an ecclesiastical organi- zation on the one hand and a political organization on the other. The Jerusalem that is above is the 246 The Christian Mission World-wide mother of us all, not merely in spiritual isolation as individuals, but in our collective relationships and our mutual interests. What nobler task can possibly be conceived for those who, while they are Christians on the one hand, are citizens on the other, than to supply Christian faith, ideals, and character to the State ? The deplorable consequences of a merely ecclesiastical conception of the Christian religion are to be found on the Continent of Europe wherever, under the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, the forces of nominal Christianity have called out into opposition those instincts of manhood which seek freedom and apprehend the worth and meaning of the present life. Happily this country has hitherto been, to a large extent, free from this appalling danger both to religion and to progress. It is for Free Churchmen to use the masculine character which has been in- herited from the struggles of the past to ally the forces of religion throughout the land with all that makes for liberty, righteousness, and progress in the life of the State. In accomplishing this task, we shall help to save our times from the mischief of false abstraction. We are asked to limit ourselves beforehand by abstract theories of the functions of the State or of the rights of man. Such doctrines are the remaining vestiges of the superseded belief in a primitive ' Social Contract.' 247 The Christian Mission World-wide Each epoch of progress is in practical antagonism to all such foregone conclusions. The State grows in meaning and power year by year. Its ultimate powers will only be limited by what it is needful that it should do, and by what experience may show that it can do efficiently to serve the higher life of men. The State is not a fetish ; it is simply the people in combination, utilizing rulers, statesmen, and parliaments as their executive. For us, therefore, progress towards the ultimate efficiency of the State lies in the ever fuller expression of Christian principle in and through the whole of its legislation and administration. It is in this spirit and for these ends that, as Free Churchmen, we are politicians. Although most political proposals have some bear- ing upon moral interests, it would be rash and presumptuous on the part of the Council to interfere, as such, in projects of legislation which involve the practical wisdom of the statesman rather than the motives of the spiritual and moral reformer. Such matters must be left to the individual in the ordinary relations of citizenship. Yet there are occasions when the sense of a religious community approaches unanimity, and when it is compelled to take corporate action in the sphere even of party politics. Such occasions arise when its own vital principles are assailed, or when the conditions essential to the 248 The Christian Mission World- wide discharge of its mission are endangered by the action of the State. Still more is such action justified when it conceives that the interests of morality and humanity are at stake. In such cases, all risks must be run by those who desire to be loyal to Christ. In order to discharge this duty, we must needs remain independent of mere party ties and interests. From time to time we shall support this party or that, this measure or the other, according as the one or the other seems to offer the greatest prospect of promoting those great ends of freedom, righteousness, temperance, and peace, for which we have received the mandate of our Lord. Such action, wisely con- ceived, will show our loyalty to Christ, and will maintain the essential features of Christian religion. Absorption in the concerns of the inner life, the pro- motion of a spirituality which is abstract or senti- mental rather than healthily human, the prevalence of narrow ecclesiastical aims, injure the depth, breadth, sincerity and strength which are essential to the highest and completest Christian life. In giving effect to this view of the Christian life, we may well bear inevitable reproach and misrepresentation with cheerfulness and magnanimity. We have recently fought a great campaign on the subject of national education. It was forced upon us by the action of others ; we were compelled to wage 249 The Christian Mission World-wide it because of our fundamental principles, and in order to secure complete freedom of conscience for our people ; above all, out of a desire that justice should be done to all sections of the community, and to the claims of education as the highest of our civic inte- rests. The present unhappy position could not have been brought about by mere zeal for denominational interests on the part of the Churches. It is due in a large measure to the short-sightedness of the English people, and to their unwillingness to bear the financial burden of what is a prime necessity of civic and national well-being. This fact makes it all-important that we should exercise a large spirit of patience and forbearance in securing a lasting settlement of this great controversy. The original services rendered by voluntary associations to national education must not be forgotten, because in more recent times they have been obscured by the pursuit narrow at the best, unjust at the worst of denominational ends. Our main contention is that the supply and ad- ministration of education is a civic and not an eccle- siastical concern. It is unjust to make education compulsory on all the children of the State without securing to each child the provision of a place in a school which is carried on entirely by the State for the objects of the State. Our demand is that hence- forth one type of school, and one type only, should 250 The Christian Mission World-wide be maintained by the State a school controlled by the people for the people. No priest or presbyter, as such, must have access to the national education, nor must the State impose any disability on the con- science of those who discharge the office of teachers in its behalf. At the same time, State education must have no bias against the influence and mission of the Churches, as such. It must, above all, have respect to the training of character, and have access as it will to