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 Selections from the Correspondence of the 
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 Honorary Fellow of St. Catharine's College, 
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 LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
HOPES FOR 
 ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN NEVILLE IGGIS, D.D., Lirr.D. 
 
 0* TUB COMMUNITY Of THE EftUtllCTION 
 HONORAIY FELLOW Of ST. CATHA1INE i COLLEGE, 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 FOURTH AVENUE ft jortt STREET, NEW YORK 
 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
 1919 
 
TO 
 
 ANNIE FIGGIS 
 
 IN REVERENT LOVE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 (PrtatktJat Grosvtmor Cktptl, Afar/sir. August 79/7) 
 
 fAC 
 
 i. FREEDOM .... ... i 
 
 u. REDEMPTION . 13 
 
 in. SACRAMENTALISM . 27 
 
 iv. HUMANISM 43 
 
 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 (Prtaekfd at St. B*mo**t Ckttrck. Ptmluo) 
 
 i. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND . . 55 
 
 u. OUR DEBT TO ROME 62 
 
 in. OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME ... 70 
 
 iv. ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS ... 82 
 
 v. THE DISTINCTIVE TYPE OF ENGLISH 
 
 CATHOLICISM 92 
 
 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 i. THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE ... 103 
 
 (Camtrtdft, January ji. 79/5.) 
 
 u FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY . . . .114 
 
 (Oxford, January j. /9/6.) 
 
 in. CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE . . .126 
 
 (Oxford. F<9r*ary 18. 79/7. ) 
 
 iv. THE ETERNAL REFUGE 136 
 
 (Camkridj-e, June t, /g/9.) 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 Four Sennons preached at Grosvenor Chapel^ 
 May f air ) August 1918 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE NEED OF GOD .148 
 
 THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN . . . .155 
 
 'REJOICE EVERMORE' 160 
 
 SERVICE 167 
 
 'THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN' . . . .172 
 
 (Festival of Corpus Christi. Preached at All Saints , 
 Margaret Street. ) 
 
 ANGELIC MINISTRY 178 
 
 (Preached at St. Michael's, Paddington, September 29, /9//.) 
 
 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE . . . .184 
 THE INELUCTABLE CHARM . . . . . .196 
 
HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 I. FREEDOM 
 
 4 Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother 
 of us all' GaL iv. 26. 
 
 WE are beginning the fourth year of the war ; 
 our leaders have been taking stock and clearly 
 stating its objects. Many statements of these 
 are made. Some of them concern diplomatic 
 arrangements or legal topics. With these we are 
 not concerned here ; what we are concerned 
 with is the conflict between principles. The 
 war, we have been told, is a war of ideals, and 
 this is in the main true. The conflict is between 
 the soul of the English and the soul of the Prus- 
 sian. Our danger is that in conquering the body 
 of our enemy we shall be inspired with his spirit. 
 Last week Mr. Asquith defined the meaning 
 of the struggle as the conflict between ideals of 
 freedom and of force. So far as we are assured 
 that freedom is the end for which we are fighting, 
 we know that our aim is spiritual. Faith in 
 freedom implies faith in the spiritual nature of 
 man. Prussia in its characteristic incarnation, 
 Bismarck, always scouted the ideal of freedom, 
 and her actions are all in harmony. English- 
 
 A 
 
* HOPES FOR "ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 men believe in freedom even if they do not always 
 achieve it, and even though they may have been 
 at times false to their ideals for the higher and 
 the more spiritual your ideals, the greater gap 
 must there be, always will there be, between ideal 
 and practice. It is only the people with a low 
 ideal who carry it out nearly. Only the devil is 
 completely successful. 
 
 Now the great hope for English freedom is that 
 at least in politics we do not confuse it with 
 anarchy. In religion, in morals, there may be 
 a tendency to carry individual liberty to excess ; 
 but there is less of this in political and social life, 
 or in social arrangements. That excessive in- 
 dividualism comes from a false view of human 
 nature ; it loses sight of the essentially social 
 nature of personality. The greatness of England 
 has been that in all her characteristic institutions 
 she has succeeded in harmonising both com- 
 munal life and individual liberty. The best 
 proof of that is, that people who stress one to the 
 excess of the other always disapprove of those 
 institutions ; they will either tell you that it 
 is a tyranny, or else that it is anarchy. 
 
 We recognise that the individual is free, and 
 we also recognise him as a member of a group. 
 More and more does the problem of liberty turn 
 on the recognition of small groups by the side of 
 large ones. 
 
 It is this character of freedom at stake that has 
 
FREEDOM 3 
 
 brought America into the war, and led to the 
 Russian cataclysm. We must not be surprised 
 if the latter event has in its early stages pro- 
 duced excesses which are the cause of military 
 disaster. As a power at war we must deplore 
 this, but do not let us get into the habit of laying , 
 it all on the present rigime, or want of regime, 
 in Russia. The fault is with the bureaucrats of 
 the last rtgimc, who kept the millions ignorant. 
 It is the cheapest form of Pharisaism to attack 
 the Russian revolution just because it has not 
 worked like clockwork at the first ; moreover, it 
 is practically certain that without this revolution 
 the Russian Government (not the Emperor) 
 would have made a separate peace some time ago. 
 Let us not, then, get into the tone of Pharisaic 
 superiority, abusing people who are at this 
 moment unduly suffering from the intoxication 
 of liberty when first enjoyed. Still, that ought 
 to be a lesson for us not to mistake liberty for 
 anarchy, or to suppose that if every man can do 
 what is right in his own eyes you can still have 
 a real commonwealth. 
 
 The second error with regard to freedom is 
 this : that it consists in desiring our own way. 
 Everybody desires his own way. That is how 
 the worst tyrant that ever was would express 
 his aim in life. The true test of faith in free- 
 dom is the measure of tolerance we have for those 
 who go a different way. Those who really 
 
4 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 believe in freedom prove it by upholding the 
 rights of others, whether peoples or individuals ; 
 moreover, the limits of individual action in any 
 nation, or in any part of a nation, must vary 
 with circumstances. You cannot have the same 
 liberty in a city besieged as in time of peace ; 
 there must be concentration and even inter- 
 ference for the sake of bare existence. 
 
 Englishmen have been able to see these things ; 
 that is what has united all classes, and led them 
 to submit not only to sacrifices, but to all kinds 
 of regulation very alien from their habit. We 
 can all of us think of cases where that has not 
 been done, but if you consider the ordinary 
 Englishman's strong dislike of interference, the 
 amazing thing is the amount of interference he 
 has stood, and the nation as a whole has stood, 
 as compared with the small number of those 
 who claim in one thing or another to be sup- 
 ported by the nation at a time of crisis, while 
 they themselves do exactly what they like. 
 
 However, it is not of the war that I am to speak 
 on these four Sundays. I do not think people 
 very much want sermons about the war they 
 come to church to get away from it. 
 
 Last year we considered here during the four 
 Sundays in August some of the defects in English 
 religion. On the* eve of the National Mission 
 it was well that we should see what was wrong ; 
 but we are not wise if we fix our minds only upon 
 
FREEDOM 5 
 
 that ; we have enough to depress us as it is. 
 This month, let us try to see what are the grounds 
 of hope for the Catholic religion ; these are real. 
 We forget them sometimes, owing to the English 
 like of grumbling ; it is known that people who 
 do not understand the English always imagine 
 that their institutions are very much worse or 
 less suited to them than they are, because one 
 of the things that is a sine qua nan in any English 
 institution to the average Englishman is some- 
 thing in it at which he can grumble. 
 
 Let us this morning take that which is germane 
 to the day, namely, the liberating force of true 
 religion. This is not always recognised. Re- 
 ligion in a country like this has become involved 
 in a mass of traditional and social institutions, 
 and, consequently, some people identify religion 
 with convention, and among many believers 
 there are those who think of it mainly as a com- 
 plex system of taboo, mainly concerned with 
 prohibiting things. This may even be defended 
 as needful discipline, or it may be attacked as 
 cramping. Many of the younger generation in 
 revolt think of it simply in dislike. But that is 
 not the main quality of religion. In any time 
 of religious awakening, it is the freedom-giving 
 note that is the loudest. This exhilarating, up- 
 lifting spirit you can see throughout the Psalms, 
 and also throughout the New Testament. The 
 reason why people without knowing it are so 
 
6 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 fond of the Psalms is that the Psalms are so full 
 of exhilaration, the sense of freedom given by 
 real religion. One not a Christian has said that 
 the whole meaning of religious experience is 
 summed up in the words : ' My soul has escaped 
 even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler.' 
 Psalm cxix. is occupied mainly with the law of 
 God, yet you see it also brings in the same 
 notion : ' I will walk in the way of Thy com- 
 mandments, when Thou hast set my heart at 
 liberty/ 
 
 This sense of liberty, of escape, of being lifted 
 above the torments of time, all of us need. We 
 need it just now more especially. As the long 
 agony of the conflict goes on men feel this. 
 Most of all they will feel it when it is over. They 
 will feel it partly because there will come a sense 
 of terrific fatigue ; and partly because the throes 
 of war will be in some ways less perplexing than 
 the social and economic tangle we shall have 
 then to unravel. If we are not to be enmeshed 
 in the net of circumstances we need faith in some 
 power which shall lift us above that. In other 
 words, the world needs a faith, men need a faith, 
 in the eternal values, as they are called, in a 
 power beyond this life. They want to be able 
 to believe in themselves as having immortal aims, 
 and they want to 'be able to believe in something 
 that is beyond the extraordinary, ugly and 
 tangled mess which life seems. 
 
FREEDOM 7 
 
 This is brought home to them in an age like 
 this new age in which we now live, and of which 
 we cannot live to see the end. It is a ' life and 
 immortality brought to light ' by the Gospel 
 which can alone assure us ; for that does lift 
 us up ; that shows us that our real life is in a 
 world of which all these other things are only 
 elements or stepping-stones. This thought of a 
 God Who really lives and of a human life which, 
 in society, is to go on beyond the grave that 
 can lift us up above ' the rumour of the periods/ 
 and free our feet from sinking in the slough of 
 despond. That was what the Jews found in the 
 days when their kingdom was destroyed, as you 
 can see in some of the later prophets. That was 
 the sustenance of the first Christians. These 
 people we do not remember it these early 
 Christians were most of them slaves ; slaves, 
 no doubt, with different degrees of education, 
 but slaves legally, and they had nothing in this 
 life to look to, and no sense of freedom in the 
 world they lived in. They found it in the 
 Christian Church. 
 
 It is remarkable how modern writers who are 
 enemies of freedom can find nothing but scorn 
 for the early Christians. Believers in race 
 supremacy, like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, 
 are never weary of talking about what he calls 
 the chaos of the Roman Empire and the mongrel 
 people who embraced Christianity ; and out of 
 
8 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 that he would lead us into a new conquering 
 and Teutonic religion still to be called Christian. 
 It is a remarkable fact that people in this country 
 to a large extent admired that book, The Foun- 
 dations of the Nineteenth Century, when it was 
 translated about 1911 or 1912. It was greeted 
 with a thunder of applause, although it is ex- 
 tremely superficial, and, indeed, in certain places 
 absolutely wild ; yet men were not afraid then 
 of this notion, which is inimical to freedom and 
 opposed to Christianity. 
 
 Now we have learned a little what that means. 
 But we must realise that to many minds those 
 early Christians are still what they were in the 
 days of St. Paul, when he described them as the 
 offscouring of all things. We who are Christians 
 do well to compare ourselves to the men of that 
 day, for the position of the Church in regard to 
 the world has in the last fifty years more and 
 more closely approximated to the earlier days of 
 its obscurity. That is one reason why St. Paul 
 is so modern and so helpful. We can all of us 
 get refreshment and strength from St. Paul. It 
 is the sense of a new-found freedom which 
 breathes in all his utterances. All this is the 
 secret of his terrific vitality. It is amazing to 
 me how any one can seriously believe that the 
 Christian Church is an institution which is hostile 
 to life, in face of the writings of St. Paul. They 
 do believe it, because they identify the Christian 
 
FREEDOM 9 
 
 Church with certain by-products, or else because 
 they make the mistake which we used to make, so 
 many of us, before the war, of thinking that all 
 discipline is deadly. The same spirit can be 
 seen in the Apocalypse of St. John. There the 
 writer sees the Church as the liberating force 
 setting men free from the tyrannous immoralism 
 of the world-empire. 
 
 Such stirrings of the sense of freedom we see 
 all around us now. You have heard of the Life 
 and Liberty Movement. That movement is not 
 the effort of a few cranks ; nor is it the push 
 of one party. What precisely it will effect we 
 cannot say. But it is gathering together many 
 men and women of very different sympathies, 
 solely on the ground that it represents religion 
 as the spirit of liberty, and that it is determined 
 to secure for the Church freedom from ancient, 
 legal, and institutional trammels. 
 
 Another quality of freedom which we have 
 that is in this country is the variety of parties 
 in the Church of England. People on all sides 
 deplore this ; they would like the Church to be 
 of one colour ; they would like to turn out those 
 who do not think the Church means what they 
 think it means. And this is by no means 
 confined to any one party ; it is equally virulent 
 in those who are always talking about Liberalism. 
 Yet by keeping all within one body we influence 
 each other. The modern Christian, whether he 
 
io HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 is a High, Low, or Broad Churchman, if I may 
 use the old terms, owes more than he would like 
 to admit to the contributions of those whom he 
 regards as opponents. It is extraordinary how 
 the work of men like Frederick Denison Maurice, 
 or men like Bishop Westcott, or great Evangelical 
 teachers on the Atonement, have entered into 
 the minds of people who would be regarded as 
 very different. Moreover there is a difference 
 between attacking people inside the Church and 
 desiring to turn them out of it. To say that 
 people's views are very inadequate or very wrong 
 is a very different thing from turning them out, 
 so long as they mean what they think the Church 
 means. In the same way, how often we feel that, 
 though we may agree fundamentally with certain 
 men in other bodies, there are barriers between 
 us which no fraternisation can destroy. 
 
 Freedom and variety in the Church is our 
 special note. It has its special dangers, and is 
 a great trouble to many ; but I think we should 
 be ill-advised if, in consequence of those dangers, 
 we were to adopt a system which gave a greater 
 appearance of uniformity, and possibly concealed 
 beneath it even wider differences. 
 
 Further, if freedom is the quality of religion, 
 if this is to be our main appeal to this age, we 
 must look for more varied experiments. Such 
 experiments will be of different kinds. We 
 need not expect them all to be successful, but 
 
FREEDOM ii 
 
 we must be generous to them all. We are not 
 to condemn them by maxims derived from Acts 
 of Uniformity or the Test Act. The coercive 
 force of these statutes may have long vanished, 
 or mainly so, yet many people are still dominated 
 by ideals suited only for the Caroline, and even 
 sometimes the Elizabethan, period. 
 
 Lastly, let us not be afraid to claim for our- 
 selves as Catholic Christians the name of Liberal. 
 That term is not the exclusive property of 
 persons with negative opinions closely allied to 
 those of clerics like Bishop Hoadley of the eight- 
 eenth century. Still less must we allow the 
 title of free spirit to be appropriated by those 
 who in the name of religion would deny the 
 Cross, and would jettison the whole experience 
 of the race. They are right in thinking that 
 religion is new and has the future, but it has the 
 future because it is the inheritor of the past. 
 Our claim as Catholics is just this : that we are 
 neither the slaves of mere rationalistic theory, 
 nor are we the victims of a lifeless tradition. 
 We have no use for religion in tabloids, whether 
 orthodox or not. Our claim is that we are in 
 union with a living Person through a great 
 society ; that we share the experience of all its 
 members, and that into our life is poured the 
 depth of St. Augustine, and the power of St. 
 Ambrose, and the energy of St. Dominic, and 
 the love of St. Francis. That Society is the 
 
12 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 witness in this world to the reality of the other ; 
 it lives not by the force of a carnal command- 
 ment, but by the power of an endless life. It 
 is universal, and it outlasts the empires ; it is 
 beyond the distinctions of race, just as it holds 
 within it every kind of individual quality which 
 can make God glad. 
 
 The Church is not an ancient Jewish insti- 
 tution which has survived ; nor is it merely 
 Greek philosophy transmuted, nor modern Eng- 
 lish or French, or even Italian, but it blends 
 the best elements in all. It is essentially free 
 because its life is essentially personal, the spirit 
 of Jesus, changing ever in expression, so that the 
 Church can always teach because she can always 
 learn. 
 
 That is the strange El Dorado adventure, at 
 once the starting-point and the goal of the human 
 spirit, the home of the soul and the paradise of 
 God, on which you and I are going ; and in that 
 adventure we shall be able both to find and to 
 give freedom, for ' Jerusalem which is above is 
 free, which is the mother of us all. 7 
 
II. REDEMPTION 
 
 * The whole creation groaneth and travaileth, waiting for 
 the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.' Rom. 
 viil 22-23. 
 
 THE Catholic religion, as we saw last week, is 
 the great liberating force of the world. This is 
 our ground for hope at this day, provided we see 
 the Catholic religion in its beauty, that we do 
 not, as one has put it, mistake for Christ the 
 grave-clothes that enwrapped His Body. 
 
 These principles, of which we speak this 
 month, are sometimes forgotten, but if they are 
 borne in mind and become the motives of action, 
 they give us grounds of hope. 
 
 To-day we will look at another of them. The 
 redemptive character of the Christian religion 
 is our great hope, especially when we compare it 
 with other principles of reconstruction. Therein, 
 in this redemptive character, lies the dynamic 
 energy of Christianity, and by a redemptive 
 system I mean a system which postulates, first, 
 that the present condition of things is evil ; and, 
 secondly, that this evil is not to be remedied 
 from within, but that a remedy from without is 
 
 forthcoming. 
 
 it 
 
14 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 You remember how William James, who cer- 
 tainly was not a Christian, defined the essence of 
 all religion as, first, the sense that something is 
 wrong ; and secondly, that this wrong can be 
 put right by making the necessary adjustments 
 with the higher powers. I am not sure that all 
 religion can be got into that formula, but certainly 
 redemptive religion can. Nor must we suppose 
 that our religion is the only religion of redemp- 
 tion. If it were, our task would be simpler. 
 Buddhism is also a religion of redemption ; it 
 teaches that evil is inherent in individual exist- 
 ence, and it inculcates an ethic of self-annihilation 
 annihilation which, by a long discipline of 
 denial, is to destroy this evil nature. 
 
 The doctrine of Nietzsche is an ethic, if not a 
 religion, of redemption ; it teaches that man's 
 present evil or worthless character will be re- 
 moved by the supersession of Christian ethics 
 through its opposite, and by the development of 
 a race of masters living on the top ; the rest 
 of the world does not count. Christianity also 
 teaches that ' the world is very evil ' ; that evil, 
 it says, is due to sin, to the wrongful direction 
 of the will. Yet it is different from either of the 
 two systems I have mentioned in teaching the 
 inherent dignity of human nature. It is not 
 human nature, not classes of men, nor the fact 
 of existence that is wrong, but the disease of the 
 will. Human nature is in itself of so high a 
 
REDEMPTION 15 
 
 worth that God could take that nature upon 
 Him, and bring about redemption through the 
 death on the Cross, and give us life from His own 
 risen life. 
 
 This deliverance, once wrought, men appro- 
 priate by becoming 4 new creatures ' in that 
 society which shares and communicates the 
 Divine life. Everybody who joins a new society, 
 in so far as the pressure of that society is effec- 
 tive, is to some extent a new creature, and the 
 universality and penetrating quality of religion 
 makes this more true of Christianity than of 
 others. Buddhism believes that human indivi- 
 duality is so bad that it must be done away with. 
 Nietzsche teaches that most men are inherently 
 worthless, and that the only thing to be done 
 with them is to treat them as instruments, but 
 he says that the ruthless exploitation of the 
 many will make possible, not in this age but in 
 future ages, a small body of true and noble 
 characters. 
 
 But Christianity is the most democratic of all 
 religions, though Mohammedanism in that re- 
 spect runs it hard. It sees hope for every man 
 who wants it by virtue of the Cross and Passion 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ. It declares that no- 
 body is sunk so low that he may not be raised 
 to share in the Divine life of Christ. On the 
 other hand, it declares also (and that is harder 
 to our own day) that nobody is so naturally 
 
16 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 noble that he does not need God's help and for- 
 giveness. Theosophy would, I suppose, give 
 you other means of redemption ; I think it is 
 a system of redemption. 
 