the best means available for training character in the children. The history of the past and the demand of the people of England in the present forbid the removal of the Bible from our schools. The teaching of Christian ethics upon a biblical foundation above all, the conception of the worth and meaning of human life which is conveyed in the teaching of the prophets and of our Lord Himself must not be surrendered. It should be supplemented by the Churches discharging their own divine mission on their own ground in friendly alliance with the State, and not usurping its functions. We therefore seek peace as the end of this unhappy controversy on the following principles : (i) That national education must henceforth be a civic and not an ecclesiastical task ; (2) that ample security must be given for the protection of conscience in the case of teacher and 251 The Christian Mission World-wide taught by the exclusion of sectarianism ; (3) that provision should be made for the training of character in a definitely Christian civilization ; (4) that the demand of the people for the Bible in the schools should on these conditions be respected ; (5) that respect should be shown to the spiritual mission of the Churches, although they are restrained from trespassing upon ground that does not belong to them. Finally, let us remember that henceforth Free Churchmen must become in the true sense of the word educationists, recognizing and promoting the ordinary interests and work of education, as such, with a largeness of spirit and a personal devotion which hitherto have been sadly wanting. Let us throughout the remaining stages of this struggle endeavour to combine strenuous fidelity to principle with wise statesmanship and Christian conciliation. 3. In the third place, the Council must stand for the world-commission of Christianity. We must realize and promote the missionary calling of the Church. The marvellous progress of the modern world has transformed our international relationships. The nations are bound together by ties of industrial, commercial, political, and spiritual solidarity, such as hitherto have been undreamed of. The limitations of time and space have been wellnigh abolished. 252 The Christian Mission World-wide We cannot tolerate any attempt to interfere with this process or to destroy the spirit of international fellowship which it should tend to create. With all our hearts, we must respond to the new conditions as an act of loyalty to the world-embracing kingdom of our Lord. What would the eager and dauntless spirit of St. Paul have done for the world-wide service of his Master could he have enjoyed our modern facilities of intercourse, and the opportunities created by our modern relations ? In the scientific realm the comparative study of religions has long led broad-minded Christians to adopt a more sympathetic attitude towards the nobler of the non-Christian religions. But it is not too much to say that the recent rise of Japan is bringing us into entirely new spiritual relations to the non-Christian world. In the past, two attitudes of mind have by turns, and with different sections, prevailed towards the great non-Christian races of the Far East : the desire of ascendency and the feeling of pity. Each has been made possible by a sense of superiority, accompanied by scarcely veiled contempt, not only for the religious faith, but also for the moral qualities of these races. Suddenly the rise of the Japanese race, with its dazzling success, its marvellous efficiency, and its splendid patriotism, has brought an Oriental nation into terms of equal 253 The Christian Mission World-wide international fellowship with the so-called Christian nations of the West, and these new relations have been cemented by the Anglo-Japanese alliance. The religious and moral characteristics of such a race are studied with a new respect, and have even led some to discuss whether the moral supremacy of Christen- dom is in danger. Such a view, groundless in itself, is not entertained by the most thoughtful of the Japanese themselves. Mr. Okakura says, in his re- cently published book on The Japanese Spirit (p. 100), ' Some have indeed gone so far as to say that we owe the whole success we have up to now achieved in this remarkable war to the holy inspiration we drew from the teaching of Jesus Christ.' Professor Anesaki, Professor of the Philosophy of Religion in the Imperial University of Japan, and himself a Buddhist, has published a remarkable article in the Hibbert Journal for last October, on ' How Christianity appeals to a Japanese Buddhist.' He contemplates the time ' when all the world will accept the Christian religion ' (Hibbert Journal, October, 1905, p. 9), though he contends that faith in Christ is not incompatible with faith in Buddhism. ' We Buddhists,' he says, ' are ready to accept Christianity ; nay, more, our faith in Buddha is faith in Christ. We see Christ because we see Buddha* (p. 10). Later on, he declares, 'as to Christian morality, I find nothing to add to Christ's 254 The Christian Mission World-wide saying : " None is good save one, even God " ' (p. 1 3). He concludes by saying that while the primitive faith of Japan has been much ' elevated by Buddhism/ it ' still has enough room to be purified by a more decidedly monotheistic religion, such as Christianity ' (p. 15). Critical examination does indeed show an absolute contrast between the root-principles of Christianity and Buddhism, for Christianity reveals the absolute and eternal worth of personal existence, while Buddhism insists upon its worthlessness. Yet the statements just quoted are remarkable as a testi- mony to the influence of Christianity and to its power everywhere to evoke an idea of God and a religious spirit congenial to itself. The establish- ment of such relations of more appreciative thought and sympathy between Christians and the representa- tives of the highest religious faiths of India, China, and Japan will have a twofold influence for good. It will exercise this influence upon these faiths them- selves by thus leading their exponents to emphasize and develop those elements which are most congenial to the Christian faith. On the other hand, it will enable Christians to set forth Christianity, not as purely exclusive of all other religions, but as in- cluding, completing, and harmonizing all elements of truth and moral power within them in the one religion which proclaims to the world the love and 255 The Christian Mission World-wide grace of God, effects a full redemption from sin, and offers complete satisfaction to the infinite needs of the human heart. This more sympathetic attitude will enable us to appreciate the great service which will ultimately be given to the fuller apprehension of Christ by the winning of these races to His service. Is it not manifest, for example, that the peoples who have for ages been so attracted by the gracious and gentle personality of the Buddha as practically to place him in the vacant place of God will, when they are converted to Christianity, make an invaluable contri- bution to the fuller realization of Christianity as the manifestation of the grace, the condescension, and the gentleness of God ? It is of importance that we should take note that for the present the sympathy of Japanese thinkers with Christianity is chiefly on its ethical side. Mr. Okakura goes on to say, 'I endorse this opinion [as to the influence of Christ] to its full extent, but only if we are to understand by His teaching that whole body of truth and love which are of the essence of Christianity, and which we used in former days to call by other names, such as Bushido, Confucianism, &c. But if you insist on having it understood in a narrow sectarian sense, with a personal God, and rigid formalities as its main features, then I should 256 The Christian Mission World-wide say that I cannot agree with you' (The Spirit of Japan, p. 101). The first necessity, therefore, is to bring home to the mind of such sympathetic men that the metaphysics of Christianity are bound up with its emphasis on love and upon the ethical grounds of love. Love is the greatest thing in the world, so Christianity affirms ; and to this message the universal heart of humanity, wearied of strife, says 'Amen.' But if love be thus sovereign in the world, the complete expression and highest satisfaction of human hearts, the motive power of all true human progress, then the next Christian affirmation is verified, ' Love is of God,' the source and explanation of all that is. Again, if love, supreme throughout the world, be of God, it can only be because the great companion proposition is true that ' God is Love. 1 The whole object of truly Christian metaphysics is to lay down the propositions which are involved in and safeguard this great affirmation. Yet the way to secure their acceptance is not by mere argument, but by living out in full degree that life of missionary self-sacrifice which is only possible when Christ has so reproduced His own Spirit in His followers that life has become for them, to use Wordsworth's expression, ' An energy of love, divine or human.' Under such influences Christianity will give the final proof of its catholicity, and Christian R 257 The Christian Mission World-wide metaphysics will assume a living simplicity and a convincing power never reached by formal argumen- tation, but only when ' heart speaks to heart ' of that which is essential to salvation. Three conditions are necessary if we would realize this world-wide mission of the Christian Church. In the first place, we must seek, by the help of the Spirit of Christ, a new and deeper understanding of our divine message in the light of the nature and needs of those to whom we address it. The great triumph of New Testament theology is that while it is deeply Hebraic, and therefore makes the ancient revelation of God in Israel the permanent inheritance of the world, it knows how to find points of contact with the highest Greek, Roman, and Oriental conceptions with which the Apostles were brought face to face. That attitude, alike true to the central meaning of revelation and quick to mark the presence of 'the Light which lighteth every man,' must find a noble embodiment in our modern Christianity and in its attitude towards the whole missionary problem. Secondly, we must promote Foreign Missions on an entirely new scale. The story of the readiness of great multitudes in almost every non-Christian land to receive the gospel message shows how over- whelming is our responsibility in this matter. If our faith, courage, and self-denial be equal to our 258 The Christian Mission World-wide opportunity, the twentieth century will mark a turning to Christ throughout the world unequalled in the his- tory of the Christian Church. It will give a new and convincing demonstration of the world-Lordship of Christ, and will quicken religious life at home by the influence upon it of an t ever vaster Christian fellowship throughout the world. It were well if all Churches in this country would combine in a united effort in every city, town, and village to bring home to the mind and heart of all Christian people the urgency of this call and the measure of our responsi- bility with regard to it. Lastly, in order to the successful fulfilment of our commission we must secure a foreign policy on the part of this country based upon truly Christian prin- ciples. We must insist that our statesmen, our imperial administrators, and our captains of inter- national industry shall treat men everywhere as ends and not means. The policy they pursue must con- sider, not what it is possible for us to impose upon weaker races by force in our own interests, but what it is right for us to promote in the light of that human brotherhood which, because it is the ideal of Chris- tianity, is therefore the ultimate aim of all sound statesmanship. Christian nations must repent of such crimes against China as have disfigured our own history in the case of the opium traffic, and have 259 The Christian Mission World-wide marked the recent scramble to take advantage of her 'people, which came to so ignominious an end during the past year. It is for this reason that Free Churchmen have so strongly opposed the introduc- tion of Chinese labour under servile conditions into South Africa. It was open to the late Government to refrain from adding a new race-problem to those already existing in South Africa, and to restrain the capitalists from thoughtless means of remedying the inevitable havoc and disorder wrought by the South African war. But if such labour was to be admitted at all it should have been under conditions honourable