 All these are different from the optimism of 
 the last two centuries. Any one of them has a 
 better chance just now than the shallow senti- 
 ment of a good-natured universe which I suppose 
 nearly ever since the time of Leibnitz has ruled 
 a large amount of educated and benevolent 
 opinion. 
 
 This war has put an end to this optim- 
 ism. Certain notions once popular have been 
 destroyed by it. The intellectual baggage for 
 life's cabin passage, which a little while ago 
 did duty, has been torpedoed. First and fore- 
 most, men have learned the reality of evil. 
 Men used to say that evil was ignorance, or that 
 it was imperfection, or arrested development, or 
 the survival of animal instinct, or even that it 
 was mere illusion, the inevitable error of a 
 limited and partial view, but that from the 
 point of view of God there was no such thing as 
 evil. Now the world has seen it in ' all the 
 naked horror of the truth.' Evil is the chosen 
 idol of a will self-absorbed and worshipping its 
 own fancies. Other errors this age may make 
 and will make. All kinds of different schemes 
 for salvation it may embrace. One thing it will 
 not do : it will not deny that salvation in some 
 
REDEMPTION 17 
 
 form is a need of the world ; nor will it assert 
 that evil is an illusion, a tremor of the imagina- 
 tion. The world knows evil and feels it, as it 
 has not done for generations. It suspects it for 
 what it is love turned the wrong way. Do not 
 misunderstand me when I say that our age is 
 like to be free from these errors of the near past. 
 I do not mean that they will not be held at all. 
 You can never say of any view that nobody will 
 hold it ; some survivals there are, people who 
 belong to the previous age in any time, and some 
 cranks who see only what they wish to see. 
 Have we not in this land with us our own dear 
 pacifists, just like the Bourbons of a past age, 
 in order to show us that it is possible to live 
 through a time of lurid tragedy, learning nothing 
 and forgetting nothing, and repeating with a 
 complacent satisfaction the formula and the 
 catchwords of an age which had not the revelation 
 which we have ? 
 
 Secondly, the notion of progress progress 
 automatic and inevitable has gone ; I do not 
 say that there is not a right sense in which we 
 can talk of human progress : there certainly is. 
 Yet this war with an enemy, more fiendish and 
 brutal and treacherous than the worst days of 
 barbarism, has shown how false is that idea of 
 the last age, that the world gets better of itself, 
 like a child growing in its sleep. Tennyson 
 bade men ' move upward working out the beast, 
 
 B 
 
i8 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 and let the ape and tiger die.' Such appeals 
 ring false now because the ape and tiger are so 
 far preferable to the ' All Highest,' and still more 
 so to the intellectual apologists of his scheme. 
 For the remarkable thing is, as the French 
 Ambassador pointed out in speaking of la 
 barbaric pfdante, not a certain amount of bar- 
 barous action presumably that takes place in 
 all war but the intellectual backing which such 
 actions have had, and the definite command on the 
 part of the highest authorities among the enemy. 
 The tendencies of thought which this war has 
 accentuated had begun before. The war is the 
 culminating point. Huxley began this process. 
 He had no religious bias ; he remained a strong 
 agnostic to the end, but he showed in his famous 
 Romanes Lecture that the best things in human 
 life had not come from natural evolution, but 
 from the human will set upon good and resist- 
 ing cosmic development. Still the old doctrine 
 bore sway in the popular mind, and also in a 
 large part of theological writing, especially that 
 intended to be liberal, and still more so across 
 the sea. I remember once after I had been talk- 
 ing to some American students on the subject, 
 ' Marvel not if the world hate you,' that one or 
 two of these spoke to me (so far as I recollect 
 one was a Churchman and the other probably 
 not ; neither, as far as I know, had any objections 
 to orthodox Christianity) but they both came 
 
REDEMPTION 19 
 
 to me and said they could not understand what 
 I meant : surely the world as a matter of course 
 was getting more and more Christian every day ? 
 We did not talk like that even then in this 
 country, and now we know how far it is from 
 the truth. We can no longer say that apart 
 from the grace of God men show any tendency 
 to get better ; rather they get worse. The mind 
 becomes subtler ; life becomes more complex. 
 All that means greater power for evil, both ex- 
 ternal and internal. Compare the possibilitu ^ 
 both in action and in his inner life of a highly 
 educated Prussian prince with those of some 
 chief of a tribe in the Caribbean Sea. The 
 latter may order cruelties and thefts, but his 
 mind is only half awake, and much is due to 
 custom ; his villainies bear the same sort of 
 relation to the other as the naughtiness of a child 
 of five to the calculated scheme of a Crippen 
 or a Charles Peace. 
 
 Thirdly, and closely connected with the last 
 point, even more patently false than the doctrine 
 of natural goodness and inevitable progress, is 
 the doctrine that all necessary amelioration can 
 be effected by culture. In education, in the 
 powers of a trained mind and will, no one dis- 
 putes the pre-eminence of the Prussian. I 
 suppose it would have been admitted before the 
 war that the Prussian officer is in this matter of 
 mental training as much superior, not, of course, 
 
20 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 to all, but to his average English compeer, as 
 Mommsen is to Mrs. Markham. At any rate, 
 we need not deny that two generations of English- 
 men and other countries have bowed before the 
 Germans in music, in history, in classical scholar- 
 ship, in philosophy, in science, and still more, 
 of course, in the military art. But for this war 
 Teutonic culture would have conquered the 
 world ; and possibly that dream of Houston 
 Stewart Chamberlain of a new religion, nomi- 
 nally Christian, but entirely Teutonic, paying 
 no regard to the development of Catholic Chris- 
 tianity, might have come true. Fortunately 
 the Germans have saved us by showing in act 
 and deed both the matter and the manner of their 
 doings ; they have shown us our mistake, and 
 delivered the world from an unreasoning faith 
 in culture. Education increases the power of 
 a nation or an individual to manipulate the 
 world. A man knows more and knows better 
 what he wants. He has more command of the 
 means to attain his wants. "*He has learned the 
 self-control needful to wait and to set aside sub- 
 sidiary aims ; but a man does not, because he is 
 educated, necessarily have nobler aims than 
 others, and he may be more and not less con- 
 scienceless. Germany has shown us with less of 
 grace and refinement what Europe in the fifteenth 
 century learned from some of the Renaissance 
 princes and popes. 
 
REDEMPTION 21 
 
 All this, the revelation of the reality of evil, 
 of the if I may so put it non-inevitability of 
 progress and of the inadequacy of culture, has 
 made men feel that the world as it is is in a 
 parlous state, and that it needs redemption. 
 That has been the cry of social reformers of 
 every school ; it is the leit motif of revolution- 
 aries ; it is the burden of much recent literature. 
 Mr. Wells said so long since in a book called 
 Marriage. It inspires the writings of Mr. Gals- 
 worthy and even of Mr. Shaw, and you will find it 
 in many other popular writings. The facile op- 
 timism of the last age has gone for a time. 
 Christianity has new rivals, some of them 
 formidable, but they are different in kind from 
 the agnosticism of the past age. Neither rose- 
 water idealism nor cold self-restrained moralism 
 has much appeal. All the competitors of 
 Christianity come with some kind of gospel, 
 catastrophic, redemptive, apocalyptic. In that 
 way they will be nearer akin to the Christ of the 
 New Testament than was the liberal Protestant 
 caricature of Him, or than any philosophic 
 meliorist with His maxims. 
 
 This, then, is the ground of hope for the Chris- 
 tian religion : the world not only needs but feels 
 the need of redemption ; it does not always use 
 the word. But if we are to realise this hope, we 
 must fulfil certain conditions. First of all, this re- 
 demptive character of the Christian Faith must 
 
22 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 not be slurred over ; to use technical language, the 
 theology of grace must be emphasised, the sense 
 that it is not of him that willeth, or him that 
 runneth, but God from Whom comes all help 
 and power the picture of the Gospel as light to 
 a world in darkness, or, more accurately, a spar 
 to a man drowning in a rough sea, and not merely 
 the thought of religion as the guarantee of 
 man's own higher thought, or the sanction of 
 honourable living, or of social piety. It is that, 
 but it is much more than that. What the 
 world needs is help ; it feels that it cannot help 
 itself alone, and if it can only believe it is ready 
 to recognise that power from beyond which shall 
 tell us that ' our warfare is accomplished, our 
 sin is pardoned.' 
 
 People are afraid sometimes to talk about the 
 forgiveness of sins, but it is what we all want 
 now. The Tractarian Movement went too far 
 in its reaction from the crude language and 
 excited appeals ' to be saved ' of the Evangelicals. 
 In the last age the Atonement was not denied ; 
 it was taken for granted. Conversion, definite 
 conversion, very often was denied. Men thought 
 of the Incarnation as the central truth, and that 
 if they concentrated upon that all the rest would 
 follow. 
 
 Unfortunately, what has followed this thrust- 
 ing aside of the Atonement has been an increasing 
 hesitation about the worship of Jesus as Lord. 
 
REDEMPTION 23 
 
 Make people think of Jesus as Saviour, and they 
 will soon worship Him as Lord. Make Him 
 only the Lord of all good life, and they will begin 
 to think of Him merely as the embodiment of 
 the moral ideal ; and gradually, almost without 
 knowing it, to lose sight of His transcendent 
 nature. It is Jesus as our Saviour Who always 
 wins men, and always will do, except the vir- 
 tuous few, the ' moral gentlemen, 1 upon whom 
 Dr. Forsyth casts scorn. But what men need is 
 ' that strange Man upon the Cross, ' God supreme, 
 not in power, but in humility and suffering and 
 submission. 4 I, if I be lifted up, will draw all 
 men unto Me.' 
 
 Along with the Cross, we must emphasise the 
 unique character of our religion. Sometimes 
 we hear that this war has shown the bankruptcy 
 of the Christian Church. That is nonsense. 
 What it has shown is the bankruptcy of all 
 other ways of life. Ever since the Renaissance 
 people have been excluding Christianity from 
 any influence on public life, or intellectual ideals. 
 Christendom was a fact in the Middle Ages ; now 
 it is no more than a geographical expression, if 
 it be so much. This war was provoked by the 
 universal prevalence, in industrial no less than 
 in international relations, of ideals and methods 
 which not even its enemies would call Christian ; 
 and so it has proved the death of all hopes for 
 the world based upon pure naturalism. I do 
 
24 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 not say that it is the death of naturalism itself, 
 because you can hold that if you are con- 
 sistently pessimistic ; but it destroys the hope 
 from it. 
 
 But the Christian doctrine of loyalty to the 
 brotherhood of human life as essentially a society 
 and springing out of loyalty to Christ the Re- 
 deemer, of the permanence in the other world 
 of personal and social relations of love and 
 worship this is not only intact, but it shows 
 the only optimistic way out. Apart from its 
 theological foundations and its reference to the 
 other world, it is being preached as the one hope 
 of mankind by many who are far enough from 
 our Faith. 
 
 Lastly, the Alexandrian age, as I may call it, 
 of English religion has closed the period domi- 
 nated by Westcott ; that method of assimilation 
 and culture (the same sort of motive that inspired 
 Clement of Alexandria and others of the Greek 
 fathers) has come to an end. It did a very 
 valuable work, but we have passed that stage. 
 The growth of influential systems of thought 
 and inspirers of action which not only deny 
 creeds but repudiate Christian ideals of life, has 
 forced upon us the realisation of our own distinct- 
 ness, our unique quality as Christians. All high 
 ideals ultimately .have their sanction in the 
 Christian Church, and without that support will 
 soon decay ; just in the same way as the ancient 
 
REDEMPTION 25 
 
 world on its better side was feeling after a sys- 
 tem of life only fulfilled in completeness by the 
 Gospel. But we must not take these things as 
 the measure of our aim. In the same way the 
 philosophy of the Cross of Christ was precisely 
 the same as the philosophy that we see now ful- 
 filled so wonderfully in the sacrifice of those who 
 are dying for us at the Front. But although it is 
 the same it is a great deal more, and bigger. 
 
 Frank paganism is now proclaimed by some ; 
 others throw scorn upon every object of Christian 
 reverence, even the character of our Lord. It 
 is clear that we must realise our own unique 
 position ; we must present our Faith as desirable 
 because it is different from other things, and not 
 in spite of the fact. Too many people have been 
 inclined to argue that there can be no harm in 
 accepting Christianity, because it is just the 
 same as all high moral ideals. We want its 
 distinct beauty and colour, and that is what the 
 world wants, though some will reject it. To 
 that end we need more and more to feed upon 
 the Bible. 
 
 That is the great help for us in England. The 
 Bible is not so well known or read as it used to 
 be, apart from students. The great tradition, 
 the atmosphere of Scripture, is still with the 
 masses. Quotations still are made quite natur- 
 ally. This is more so, I think, with the great 
 masses of men than it is with the most highly 
 
26 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 educated. But if we are to bring out these 
 qualities, the redemptive, the apocalyptic, the 
 unique nature of the Catholic religion, we need 
 more and more to dwell upon the words and the 
 pictures of Scripture ; not upon any summary 
 of the philosophy of religion or the ideals of 
 Christianity, but the pictures of Jesus in the 
 Gospels, or that wonderful picture of the heart 
 and mind of that great human being St. Paul, 
 or the sublime, almost unearthly vision of 
 St. John. It is often the best hope for any one 
 who is in doubt about his faith to get him to 
 read the First Epistle of St. John. 
 
 But for ourselves, let those words and phrases 
 mean more and more to us ; let us meditate upon 
 them, and once more perhaps we shall win that 
 in which we are so sorely behind the world, the 
 courage for which all things are possible. ' In 
 the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of 
 good cheer, I have overcome the world.' 
 
III. SACRAMENTALISM 
 
 ' The invisible things of God are clearly seen, through the 
 things that are visible.' Rom. i. 20, 
 
 ONE of our chief grounds for hope is the Sacra- 
 mental character of the Catholic religion. In 
 face of certain notorious facts this statement 
 may seem strange, but I think it is true. Sacra- 
 mentalism is not an excrescence upon Chris- 
 tianity ; it is of its inmost being. 
 
 Secondly, it is congruous with human life, 
 and in the true sense natural. 
 
 Thirdly, it is the form which makes reli- 
 gion effective for the average man. Professor 
 Gwatkin used to deplore that ' the natural man 
 is a born Catholic/ We may accept the fact, 
 but we need not deplore it. A religion which 
 is to help men in general must accept while 
 sublimating the natural qualities of human 
 life. 
 
 The first of these is our condition in a world 
 of space and time with inward and outward in- 
 extricably mingled. Secondly, man is by nature 
 a social being ; society is not a thing added on 
 at will. He develops himself through living in 
 groups, of which the most obvious is the natural 
 
28 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 group of the family. The Church bases her 
 claim upon these facts. 
 
 Firstly, man is not a discarnate spirit ; he is 
 a being which functions in space and in changing 
 time ; nor, except in thought, can we separate 
 the outward life of the body from the inward life 
 of self-consciousness. This latter, strictly speak- 
 ing, is all that we can be sure to know. Any 
 religion which appeals to man, and not to a 
 piece of him, must do so in a concrete form, and 
 not merely in ideas and sentiments ; that is, it 
 must make use of outward means as well as of 
 inward. That is the method of Incarnation. 
 
 It is a commonplace that the Sacramental 
 method involves the same principle. Most argu- 
 ments against the Sacramental significance of 
 Baptism or the Eucharist can equally well be 
 used against the Incarnation. 
 
 On the general principle of a religion which 
 shall be more than merely notional we need not 
 go to High Churchmen. We can take two such 
 typical eighteenth-century prelates as Bishop 
 Butler and Bishop Warburton. The former in 
 a Charge to the clergy of Durham argues forcibly 
 for the external formulation of religion. He says: 
 1 The form of religion may indeed be where 
 there is little of the thing itself ; but the thing 
 itself cannot be preserved among mankind 
 without the form/ Warburton, in The Alliance 
 between Church and State, answers the claim that 
 
SACRAMENTALISM 29 
 
 Christianity need be no more than the relation 
 of each individual to God. He says : * It may 
 be asked whether this intercourse as it begins, 
 so likewise, it should not end in mental exercise ; 
 and consequently whether religion be not what 
 many seem now disposed to think it, but a kind of 
 divine philosophy in the mind ; which composes 
 only a spiritual and mystic body of followers. 
 For if this indeed be the case there is an end of 
 all religious society-. . . . We can easily con- 
 ceive how a mere mental religion may fit the 
 nature of pure immaterial spirits. . . . But man 
 being compounded of two natures, soul and body, 
 it seems necessary at first sight that religion 
 here should partake of the character of its 
 subject.' 
 
 Yet, as Warburton knew, the dislike of this 
 doctrine of any external form of religion is 
 common ; it always will be common. Religion 
 has been defined as living from the deepest 
 depths of being. To many who try to feel 
 these depths consciously, abstraction from 
 any outward form seems a needful means ; 
 in consequence they resent any notion 
 that, for instance, Sacraments can be vitally 
 effective. This objection is further connected 
 with the doctrine that it is degrading to God to 
 suppose that He would make use of such means 
 as bread and wine, purely material means, as a 
 condition of a gift so spiritual as grace is. That 
 
30 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 objection owes its force to the subtle Manichaean 
 doctrine that matter is evil. There is a feeling 
 that God cannot enter into the material world. 
 This doctrine has great attractions, especially 
 for good people. It is so easy to see an inera- 
 dicable taint in all outward things. Then you 
 will go on to declare that God is not to be wor- 
 shipped by consecrating material things, but by 
 living so far as may be in denial of them. But 
 after all, as the text says, the outward world is 
 a Sacrament of the inner. This Sacramental 
 claim is not, as some would have it, the claim of 
 some strange and foreign element intruding into 
 religion and degrading it : rather it comes from 
 life in this world, and is congruous with the 
 natural pieties of life. The sense of worship 
 which rises on the hills, or, as we contemplate 
 a sunset ; our reverence for the spirit in the 
 simplest and most ancient form of family re- 
 union ; the belief that a meal is a sort of sacra- 
 ment of friendship ; the age-long belief that the 
 highest kind of life is sustained by some physical 
 communication of the divine all these are 
 summed up, and find their true development in 
 the Christian cult. 
 
 That some of these notions are of earlier origin 
 and wider prevalence than Jewish religion may 
 be true ; if so, we may welcome the fact. Sacra- 
 mental Christianity is the consecration of the 
 spiritual life of the race, and the Church is the 
 
SACRAMENTALISM 31 
 
 natural home of the soul. So far from its being 
 an objection, it is a gain when we are told in 
 detail how the Gospel is a net which gathers in 
 many kinds. This characteristic of our religion 
 makes it a charter of liberties for all. Chris- 
 tianity is a religion not for saints only, but for 
 sinners : ' I come not to call the righteous but 
 sinners to repentance. 1 The Church is not 
 meant to be a small body of nice people ; it is 
 the great universal society of sinning, suffering, 
 and struggling men and women, saints and 
 sinners, good, as the world calls them, and bad ; 
 the phlegmatic no less than the zealous ; realists 
 no less than idealists. 
 
 Now, Sacramental religion is the one safeguard 
 of this ; those to whom religion is an interest 
 even more than it is a principle have always 
 the temptation to get by themselves into a 
 Paradise apart. This they may well do, pro- 
 vided they gather into guilds within the great 
 Society and not apart from it, or do not try to 
 make themselves the whole. The danger is 
 always lest good people want to make the Church 
 consist of themselves alone. That was the fault 
 of the Donatists. It has been the bane of 
 Puritanism ; but we can see it at times even 
 in zealous Catholics. Every one who feels him- 
 self burning in zeal has the temptation to wish 
 to cast out people who seem lukewarm ; he thinks 
 their religion means nothing to them ; but he may 
 
32 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 be wrong. The Church is not meant to consist 
 only of spiritual athletes, still less is it meant to 
 consist of spiritual dilettanti. The Church is a 
 body of men, not supermen. ' Are all apostles ? 
 Are all prophets ? Have all the gift of tongues ? ' 
 No religion has any claim to be universal which 
 of set purpose leaves out the average man, and 
 by the average man, remember, we mean the man 
 of no more than average spiritual endowments 
 and religious tastes, for these are independent 
 of earthly circumstances. The Catholic Church 
 would not be democratic if it merely included 
 the whole spiritual elite, though they happened 
 to be crossing-sweepers, because this endowment, 
 these spiritual faculties, as I say, do not depend 
 on education to any great extent and certainly 
 not on position ; but we must not deceive our- 
 selves into believing that the Church would be 
 anything more than a coterie if it excluded no 
 one from its fellowship, dukes or dustmen, 
 making only the condition that all must have 
 great spiritual power. It is glorious to think 
 that the prince of the Apostles was St. Peter, 
 that bungling fisherman, and not an educated 
 intellectual genius like St. Paul, or a born mystic 
 like St. John. The various Puritan systems 
 have always tried to make, or would make, 
 of the Church a- body of the spiritual elite ; 
 belief in the Sacraments is a great safeguard 
 against that, because it does not depend upon 
 
SACRAMENTALISM 33 
 
 our capacity to have spiritually exalted ex- 
 periences. 
 