alike to employer and employed, con- ceived in that sense of common brotherhood and hospitality which is the only guarantee of moral and social interests, and it should have been in harmony with the respect for the conditions of freedom which in modern times has animated the British race. What has been said is but an imperfect exposition of the tasks which are laid upon the Council. In its main outline, it inadequately represents what we understand by the spiritual content of Christ, the meaning and purpose of His heavenly kingdom. Our surrender to Him means the dedication to His service of every power of our being. It means further entire dedication to every purpose of His kingdom. Consecration is not a mere interior state 260 The Christian Mission World-wide of the spirit in isolation from the relationships and concerns of men. Such a view fails to understand the meaning of the great truth that in Christ 'all things hold together.' Our discipleship is intended to enable us to apprehend and to set forth the sovereignty of Christ in all its breadth and length and height and depth. We need to guard the mystic secret of the inner life, and to minister unceasingly to the conversion of individual men. Yet just as the great truth of our faith is that 'the Word became flesh/ so the whole object of converted and spiritual men is to exhibit the mind of Christ and to make good His supremacy in all human affairs. All this is involved in the fact that He is 1 the First and the Last the Living One.' A great opportunity is opening before us, and an immeasurable responsibility rests upon us. A great national move- ment has recently taken place which, while political in its form and immediate results, is, we believe, spiritual and moral in its source. Free Churchmen have a position and power in Parliament which they have never possessed since the Commonwealth. The election which has given to them this position has also brought about the return of a greatly increased number of direct representatives of labour. Their presence in Parliament, while justified on the ground of their character and ability, is necessary in order 261 The Christian Mission World-wide to gain adequate attention for the pressing needs of the industrial classes, and to secure to those classes their fair share in the administration of our national concerns. We live in a larger world than that of our forefathers, in more vital and complex relationships, and with an enlarged perception of the worth and possibilities of earthly life. The same fidelity to principle and strenuousness of action which distinguished them are needed by us. We must add to these qualities a greater breadth of view, a wider sympathy, and a larger magnanimity. Generosity and not austerity of spirit is the best expression of the divinity of the gospel. We must forget the bitterness of the past in the widening vision of the future. If to the tenacity which marks Free Church- men be added the width and humanity of a compre- hensive statesmanship, the Parliament which marks the accession to commanding national influence of Free Churchmanship and Labour side by side will inaugurate a new and more glorious era in the history of Great Britain and of the Empire. Let us pray without ceasing that this great promise may be fulfilled, and that we fail not in any of the qualities by which it may be made good ! The Christ whom we serve as King of kings is also the Son of Man, the Way to the Father, and to that life of brotherly love and spiritual endeavour 262 The Christian Mission World-wide which springs unceasingly from the Father. In Christ the ideal became actual. His Spirit brings to us the faith and hope, the method and purpose of the Incarnation. The ideal made actual nothing lower than this can be our aim. The watchword for our prayer and effort is given to us by God Himself. It is this, ' As in heaven, so on earth.' 263 XV Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality l In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth : for that the Lord of Hosts hath blessed them t saying, Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance. ISA. xix. 24. Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ ; and to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which from all ages hath been hid in God who created all things. EPH. iii. 8, 9. ^CATHOLICITY is the distinctive mark of spiritu- \-J ality, the noblest expression towards man of life in God. This is the great truth conveyed by these great declarations of Isaiah and St. Paul. These two men represent the highest spirituality and the deepest evangelical experience, the one in the Old Testament and the other in the New. And the result of their knowledge of God is in each case alike. Under the influence of grace the ethical Theism of the Old Testament is transformed in the case of Isaiah till it 1 The retiring President's sermon, delivered to the National Council of the Evangelical Free Churches in Leeds on March 5 1907. Owing to the author's illness, the sermon was read to the Council on his behalf. 264 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality becomes universalism in religion. In this wonderful prediction the prophet soars above the limitations, the exclusiveness, and the timid worldliness of his times. He looks forward to a day when the distinc- tive privileges of Israel will be shared with Egypt and with Assyria. These two states represent in varying degrees the militant heathenism of his times. Their might and their resources make them alter- nately a source of hope or of fear to the men of Jerusalem, according to the relations in which the city stands from time to time to each of them. Religious bigotry would hold them at a distance. Cowardice would cringe to them and despair of exercising influence over them. The faith of Isaiah gives him so clear a vision of the inmost heart and ultimate purposes of the God of the whole earth that he looks for a final victory of truth and grace which shall cause all men to receive the revelation hitherto confined to Israel, and shall thereby bring all nations into an equal fellowship with God and with one another. The prophet receives no mandate to bring about this blessed consummation. Only Christ could so fulfil the promise of Old Testament religion that it should become a gospel for the world. The