 Secondly, the Sacraments are universal in 
 their operation. Not only do they appeal to all, 
 but they help us in all moods, and we know very 
 well we need them most when we feel dullest. 
 It is not when, as we say, we feel good or feel 
 spiritually moved that we need most the help 
 of God in this way. You need not have any 
 particular thrill to get the benefit of Sacramental 
 grace. What some people regard as the shame 
 of Holy Baptism and the Eucharist is their glory. 
 The grace is from God, and works independently 
 of the mood and of the temperament of the 
 recipient. 
 
 On the other plan religious life becomes a 
 succession of rare ecstasies followed very often 
 by the attempt to galvanise ourselves into 
 thrills that we can imagine to be ecstasies. 
 Nothing is more dangerous, but it fits in with 
 the modem cult of excitement for excitement's 
 sake. 
 
 Let us then have hope ; for in presenting Sac- 
 ramental Christianity we are not offering the 
 world a weird and unnatural mysticism, nor are 
 we demanding some rare spiritual experience 
 beyond the common power. Rather it is natural 
 piety sublimated, and it has its special appeal 
 and place for the man of ordinary, and no 
 more than ordinary, spiritual endowment. The 
 
34 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 person who can do best without it is not the 
 ordinary man, but a person of a naturally high 
 character and aspirations, and so we often find. 
 More than this, we must claim for the Sacra- 
 mental principle that it is of the essence of 
 Christianity. When the Church appears in 
 history she is Sacramental. It is not an ex- 
 traneous foreign infusion in the simple life of the 
 early Christians. If it were, we should not have 
 the Epistle to the Hebrews taking for granted 
 as first principle the doctrine of Baptism. All 
 modern researches show that we cannot cut the 
 Sacramental notion out of the New Testament. 
 Even those who attribute all to St. Paul testify 
 to its primitive quality ; for the epistles of 
 St. Paul are our earliest authority for Christian 
 practice. It is now charged against St. Paul 
 that he invented the Eucharist, that he adapted 
 Christianity to the mystery cults at that time 
 so fashionable ; but we find that the First 
 Epistle to the Corinthians clearly speaks of the 
 Eucharistic worship as something established 
 and well known. Still it may be admitted that 
 Christianity is a mystery religion. How much it 
 owes to them in terms like salvation I hardly 
 think we can say. It fulfilled a want of whose 
 existence the prevailing mystery cults were evi- 
 dence ; that is, Jt gave those people in reality 
 what they had been long seeking for and trying 
 to invent. 
 
SACRAMENTALISM 35 
 
 But that is only one side ; you cannot cut off 
 the entail which binds the Christian Church to 
 the Jewish. It is being asked now whether our 
 Lord really founded the Church, with a strong 
 presumption in favour of a negative reply. The 
 answer to that is not to point to a definite polity 
 sketched out by our Lord, as we must suppose 
 in the great Forty Days, but rather to em- 
 phasise His claims to be the Messiah. ' I am 
 not come to destroy the law but to fulfil it.' 
 
 The Christian Church is the Jewish Church 
 come to its consummation. The object of 
 Christ's earthly ministry was to get the Jewish 
 nation to recognise that the Kingdom had come 
 at last, and that the meaning of their hopes was 
 there. Had they done that, there would have 
 been no question about this continuity ; since 
 they did not, the Church has, to some extent at 
 least, the appearance of being a totally new body, 
 and even her own apologists sometimes over- 
 stress this newness. That is why it is so im- 
 portant to dwell upon the prophecies of the Old 
 Testament to see how all is working up to the 
 doctrine of the Kingdom of God and the Messiah. 
 
 And that is why we are right in claiming that 
 loyalty to the Church is a duty. ' Loyalty to 
 the brotherhood,' somebody said the other day, 
 ' is incompatible with loyalty to the Spirit.' 
 That is true only on the doctrine of absolute in- 
 dividualism false alike in politics and in religion. 
 
36 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 The Catholic Church, it is said, owes more to 
 Greece and Rome than to Galilee. In truth it 
 owes a great deal to both. The ancient world 
 was strong in its sense of loyalty to the com- 
 munal life. In Aristotle's famous phrase, ' The 
 State is prior to the individual.' In this way we 
 can see how much of the antique passion of 
 sacrifice for the compact city-State has had to 
 do with the Christian notion of reverence for 
 the body. But is the Jews' passionate sense of 
 loyalty to their own polity as God-given to go 
 for nothing ? From which side is derived that 
 notion of ' a peculiar people, a royal priesthood, 
 a holy nation ' ? Surely the Jewish. Even now 
 we are told the Jewish sense of fellowship and 
 loyalty to their own body shames that of many 
 a Christian. Both Jewish polity and ancient 
 civic piety bear witness to the same truth 
 the inherent sociality of man and his need of 
 loyalty to the body. Professor Royce argues 
 that this loyalty to the brotherhood is the whole 
 meaning of Christianity. 
 
 Authority rightly understood is not a fetter 
 upon the freedom of the spirit ; it is a means for 
 its growth. All men, even the most unconven- 
 tional, must pay regard, first, to their past, and, 
 secondly, to their fellows. You cannot cut the 
 painter, and begin the world afresh each genera- 
 tion even if you try : nor can any man live unto 
 himself alone ; if he did he would have no Ian- 
 
SACRAMEXTALISM 37 
 
 guage. The point is whether these things 
 loyalty to the traditional wisdom of men and 
 loyalty to the collective judgment are of the 
 essence of our life, or whether they are things in 
 regard to which you can, without damage, 
 exercise your own caprice. 
 
 The Catholic Church, as do all wise statesmen, 
 insists upon the former view ; only, as we see 
 from the case of Germany, you must not make 
 that claim of authority absolute ; authority is 
 not infallibility. The opposite scheme, that of 
 ( xtrcme individualism, is put forward as a rule 
 by a few highly placed persons living on the 
 accumulated treasures of society, and cherishing 
 an isolation of spirit which is rendered possible 
 only by the vast communal labour of the present 
 and by ages of fellowship and sacrifice in the 
 past. Sheltered in such a way, men can preach 
 alike in politics and religion a purely self-centred 
 individualism. Long since it has been discarded 
 in politics. From the Christian Faith it is in- 
 herently alien, not on account of any high-flown 
 supernatural doctrine, but because it conflicts 
 with the essential principle of love. The in- 
 dividualist mystic, treating Church life as an 
 accident, disbelieving in Church prayers and 
 collective organisation such a one may, indeed 
 often does, practise benevolence ; he tries to love 
 his neighbour, but this cannot seem to him in 
 the same way part of his spiritual life as it is to 
 
38 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 one who feels that he is a Christian as being a 
 baptized member of the Church, drinking in the 
 life of the whole, and in his turn contributing to 
 that life. We must never forget that if the in- 
 dividual takes, he also gives, and that is why 
 we are each of us so deeply responsible. 
 
 Church authority is a communal fact in which 
 every single member not the priests or the 
 bishops alone has his part. Newman saw that 
 long ago, and pointed it out in his paper on 
 Consulting the Laity on Matters of Doctrine. 
 
 This is our final reply to those who charge 
 us with making an addition to, and perverting 
 the purity of, the original faith. Churchliness, 
 treating men as Christians because they are 
 members of the Body, is of the essence of Chris- 
 tianity ; because Christianity is the revelation 
 v that love is the goal of human life, and the mean- 
 ing of the Godhead. Therefore society is not 
 an afterthought, but inherent in the nature of 
 things. 
 
 For the same reason we can take courage ; 
 the taunts of our enemies may be bitter, and 
 the prospect may look black, but the Catholic 
 religion has its strength in the immemorial depths 
 of human life ; just as it gathers beauty from 
 the devotion of a hundred generations. We are 
 not to fear but that it will outlast ' the shocks 
 of time, the shows of circumstance/ even in a 
 day that seems turned to other things. 
 
SACRAMENTALISM 39 
 
 It does seem turned. It will be asked : if 
 your principles are universal, why is it that 
 they are so little accepted ? First of all, Chris- 
 tianity needs faith. The religion of love as the 
 essence of things is not obvious. If we thought 
 it was so in 1914, we cannot think so now. It 
 cannot be proved. The cumulative force of 
 many different arguments may be strong, but 
 it is not coercive, and therefore, unless you have 
 persecution, so long as you have education you 
 cannot have religious uniformity. In all ages, 
 many, perhaps the majority, will reject Chris- 
 tianity. A philosopher said all the fundamental 
 philosophical positions are tenable in any age, 
 though not all are equally prevalent. If they 
 are free, some men will take one, some another. 
 We cannot expect to do away with unbelief in 
 this world. Great harm is done by trying to 
 state Christianity in such a way as to embrace 
 every one in a world like this. All we can hope 
 for is a religion which makes a universal appeal. 
 
 But even so it may be said, even among 
 Christians, only a small minority accept these 
 principles. Ask the man in the street, and what 
 will he tell you ? Still I would say it is not a 
 minority if we take Christendom as a whole. 
 And secondly, even in this country more people 
 accept these principles than we suppose. Where 
 they differ is in their application. Methodists 
 arose really owing to their strong feeling of 
 
40 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 Churchliness and to the Establishment of the 
 eighteenth century not providing for them. The 
 Baptists have, or had, a strong doctrine of Sacra- 
 mental Grace in regard to Baptism, and even 
 among Churchmen who dislike the word Catholic 
 there is a great deal more faith in its fundamental 
 principles than we suppose. They may not like 
 what they think is elaborate and fussy ceremonial ; 
 but they do not want religion utterly non- 
 sacramental and interior ; and for the more part 
 they believe in Baptism as constituting member- 
 ship of the Church, and have a vague but real 
 belief in Sacramental Grace. 
 
 Still, even with all these qualifications, are 
 there not those who repudiate all this doctrine 
 of the Church and Sacraments, and only tolerate 
 its power at present in the hope of getting rid 
 of it, while they still retain faith in our Lord as 
 their Redeemer ? Yes, there are. But will they 
 go on in that way ? I think that Evangelical 
 Christianity apart from the Church is not easy 
 to maintain. Quakerism carries these principles 
 to their logical conclusion ; but remember that 
 the Quakers arose in an age when all accepted 
 the Incarnation and the Bible. But the doctrine 
 of the inner light is really a denial of both. If 
 the individual is to be guided solely by his own 
 immediate inspiration, which he believes to come 
 from God, then he has no possible means of con- 
 necting anything that comes to him with the Jesus 
 
SACRAMENTALISM 41 
 
 of history, still less of believing in a doctrine to 
 explain or to expound Jesus, such as the Incar- 
 nation. He believes only in the immediate gift 
 of God to his own spirit, and ultimately you 
 must have, so far as I can see, a purely sub- 
 jective religion without any reference to any 
 historical development. Even a less rigid ac- 
 ceptance of the ' evangelical ' parts of the 
 Creed apart from the others is not much more 
 hopeful. We have seen the way things have 
 gone in Geneva and in Germany. But, on the 
 other hand, we must remember this ; as I said 
 the first week I was speaking to you, people will, 
 and are intended to, emphasise very different 
 parts of Christian life. There will always be 
 those within the great society of the Church 
 who may accept and indeed use the Sacramental 
 system, whose religious life will go on mainly 
 apart from it. We must always be prepared for 
 this emphasis of different elements in the life 
 of the Christian Church. So long as people 
 are content to live within the one great body 
 and not to pour scorn on others, we must admit 
 that there are some for whom the Sacramental 
 side of religion is not the most important. 
 
 But for the great mass of Christians I believe 
 that will not be so. More and more as I muse 
 upon it, more and more as the wonder and beauty 
 of the Catholic experience of all ages come into 
 my soul, do I feel that the more rich and strange 
 
42 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 is the experience that may be ours, and the sense 
 of praise and worship and of God's Presence given 
 to us in our Eucharistic worship ; and more 
 and more am I convinced that for the majority 
 of men and women, not, perhaps, capable 
 through time or temperament of high speculation 
 or of any great powers of religious rapture, the 
 system of external ordinances and of Sacramental 
 means is the one truly democratic system in 
 religion which gives them each and all their 
 place and their rights independent of their tem- 
 perament, their education, and, if I may say so, 
 of their character. It provides for them, not 
 at the time when they are at their best, but at 
 the time when faith burns dim, when the light 
 of life seems low, when everything seems dull 
 and nothing worth doing then they can come 
 and rest in the beauty of the Sacrament when 
 they would perhaps by themselves be unable to 
 make prayers of any meaning. 
 

 IV. HUMANISM 
 
 'I am come that they might have life, and that they 
 might have it more abundantly.' St. John x. to. 
 
 THE most dangerous notion that modern Chris- 
 tianity has to combat is that it means a shrinking 
 from life, that by its moral system it closes the 
 avenues of human experience, and that in that it 
 is wedded to the tradition which starves the mind. 
 Yet the heightened life of which these words 
 speak is the quality of the Christian Church as 
 we see it in the New Testament, and it is clearly 
 shown in all great periods of the Church, and it 
 is also found in individuals. 
 
 So, too, it gives this sense of the right to a 
 full life to people of whom outwardly we should 
 think the reverse was true. True, this system 
 involves discipline, and all discipline is a ' dying, 1 
 the cutting off of what we like best at the moment, 
 or the facing of something painful or dangerous ; 
 but, if discipline be a dying to life, we can em- 
 brace it. No artist, no thinker, no successful 
 leader was ever made without it. Christianity 
 is the hardest discipline, for its aim is to make 
 us ' pilgrims of eternity ' fit for our destiny. 
 But that aim is the development of our fuller 
 
44 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 personality, functioning in a society, rich in 
 every spiritual treasure. It is not, as in 
 Buddhism and other Oriental religions, the 
 annihilation of personality. 
 
 Our hopes for the Catholic religion at this 
 stage rest upon our faith in its power to stimulate 
 every living and wholesome interest of human 
 life and society. We claim that in the Christian 
 Church each man in the degree and measure of 
 his capacity can have not less but more of the 
 love of beauty, as shown in art, letters, and 
 music, or the sense of order and the desire for 
 truth in the investigation of natural phenomena, 
 or that love of intimacy with human life in every 
 age which we call the historical sense, no less than 
 he can in the growth of all bodily powers and 
 courage, and the readiness for adventure, mental 
 and physical. 
 
 In a word, Christianity is the sanction of 
 Humanism in its best sense, and the Church is 
 the true home of the soul and the body. These 
 are large claims. Many do not believe that 
 they are well founded. Yet our hopes for win- 
 ning men and women in this age, avid of ex- 
 perience, set on fire by the love of what is new, 
 depend upon our trying with all our force to 
 make that claim good. Its success rests upon 
 each of us each -Christian man and woman. 
 Any turning back or shrinking, any frowning out 
 on puritanic or obscurantist lines, or undue 
 
HUMANISM 45 
 
 readiness to be shocked (which is all that some 
 people think religion means) may do incalculable 
 harm. I heard of an eminent bishop, who when 
 \i>iting was introduced by the priest to his 
 churchwarden, the publican of the village, and 
 an excellent man, but the bishop's remark was, 
 4 Could you not have managed to get some one 
 else?' 
 
 Remember that this depends upon the laity 
 more than it does upon the clergy. Some will 
 say how absurd it is to claim for the Church any 
 place in this movement of the spirit. Is it not 
 notorious that Christians are of small account 
 in certain circles which are predominantly intel- 
 lectual, while as to art, letters, science, the 
 majority of Christians, even of those who have 
 what is called a good education, are avowedly 
 unsympathetic ? The English clergy used to 
 be called the wonder of the world for their learn- 
 ing, and a little later it was expected, as a matter 
 of course, that the vicar of the parish would be 
 the most cultivated man in it. Is it not, rather, 
 true that there is a gulf between the Church and 
 culture, and that this gulf is widening daily ? 
 In so far as it is true, I claim that it is only an 
 incidental phase, and that it is our business to 
 end it. Moreover, the Church does not mean 
 the clergy. It is for Christians because they are 
 Christians to have this sympathy, and in some 
 rather obvious cases it is not the priest who 
 
46 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 should be expected to develop it. It is not the 
 business of any one to try to be everything. 
 It is the business of the Church to include every 
 real interest. We cannot expect, for instance, 
 a hard-working parish priest in a populous slum 
 district to have at his finger-ends the latest 
 literary, artistic, or scientific gossip. My point 
 is that these qualities and these interests ought 
 to be shown by the Church in its members, and 
 that they may be. 
 
 The divorce between the Church and intel- 
 lectual activities, so far as it is a fact, is due to 
 several causes. The first has been the attempt 
 to dominate scientific inquiry by conclusions 
 supposed to be derived from theology. Of this 
 the cardinal instance is the case of Galileo. The 
 outcry against Charles Darwin in the last age 
 was an unpleasant echo of that. The effect of 
 that error was disastrous, and it is not yet over. 
 There persists amongst scientific men a sus- 
 picion of all theological thought, and it still 
 persists, although it is probably mitigated. But 
 science has acquired her independence ; even that, 
 however, has tended to make the Church take up 
 a position of entire detachment and to disclaim 
 interests in a sphere beyond its direct province. 
 
 Other causes are deeper. Religion is, as I 
 
 N believe, the ultimate sanction for all that can 
 
 be called humane culture ; that is, culture may 
 
 exist at any moment without religion, but it has 
 
HUMANISM 47 
 
 no real right to do so, and it may decay. Yet 
 this basis is not obvious, nor is it always clear 
 what is meant by culture as a fruit of the religious 
 spirit. To the profoundly religious mind the 
 danger of absorption in these interests may 
 present itself as an acute form of the temptation 
 of the world, more acute because more subtle 
 than in its somewhat grosser form. You know the 
 famous story of St. Bernard, how he walked past 
 the Lake of Geneva, and was so absorbed in 
 Divine contemplation that he had no leisure to 
 admire the scenery. At other times he showed 
 a real regard for scenery. Since the other world 
 is the goal of the religious man, and since his final 
 place can be only in the City of God, the religious 
 man may be inclined to treat interest in all these 
 matters of human creation as though it meant 
 living upon a lower level, and to detach himself 
 therefrom. Where this notion rules, in propor- 
 tion as people are earnest in religion, they will 
 tend to regard themselves as superior to learning, 
 without the need of any earthly cult of beauty. 
 For certain rare souls that may be true, but it 
 is not true for the mass of men, even Christian 
 men. The effect of this has been bad. It has 
 tended to make both religion and culture of de- 
 partmental interest as you see in shop windows 
 the term ' Art fabrics. 1 Instead of ministering 
 to the whole life of the people, having a broadly 
 human appeal, as we see in the great age of the 
 
48 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 thirteenth century, both religion and culture 
 are now regarded as the affairs of those who like 
 that sort of thing and have time for it, and each 
 of them tends to be treated as a something apart 
 from the main stream of civilisation as presented 
 to us in all its beauty by the factory and the 
 cinema. Religion to be human must be in prin- 
 ciple Sacramental. Treated as a purely other- 
 worldly interest it becomes the property of those 
 who can make it their main form of earthly 
 activity. 
 
 This need not be. Of that we have evidence 
 in history. The better side of the ancient world 
 from the time of Socrates developed in ideals 
 which had their outcome in Christianity, and 
 which could be fulfilled in no other way. The 
 Church has been the most potent means for 
 preserving what is good in the ancient culture, 
 and handing it down. Clement of Alexandria 
 saw this, and claimed that the educated Christian 
 was the true Gnostic. St. Augustine, uncom- 
 promising as he is, is fully imbued with the cul- 
 ture of his day, and influenced by the writings 
 of Vergil and Cicero. Here we have shown the 
 power of the great Christian Society to assimi- 
 late all that was malleable to its spirit of an 
 ancient civilisation. In the Middle Ages we see 
 its creative activity at work. It is easy to sneer 
 at the barbarism of those times, so different 
 is it not ? from our world, as ' the combats 
 
HUMANISM 49 
 
 of kites and crows.' Bishop Creighton was right 
 in saying that the greatest age yet known was 
 the thirteenth century. There we find the high- 
 water mark of achievement in the greatest Gothic, 
 like the Sainte Chapelle and all the subsidiaries. 
 Poetry never surpassed the Divina Commedia of 
 Dante ; and the intellectual activity of the uni- 
 versities of those days put ours to shame, and 
 it was not the possession merely of a class. 
 Every part of life was claimed for God, but in 
 writers like St. Thomas the intellect obtains its 
 rights, and in spite of reverence for authority has 
 rarely been freer. The revival of the spirit of 
 humility and poverty in the friars went side by 
 side with the development of a vast system of 
 law founded on the Roman, and attempts to 
 prevent the oppression of the poor, which, if not 
 wholy successful, were preferable to the methods 
 of the Manchester Economists and their fellows, 
 who encouraged the slavery of children, so ably 
 described recently by Mr. and Mrs. Hammond 
 in their new book, The Town Labourer. Even 
 the change to the modern world was the work of 
 Churchmen. In its later stages the Renaissance 
 may have been anti-Christian. Machiavelli and 
 others, like Nietzsche, took the bad elements 
 of the pagan mind ; but the great rush of the re- 
 discovery of Humanist enthusiasm was not anti- 
 Christian, and the debt of culture is great to 
 Popes of blameless life and human learning 
 
50 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 like Nicholas V. It was so also in the seven- 
 teenth century. Alike in this country and 
 France, there was a great intellectual ferment, 
 and in the main it was nothing incompatible 
 with religious fervour. We see that in men like 
 Jeremy Taylor, or Bossuet, or F6nelon. On the 
 evidence of history it cannot be maintained that 
 the Church is divorced from culture. 
 
 I think we can go further. In the first part of 
 his work, The Foundations of Belief, Mr. Arthur 
 Balfour has shown that a thorough-going accept- 
 ance of the principle of naturalism must be the 
 death of religion and all the other goods of 
 human life beyond immediate comfort. This 
 thesis has been developed by others, like Mr. 
 Mallock. This is not true always of indi- 
 viduals, and would show itself but gradually. 
 What is true is that the pursuit of truth, the 
 worship of beauty, alike depend upon faith in 
 the universe as the work of God. Apart from 
 the practical work of science in enslaving nature, 
 there is no reason for going on with laborious 
 toil unless we believe ourselves to have permanent 
 value. Truth is worth getting at if we think 
 we are immortal beings. Otherwise man is a 
 stranger in a hostile universe, and can but make 
 the best of 'a short day of frost and sun ' before 
 all goes down. Still more is this true with the 
 worship of beauty. That is the ultimate meaning 
 of all the markings, whether stone or paint, or 
 
HUMANISM 51 
 
 sound or words. What makes it worth while, 
 or, rather, what does this ineradicable instinct 
 of the artist imply ? Beauty, as has been well 
 said, is the form of Love, and the meaning of 
 aesthetic activity is faith in Eternal Love, that 
 1 light whose smile kindles the universe, that 
 benediction in which all things move.' Many 
 may be content with the fact who do not seek 
 for the cause, and repudiate, indeed, the further 
 reference. 
 
 Still, it is there. A civilisation cut off wholly 
 from God would be a civilisation without the 
 highest kind of culture, whether aesthetic or 
 intellectual. It would have no motive beyond 
 fear, immediate pleasure, and the desire to ward 
 off the terrors of pain or death to pursue these 
 ends. If indeed there be eternal life, and man 
 can share it, then indeed the goods of sight and 
 imagination, the treasures of thought, and all 
 the ardours of spiritual adventure are the out- 
 ward and visible signs of that inward and in- 
 visible grace which we term the glory of God. 
 
 Further, for these things to be held to the 
 full there must be peace in the soul. Not a 
 peace necessarily of body or outward things, or 
 a life without trouble or sacrifice. Even in art 
 it is true that men must die to live. You 
 cannot keep the cross out of any form of human 
 life. This is admitted by all the greatest poets, 
 even where they are not Christian. The true 
 
52 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 artist is like the man in Daudet's tale with the 
 head of gold, who had the means of making 
 richer any one he cared for, but it was only by 
 the costly sacrifice of a part of himself. At the 
 base of all this must be a sense of peace, of 
 resting on a sure foundation, of being at home 
 wkh all things, and this can only be to those 
 who have the peace of God. 
 
 Lastly, we must bear in mind that, if Chris- 
 tianity be the source of culture, it is because of 
 \ its belief in Eternal Love, and in human society 
 as a fellowship. All culture requires a social 
 atmosphere. The notion that we can be purely 
 individualistic is false in fact. Some intel- 
 lectuals are for denying the social elements in 
 culture, and claiming that every one can be for 
 himself alone. I am glad that most who think 
 that deny the Christian Faith, but if our faith be 
 in the fellowship of the redeemed, in the human 
 family as heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, 
 then we must beware of making anything ex- 
 clusive. The great need of our hideous in- 
 dustrial cities is not more money, but a higher 
 life for all ; not better houses, but better com- 
 munal buildings ; a first-rate theatre for every 
 city, with a municipal orchestra ; for more 
 universities, not only for the few but for all. 
 This is not only a just claim, but it is eminently 
 Christian. The great evil of the culture which 
 came in with the Renaissance, and sheltered in 
 
HUMANISM 53 
 
 the courts of princes, and flowered in educated 
 Europe in the eighteenth century, was that it 
 was exclusive. The writings of Gibbon or 
 Montesquieu or Goethe, or, in a lesser scale, 
 of Horace Walpole or Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu, are evidence of this. We Catholic 
 Christians, as I contend, and no one else, are 
 the true ' Argonauts of the ideal ' ; but we cannot 
 be that, as Christians, if we are clinging to a class 
 culture, the treasure of an expensive education, 
 lifting us above our common fellowship, for that 
 exclusive spirit, alas ! is too often the result of 
 education a culture purely selfish. The Church, 
 I am persuaded, has a greater and more glorious 
 opportunity than she has ever had in the past, 
 but she must not be a class Church, either in 
 fact or name. She must be ready to see the 
 value of the principle of fellowship, as something 
 truly Christian, and not to gather up her skirts 
 because some people are different in their ways 
 and speech. Ethically considered, the most 
 thoroughgoing Christian movement of the last 
 century was the Trade Union movement, which 
 expressed the principle of brotherhood. Yet 
 many people disapproved. How needful it was 
 is shown by the facts detailed by Mr. and Mrs. 
 Hammond in their book on The Town Labourer, 
 and it cannot be said that the Church did much 
 to understand or welcome it, though we must not 
 forget the labours, in a cause despised by all the 
 
54 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION 
 
 intellectuals of that day, of the great Lord 
 Shaftesbury. It has been well said that, horrible 
 as the state of things was in the factories as 
 regards child labour a hundred years ago, pro- 
 bably in a hundred years to come we shall be 
 equally aghast at the wastage of child life to- 
 day in blind-alley occupations and bad housing. 
 We ought to be the people most alive to it, but 
 is our conscience alive ? If it is not, I do not 
 know whether we shall have a great Church 
 very long with a live and wholesome life of really 
 human interests. 
 
 Still, there are many signs of hope, and there 
 are more people whose consciences are awakened. 
 Let us, then, pursue all these things which go 
 by the name of culture. Let us repudiate the 
 charge that we are afraid of thought, but let us 
 above all bear in mind that the Christian life 
 is the fellowship of brotherhood, that we are 
 determined to do all we can to make these things 
 common. ' Whatsoever things are true, what- 
 soever things are honest, whatsoever things are 
 just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever 
 things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good 
 report : if there be any virtue, and if there be 
 any praise, think on these things. J 
 
OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 I. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 IN ENGLAND 
 
 ' I have a goodly heritage.' Psalm xvi. 6. 
 
 HAVE I ? That is the question which many 
 English Churchmen ask themselves. What is 
 the worth of our so-called Catholic heritage in 
 the English Church ? That is the topic which 
 we shall consider together these five Sundays. 
 Many people just now are inclined to doubt 
 fit her the reality, or else the value of this heritage. 
 Such doubts are natural, but I think that they 
 are not well founded. Nor must we over- rate 
 their importance. The English branch of the 
 Church of God is one of our most characteristic 
 institutions, and we know that it is always an 
 Englishman's privilege to grumble. That privi- 
 lege has been exercised to the full by English 
 Church people, lay and clerical, male and female. 
 From the days of John Henry Newman onwards 
 many have been found to echo the scorn of the 
 Apologia at the comfortable Church ; some, too, 
 will feel the justice of those pathetic words in 
 the last sermon at Littlemore : ' O my mother, 
 
56 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 whence is this unto thee, that thou hast good 
 things poured upon thee and canst not keep them, 
 and bearest children yet darest not own them ? 
 Why hast thou not the skill to use their services, 
 nor the heart to rejoice in their love ? How is 
 it that whatever is generous in purpose, and 
 tender or deep in devotion, thy flower and thy 
 promise, falls from thy bosom and finds no home 
 within thine arms ? Who hath put this note 
 upon thee to have a " miscarrying womb and dry 
 breasts," to be strange to thine own flesh and 
 thine eye cruel towards thy little ones ? Thine 
 own offspring, the fruit of thy womb, who love 
 thee and would toil for thee, thou dost gaze 
 upon with fear as though a portent, or thou dost 
 loathe as an offence ; at best thou dost but 
 endure, as if they had no claim but on thy 
 patience, self-possession, and vigilance, to be 
 rid of them as easily as thou mayest. Thou 
 makest them ' stand all the day idle,' as the very 
 condition of thy bearing with them ; or thou 
 biddest them be gone where they will be more 
 welcome ; or thou sellest them for nought to 
 the stranger that passes by. And what wilt 
 thou do in the end thereof ? ' I 
 
 Such complaints have much to be said for them. 
 The faults of our Church are ' gross as a moun- 
 tain, open, palpable.'. But they are the defects 
 of her qualities, and if we dwell only on the dark 
 
 1 Newman, Sermons on Subjects of the Day, No. xxvi., pp .407-8. 
 
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND 57 
 
 side we shall form a wrong picture of the whole. 
 Always there is a tendency to see the ill in any 
 society in which we are living. In bidding you 
 be thankful for the great privileges of an English 
 Catholic I must not be understood to echo that 
 self-complacent optimism once so fashionable, 
 and even now not unknown. Quite in the 
 manner of the eighteenth century, some people 
 treat the Church as a part of the British Con- 
 stitution, alongside of the lion and unicorn. 
 Still connected with our present happy establish- 
 ment in Church and State, it recalls the defeat 
 of the Armada and Guy Fawkes' Day, and the 
 victories of the great Marl borough, and other 
 like joyous colourings of history. These people 
 are not so buoyant as of old. They have begun 
 to doubt the truth of their dream, and the Church 
 is very obviously not the nation, nor is it likely 
 to become so. 
 
 The Toleration Act it is, and not any bigotry 
 of High and Low, which has made the Church 
 a small society, relatively. True, every bap- 
 tized person is a member of the Church Catholic, 
 and what is the precise relation of those bap- 
 tized who prefer other associations no one 
 has yet determined. Yet even so, the Church 
 can no longer be said to be the Nation. That is 
 the first fact that we must face. The Church of 
 England may still be established, but it is only 
 one religious society among many others. It 
 
58 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 might be very nice to live in the seventeenth 
 century, but we do not. All views of the Church 
 and its relations to the State or to politics, or to 
 other bodies, which assume that the Church is 
 coextensive with the nation, are erroneous, and 
 if we try to act on them disaster will result. 
 
 Still we, the minority who cling to our member- 
 ship in the historic Church of the country, are not 
 wrong in viewing with pride its long connection 
 with the English State, and with the most striking 
 events in English history. We do right when 
 we are proud of our Archbishop being the suc- 
 cessor of Stephen Langton no less than of Laud, 
 of Becket as well as Parker. This historical 
 sentiment is wholesome ; but I am not sure 
 whether it greatly appeals to the younger gene- 
 ration. 
 
 The proudest title in our Church is that of 
 Catholic. Right as we are in disapproval of 
 those who scorn her English character, still it is 
 the Catholic, universal quality which is the 
 greatest. We are loyal to the Church of the 
 land as the representative of the whole body, 
 and one element in the great Society : she is no 
 absolutely separate entity. We cannot under- 
 stand her hierarchy, her Liturgy, her Creeds, even 
 her outward embodiments, apart from that great 
 body ; even her Prayer- Book is not the separate, 
 unique production some imagine it. 
 
 Nor, again, is her origin independent. Some 
 
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND 59 
 
 years ago Bishop Lightfoot tried to derive the 
 English Church from Celtic Christianity. He 
 did not succeed. Dr. Collins proved that, great 
 as is our debt to St. Columba and St. Chad, it 
 is still to Pope Gregory and St. Augustine, to 
 Wilfrid and to Theodore of Tarsus that we owe 
 our Church and its organisation. Let us be 
 frank in this admission. Even those parts 
 evangelised by Celtic missionaries soon lost their 
 peculiar quality. Nor need we regret this. 
 Neither for English Christianity nor for English 
 culture would it have been aught but a calamity 
 if she had grown up in isolation from Europe. 
 Yet has she not grown to that condition ? 
 Almost : a couple of centuries ago it seemed 
 as though the tightening of all national bonds had 
 led to a completely insular Church. But with 
 the nineteenth century that appearance (it was 
 never more) had ceased, though still we need to 
 guard ourselves against that pert and provincial 
 spirit which sees in the English Church the word 
 English and nothing else ; and, whatever her 
 continuity with the past, would shut off our 
 national Christianity in a bombproof shelter, 
 where no foreign fliers could touch her. Some 
 people talk of our not being a Church, but the 
 ' two Provinces of York and Canterbury.' Such 
 a phrase has its truth, provided it be not held 
 to mean any obligation of allegiance to the 
 autocrat at Rome. Its use does serve to explain 
 
60 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 the relation of the Church to Christendom. 
 (Not indeed that the phrase ' Church of Eng- 
 land ' is new. That Ecclesia Anglicana liber a 
 sit is the first provision of Magna Charta.) 
 Mr, Lacey, in his admirable little volume on 
 Catholicity, tells us that we must repent of 
 Anglicanism no less than of Romanism. That 
 is true, if he means by it that self-righteous spirit 
 which seems to think the English character is 
 the one among all the nations of the world which 
 needs no redemption. 
 
 What is it but her inherent Catholicity which 
 makes it always impossible to treat the English 
 Church as a purely Protestant institution ? The 
 experiment has been tried, and tried more than 
 once ; but it has never succeeded. The Pro- 
 testant elements in the Church, which assuredly 
 are there, from time to time try to make out that 
 they are its whole essence ; and then the Catholic 
 elements uprise and reassert their claim. This 
 is a far better way of arguing the Catholic reality 
 of the Church than the argument of continuity. 
 When that is used, what is proved is usually 
 only legal and historical continuity, not spiritual. 
 Moreover, even though a society were continuous 
 with a mediaeval Church, it might have shed 
 irrevocably all the characteristic elements. Too 
 much stress laid OR the continuity argument 
 has another danger ; it may foster the spirit of 
 antiquarianism no bad thing, but not what 
 
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND 61 
 
 people want mainly in religion. Neither legal 
 continuity, nor national sentiment, nor ecclesi- 
 astical antiquarianism interesting as are all 
 these is our real claim to thankfulness ; but 
 the sense that the Church has the power of an 
 endless life, that she gathers up all the ages, 
 and that she is the Church of the future, because 
 she is the Church of the past, that she is rather 
 a living spirit than a dead tradition. It is such 
 a Church as this, with its worshipping people, 
 which is the best evidence of the Catholic and 
 universal character of the Church. It is for you 
 for it is the work of the laity far more than the 
 clergy to show by your lives the transforming 
 power of the Catholic religion, and by a devotion 
 removed from all pettiness to display its grace 
 to beautify the most common of daily duties. 
 
II. OUR DEBT TO ROME 
 
 'Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn.' Isaiah li. i. 
 
 LAST week we began to speak of our Catholic 
 heritage in the English Church. We saw that it 
 is the greatest treasure which we possess. We 
 spoke of the danger of becoming what Father 
 Tyrrell called ' pert and provincial ' in our 
 Churchmanship, and the evil of confining the 
 development of the Church to any single epoch. 
 That is the cardinal objection to the purely 
 Protestant theory of the Church. It makes it 
 too much a thing of one time. Some upheaval 
 was needed if Christianity was to survive after 
 the Renaissance. No trained historical judg- 
 ment can deny the abuses which stifled Church 
 life in the later Middle Ages. No judge of men 
 will question that the mighty influence which 
 swept the abuses away, and much else with them, 
 was predominantly religious, although many other 
 things added to its force. One age isolated the 
 Reformation, and apotheosised that most human 
 of all religious leaders, aptly described by Robert 
 Browning as ' grand, rough, old Martin Luther.' 
 That exaggeration is no excuse for our going to 
 the opposite extreme and treating the whole 
 
OUR DEBT TO ROME 63 
 
 series of movements as one vast mistake. As a 
 very good Catholic said once to me, * Salvation 
 by faith was a needful substitute for salvation 
 by dodges/ 
 
 Yet the claim in some quarters to treat the 
 Church as a manufacture of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury alone is outrageous. If we reject this claim 
 and I suppose that all of us here do reject it 
 then we are faced with the problem of Rome. 
 1 If the Catholic life of all the ages means to you 
 as much as you say that it means, why cut your- 
 self off from the greatest embodiment ? You 
 are Western, and your obvious duty is sub- 
 mission to the ruler of all the West.' Some such 
 doubt must be faced by all who hold to the 
 Catholic ideal. It is not merely Protestants on 
 the one hand, or Papists on the other, who will 
 put these questions. It is their own minds. 
 These questionings arise naturally from present 
 conditions. It is not honest to speak of those 
 who go to Rome (and still less of those who feel 
 Roman difficulties) as though they were driven 
 only by some strange spirit of perversity. We 
 cannot claim the title of Catholics without ask. 
 ing ourselves why that does not mean Roman 
 Catholics. If we are not going to be Papists, 
 we must have some grounds. Moreover, we 
 shall probably feel that many of the grounds 
 alleged in previous ages are invalid. We must 
 face the problem for ourselves. 
 
64 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 To-day, however, I want to make the ground 
 clear by speaking a little more of our debt to 
 Rome. Last Sunday I stated the fact that to 
 Rome is due the Christianisation of the English. 
 Even the ecclesiastical divisions were framed 
 on the lines of the Roman Province of Britain, 
 and when the Primate of England meets the 
 Primate of All England he testifies to the living 
 power of an Empire which seems long since to 
 have ended. If we owe our Christianity to the 
 Papacy, so also we owe our ecclesiastical de- 
 velopment. No doubt existed in the later 
 Middle Ages about the relation of the English 
 Church to the Roman See. These bonds had 
 been tightened by St. Dunstan, and again by 
 Lanfranc. The thirteenth century witnessed 
 the most complete subjection of the English 
 Church to the Pope. Yet all through there was 
 no real question about it. This needs to be men- 
 tioned, owing to a common error. Somewhere 
 in the Victorian era High Churchmen thought 
 that they could do their cause service by proving 
 that the English Church was, in the Middle 
 Ages, an independent society. This well-mean- 
 ing dream is not history. True, the English 
 kings disliked the temporal interference of the 
 Pope. Patrons resented his claim to ' provide ' 
 to benefices. The Whole people wished ill to his 
 tax-gatherers. Incumbents liked to be let alone. 
 So they do now. Parliament could pass Acts 
 
OUR DEBT TO ROME 65 
 
 like Provisors and Praemunire in order to restrain 
 Papal interference, and proclaim in high-sound- 
 ing phrases that 4 this Crown of England hath 
 been at all times so free that it hath been in 
 no earthly subjection in all things touching the 
 regality of the said Crown.' This is true. But 
 the corollary which some might think would 
 follow did not follow. Neither king, nor nobles, 
 nor people rejected the spiritual rule of the 
 Papacy. No one claimed a special law for the 
 English Church. Whenever the Government 
 allowed the Courts Christian to do their work, 
 they did it on the lines followed throughout 
 Western Europe. So far from England's atti- 
 tude to the Pope being merely honorific, she was 
 more submissive than the Gallican Church, and 
 less of a separate entity. Dr. Maitland's classical 
 book on this subject has established this point. 
 Some few qualifications may have to be made, 
 and Mr. Ogle showed that Lyndewood was 
 something better than the ' stark Papalist ' 
 Maitland styled him. In the main it is true to 
 say that those who have attempted to prove 
 an independent entity for the English Church 
 in the Middle Ages have failed. 
 