foresight of Isaiah waits, therefore, for its fulfilment until a commission is given to St. Paul ' to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.' His 265 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality conversion brings with it a still more signal victory over the religious bigotry of his class, gives to him a sustained confidence in the universal meaning of the gospel to which Isaiah never attained, and makes him, by the power of the Spirit, the prime agent in giving practical effect for all time to this immanent universalism of Christ. A study of the process by which the Theism of the Old Testament arrives at its final comprehensiveness, and of that by which Paul reaches his sense of the meaning of his apostleship, will be found to suggest considerations of the highest importance for the spiritual tasks of the present day. The Old Testament faith in Jehovah is in the first instance the sense of a spiritual tie, a covenant bond between the God of the fathers of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the people whom He has chosen for fellowship with Himself. The nation is understood in the light of its relation to Jehovah. The deep experiences of the saints are the slowly achieved results of their union with God, brought about by their union with the holy community which He has chosen to be His inheritance. The original development of Old Testament theo- logy and religion springs from what is in one sense a very humble beginning. There was little conception of the breadth and length and depth and height of 266 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality what was involved in covenant relation to Jehovah in the early times. Yet the very fact that the personal relation between God and His people was so deeply recognized that He exercised sovereignty over all the issues of their inner and outer life contained within itself the promise of the glorious development which took place by means of the fuller revelation given to the prophets. What Jehovah is to the inner life of Israel is a sure witness of what He is in regard to the being and to the ends of the universe itself. The final expression of what is involved in the spiritual experience of Israel is seen in the descriptions of God's creative lordship, which find their highest and noblest utterance in the last twenty-six chapters of Isaiah. The sovereignty of God in Israel manifests His sovereignty over the universe. His sovereignty over the universe is necessary in order that He may take up the covenant relation in which He stands to Israel. He who plants the heavens and lays the foundations of the earth says unto Zion, 'Thou art My people' (Isa. li. 16). Here, however, the deeply spiritual source of Israel's religion keeps the conception of Jehovah's creatorship of the universe from magnifying material vastness at the expense of moral worth. If Jehovah's relation to Israel is founded upon His creatorship, equally is His creatorship the expression and outcome 267 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality of His spiritual perfection. Nature springs from spirit, not spirit from nature. The two great voices of the starry heavens above and the moral law within acclaim in unison the sovereignty of Jehovah. But it is the latter and not the former which leads the anthem. It is the spirit of man in which is revealed the character and ends of the world-sovereignty of God. Hence, first of all, the moral universalism of Amos. The moral purity of God can make no favourites, can allow no exceptions : ' You only have I known of all the families of the earth : therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities ' (Amos in. 2). All nations are subject to the same law. The special privileges of grace enhance the moral responsibilities of those who enjoy them. An austere yet health- ful insistence upon the universalism of the divine law and retribution is the first note of Old Testament catholicity as its voice is uttered by Amos. This moral note is taken up into the richer music of Isaiah, but with Isaiah Law is the handmaid of Grace. The righteousness and judgement of Jehovah are the instruments of His salvation. The nations of the earth, if they must receive a common judgement, await so at least this text informs us a common salvation. The wonderful sovereignty of Jehovah is manifest, not only in setting up and enforcing a common moral standard, but in preparing a common 268 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality evangelic destiny for mankind. History marches forward to attain this end under the combined in- fluence of grace and judgement This catholicity of the prophet is not only extensive but intensive. If Isaiah treats all mankind as subject to the world-sovereignty of Jehovah, with its moral demands and its gracious gifts, he sees that no concern of human life is outside the spiritual and moral authority and the concern of God. He purges life in all its interests from heathenism that He may claim it all for the holy ends of God. There is therefore no discrepancy between Isaiah the saint and Isaiah the citizen. He finds a brotherhood in the enjoyment of revelation between himself in his loftiest inspiration and the farmer in the possession of his practical wisdom (Isa. xxviii. 26). He comes from the heavenly vision and the reconciling ministry of the heavenly temple to the international policy of the king, to the administration of the city, to the moral and social condition of the people, and even to land tenure and housing, without the least sense of violent transition, still less of inconsistency. The moral sovereignty of Jehovah must be reflected in the organized relationships of the city. The gracious purpose of Jehovah must be expressed in the brother- liness and the mercifulness of the citizens who wor- ship in His temple. The moral and social well-being 269 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality of the city is the true test of religion, and not the crowded services of the temple. Whatever may be the exaltation of pious emotion in religious service is an added insult to the righteous and gracious Jehovah unless it is the utterance of a practical consecration to the ends of justice and humanity. Such is the catholic expression of Isaiah's spiritu- ality. It is easy to recognize the factors which go to its