 Nor, again, need we regret the fact that we 
 were ruled for so long by Rome. In a valuable 
 series of lectures on Church and State in the 
 Middle Ages, Mr. A. L. Smith has shown that at 
 least up to the middle of the thirteenth century 
 
 E 
 
66 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 the influence of the Papacy was, on the whole, 
 a good one ; that a strong international insti- 
 tution was the only possible check on unbridled 
 tyranny either of sovereigns or feudal lords ; and 
 that in their religious life the barbarian races 
 were far too crude to develop without tutelage. 
 In many matters, such as the marriage laws, he 
 shows the unfairness with which the Papacy has 
 been treated, and he proves conclusively that 
 neither for people nor priests would an inde- 
 pendent position have led to a deeper religious 
 life and morality, but rather to a very sensible 
 lowering of both. We therefore need not be 
 ashamed to admit our debt to Rome, whether 
 in regard to the origin and the development of 
 the English Church, nor need we deny that it 
 was a good thing. 
 
 That, however, some would say, is all over. 
 Since the sixteenth century, which rid us of the 
 1 Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enor- 
 mities/ we have no further relations with the 
 See of Rome, and we are not concerned to take 
 any lessons from this great obscurantist Church. 
 Such a water-tight compartment doctrine of the 
 Christian Society is, however, untrue to the facts 
 of life. Spiritual connections are deeper and 
 more subtle than material, and we cannot, if we 
 would, escape the influence of this vast associa- 
 tion any more than in certain other matters we 
 can or do escape Lutheran and Calvinist influence. 
 
OUR DEBT TO ROME 67 
 
 More than this, if the effort were feasible it would 
 still be undesirable. For the most venerable 
 See in the West, and the most illustrious in the 
 world, are we to have no feeling of respect ? Is 
 our relation for a relation there must be to 
 be merely negative ? We English, who pride 
 ourselves beyond all the nations of the earth on 
 our reverence ' for tradition, and for the slow- 
 moving spirit of the ages ; we who are impatient 
 of novelties and despise the mere jerry-built 
 structures of the moment ; who seek the origins 
 of our national institutions in the most im- 
 memorial monuments of the past are we to be 
 such unworthy children of our ancestors, who 
 covered this country with those abbeys and 
 cathedrals which are still its chief glory, that we 
 shall copy every littlr vulgar upstart and deny 
 the fact of our affiliation ? I trow not. English 
 Churchmen need not be ashamed to acknow- 
 ledge what is mere fact that the Bishop of 
 is the ^occupant of the one Apostolic See 
 in the West ; that we are Western, and that onre 
 in obstacles were removed jwe^ shnnlH t>f 
 glad to accord^o the Primatial See of Urns. 
 
 lom jja primatial dignity What prospect 
 
 within the next five centuries there is of a 
 truly (Ecumenical Council, who shall say ? But 
 should there ever be one I do not think we are 
 concerned to repudiate the claim of the Pope 
 to act as its natural President. All this is very 
 
68 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 far from admitting such claims as those of ' uni- 
 versal Bishop ' or ' infallible autocrat.' That, 
 which is our real difference, will form our topic 
 next week. 
 
 Short of this there are many things in which 
 we can learn from Rome. Into the battle of the 
 styles in ritual I shall not enter. This much 
 may be said it is no argument against adopting 
 some usage that it has been commended on the 
 score of convenience or devotion, and has been 
 ' mixed with life ' in the last couple of centuries. 
 The supreme quality of Rome is her supernatural 
 and her democratic character. No one, not even 
 her bitterest enemies, denies that the Roman sys- 
 tem is the great witness to the supernatural. 
 No one, again, who believes in the Sacramental 
 idea would deny that it is a main feature of the 
 Roman system. Personally, I do not like the 
 Latin clearness of cut, its hard-and-fast dis- 
 tinctions, its pigeon-hole use of words, its ex- 
 treme articulateness and machine-like logic. 
 But I cannot doubt that for many this is the 
 most adequate, indeed the only possible method 
 of apprehension of the supernatural in life, and 
 it were better to accept the whole cycle of Latin 
 thought and cult than to give up that, supposing 
 the choice had to be made. I do not believe 
 that it has. But this supernatural atmosphere, 
 this intimacy with the other world, this natural 
 habit of talking to God and the Saints, this per- 
 
OUR DEBT TO ROME 69 
 
 petual expression of the prayer idea can we 
 say that we have them in any like degree ? 
 
 Then, lastly, Rome is a Church where all are 
 at home. Nobody thinks of the Roman Church 
 in the way many people, I fear, think of the 
 English Church in this country-. These people 
 may be wrong, but they think of us as the 
 Church of the prosperous, a middle-class insti- 
 tution, not upper class as some do vainly boast, 
 but an appanage of the prosperous, which goes 
 along with banks and co-operative stores, and 
 week-end tickets. Now, unless I am mistaken, 
 this is not the case with Rome. The rich are 
 there, and we may think a little over-advertised, 
 but the poor are there too, and as a matter of 
 right and not of favour. You can see the differ- 
 ence at once if you spend a holiday in Italy and 
 go, say, to St. Mark's, Venice, and then return 
 to an English Cathedral Close. Then, again, 
 have we nothing to learn from the flame of sacri- 
 fice which burns so brightly in their temple ? I 
 do not deny the magnificent offerings of life 
 which English priests, both at home and in the 
 mission field, have poured out. But what are 
 they what is our tiny stream of martyrs as 
 compared with the mighty river on the other 
 side ? 
 
III. OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 
 
 * Not as lords over God's heritage, but as ensamples to 
 the flock.' i Peter v. 3. 
 
 THERE is the true ideal of Episcopal authority. 
 To-day we~are giving the sinister side of the 
 Roman emblem. We have seen the error of 
 treating the English part of the Universal Church 
 as a thing in itself entirely separate. We have 
 seen our duty of reverent regard for what came 
 to us through Rome, and the danger of a purely 
 negative attitude even to its modern represen- 
 tative. If, then, we are not prepared to go 
 further, and to admit the modern claim of the 
 Papacy, we must perforce ask ourselves why ? 
 Our reply to this rests primarily on the false 
 conception of authority inculcated by Rome ; 
 and secondly, it rests partly upon history and 
 partly upon the present condition of the Churches 
 of God in the East. 
 
 The discussion of Roman claims is best carried 
 on apart from the somewhat intricate subtleties 
 involved in the Vatican Decrees. Infallibility 
 in the famous definition need not mean very 
 much, as you can see if you read Newman's 
 famous letter to the Duke of Norfolk. I have 
 
 70 
 
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 71 
 
 read a book by a modern Romanist claiming 
 that only two documents in the history of the 
 Church come under the head of that decree 
 one, the tome of St. Leo the Great, and the 
 other the decree of Pius ix. establishing the 
 Immaculate Conception. One word in the 
 Vatican decree alone is really important 
 1 irreformable.' It says that the decrees of the 
 Popes are ' irreformable/ If the Pope be en- 
 dowed with that infallibility which Christ gave 
 to the Church, the question arises, What kind 
 ufallibility did Christ give to the Church ? 
 Is it a power of uttering verbally exact pro- 
 positions, always adequate to Divine realities 
 like the old theory of inspiration, in which case 
 the Pope would be a sort of super-gramophone 
 or is the power rather of the nature described 
 by the writers of the seventeenth century, and 
 by Bossuet, as ' indefectibility,' an assurance 
 that the Christian Society is living by the power 
 of the Holy Spirit, and will never so far go wrong 
 as to make separation a duty. If we could bring 
 our adversaries to understand no more than this 
 by ' infallibility,' union would be nearer. I fear 
 that it will be long ere that end is reached, for 
 they have chosen to confuse infallibility with 
 authority. Theoretically it might be possible 
 to maintain the doctrine that the Pope is 
 infallible while separating this from the Ultra- 
 montane mode of its exercise. I do not say that 
 
72 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 it would so be possible, but I am not altogether 
 certain that it would not. What is important 
 for our purpose is that as a fact these two, In- 
 fallibilism and Ultramontanism, are not so dis- 
 sociated. The claim to infallibility is merely the 
 culmination of the long series of events which 
 have produced the triumph of a complete auto- 
 cracy within the Latin Obedience. The claim 
 for the Pope to act alone, to act apart from a 
 Council, comes before us as part of his general 
 assertion of absolute power by Divine right, and 
 this sheer autocracy it is which we repudiate, and 
 say that, short of a revolution, we could not be 
 brought to accept the Roman claims. Whether 
 any other matters, such as the doctrine of the 
 Eucharist or the Immaculate Conception, or 
 various extravagances in popular devotion or 
 practical abuses, would be sufficient, apart from 
 this, to justify our separation, I do not know. 
 Perhaps they would not. 
 
 The real head and front of the Papal offend- 
 ing is, in our eyes, this claim to an absolute 
 monarchy within the Church upon earth. This 
 seems practically to deny the Headship of Christ, 
 and unduly to divide the Church militant from 
 the Church triumphant. As it was humorously 
 said by the late H. D. Traill : ' The Pope seems 
 to claim to be the Vicar of Christ in the sense that 
 a man is said to be the vicar of his curate.' This 
 seems to us to be contrary to the very idea of 
 
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 73 
 
 Christianity, for that asserts the spiritual free- 
 dom of every baptized Christian, and that 
 freedom must affect every part of his being, 
 intellect no less than conscience. It gives him, 
 therefore, some share, however small, in that 
 authority which belongs to the whole body, and 
 is not vested in any official, or in any class of 
 officials, to the exclusion of all others. I would 
 say that even so devoted a Papist as John Henry 
 Newman has taught us much about the true 
 nature of authority. In an article entitled 
 4 On Consulting the Laity in Matters of Faith/ 
 which was printed in the Rambler, was not liked 
 at Rome, and was not reprinted until lately, 
 Newman explains how it was to the laity, and 
 not either to the Popes or the Bishops, that the 
 pi^servation of the reality of faith in Christ's 
 Godhead was due during the storms of the fourth 
 century the time when, as somebody said, that 
 at one moment the whole world woke up to find 
 itself Arian. All that we know about human 
 life and society combines with all that we have 
 been given in the Christian revelation to drive 
 us to a passionate and resolved repudiation of 
 the Ultramontane monstrosity, rightly styled 
 by the great Puritan allegorist ' Giant Pope.' 
 
 The late Pius x.'s Encyclical on Modernism 
 was not altogether wrong in its account of the 
 dangers of that movement. This fact has been 
 proved by the later career and writings of M. 
 
74 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 Loisy. But where the Pope was wrong was in 
 the denial of any real place in the development 
 of the Church to the laity. They are merely the 
 basins into which you are to pour the truth. 
 They were, in fact, reduced to that condition 
 ascribed to the people by Bishop Horsley : 
 ' The people have nothing to do with the laws 
 except to obey them ' ; or put with naked 
 brutality by Mr. Talbot : ' What is the function 
 of the laity ? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain ' 
 a strange notion of the office of our Lord, 
 because a layman as such is a member of the 
 Church. After this gathering of the forces of 
 the Church into a special caste the clergy 
 the Pope may seem to have provided himself 
 with a firm basis for support in the universal 
 love of domination. Unluckily he does not stop 
 there. The clergy themselves are under orders. 
 The whole teaching power is claimed to reside 
 in the Episcopate. The clergy are reduced to 
 the rank of non-commissioned officers. Finally, 
 even Episcopal authority is rejected in the 
 interests of absolutism. The Pope can say 
 triumphantly : ' L'&glise c'est moi? for he becomes 
 its one essential element, and his flatterers can 
 develop doctrines about the Real Presence 
 within him as being on a par with that of Christ 
 in the Eucharist, a position condemned, if by 
 nothing else, by its vulgarity like some other 
 things in Rome. This may not be said by many 
 
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 75 
 
 people. What is clear, however, is that in the 
 Pope all jurisdiction centres ; from him every 
 kind of life in the Church, except its purely 
 Sacramental life, is held to derive. This system 
 we reject, for it is false to all our ideas of what 
 Society by its very nature must be. Also it is 
 false to the Christian idea of God ; it gives 
 one a purely oracular conception of authority. 
 Nothing is left to the reason and conscience of 
 the individual, and no kind of reality is allowed 
 to those innumerable social units, parochial, 
 diocesan, provincial, national guilds, and so 
 forth which make up the life of the Church. In 
 my judgment, this kind of authority cannot be 
 ascribed even to God Himself ; for by the In- 
 carnation He has shown that there must be chords 
 in us to respond, or else the music of the spheres 
 will have no meaning. The truth is that the 
 conception of the Church as a society has really 
 vanished before the Ultramontane horror. Pa- 
 palism is, as Tyrrell said I think it was Tyrrell 
 or Loisy only an extreme form of individual- 
 ism ; so that in the last resort the extremes meet. 
 Luther and Ignatius have met together, and 
 beer anarchism is seen to be identical with the 
 apotheosis of Imperial tyranny. 
 
 For it is imperialism, and it is tyranny. The 
 Pa pa list theory is not a gift of revealed truth ; 
 it is the pillage of the Roman law-books, for the 
 Church became the residuary legatee of the 
 
76 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 antique Empire, and imbibed its conceptions 
 of the nature of civil authority absolutism at 
 one end and a mass of unrelated individuals at 
 the other. Certain it is that some of the most 
 famous texts from the Roman law-books can be 
 applied straight away to the Pope and the 
 authority of the Papacy. This is precisely the 
 same error as that of the Prussian theory of the 
 State, with this one exception : the Roman 
 Church, whatever its faults, is incurably Chris- 
 tian, and has never denied the profound truth 
 of human individuality resting on the immortal 
 worth of every soul. Consequently it does not 
 fall into some of those immoralist excesses 
 which attach to that doctrine of the State, which 
 looks solely to this world and treats the in- 
 dividual as having no worth except as a cog in 
 the gigantic machine. The individual, so far 
 as his own life goes, is always something more 
 than merely a means, although whether this is 
 justifiable to the Roman theory is not so certain. 
 That theory makes the Church exist for the sake 
 of the Pope, and confuses infallibility with 
 authority. The weight of authority rightly 
 understood is presumptive, however great. In- 
 fallibility assumes an absoluteness which denies 
 all reality to the heart and conscience. The 
 real vice of the Roman system need not be 
 sought in any doctrinal or dogmatic study. 
 It can be found in writers like Augustinus 
 
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 77 
 
 Triumphus in the fourteenth century, and is 
 expressed succinctly in the words of Pope 
 Boniface vm. claiming to have all law locked 
 within his own breast. 
 
 But it may be said that no analogies from 
 human society are arguments. The Church is 
 not a human, it is a Divine institution. Christ 
 surely exercised, and He did institute, an authority 
 coming from above. No question in my mind 
 exists that there is an element of what we may 
 call aboveness, an outsideness in authority, only 
 it is not the whole of it. But the Petrine texts, 
 it is said, are a proof that He gave this power to 
 St. Peter, and therefore to his successors. Are 
 they a proof ? Read the texts over for yourself, 
 and see whether that explanation would natur- 
 ally occur. I think that no one would have been 
 more astounded than St. Peter if he could have 
 been present at the Vatican Council, or even 
 at Lyons in 1245, to find that the text ' Feed 
 My Sheep * was held to mean the right to treat 
 kings as his executive officers, to depose them 
 for non-compliance, and to substitute himself 
 for every other form of teaching authority for 
 everybody within the Church, so as to destroy 
 all meaning of the social apprehension of truth. 
 And not only would Peter have been surprised ; 
 so would many of his successors. Do you sup- 
 pose that Popes Zosimus and Vigilius, Liberius 
 or Honorius believed in this power, still more 
 
78 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 those who accused them of teaching heresy ? 
 And remember that though Papalists have tried 
 to explain these errors, the defects may have 
 been apologised for, but they have never been 
 explained on the Papal theory. Take the Re- 
 naissance Popes ; however strongly they believed 
 in their power, they would have laughed at you. 
 That beau-idSal of Churchmanship, Pope Alex- 
 ander VI., or the genial and highly-educated 
 epicurean Leo X., or that charming and most 
 delightfully unscrupulous of men Pius II., or the 
 eloquent and learned Nicholas V. how they 
 would be disgusted at the Jesuit-scented atmo- 
 sphere of the modern Curia \ It may not dis- 
 prove the doctrine, but it cannot be held to 
 recommend it to those of us who are without, 
 that for many centuries the Popes themselves 
 were unaware of this infallible power ; that the 
 Church without hesitation might accuse some of 
 heresy ; and that, though they set forth great 
 claims to govern, they had nowhere reached a 
 point of claiming complete inerrancy. But there 
 is far more than this. By the latter part of the 
 Middle Ages they had developed a very long 
 way in the direction of absolutism, but this 
 development was not unchallenged. A great 
 Council, whose decisions were afterwards ap- 
 proved by a Pope, definitely asserted the 
 authority of the Council over the Pope ; it 
 deposed three Popes, and denied the extra-con- 
 
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 79 
 
 ciliar autocracy now claimed. When certain 
 Papalists in our branch of the Church, ignorant 
 of history, and glorying in a pharisaic legalism, 
 are trying to stab the Church of England in the 
 back, and bidding us bow down before this image 
 of mere power, forgetting all abuses and the 
 tyranny in the past and the present, I could 
 wish that they might be forced to study some 
 of the original writings of those great men Zaba- 
 rella and d' Ailly, and the greatest of all, Nicholas 
 of Cusa. Cardinals all, they had no illusions. 
 They lived too near to the Pope to think that an 
 unrelieved autocracy would be safe in his hands. 
 They were well known to our Caroline divines. 
 Ignorance of history and of the whole historical 
 habit of mind is the evil with those in our 
 Church who are inclined to move towards the 
 theory of Papalism. 
 
 Finally, there are the Eastern Churches. No 
 Papalist can get over the fact that the auto- 
 cratic claims of the Pope never have been, and 
 never will be, admitted in the East ; that this 
 usurpation is the real ground of division between 
 the East and the West ; that when in the four- 
 teenth century peace was patched up or at 
 least seemed to have been at the Council of 
 Florence, the real authority in the Church 
 the general consent and obedience of the faith- 
 ful rejected it at once in the East. They re- 
 pudiated alike the Pope, the Eastern Emperor, 
 
8o OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 and their own Patriarch. They would have 
 nothing to do with submission. Further, I am 
 told that they have developed a definite theory 
 of the Church which does justice, first, to its real 
 authority ; secondly, to the diffusive consent 
 of the faithful as its power ; and thirdly, to the 
 inherent rights of smaller groups within the 
 whole. But I must say that I have not read 
 the authors of that. We are standing up in 
 England not only for individual freedom so much 
 as for the reality of the group-life within the 
 Church, for a conception of the religious society 
 which is organic and federalised, as against one 
 which is merely unitary and absolutist. This 
 relative independence never absolute indepen- 
 dence of parish, of diocese, of province, of 
 local union, this organic and federalist concep- 
 tion of the whole, is at one with the facts of life 
 in society of all kinds. We must remember that 
 society does not cease to be society because it 
 calls itself the Church, and that certain truths 
 about society rise out of the nature of things. 
 You may deny that nature of things, and try 
 living for a while as though it did not exist ; but 
 it is there, and ultimately you will come to con- 
 fusion if you ignore it. The admission of this life 
 may result in some confusion. It does not give us 
 the clear-cut logical system of Rome ; but it has 
 the realism, the variety, the richness, the infinite 
 powers of growth and adaptability of life itself. 
 
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 81 
 
 Last week I said that supposing that the sole 
 guaranty of the supernatural religion were to be 
 found in submission to the Roman claims, rather 
 than give up that supernatural faith I would 
 submit to all those claims, for at bottom they 
 are concerned with a matter of government. 
 This I would do. To-day I must add that, once 
 I were assured of that supernatural faith I would 
 prefer the religion of the wildest and the most 
 eccentric sectary, even though it came to me 
 devoid of any historical sentiment, of all intel- 
 lectual interest, and of every kind of aesthetic 
 charm, offending the taste at every moment. 
 I would rather accept such extreme sectarianism 
 than I would give in to that notion which is at 
 the bottom of all Ultramontanism, destructive 
 as I believe it ultimately to be of the true social 
 and organic conception of the Church, dangerous 
 to the individual conscience which it supersedes, 
 ultimately productive of widespread infidelity, 
 and opposed alike to the teachings of experience 
 and the whole method and spirit of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
IV. ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 
 
 'Diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit : diversities of 
 operations, but the same Lord.' I Cor. xii. 4 and 6. 
 
 So far we have been considering what the Church 
 of England is not. It is not a self-subsistent 
 entity, but can be understood only as part of 
 a larger whole the Universal Church of Christ. 
 It is not historically independent of Rome, and 
 owes much to the Papacy. Yet it is not Roman 
 in the distinctive modern sense, for it denies the 
 autocratic claims of the Curia, and is opposed 
 to the Ultramontane conception of Church life. 
 Let us to-day consider some of the specially 
 distinctive characteristics of our part of the 
 Church. 
 
 The first fact which strikes the observer who 
 compares the English with the Roman, or, I 
 suppose, the Eastern Churches, is the great 
 variety of type which exists within her. True, 
 in all English churches Matins and Evensong 
 will be said or sung on a Sunday, and the clergy- 
 man will wear a surplice, and there will be a 
 sermon at least once, and those of you who 
 know the seventeenth century know how hard 
 it was even for this minimum to be enforced. 
 
 82 
 
ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 83 
 
 Apart from that, no one who does not know 
 the particular church beforehand can tell you 
 what is going to happen. Take any diocese, 
 any county, any large city, what do you find ? 
 Some of the churches will have the Holy Eu- 
 charist once a month ; some will have it on 
 Sunday evenings ; some will have it daily ; 
 some will have congregations instructed to 
 receive fasting ; some churches will use the 
 vestments ; some the surplice and stole ; some 
 will wear a hood for the celebration ; some will 
 perform it with as little outside help as possible ; 
 some will celebrate it with every accessory of 
 beauty and ceremonial. Or, again, in one 
 church you will see confessional boxes ; in 
 another the people will be told that private con- 
 fession is a soul-destroying practice. In one 
 church you will hear sermons preached which 
 might be taken from the Penny Catechism, and 
 a great deal said perhaps in honour of Our Lady 
 and about the Invocation of the Saints. In 
 another you will hear, not now and then, but 
 week in and week out, appeals which savour of 
 the Methodist Revival. Yet a third will give 
 doctrine which, as Mark Pattison said, defecates 
 the idea of God to a pure transparency. So also 
 in the books written by English official clergy- 
 men, priests and bishops alike, differences can 
 be found. Except reverence for our Lord as a 
 Teacher sent from God at least so much and 
 
84 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 the belief in a general morality of love (and 
 these things are not nothing, as we are learning 
 just now), there is hardly any doctrine that 
 you hear in one church which you may not 
 hear denied in another, and all of them Church 
 of England. 
 
 All this raises a real difficulty. How, says 
 the Roman controversialist, or how, say many 
 of us to ourselves, can we be certain of anything 
 at all if we remain in this City of Confusion ? 
 Is it not an outrage to talk of the ' mind of the 
 Church of England ' if such differences, whether 
 approved or not, can openly be proclaimed ? 
 This difficulty cannot be ignored. We must 
 get over it. This state of things exists, and 
 does not look as if it would cease. Ever since 
 the seventeenth century three parties in the 
 Church have been active. Sometimes one, 
 sometimes another, has been officially pre- 
 dominant. None, however, has been strong 
 enough to drive out its adversaries, or even to 
 coerce them, although this has been tried. 
 Any defence of the Church of England must 
 somehow meet this problem and excuse, if it 
 cannot altogether justify, this apparent disorder. 
 
 First of all let us remember that extremes at 
 either end of any society do not prove that there 
 is no normal, no* general type. Rather are 
 they evidence of its existence. That is true of 
 all types the average Englishman, the Public 
 
ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 85 
 
 School type, the normal man of the world, the 
 normal professional man, and so forth. Each 
 type presents certain marked characteristics. 
 That does not mean that every one, every 
 member of these classes, has all of the character- 
 istics, nor does it exclude the freak, the person 
 who, though he belongs to a class, possesses 
 none of its typical qualities. So with the Church 
 of England. It may have a mind, a general 
 view, a common way of life ; but that does not 
 prevent there being many people on the fringe. 
 This is shown nowhere in entirety, but more or 
 less perfectly in many places and people. There 
 may be a few freak churches which suggest 
 either Rome or Methodism. Short of coercion, 
 such exceptions cannot be prevented, but there 
 may be a very general type for all that, and it 
 may be conformed to a very real authority. 
 Authority in the theoretical sphere does not in- 
 volve infallibility. It need not. It means a 
 presumption in favour of tradition or official 
 exponents, or general opinion as against mere 
 individual insight. In the same way in the 
 executive sphere authority does not mean merely 
 military authority enforced by the sword. It 
 may be perfectly real, although no one can be 
 turned off who does not obey it. What is the 
 authority, for instance, which makes most men 
 wear two buttons at the back of a tail-coat ? 
 No one can compel them to do so ; even if the 
 
86 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 tailor puts them on, you can cut them off, and 
 it makes no important difference to your coat. 
 Here is a very real authority. Most of the 
 authorities which have made us are of that sort. 
 At this moment the papers are discussing some- 
 thing about changes in women's fashions, and 
 some people write to the papers and say it will 
 be impossible for them to stand up against it. 
 What is the authority ? Nothing in the nature 
 of coercion. A study of the distinctive English 
 divines from Hooker through Laud down to 
 Westcott and Liddon, will not show them always 
 in agreement, but it may very likely give a fair 
 general notion of the Church of England out' 
 look. We cannot say that there is no specially 
 distinctive ethos of the Church, because some 
 people have it only in very slight degree. 
 
 However, it is not the sameness ; it is the 
 differences that we are speaking of to-day. 
 How can you justify, or even tolerate, such deep 
 and fundamental differences, not merely among 
 laymen, but among the official teachers ? The 
 common answer has been found in the phrase 
 1 glorious comprehensiveness,' but this reply is 
 felt by many to be unsatisfactory. Let us try 
 to see what it means. Are there any facts, per- 
 manent facts, to justify it ? If there are we 
 need not trouble, "even though the principle 
 be carried further than we like in certain cases. 
 Do the differences which all admit in our Church 
 
ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 87 
 
 correspond to anything permanent in human 
 nature ? For instance, in politics the two-party 
 system may have ii> < \ ils. In times of many 
 complex and conflicting problems that system 
 is difficult and misleading, for they cannot all 
 be settled on the same principles, and people are 
 only held to their own party by organisation ; 
 consequently it is denounced as artificial and 
 hypocritical. There is no reason why a person 
 in favour of or opposed to Home Rule for Ireland 
 should be in favour of or opposed to Dises- 
 tablishment for Wales, and so forth. Conse- 
 quently the party system is unreal. Yet it. 
 maintains itself because in human nature, so far 
 as politics are concerned, there are, broadly 
 speaking, two kinds of temperament. First, 
 tlit temperament of the person who likes change, 
 who thinks that things are so bad that any 
 change is better than going on as they are, who 
 is prepared to take risks in the hope of a real 
 improvement, or who desires change simply for 
 the sake of shuffling the cards. Secondly, on 
 the other hand, there is the other kind of tem- 
 perament which dislikes change the purely 
 conservative, who is happy in what exists because 
 it exists, and who does not desire the coal- 
 scuttle ever to stand in a different place from 
 that to which it has been accustomed. Or the 
 highly critical temperament, which does not in 
 the least satisfy itself in existing conditions, but 
 
88 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 is timid and critical of every change. It sees 
 objection to every course of action, and so forth. 
 Are there in religious matters any similar funda- 
 mental differences ? Do these party divisions, 
 once known as High, Low, and Broad, correspond 
 to anything real in human nature ? If they do, 
 in some form or other they will subsist, however 
 much you may attempt to secure a rigid uni- 
 formity. I think that they do. Always there are 
 temperaments to whom religion appeals most on 
 its institutional, its sacramental side, to whom 
 tradition and ordered cult will be much, and 
 whose conception of Christian life is that of 
 gradual growth. Always, again, there will be 
 those in whom the intellectual or the purely 
 moralising element is the predominant. Lastly, 
 there will be those in whom the personal, the 
 emotional, the mystical is strong, whose sense 
 of the immediate relation of the soul to God is 
 acute, and who worship by prayer with a mini- 
 mum of outward paraphernalia. Doubtless all 
 these tendencies may be found in every one ; 
 and in the same person different tendencies will 
 be directing at different times in his life ; yet, 
 in spite of all these cross-currents, broadly 
 speaking, there remain those people in whom 
 one or another of these the institutional, the 
 intellectualist, and the mystical is predominant. 
 That fact is the real ground of our despised 
 comprehensiveness. Possibly it is carried too 
 
ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 89 
 
 far. No one denies that our Church suffers 
 from the defects of her qualities. In the judg- 
 ment of many of us these temperamental diffi- 
 culties would be less disagreeable if they were 
 restrained by the outward show of uniformity. 
 But that is all a matter of detail. If these types 
 of mind are genuine and are permanent, can we 
 rightly complain that the Church of England 
 allows for and admits of that difference ? To 
 take two instances more especially pertinent 
 here. We will not take the Sacramental type. 
 You and I may be of opinion that the so-called 
 Evangelicals betray a lamentable lack of the 
 corporate sense of religion, and that they are 
 dangerously near to subjective religion in their 
 depreciation of the Sacrament. But can we 
 deny the vast service they performed, not only 
 in the days of Simeon, but even at this moment, 
 by the reality of their personal religion, their 
 vital hold on the Cross of Christ, and their rigid 
 austerity of life ? This may not be true of mere 
 Low Churchmen or of many persons who attend 
 Evangelical churches, but you must judge any 
 religious party not by its fringe, not by the 
 people who merely make use of it, but by its 
 type the people to whom it means most. If 
 that were not the case, we here might be in a bad 
 way. We should be judged as people so often 
 wish to judge us, by the fringe of the soi-disant 
 Catholic party, by any dilettante ritualist, or 
 
90 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 hide-bound legalist. They would form the cri- 
 terion by which we should be judged. If we 
 claim that we are to be judged by our best as 
 our most typical, we must allow that claim to 
 others. Personally I believe that, in spite of all 
 our differences, the Evangelical party is so much 
 at one with us in regard to the deeper realities, 
 and is so much concerned with the depths of 
 personal religion that we can well afford to put 
 up with what may seem to us its half-informed 
 criticisms, in return for the rich treasures of 
 prayer and devotion it gives to the Church of 
 England. 
 
 So, again, with what used to be called the 
 Broad Church party. Certain cases we may all 
 find, in which not only the dogmas but the very 
 spirit of Christianity seem to be a matter of scorn 
 to the superior person whose intellectualism 
 is always more manifest than his intellect. Yet 
 the Liberals are performing a needed service. 
 They are forcing the Church and without them 
 it would not be forced to face the problem 
 which has been raised by modern inquiry and 
 modern thought, and to adapt itself to a new 
 world. For it is a new world. We cannot go 
 on living as though nothing had been discovered 
 of any value since 1400. We must beware of 
 all things of a religion which is merely historical 
 sentiment, whether that sentiment be Mediaeval, 
 Caroline, or even Tractarian. We have to face 
 
ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 91 
 
 the world of to-day. We have to show that it 
 is through the Church of God that redemption 
 and fulness of life will come to the modern man 
 or woman, to the growing boy and girl, to the 
 soldier in the trenches and to his officers. This 
 we cannot show unless we are open to every 
 current, and live in the world to-day, while pay- 
 ing every reverence to those that are gone before. 
 We hope for a true mastery of the present and 
 the future, while we must avoid all slavishness 
 to the dead hand of the past, and at the same 
 time must oppose that insolent caprice which 
 supposes that everything is bad because it merely 
 has been, and will do strange and weird things 
 solely because they are new. We are, at least, 
 in this Church, true to the spirit of our fore- 
 fathers, not only those of long ago, but those 
 who have made this particular Church what it is 
 true to their spirit, men who carried on their 
 work not in any servile rigidity, but with the 
 power and the potency of life, and with faith in 
 the inexhaustible riches of the Grace of God's 
 Holy Spirit. 
 
V. THE DISTINCTIVE TYPE OF 
 ENGLISH CATHOLICISM 
 
 1 Things new and old.' St. Matt. xiii. 52. 
 
 SOME of you know the story of Isaac Casaubon, 
 the Genevan scholar, who was favoured first by 
 Henri IV. and afterward by James I. He died 
 in 1614. The mordant Rector of Lincoln, Mark 
 Pattison, related his life once more for the 
 nineteenth century. His book is a work of almost 
 excessive erudition and extreme severity of treat- 
 ment. No one could accuse the writer of any 
 penchant for any ecclesiastical party. By the 
 time he came to write that book his views had 
 gone to the extreme negative position. His book 
 was due to the interest of a scholar in one who 
 was pre-eminent in the age of the giants of 
 scholarship, fit to be named alongside even the 
 great Scaliger. Incidentally, this contribution 
 to the history of classical scholarship shows us 
 what is the best defence or the best justification 
 of our position in the Church of England. 
 Casaubon was by birth a Swiss Calvinist and by 
 profession a student, and taught first at Geneva. 
 Leaving there for France after a short Professor- 
 
 92 
 
DISTINCTIVE ENGLISH CATHOLICISM 93 
 
 ship at Montpellier, he went ultimately to Paris, 
 and enjoyed to 'some extent the favour of Henri 
 IV. That was the great age of book-lovers, 
 and Europe honoured him. Natural it was that 
 efforts should be made to convert him, and you 
 must remember that this took place after the 
 conversion of Henri IV. himself in the earlier 
 years of his reign. There was a very great effort 
 to bring over by persuasion all the more im- 
 portant Huguenots, for it was known that some 
 features of Protestantism were not pleasing to 
 Casaubon. He did not get on well with his co- 
 religionists, and at times great hopes of his 
 conversion to Rome, or fears of it, were enter- 
 tained. Every blandishment was displayed, and 
 even a Cardinal so far condescended as to 
 argue with him. (It was the learned Cardinal 
 du Perron.) Protestant alarm was great, and 
 Casaubon had not been conciliatory. Yet all 
 the efforts were unavailing ; his intellectual and 
 historical conscience forbade the change. Later, 
 however, he came to England, and there he saw 
 a very different scene from the Huguenot temples 
 in France. The English Church had not dis- 
 carded Episcopacy ; she did not make light of 
 tradition ; she did not despise history in the 
 desire for a new creation. So this great scholar 
 found his true resting-place in the English 
 Church, and wrote in this country his exposure 
 of the appalling blunders of the new and much- 
 
94 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 belauded Annals of Cardinal Baronius, which 
 was supposed to set history on a basis favourable 
 to the Papacy. 
 
 That career of Casaubon is a lesson to all who 
 desire a balanced judgment on the ecclesiasti- 
 cal conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries. Casaubon's studies had been leading 
 him to a theoretical position almost identical, 
 when fortune showed him the concrete English 
 Church. That fact and other similar facts 
 could be mentioned is part of the ground for 
 the statement of Mandell Creighton that the 
 basis of the Church of England is reverence for 
 sound learning. This does not mean that the 
 Church is purely intellectualist either in its doc- 
 trine of religion or life, still less that she has a 
 monopoly of knowledge. No English Church- 
 man would be so foolish as to deny the immense 
 value of the work of students in other Com- 
 munions, whether Roman or very different from 
 Rome. Even in the last few years we owe to 
 Rome such books as Pastor's History of the Popes, 
 Janssen's History of the German People ; and the 
 works of Denifle and Grisar on Martin Luther, 
 which have revolutionised the subject ; while 
 of the value of Presbyterian and other Protestant 
 scholarship it is needless to speak. For all that, 
 I think that the greaj; historian bishop was right, 
 and I would that all those troubled with doubts 
 in our Church would read the various lectures 
 
DISTINCTIVE EiNGLISH CATHOLICISM 95 
 
 and essays which he put forth on this topic. 
 Her writers in the seventeenth century spoke 
 i.f her as the 'Protestant Catholic Church. 1 
 You will find the phrase in the book of John 
 Nalson, who afterwards became a Nonjuror. 
 They mean that she rejected Papalism, with its 
 offshoots, as in the main a mediaeval usurpation, 
 although for the germ of the Papal claims we 
 have to go back further than they thought then. 
 On the other hand, the Church of England 
 was opposed to that passionate repudiation of 
 the past, that revolutionary conception of the 
 sixteenth-century changes which in their earlier 
 days had distinguished all the Protestant sects. 
 I mean that they all repudiated their connection 
 with the past, as well as they could, and dis- 
 liked it. Now, I think, they would speak dif- 
 ferently. Unlike these, the English Church 
 refused to make any greater breaches than were 
 necessary ; and, if some matters of forms of 
 devotion remained for a time obscured, she 
 preserved within herself the means once more of 
 restoring them, as we have seen them restored, 
 and may see more restored openly. All through 
 her history it has been sound learning which has 
 distinguished the Church in this country, and 
 has been her special contribution. This, re- 
 member, is a method rather than a quantity. 
 It is the temper of mind, the spirit at once of 
 inquiry and reverence, which makes the scholar 
 
96 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 or historian, not the number of odd facts he 
 has managed to accumulate, or even the number 
 of books which he has read or analysed. Now 
 it is this peculiar temper, which to one side 
 seems too conservative, and to another too 
 vague, which is like to be the need of the Church 
 in the present distress. And I think, further, 
 that we may look to our branch of the Church 
 as likely to contribute a very valuable asset to 
 the Church in the future. 
 
 First of all there comes the great inrush of 
 modern knowledge. How much of this is know- 
 ledge, and how is it to be assimilated to the 
 ancient cult of worship and ideals ? No one 
 knows. Some youthful scholar, in love with new 
 things and new theories, may claim that the 
 latest hypothesis is new knowledge such as 
 that the women who went to the tomb of our 
 Lord were mistaken as to the tomb and desire 
 that we remodel our Creeds accordingly, and that 
 all our belief be altered. Other pious but old- 
 fashioned divines, reckless of anything later than 
 Alford's Greek Testament, may want to put 
 back the hands of the clock and hold to the 
 Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, or simi- 
 lar things. The one would seem to be the line 
 adopted in such a book as Dr. Latimer Jackson's 
 Hulsean Lectures on the Eschatology of the New 
 Testament ; the other is the position of the 
 Roman official world. Here we see the Church 
 
DISTINCTIVE ENGLISH CATHOLICISM 97 
 
 in our branch taking a wiser course. She is not 
 prepared beforehand to condemn the conclusions 
 of scholars, and, even when she dislikes them, 
 uses no machinery to displace them. She is not, 
 as some would claim, desirous to give up her 
 character as an historical religion embedded in 
 the concrete. She will not allow the cry that 
 criticism should be free, which is a civil right, 
 to be confused with a claim to act as an official 
 in a society while denying the statements in its 
 Creeds, which are documents more historical 
 than philosophic. It is with small justice that 
 any one here raises the cry of persecution. To 
 complain that it is a case of religious persecution, 
 which means the infliction of civil penalties for 
 religious opinions, when the only question is 
 whether an individual may minister in a society 
 whose opinions he denies this would be like 
 complaining if a man were turned out of a Free 
 Trade Club upon becoming a Protectionist. 
 
 But, it may be said, that is just what you do 
 not do. People are not turned out. Therefore 
 you have no authority. The Bishops last spring 
 issued a declaration that certain historical state- 
 ments in the Creed were to be taken literally. 
 Yet it is notorious that those who repudiate such 
 a view are untouched. They are honoured in 
 many Church circles. Where is your authority ? 
 
 This complaint comes from the cardinal error 
 of identifying authority with the policeman. 
 
 G 
 
98 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 Authority is the pressure of the community 
 upon individuals. One form of its exercise, and 
 only one, is the swift judgment of the sword, but 
 its more usual form is subtler, more penetrating, 
 more enduring, and very much more continuous. 
 This process is less clean-cut than the militarist 
 use, and consequently the number of open dis- 
 sentients is larger. As I said last week, with 
 our methods in the Church of England there will 
 always be plenty of people on the margin. Such 
 people will no doubt exist in other Churches, 
 even on a militarist plan like that of Rome, but 
 they will have to be more discreet, or they will 
 be silenced. Our method is in the long run more 
 effective, for the mind and the conscience go 
 with it. In England, for instance, it is doubt- 
 less easier to express opinions against the war 
 than it would be in Germany to take a differ- 
 ent topic as an illustration. A pro-German in 
 this country is only disliked. Mr. Bernard Shaw 
 can write letters to the papers showing, to his own 
 satisfaction, that this war was the outcome of a 
 Machiavellian plot on the part of Sir Edward 
 Grey. Germany was dragged into violating the 
 integrity of Belgium just before we did so, or 
 were going to do so, in order that we might have 
 a better case. A pro- Englishman in Germany 
 would, I suppose,* be shot, if he said anything 
 like as much. Yet can you deny that there is 
 a strong pressure, a general social pressure, in 
 
DISTINCTIVE ENGLISH CATHOLICISM 99 
 
 favour of the war, which is constant and effective 
 to a large extent ? You must remember that 
 no absolute authority is entirely effective, for 
 no State has been without its criminal classes. 
 If you mould the Church on this absolute 
 authority you will still have people living within 
 her who do not obey her rules properly. 
 