creation. In the first place, spirituality is no abstract quality, no self-contained sentiment. It is the entering into relationship with God, who rules the world for the accomplishment of ends which are clearly manifest in the glory of His character as disclosed to faith. Spirituality is the entrance into relationship with God and into union with His all- embracing purposes for mankind. If the moral perfection of God is the highest, it is also the sovereign. Its sovereignty implies its assertion by God and its realization by men in relation to the whole world-process by which the divine purpose is carried out. Yet in order to the clear vision of this truth two other factors were necessary. In the first place, Isaiah was a citizen. He stood in close contact with the men of affairs of Jerusalem. His sympathies were stirred by the needs of its people, his indignation by the injustice of its magnates. The hermit or the ecclesiastic could never have been an Isaiah. 270 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality And, in the next place, the conditions of his times prepared him to extend the range of his sympathies till, at least fitfully, they embraced mankind. In his days the isolation of Jerusalem had passed away. The sphere of its international politics had passed beyond Samaria, Damascus, Edom, and Moab to Assyria and to Egypt. The city, once hidden, now formed part of a great world-system. The imagina- tion of Isaiah responds to the new conditions. His faith sees that they provide but a wider theatre for the gracious purposes of God. The religion of Jehovah, in order to be truly national, must become international. It must claim for itself the new nations, and by the slow travail of the ages impose its righteous and peaceful order, not only upon a people but upon mankind. While our text, there- fore, is the outstanding and permanent result of revelation and of faith, such revelation and such faith could only come to the man who combined in him- self the saint, the citizen, and the statesman. The same features are reproduced with minor differences in St. Paul. The secret of his life lay in the unfolding to him of ' the unsearchable riches of Christ.' With the experience of forgiveness, recon- ciliation, and renewal in Christ came the call to be the apostle of the Gentiles. He discerns God's purpose to bring about a catholic fellowship of all mankind 271 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality in Christ Jesus. It is not with the creation of an ecclesiastical system or the establishment of a spiritual authority that he is concerned, but with the sharing of an unspeakable secret, the gift of a universal quickening and illumination, and the formation of a living fellowship of partakers of Christ, 'where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncir- cumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman ; but Christ is all, and in all ' (Col. iii. n). This catholicity of Paul gives living effect alike to the influence of his conversion and to that of the age in which he lived. His experience, so deeply individual, was yet spiritually universal. As he ex- plained to Peter, though not a sinner of the Gentiles (Gal. ii. 15), he had been forced to abandon the religious exclusiveness of the law in order to find deliverance from a universal sin. The evil from which he suffered was human and not Jewish. The Christ who saved him transcended Jewish exclusive- ness. The act of faith by which he received salvation was his act as man and not as Pharisee. Alike the need, the remedy, and the acceptance, therefore, witnessed to the universalism of the redemption. The spiritual experience of Paul was therefore the earnest of the world-wide salvation of mankind. The infinite riches of Christ precluded any narrower partnership in their enjoyment than that of the whole 272 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality world. Such was the testimony of the religious experience. But St. Paul was helped to draw this inference by the conditions of his age and the environment of his youth. The comprehensive power of Roman govern- ment and civilization, the penetrating influence of Greek culture, the leavening activity here and there of Jewish religion, assisted the imagination to realize a possible commonwealth of Christian life and catholic fellowship. And Paul, the apostle of that larger hope, had been placed by God where all these in- fluences of universalism had played upon his mind and heart. True, in the days of his Pharisaism their effect was obstructed by the bigotry of his religion. But directly he was brought, by the grace of God and under the pressure of sore need, to receive the salvation of Christ, the barriers of religious exclusive- ness gave way, and the long pent-up forces of human sympathy swept over his heart. The calling of God is never merely external in its voice or mechanical in its constraint. It makes itself felt in and through the vital forces of the spiritual life as these are affected by each man's position in time and place. The catholicity of Paul is therefore the noblest product of an age unique alike for spiritual influence and for the unification of the world. Does not the bare recital of these facts shed a flood S 273 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality of light upon the present position and calling of the Churches of Christ ? Our world-outlook reproduces in a remarkable degree the characteristic features of the times both of Isaiah and of Paul. Nay, the conditions of their times were only a feeble suggestion of what is coming to pass in ours. The comparatively narrow sphere of international relations known to Isaiah, the limited extent even of the Roman Empire, which made the world for St. Paul, are but a faint suggestion of the solidarity of mankind which is being brought about under our very eyes. No nation is so self-sufficient that it can stand out of relationship to all the rest. Even China is abandon- ing her proud and militant exclusiveness in order to take part in the general movement of the world's life. No region so remote or so inhospitable that it has not been explored and brought into tardy contact with the prevailing races of mankind. The natural ex- pansion of multiplying races, the growing enterprise of commerce, the practical appliances of science, have