 Or, again, let us take a more germane topic, 
 some ecclesiastical matter. In the eighteenth 
 century, or the greater part of it, the Georgian 
 period, all the official favour was for latitudi- 
 narian and Erastian opinions, and people like 
 Bishop Hoadley were typical bishops. Yet 
 they were never able to identify themselves 
 with the Church as a whole. They tried very 
 hard, and I dare say that an outside observer 
 visiting England would have predicted the com- 
 plete triumph of what was really a Socinian 
 Christianity. But that was defeated by the 
 uprising of the Evangelical movement, and then 
 the Tractarian. Or, again, in the Victorian 
 period up to about 1880, all the official favour 
 was against the Tractarians and their succes- 
 sors of the next generation. Yet they have won 
 a position from which it will not be possible 
 to dislodge them. The question is now, not 
 whether they have a place, but how much place 
 others have within the borders of the Church. 
 So will it be with the movement for critical and 
 historical developments. These are the con- 
 
ioo OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 tribution of scholars to the life of the Church. 
 They are not separate from it. 
 
 The Dean of Christ Church, in an admirable 
 pamphlet, has pointed out that religion is made 
 up of many elements other than the purely intel- 
 lectual, and that the deep instinct of the com- 
 munity as a whole is a safeguard against the 
 eccentricities of mere cleverness, and that we 
 must beware of offending that instinct. But at 
 the same time scholarship, modern knowledge, 
 is making great changes in the whole outlook of 
 people, and it will be for the Church of the future 
 to assimilate these changes, to sift them, and to 
 take up into herself that which is permanently 
 valuable. That process of sifting is going on, 
 and has been going on for thirty or forty years. 
 It is not complete ; nobody knows exactly what 
 will be the final judgment on many matters, 
 but can it not be said that our Communion 
 offers the best chance of that wise judgment 
 being at once Christian and well-grounded ? 
 
 Take another favourite topic of our time 
 Reunion. The Papal condemnation of Anglican 
 Orders showed how vain it was to expect that 
 Rome was ripe for anything but unconditional 
 submission on our part. If you read Mr. Lacey's 
 Diary you will see that he rather regrets that he 
 took part in that -movement. But the desire 
 for reunion on all sides is a most significant fact. 
 It seems to me that the days when people could 
 
DISTINCTIVE ENGLISH r. \IHOLIC1SM 101 
 
 glorify schism as such has come to an end. The 
 desire for Reunion is very remarkable in our 
 Church. The desire in many of the Noncon- 
 formist Churches is perhaps more remarkable, 
 and something will ultimately come of all this. 
 What the future may bring about in this way 
 we cannot tell, and I do not know that it is very 
 much worth while to speculate. But a Reunion 
 which is to be in any way universal through 
 Christendom must surely be very much the 
 work of the Church of England. She stands in 
 a peculiar relation to the Protestant communities, 
 not understood either by Rome or by the East. 
 On the other hand, she is to Rome in a relation 
 quite unlike that of the non-Episcopal bodies, 
 however much it may suit some persons on 
 either side to say that it is the same. Towards 
 the Blast her relations are going to be closer than 
 they were, and the present war will intensify the 
 rapprochement which has been going on for some 
 time. It is the extraordinary power of the 
 English character to stand by the old while 
 assimilating the new, which has been her greatest 
 political strength in the past, and is likely to be 
 her greatest contribution to the future. That 
 work, however, will not be accomplished sup- 
 posing the members of the English Church do 
 nothing but look across the water and wish that 
 we were there. 
 Let us close with a note of thanks. Is there 
 
io_2 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE 
 
 not a claim upon you and me for our loyalty, not 
 only to the men of a far past, but to those of a 
 nearer past ? The Tractarians and the gene- 
 ration which succeeded them the generation 
 which is above my own it is to them that we 
 owe very much of that recovery of which we are 
 thinking. It is to their sacrifice and at their 
 cost, which some of us are apt to depreciate, that 
 we owe the greatness and the richness of our 
 Catholic life in the Church. I do not mean that 
 they would have meant that we should be loyal 
 to them in any slavish or dead spirit, but surely 
 their sense of the value of English Catholicism 
 is one of the most important elements in their 
 whole spiritual life. It is to the value of English 
 Catholicism, to the special contribution of our 
 Church to the life of the great Church as a whole, 
 and to the glorious chances of the future, that we 
 need at this time to be loyal and devoted. Let 
 us, while taking no narrow, no insular, no merely 
 provincial view let us, while allowing full weight 
 to the great claim of Rome for her real gifts to 
 us in the past, and perhaps in the present let 
 us still be loyal to the very distinctive type of 
 English Catholicism, and still feel that we are 
 right and have a place set us by God to minister 
 to the needs of the present, and to the hopes of 
 all future generations. 
 
UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 I. THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE 
 
 ' A new heaven and a new earth.' Rev. XXL I. 
 
 CHANGES greater than those of the fifteenth 
 century have passed over the mind of Europe 
 during fifty years. Queen Victoria's death made 
 us aware of this. Present conditions intensify it. 
 Men's ideal dreams, and the means of their 
 achievement are like to be other than all of 
 us supposed in youth. This transvaluation of 
 values may well arouse misgiving among mem- 
 bers of the Christian Church. Constantly we 
 are met by the taunt either that Christianity, 
 not as a dogma but as a way of life, has been 
 a disaster ; or at best that, if once of service, 
 it is now outworn. I do not think that either of 
 these charges is true. Yet there is much to be 
 said for them. Never was the future of God's 
 Church more bright with hope : provided it be 
 treated as an institution purely religious, and 
 provided also we can rid ourselves of obsolete 
 entanglements and persuade the men and women 
 of our day that we mean something more than a 
 
 108 
 
104 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 dull survival of a different age, like a boarding- 
 house made out of a mansion. 
 
 First, the world in which we live is going to 
 have a religion. Religion is a fact. No argu- 
 ment can destroy that fact ; and no apologetic 
 entirely explains it. Religion is a feature of life 
 which can no more be destroyed by argument 
 than falling in love can be killed by eugenics. 
 This is now realised. Unbelief in its more power- 
 ful forms tends to organise itself like a Church, 
 to make its appeal to the emotional and mystical, 
 no less than to the rational elements in man, to 
 surround its votaries from birth to death with 
 an atmosphere which shall asphyxiate Christian 
 ideals. It is anti-Christian more than non- 
 Christian. Much of our talk is futile, through 
 the implied assumption that, whatever the super- 
 structure of dogmatic or ecclesiastical archi- 
 tecture, the substructure of ethical ideals is 
 always the same. It is not. So far as inter- 
 national politics are concerned, this fact has 
 been known to students ever since Machiavelli 
 told the truth about Italy. So far as our 
 personal life goes, even the most optimistic 
 should be persuaded by a glance through the 
 magazines, plays, and novels for any period of 
 six months in the last ten years. 
 
 Religion may be seen to be a normal human 
 activity, but that does not make easier our task, 
 as believers in a specific historical religion, im- 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE 105 
 
 bedded in the concrete. Such recognition need 
 go no further than a belief that certain states 
 of mind strengthening and consolatory can be 
 reached only by ways of religion ; but this belief 
 may be coupled with the sense that it has been 
 produced in religious systems of any and every 
 content, atheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic, 
 theistic, humanist. Secondly, this knowledge 
 may give to our adversaries an enthusiasm of 
 hatred, rarely seen in Victorian unbelief. Thirdly, 
 some of the outworks may provide sufficient 
 refuge for many who in other times would have 
 sought their home in the Church. Now, some 
 ' higher thought circle ' may appear to give you 
 all the comfort of Christian living without its 
 commonness, so that the anodynes of religious 
 feeling can be drunk with all the pride of superior 
 culture. 
 
 Secondly, conventional religion has long been 
 dying. This war will bury it. ' Muffled Chris- 
 tianity,' as Mr. Wells calls it, has no charms for 
 the younger generation. Five years hence it will 
 have still less. All the compromises, the half- 
 lights and half-tones, the suggestive accom- 
 modations, the drab proprieties, the sentimental 
 veneer, natural at one time, will be swept with 
 their scorn. Those young men portrayed in 
 Sinister Street, those who will come back from 
 the war, may want more Christianity, or they 
 may want less, than what we call Victorian. 
 
io6 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 But never, never will they slake their souls' 
 thirst with the tepid weak tea of respectable 
 choristers' Anglicanism. Echoes of Charlotte 
 Yonge are not a war-cry for this age. Our 
 friends will be our hardest task-masters for 
 they will ask much. 
 
 But fewer of them will ask it, you will say. 
 If it is only blazing Christianity, the flaming 
 splendour ' coloured with the blood of man,' that 
 will attract, fewer will rise to this. Yes, there 
 will be fewer. That comes of liberty. For two 
 hundred years religious freedom has been de- 
 veloping. With this the proportion of any one 
 religious body to the whole must be smaller. 
 Many people do not intend to live as Christians ; 
 when they are educated and free they cease to 
 profess a faith which has to them no meaning. 
 This means that all who do profess it mean 
 something, and the Church will gain in inten- 
 sive force far more than she has lost in exten- 
 sion. Ever since the peace of a thousand years 
 ago, the Church has suffered from the nominal 
 adherence of many to whom her system makes 
 no appeal. Now, that curse is lessened. It is 
 a pity that many people go on talking as though 
 we lived in the seventeenth century. Policies 
 are sometimes suggested for the State which are 
 feasible only on th.e assumption, long obsolete, 
 that Churchmanship and citizenship are co-ex- 
 tensive. Even if they ought to be, they are 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE 107 
 
 not, nor are they likely to become so for many 
 centuries. 
 
 In the religious trend of the hour, the loud 
 cry for mystical experience strikes one's ears 
 daily. Immediate knowledge is the claim of 
 the mystic ; that claim comes with peculiar 
 force to an age which relies on facts. Nothing 
 but ignorance can deny to the mystics the fact 
 of a mighty inward experience. No reader, 
 however hostile, of St. Teresa, or St. John of the 
 Cross, or Madame Guyon can resist the evid- 
 ence. Personal religion probably always con- 
 tains a large element of mysticism. Any setting 
 forth of the Christian Faith which belittles this 
 element will fail to-day ; and it ought to fail. 
 But we need not ignore it. Herrmann, the great 
 Protestant, thinks that Catholicism and mysticism 
 are almost identical, and declares the mystical 
 life to be the aim of that most characteristically 
 Catholic institution, the monastic life. We need 
 not be so unfair to Protestant faith as this would 
 imply. Protestantism on its highest side has 
 always had a large proportion of mystics. Such 
 a charge, however, allows us to claim that the 
 society which embodies all the past of religion 
 has been the most fruitful soil of mysticism ; 
 also it alone guards against its dangers. The 
 positive experience of the mystic may be had 
 in all religions. Certainly Plotinus had it, no 
 less than the converted Augustine. Yet if 
 
io8 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 mystics, without any criticism, dictate to us we 
 shall have a tyranny of the elect, an oligarchy 
 of the spiritually 6Hte. If not, we shall have 
 pure subjectivism, and religion will become 
 mere feeling. Against these dangers we find 
 the best safeguard in the Catholic Church, which 
 with its vast and majestic life can absorb and 
 control even the religious genius, while yet it 
 allows his powers to develop with a rich variety 
 not possible in any meaner atmosphere. 
 
 This problem (the relation of the mystic to 
 the whole community) helps us to answer the 
 question, What is the special claim of the 
 Christian society on the present age ? The 
 worship of Jesus as Lord ? This, indeed, is a 
 sine qua non. Many deny even respect to Jesus 
 of Nazareth, calling him a decadent One who 
 died for His own guilt. Christianity to them is 
 a two thousand years' catastrophe, not because 
 it has failed to understand its Founder, but in 
 so far as it has succeeded. This hatred of the 
 spirit of Jesus we have to face. It is intense 
 and real ; so long as human pride exists, we shall 
 find it. Lately it has become self-conscious, 
 and definitely proclaims itself as Antichrist. 
 Yet this alone is not enough. For even Comte 
 set Him high among men ; Positivism may be 
 Christian in ethics. . Even if we go on to say the 
 Church rests in the belief in Jesus as Son of God, 
 we cannot make this its sole appeal. Person- 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE 109 
 
 ally, I do not believe that ethical admiration 
 will be retained, if once you quite give up the 
 historical society which makes this effective. 
 Yet many individuals continue to exist without 
 this, even apart from Quakers or Unitarians. 
 
 Nor again can one seek the solution in the 
 possibility of communion with God. That is the 
 postulate of prayer ; and the essential part in 
 mysticism. But this may be had apart from 
 Christianity. All these things are included in 
 the Church's claim. Yet the claim means more 
 than all these things. The Church claims to be 
 the sphere of the action of Divine Grace, that 
 is, power given from without upon mankind. 
 The social nature of man makes it needful that, 
 if the redemptive work of Christ is to be made 
 effective for all, it must be done by the creation 
 of a society enveloping the individual like the 
 he breathes, and leaving no part of him 
 untouched by this atmosphere. 
 
 The question whether the Church is essential, 
 or merely a convenience, involves the whole 
 problem of the relation of individual to com- 
 munal life. Absolute individualism is no more 
 possible in religion than in politics ; and its 
 contrary carries the idea of a Church, which is 
 deep and penetrating in its effects, because 
 religion is the most poignant and far-reaching of 
 all human interests. Otherwise a Church is no 
 more than a limited company, to be joined or 
 
no UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 left at will, while essential Christianity remains 
 untouched. The charm of the. Church is the 
 charm that belongs to the age-long home of 
 the human spirit, which preserves all the values 
 of religion, and holds them in harmony. She 
 gathers of every kind in rite and language, in 
 movement and colour ; she holds in union 
 experiences which are older than Christianity. 
 She is Catholic, because she is tied to no one 
 temperament, to no peculiar culture. There 
 the mystic finds the food of his soul, and withal 
 the control of dangerous dreams ; there the 
 institutionist finds form and order and the 
 hallowing of all outward means ; there, too, the 
 intellectual temper finds an exhaustless store 
 of ideas, without any surrender to mere Rational- 
 ism. There even the mere moralist can find his 
 principles given their true ground, and the 
 legalist exercise his powers without losing fer- 
 vour. There the enthusiast finds fire, but also 
 light to guide. There the man of no more but 
 even less than normal religious interests finds 
 what enables him to do his best, and consoles 
 him in grief, not condemning him because he 
 cannot, like some, make of religion his hobby. 
 There can be found those whose conversion is 
 catastrophic, alongside of others God-fearing 
 and simple, who do not know the meaning of 
 the term. Our Catholic society is so called, 
 not because she is English, or Latin, or Eastern, 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE in 
 
 but because she has a place for all, excluding 
 none save by his own choice. The central fact 
 in the spiritual experience of the race, she is 
 universal in her appeal ; though she cannot 
 be so in numbers so long as man is free. The 
 least that she means is human fellowship, is 
 the love of God through Christ ; and those who 
 hold to none of these will desire no place in 
 her roll of citizens. 
 
 But the Church being universal cannot be 
 tied to one particular age. We must beware of 
 an apologetic of historical sentiment. The age 
 is conscious of its newness, and in all its culture is 
 anxious to be free from a dead tradition. If the 
 Catholic Church is to appeal to men just now, 
 her defenders must avoid laying overmuch stress 
 on an argument which to you and me may be 
 appealing, but repels those who ' take the golden 
 road to Samarcand ' and cry for new worlds to 
 conquer. Rather must we show that what we 
 hold is no dead tradition, but a living spirit 
 - which evermore makes all things new ' ; that 
 so far as we cling to the past it is not as slaves, 
 but as children using our elders' gifts to create 
 new joys, and finding every day in those magic 
 treasures not the dry bones of facts and dates, 
 but the fresh springs of a power that is ever 
 4 a wonder, a beauty, and a terror.' 
 
 Further, as against the recurrent charge that 
 we teach a service of self-denial which means 
 
112 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 death, we need to show that this is no more the 
 case with the ' die to live ' of Christianity than 
 it is with the war-cry ' Who dies if England 
 live ? ' The Christian Church is the great 
 ' yea-saying ' to life ; but that ' yea-saying ' 
 neither in Church nor State, neither for mind 
 nor bodily delights, neither for man nor boy, 
 can ever be reached by mere pleasure ; it in- 
 volves selection, self-denial, mortification. Let us 
 make it plain that it is not death, but life, and 
 more abundant life, that we bring. This war 
 has shown many how, in true life, sacrifice is 
 a part ; they will not shrink, rather will they 
 demand the heroic sacrificial side of Christianity. 
 Once they are assured, it is a real ' yea-saying,' 
 and not like Eastern pessimism, a destruction of 
 personal force. Love heightens every power, 
 yet it cannot be without sacrifice ; and so we 
 find in every lover, in every patriot, and in all 
 the saints, beginning with St. Paul. 
 
 Lastly, it is vital that we be rid of bondage to 
 Victorian traditions. Even at the cost of offend- 
 ing the Aunt Plessingtons of the Church, we 
 must be ready for that call to reality now so 
 piercing. All the pieties and age-long tenderness 
 that gather round the Communion of Saints, 
 the natural and proper place of devotion to the 
 Mother of our Lord, the enhancement of all that 
 tends to place the Eucharist where the martyrs 
 set it, the development under many forms of the 
 * religious life ' all these must and will play 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE 113 
 
 a part in the life of the English branch of the 
 Church far greater than in the last century. 
 We must not be afraid, that is our great danger. 
 We must be ready to go to school to the East, 
 to leaven the practical Rationalism of Western 
 religion by a greater sense of the contemplative, 
 the ascetic, and the mystical aspects. Many 
 Nonconformists do this. For we have no raison 
 d'etre apart from the other worldly values ; and 
 I suspect that the Cross, both as a finished work 
 and as a daily example, will be set higher in the 
 days to come than it was either by the Liberal 
 Protestantism or the respectable Churchmanship 
 of the last century. 
 
 Bright, as I said, are our prospects ; bright, 
 but difficult. Courage and the unconquerable 
 will are the one thing needful, for we have real 
 enemies ; and they hate Christ. Yet it is only 
 in Him that we can learn the maxim, ' Be bold, 
 .and everywhere be bold.' We see on the fields 
 of Flanders and all the oceans of the world men, 
 some without faith, who make us ask whether 
 any of us is worth what they can do for us, or 
 how far his faith makes him act as nobly. The 
 same call comes to the Church. If we trust our 
 own high resolve, we shall sink, like Peter. Only 
 in Christ will be enduring courage. In this fight 
 we shall be lost if we have not Him to trust. 
 ' In the world ye shall have tribulation ; but 
 be of good cheer : I have overcome the world.' 
 
 H 
 
II. FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 
 
 ' I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou 
 hast set my heart at liberty.' Psalm cxix. 32. 
 
 LIBERTY and authority are matched like the 
 man and woman in the Indian tale. They seem 
 able neither to live with one another nor with- 
 out one another. No theory can set forth their 
 relations exactly ; nor in practice can these be 
 fixed, for varying conditions change the limits 
 of both. Abstract logic applied to this notion 
 leads to disasters ; since this ignores the shifting 
 kaleidoscope of human affairs. Certainly the 
 knot is not cut by saying that freedom means 
 the right to do what we ought. Nothing could 
 make more surely for tyranny. Even this leaves 
 it open to make individual choice decide, and 
 call it conscience. So we race into anarchy. 
 
 No society but must set some bounds to the 
 acts of its members, or else it will not be a society. 
 In a state of siege, normal safeguards of freedom 
 will vanish. Otherwise the society will. 
 
 No less is true if we start from the counter- 
 principle. Unity is the end of human society. 
 Those who reason mechanically from that notion 
 
 114 
 
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 115 
 
 find an easy descent ; and the individual goes 
 to ground. Unity is the plea of all tyrants or 
 their henchmen, from Haman to Hollweg. All 
 this is commonplace. The war has flashed it 
 on the skies. 
 