brought us into the most intimate contact with the men, the affairs, and the policy of all lands. The growth of international fellowship, the network of international relations, is rapidly contributing to the formation of a common civilization. The international congresses of the past were European. The repre- sentatives who will meet this year at the Hague 274 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality Conference will represent every continent upon earth. The adoption of common conventions whether of politics or of commerce the rapid diffusion of ideas, the planting of European institu- tions upon Oriental soil, may seem at first sight to have little direct bearing upon the higher ideals and the spiritual progress of mankind. Yet more careful reflection shows that no such arrangements and institutions can be purely external in their nature. They live and flourish but as the practical expression and the instruments of great spiritual principles which lie within them. Our Western civilization is, with all its defects, a civilization steeped in the in- fluence of Jesus Christ. The Chinese deputation which visited our shores to study our national institu- tions will have carried back but an imperfect impression of the meaning of what they saw if they fail to realize the vital influence, even if imperfectly exerted, of a sense of the sacredness and worth of all human life which results from the optimism and the humane temper of Christianity. The only universal civiliza- tion towards which it is conceivable that the world is tending is a civilization based upon and expressing these great principles by which alone can the life of humanity be wrought out. Hence we live in an age, not only of external con- tact, but of approximation, and of approximation, not 275 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality only in working agreements, but ultimately in the living principles by which life is ordered and inspired. So much is this the case that the most thoughtful minds in the Far East are already associating the principles and ideals of our Western civilization with the name and authority of Jesus Christ, and predict- ing for Him a speedy world-lordship, so far at least as the adoption and influence of the ethical ideals associated with His name are concerned. They are reading anew their own scriptures and systems of thought in order to bring about, even with strain and difficulty, some means of reconciling them with the principles of Christ. The British people are at the very heart and centre of this world-process. Our world-wide empire, our still more universal commerce, bring us into unequalled contact with all the peoples of mankind. Despite our peculiar limitations and drawbacks, God has endowed us with the two great gifts of unresting energy and of practical sympathy. Our energy carries us into all lands in behalf of all enterprises. Our sympathy opens our hearts to the suffering and need of all peoples in a way that is hardly found elsewhere. Is it presumptuous to believe that we are an elect race, so far at least as that God has fashioned alike our temper and our position in the world to enable us to realize the catholic purposes which the twentieth 276 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality century brings down from the sphere of prophecy to that of almost immediate fulfilment ? Yet another influence must be borne in mind. Our modern progress is ever widening the range and enlarging the powers of our citizenship. The city and the nation are slowly being re-created by the enfranchisement of individuals, and by the ever- growing power of the community as a whole. The first awakening of individuality throws the sense of community into the background. The perfecting of individuality leads to the restoration of the com- munity, enriched by the new wealth of individual experience. Our morality, therefore, cannot any longer be confined to the duties imposed by private relationships, but has its worth determined by our spirit and conduct in regard to the community as a whole. Our citizenship is not only in heaven and in the Church, but extends to the corporate life of the mflnicipality and of the State. Our morality, there- fore, cannot be confined to states of feeling or motives of action, but must find embodiment in our relation to the social progress of our times. And if citizen- ship be the body of which morality is the soul, still more must religion be the quickening spirit of both. Our citizenship in heaven must be avouched by our bringing the heavenly ideals of Christ to inspire the social efforts of men. Thus the Church becomes, not 277 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality a refuge from the concerns of the world, but a centre from which the disciples and servants of Christ go forth to spiritualize and moralize the world. In proportion, therefore, as we come to understand the true meaning of spirituality, we shall be saved from a merely ecclesiastical Christianity and enabled grow- ingly to fulfil the Sermon on the Mount by embody- ing its righteousness and love in the spirit which shapes our laws and controls our administration. Under this influence the psalms which express the holy rapture of the Hebrew in sight of Jerusalem will be applied, not merely to the conception of an invisible Church, but will serve as an ideal for the endeavours of the citizen. By this spirit alone can Christianity respond to the social conditions which have been created for us by the providence of God. One last and most important factor remains. It consists in the deepening and strengthening of the evangelic spirit. While Paul, humanly speaking, could not have been the apostle to the Gentiles unless he had been a citizen of Rome, far more could he not have received his divine calling unless he had been brought to an almost unexampled experience of the 'unsearchable riches of Christ.' In vain would it be that the transformation of the world should make 'all men members one of another,' in vain that we should realize in imagination the untold 278 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality possibilities of our citizenship, unless above all our faith is sustained, our heart is enlarged, and our spirit transformed by the living experience of Christ, our Redeemer and Lord. May we not discern, in spite of all distractions and error, that the spiritual glory of Christ is being more clearly manifested, and that the springs of spiritual life are being refreshed from Him their living Source ? Changes of philosophic thought, altered scientific conceptions, and even the advance of a careful historical criticism, can only in the end bring into clearer light the radiance of His divinity, the all-sufficiency of His grace. If the truth is know- able by men, it is coming by all confession to be 'truth as truth is in Jesus.' It is His divine and atoning relation to the spiritual life of men which has necessitated the attempts to explain His unique person and work in the light of the noblest thought- forms of succeeding ages. If some of these thought- forms have in part lost their serviceableness and meaning, this is not to say that the eternal divinity and lordship of Jesus Christ can be set forth in lower forms to-day. The doctrine of His divinity rests, not upon Platonic conceptions, which at the best but im- perfectly express it ; but upon the glory of His sinless- ness, the reconciling power of His death, the divine energy of His resurrection, the completeness with 279 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality which He, as the eternal Son of the Father, brings home to our hearts the perfection of God. The infinite distance between His sinless perfection and our sin-stricken hearts is a revelation at once of His unapproachable glory and of His all-prevailing grace. Our faith in Him is safeguarded, not merely by the formal definitions which have come down to us from the past, but by the experience still given to His humble followers throughout the world, of ' unsearch- able riches ' in Him which bring to believing hearts the very fullness of God. We are coming to re-discover the vital relationship of His divinity to our inmost spiritual being, but in doing so we are only verifying afresh the inspired teaching of Paul and of John. All truly Christian theology must magnify and not be- little Christ ; must find in Him, and in Him alone, the author of eternal salvation unto all that obey Him. Let us seek that while we re-think our theology in order to give more adequate expression to the gospel, we submit our hearts in ever humbler penitence and more childlike faith to the divine influences of the ever-living and ever-present Christ. If that be the case, our equipment for the new catholicity will be complete. Should we fail in this, all our other advantages will be so much inert machinery waiting the electric energy which alone can make them work. We may well shudder if at 280 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality this moment of the twentieth century, with such vast openings before us and such untold responsibility, our hold upon the living Christ should be weakened and our devotion to His service impaired. 'Thou hast given me a south land, give me also springs of water.' Such a prayer is needful, not only in our own interests, whether individual or ecclesiastical, but in the interests of the community and of man- kind. Our union in Christ, if we will but realize it, gives to us the conditions of this spiritual refreshing. Catholicism has been the worst foe of catholicity. Denominationalism, if exaggerated, may be equally fatal. An exclusive spirit towards men, whether of other Churches or of no Church, whether of Christian or non-Christian races, will shut us out from knowing in all its fullness the grace of Christ and from mani- festing it in all its power to our fellow men. In presence of our growing tasks and of our spiritual dangers, let us lift up our hearts unto the Lord. Let us enter upon these sessions by a renewed act of consecration to Him. Let us follow Paul into the presence of his crucified and risen Lord and ours, that as we renew our pledges to Him we may hear Him say to each one of us, 'To this end have I appeared unto thee, to appoint thee a minister and a witness both of the things wherein thou hast seen Me, and of the things wherein I will 281 Catholicity the Mark of Spirituality appear unto thee; delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom I send thee, to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive remission of sins and an inheritance among them that are sanctified by faith in Me' (Acts xx vi. 1 6- 1 8). PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWKS AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BBCCLES. BY THE SAME AUTHOR Second Thousand. Demy 8vo, Cloth. 65. net. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION Its Meaning and Proof * It covers the whole range of Christian apologetic, and covers it all with capable scholarship and the command of an appropriate vocabulary.' Expository Times. ' A serious piece of practical apologetics, ... a broad study, born of living contact with present-day conditions, which have once for all antiquated the defences that satisfied yesterday.' Literary World. ( The spiritual appeal and the subjective experimental results of Christianity are here stated with considerable power.' Guardian. ' I feel that nothing can do justice to this book. . . . I cordially congratulate Mr. Lidgett on the work he has done.' Dr. A. M. FAIRBAIRN in Contemporary Review. ROBERT CULLEY, &&*! LONDON, E.C. AND OF ALL BOOKSELLERS. BY THE SAME AUTHOR Fifth Thousand. Demy Svo, Cloth. 55. net. THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE OF THE ATONEMENT As a satisfaction, made to God for the Sins of the World 1 The greatest book of modern times on the subject.' Expository Times. 'A treatise and a handbook on the subject more complete and thorough than is to be found elsewhere in English literature. The style is clear and vigorous, the treatment reverent, reasonable, and logical, the tone high and admirable.' Great Thoughts. 'With the greatest satisfaction we welcome an able and orthodox treatment of the doctrine of the Atonement. The author is a competent scholar, an acute thinker and a clear writer.' British Weekly. ' This book can be heartily commended to theological students. It is able and scholarly, and can be cordially praised as a piece of solid, able workmanship. 1 Glasgow Herald. ROBERT CULLEY, ntSUttS LONDON, E.C. AND OF ALL BOOKSELLERS. Bx THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. 205 00510 2056 A 001 033 990 1