 Freedom, we are told in every speech, in most 
 leading articles, in essays and poems and sermons, 
 is the aim of the Allies. Freedom tempered 
 with order, the idea of right and of peace, have 
 kissed each other in the English Constitution. 
 On that ground the soul of the English is aflame 
 as it feels it is being attacked. Yet others have 
 ever dubbed us hypocrites. So we must needs 
 take pains, lest either we should not be sincere 
 in this claim, or else* that we fail to grasp what 
 it means. Liberty enjoys two hundred de- 
 finitions. Many a man believes it his object 
 who is ignorant of its nature and hostile to its 
 claims. Either this war will fail, or it will bring 
 more freedom to the world. Freedom must 
 belong to more people. It must be understood 
 better ; it must become a reality to many classes 
 who now are only mocked by the word. To 
 reach this end those who have faith in freedom 
 must bestir themselves. ' Awake, awake, put 
 on strength, O Zion. Put on thy beautiful 
 garments, O Jerusalem. 1 
 
 The love of power, the desire to make other 
 people do things, is universal. Often in States 
 or individuals it dons the dress of liberty. Cesare 
 
n6 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 Borgia wanted freedom to do what he willed, 
 so did Napoleon ; so do many more inglorious 
 Neroes of the counting-house. 
 
 What, then, is the test of our faith in freedom ? 
 It cannot be the desire to do what we like. 
 Rather it consists in respect for the personality 
 of others. The egoist must ever cry, ' Here I am, 
 there is none beside me.' All men are tools for 
 his pleasure ; the world a baby's toy. The 
 legal maxim, ' the slave is a thing, not a person,' 
 states the unconscious postulate of many. Some, 
 like Jefferson of the American revolt, repeat the 
 phrases of Rousseau and uphold at the same 
 time race-slavery. Max Stirner's doctrine that 
 the individual must be governed by no tyrant 
 but himself is logical on the principles of 
 naturalism. On the postulates common to both 
 he did well to pour scorn on Positivists. The 
 religion of humanity without faith in a world 
 beyond is sheer illusion. Faith in freedom 
 carries with it faith in the spiritual nature of 
 men. Denial of the one brings denial of the 
 other in its train. 
 
 Justly, on the whole, we can claim to be a free 
 people. This war has shown the truth of the 
 motto Imperium et Libertas. The bond that 
 seemed so brittle has been proved strong 
 Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove can show it. The 
 practical recognition of the freedom inherent in 
 its different groups by the one Commonwealth 
 
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 117 
 
 may pave the way to new thoughts about the 
 State. At home it is our sympathies that need 
 widening. The fortunate classes know freedom. 
 Education is not bureaucratic. Our schools 
 show us each a true society with its own life 
 and special quality. Within them minor groups, 
 each something for itself. Tyranny in the eyes 
 of the sheer individualist, it would seem like 
 anarchy to a Prussian. As a fact it secures in- 
 dividual power along with a sense of corporate 
 claim. Our ancient universities have a likr 
 spirit. Their spell lies largely in the inter- 
 dependent life of colleges, separate yet united in 
 the common society. All individuals bear their 
 stamp, yet each has his own gift. So in a less 
 degree it is in the army with the strength of 
 regimental tradition. So also with the Inns of 
 Court, whose corporate teaching alone in Europe 
 preserved a national law, and thus withstood 
 the Roman torrent at the Renaissance. 
 
 All tliis is part of the make-up of the educated 
 Englishman. Too often it seems as if that were 
 all. Men imbued with these ideals for them- 
 selves can contemplate the masses as unrelated 
 units, and denounce as tyranny all efforts after 
 group-life and sacrifice. Yet that great spon- 
 taneous movement we call Trades Unionism 
 is governed by the same spirit. Germane to 
 our English character down to dislike of the 
 blackleg it is seen now as a treating power in 
 
Ii8 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 the State. Signs already appear of it taking 
 some directing share in those industries of which 
 it is a chief constituent. We cannot go on for 
 ever as we are, leaving direction only to one 
 party in a joint concern with the working men, 
 who largely are the concern, to be treated as the 
 pensioners on the bounty of employers, ' grateful 
 to be taken on/ as something they ought to be. 
 We may not like this prospect of change. We 
 must face it. As I said, there are affinities 
 between the two spheres of activity, which ought 
 to widen our sympathy. Not lack of wages or 
 long hours of inequality men are unequal 
 but the denial of personal interest is the blot 
 on the 'scutcheon of modern industry. As one 
 puts it : 
 
 1 Freedom may be hard to define in set terms, 
 but the man who can be perfectly happy without 
 it, enjoys the passive contentment of the animal 
 rather than the positive well-being proper to 
 a man. The neglect of this obvious truth in 
 the working of our industrial government is 
 the simplest and most potent element in the in- 
 articulate labour unrest which has so much 
 hampered British trade and industry of recent 
 years. Harmony can only be restored by frankly 
 basing our industrial life, as our political life is 
 already based, on the principle of responsible 
 self-government.' 
 
 This war will not be lost, though we all should 
 
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 119 
 
 be impoverished for three generations. But it 
 will be lost if we do not win more freedom, and 
 at the same time more order. It is the com- 
 bination of the two that is the secret of the 
 English strength. Both these developments 
 have this quality. For both repudiate a freedom 
 which is anti-social. Both claim that a man 
 shall have regard to the experience of his fellows. 
 The man who believes in authority is not the man 
 who utters consecrated formulae, or wants to 
 subject other people to discipline. It is the man 
 who can subject himself, who defers to the 
 common judgment, who knows that if he is per- 
 suaded he must stand alone, but who differs 
 with reluctance, believing that, however certain 
 he feels, it is less likely that the accumulated 
 experience of ages is in error than that he him- 
 suffers from some obliquity of vision. 
 
 These truths of freedom and order apply to 
 religion even more than they do to civil society. 
 What measures shall effect these ends we need 
 not discuss. The Gospel gives us no programme. 
 Christ did not come to make statesmen lazy. 
 But He did come to assure us of our end the 
 eternal world for every man, and his share in the 
 kingdom. That truth is at root of all claims 
 to freedom and it secures the balance of 
 authority. 
 
 Even more clearly do these truths shine out in 
 the Church. If we consider the individual alone, 
 
120 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 anarchy results ; religion is no more than sub- 
 jective feeling. If we argue from the unity of the 
 Church in any mechanical way, it is not hard 
 to arrive at some such external type of autho- 
 rity as the ultramontane Papacy. In a great 
 society there will always be much group life. 
 Men of like temper tend to get together. What 
 is dangerous is when such groups become ex- 
 clusive. That is sectarianism not the emphasis 
 on this or that dogma. Sectarianism is an 
 attempt to combine in one exclusive society 
 all men of a special kind of temperament in 
 religion. The Church holds all. Within the 
 Catholic society let there be groups as many as 
 you will. We need more, not less, of the guild 
 principle. So long as human life exists there will 
 be temperaments in which the personal side of 
 religion is uppermost ; others which emphasise 
 the critical ; others the sacramental and insti- 
 tutional. Parties in the Church roughly corre- 
 spond to these permanent differences. No 
 system can change this. We are not intended 
 all to think or act alike. Churchmanship is 
 tested by the power to bear with one another. 
 All share the common life ; each contributes 
 his special gift, and gains from those most unlike. 
 Freedom, as we saw, implies respect for others. 
 In so vast a life as the Catholic Church, with 
 its immeasurable reflections in human per- 
 sonality, with its multitudinous controversies, 
 
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY I.M 
 
 its many-coloured history, its treasury of inter- 
 pretative literature, its varieties of cult all 
 centred round the Creeds, men may be loyal 
 to the whole while greatly differing in the value 
 they set upon their parts. Nor need they like 
 each other equally. To the old-fashioned Evan- 
 gelical, with his strong sense of personal union 
 and pardon, the ritual of an advanced Church 
 seems to place the form before the substance, 
 and to disturb the quiet of the soul. To him 
 who glories in the Catholic heritage, his brother's 
 gospel seems partial, and to lack all bulwarks 
 against subjectivism. Both think the ' Liberal,' 
 as he loves to be called, coldly intellectual, and 
 suspect unbelief even where they cannot trace 
 it. To the latter the two seem wilfully ignorant 
 of modern problems and timorous in thought. 
 Each is apt to accuse the other of heresy, wishing 
 he were out of the Church. Yet reflection shows 
 that each group has the defects of its qualities. 
 The best way to correct these defects is to com- 
 bine one group with others whose emphasis 
 differs. So long as this is done in loyalty to 
 the whole, danger is at a minimum. 
 
 We are not to jettison our standards. But we 
 need in our thoughts to give the maximum of 
 margin to those who differ. Toleration to be 
 real means more than is thought. It does not 
 mean that we tolerate opinions on matters only 
 which we think doubtful, but that we must 
 
122 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 endure what we actively dislike, confident in 
 the power of a living society to reject what is 
 alien to its idea, and reserving our powers to 
 combat them in argument. 
 
 This freedom is not absolute. Even ethical 
 agreement involves postulates about human 
 nature. Faith in God as our Father is open to 
 doubts which to many seem insuperable. The 
 simplest view of our relation to Christ implies a 
 host of historical affirmations, none of which is 
 unquestioned. The claim for absolute freedom 
 of criticism inside the Church involves a contra- 
 diction. For it asserts that a religion essentially 
 historical may be indifferent to all historical 
 content. This would leave us with an ethics 
 without direction, a theology that was not even 
 negative, a society which lacks all principle of 
 life, and a religion without meaning. 
 
 With this caveat, let us bear in mind that 
 English Churchmanship, if true to its special task, 
 should lean to the side of freedom. It is hard to 
 be fair to what we feel to be wrong. It is always 
 exhilarating to take the offensive. Only real 
 faith can afford to be sympathetic. Too 
 often when we think we are defending the 
 faith we are only betraying our own weakness 
 of hold. 
 
 These principles apply to all, not least to the 
 intolerant preacher of toleration. The name of 
 Liberal does not prove liberality, nor the name 
 
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 123 
 
 of Catholic universality, nor that of Evangelical 
 a Gospel spirit. 
 
 Even worse is a danger of all these parties 
 the temptation to treat religion as the property 
 of those who have taste for it. It may be the 
 individual dwelling in a private Paradise, 'occult 
 withheld,' untrod, rolling Scripture phrases like 
 wine on the palate. It may be the critical 
 intellectualist, exhaustless in discussion. It may 
 be the institutionalist aflame with the wonder of 
 the Church of all the ages, erudite in details of 
 her cult. Any or all may make the error of 
 treating religion as mainly an interest. The 
 love of God, and of man, made possible by 
 Jesus Christ, and carried out in daily life, that 
 is the principle of the Gospel. To many a God- 
 fearing man this is the star to steer by, to whom 
 all our party cries are of little meaning. Religion 
 does not mean reading the Church papers or 
 going to the May meetings. We know that now. 
 Yet are we not apt to treat as the only true 
 Christians those who have the same sort of 
 interest in it as we have ourselves ? 
 
 Calvinism makes Christianity the treasure 
 of the religious tlile. Its dogmas are gone. 
 Its spirit takes Protean forms ; it is the worst 
 of all cankers in the Church. It works uncon- 
 sciously, taking people on the side of their en- 
 thusiasms. Yet we do not judge a man a good 
 citizen by his interest in a political club. Too 
 
124 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 often this is accepted by the plain man, who 
 thinks the Church no place for him. Nothing 
 will do more to ruin God's cause than to turn the 
 family into a sect of leisured persons with a 
 taste for religion. Instead of the Church of 
 God being a home for the souls of men, it would 
 become a conservatoire for training spiritual 
 virtuosity. It would imply radical differences 
 in human life, instead of the unity of all in love. 
 
 That is the bond of society not sentimental 
 affection, but will to the good of others along 
 with our own. All effort for humanity comes 
 of the golden rule. The essence of the golden 
 rule is the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. Free- 
 dom and authority are abstract terms. We 
 may dispute about them for ever. Love is the 
 activity of persons transforming the whole. 
 
 Alike in matters of dogma and organisation 
 we should simplify our problems if we had at 
 heart the governing principles of that writing 
 in the New Testament which is fullest of dogma, 
 yet gives imperishable form to the social appeal 
 grounded on the nature of God. 
 
 ' Beloved, let us love one another : for love is 
 of God, and every one that loveth is born of God, 
 and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth 
 not God ; for God is love. In this was mani- 
 fested the love of Gd toward us, because that 
 God sent His only begotten Son into the world, 
 that we might live through Him. Herein is love, 
 
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 125 
 
 not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and 
 sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 
 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love 
 one another. No man hath seen God at any 
 time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in 
 us, and His love is perfected in us. Hereby 
 know we that we dwell in Him, and He in us, 
 because He hath given us of His Spirit. And 
 we have seen and do testify that the Father sent 
 the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Who- 
 soever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, 
 God dwelleth in him and he in God. And we 
 have known and believed the love that God 
 hath to us. God is love ; and he that dwelleth 
 in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. 
 
III. CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 
 
 'All things are yours.' I Cor. iii. 21. 
 
 THIS passage is the charter of Christian culture. 
 St. Paul lays down the right of the Christian 
 to share in the riches of human experience, and 
 the limits within which that right must be 
 exercised. All things are yours. Only because 
 we are Christ's, and Christ is God's. The 
 Christian holds the master-key to the treasury 
 of life. The words are to us a truism. We 
 quote them lightly. They were not lightly 
 written. Had the Apostle been writing to the 
 hierophants of a prosperous and established 
 Church, his words would have seemed obvious. 
 Danger there might be lest possession should 
 seem everything, and the proviso be forgotten. 
 No difficulty about these words would have 
 occurred to a mediaeval statesman Pope, holding 
 in his hands the threads of universal diplomacy, 
 and master of an organisation the most subtle 
 and penetrating known in history. Some one 
 like Innocent IV. or John XXII. would have 
 expounded them in "a legal case, as proof of his 
 own more than royal rights. Or, again, these 
 
 126 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 127 
 
 words might seem the best warrant for en- 
 thusiasm in all humane studies of a Pope of the 
 Renaissance, like Nicolas V., with high ideals 
 as a scholar, sensible that he was leader of a 
 great intellectual movement, desirous to justify 
 Rome as capital of the ' country of culture. 1 
 What was felt at the centre would be felt also at 
 the circumference. Any member of a military 
 order like the Templars, or a prosperous mer- 
 chant like the father of St. Francis of Assisi, 
 would feel this. Indeed, that was partly why 
 the latter was so deeply wounded by his son's 
 marriage with Holy Poverty. Or, again, a plain 
 schoolmaster in the sixteenth century might take 
 these words to himself, and believe that he was 
 following in the steps of Vittorino da Feltre. 
 1 In all time of our wealth ' as a Church these 
 words would seem natural to the Christian man 
 of affairs, or the Christian scholar. 
 
 That was not so with St. Paul's first readers. 
 Slaves they were for the most part : men at least 
 of no social weight. The new faith was not yet 
 formidable enough even to merit official perse- 
 cution. Christianity meant less to the Roman 
 world than the prophecies of Dr. Dowie and Zion 
 City meant to us. 
 
 This fact alone shows how impossible it is to 
 think of St. Paul as speaking of material pos- 
 sessions. If is of experience, not the material 
 basis of experience, that he speaks. St. Francis 
 
128 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 once said that he got more out of the riches of 
 King Louis than the King himself. The King 
 enjoyed his treasures but he enjoyed the King's 
 joy. In other words, love, with its gift of 
 sympathy, enriches the personality. Selfishness 
 makes individuality a prison-house. It narrows 
 the character, even in the presence of vast 
 wealth. 
 
 What St. Paul said has proved true. Most 
 that was of enduring value in the ancient culture 
 was absorbed by the Catholic Church. Then, 
 in union with the fresh races of the north, she 
 framed a culture richer, more varied, and more 
 penetrating than any known before. It is hard 
 to see how any one can belittle the services of 
 the Church to humane culture, in view of the 
 material evidence still subsisting. Yet some 
 can speak of the ' gloomy asceticism of the 
 Catholic Church destroying love and laughter.' 
 Such an one can never have looked at the 
 grotesques in a mediaeval cathedral. St. Francis 
 of Assisi was in some ways the most thorough- 
 going ascetic, yet his whole life is like a child's 
 smile on a dull day. Those who bring against 
 the Church this charge of hostility to culture do 
 not argue from facts of these they are ignor- 
 ant but from theories. They know that the 
 Church prohibits certain actions and inculcates 
 self-denial. They 'jump to the conclusion that 
 she is inhuman and opposed to natural joy. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 129 
 
 If Christianity could be identified with Puritan- 
 ism they might be right. 
 
 All comes of two errors : (a) a misconception 
 of the Christian maxim * die to live,' and (b) the 
 failure to see that this principle is true of all 
 worthy human life, is indeed involved in the 
 very nature of culture, for that involves selection. 
 The Christian law is that we must lose ourselves 
 to save ourselves that pain, risk, drudgery, all 
 forms of daily dying, are essential for any 
 mastery, whether bodily, mental, social, or 
 spiritual. This maxim ' die to live ' is a postulate 
 of all education. The most perfect bodily func- 
 tions will give no one athletic freedom unless 
 he go through a discipline. Brilliant mental 
 gifts run to seed unless there be a hard and 
 hurting pruning process. Without this prin- 
 ciple, the sacrifice of the moment to the future, 
 no success can be won either in politics or affairs, 
 any profession or liberal art. When the 
 Cross of Christ is held before us, it is not as a 
 strange, unique phenomenon. It is the inner 
 meaning of all our struggles, the symbol of all 
 sacrifice for distant ends. Even for culture we 
 need the Cross. Mere hedonism will not do. 
 No high culture is possible without an asceticism 
 of the taste. How little such is practised now 
 may be seen in our cheap magazines, and some 
 of our best advertised novelists. Nobody can 
 learn to write unless he is willing to be ruthless 
 
 I 
 
130 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 to himself. Nowadays people wonder at the 
 story of a town like Siena. They read of its 
 constant wars with other cities, its internecine 
 civil strife, its insecurity and bloodshed. They 
 ask how is it possible that a people so distracted 
 should produce the things we know ? Is not 
 the answer partly in these very distractions, 
 the symptoms of intensified life ? The brilliance 
 of life and all its beauty were realised owing 
 to the nearness of death that gives a colour 
 and a glory quite unique. Take other cities, set 
 on a hill, Buxton or Harrogate. There you 
 have no wars, but fine hotels and efficient police. 
 But will there be anything for people to wish to 
 look at five hundred years hence ? 
 
 Perhaps the party is not large which attacks 
 the Church in this way. Few people deny the 
 services she has wrought in the past say the 
 thirteenth century. That, it is thought, can 
 be relegated to history. Can we not look for- 
 ward to an age of purely humanist culture, 
 without any disturbing supernatural interest. 
 Ever since the Renaissance we have been wit- 
 nessing efforts to produce this condition. At 
 last we have some glimpse of its naked beauty. 
 The present moral of the Prussian people is 
 the direct result of the marriage of European 
 scepticism with State idolatry. The sometime 
 friend and pupil of Voltaire, Frederick the Great, 
 is the symbol of it all. What has gone on since 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 131 
 
 then is merely the logical development of the 
 philosophy of sans-souci. People were shocked 
 and surprised at the bonfire of Louvain, the 
 murder of Captain Fryatt, the Belgian depor- 
 tations. They may have done well to be shocked , 
 but they are foolish to be surprised. Nobody 
 who has read Busch's Memoirs of Bismarck 
 ought to be surprised at anything that the 
 Germans have done. That is the kind of culture 
 for which all deniers of the supernatural are 
 preparing the way, though not always with 
 
 t intention. 
 
 The higher goods even of human culture will 
 not persist apart from a spiritual ideal ; they 
 will cease to be thought of as goods, and their 
 value will decay. Even education if material 
 success be all must undergo a like change. 
 More and more will a vulgar commercial spirit 
 decline to allow time and energy to be spent in 
 any fundamental problems. Scientific research 
 will be honoured for a time. But as soon as 
 it is discerned or suspected that much of it is 
 without practical value, the man of science will 
 be despised like the poet, and bidden to work 
 in fetters. Art, indeed, never did and never 
 can subsist on a rationalist basis, for in its very 
 idea art invokes other elements of human nature. 
 A society living on the mechanistic hypothesis 
 would soon begin to ask of poets what they were 
 dreaming of, and of musicians why they were so 
 
132 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 idle ? So far from making fresh masterpieces 
 such a world soon becomes incapable of com- 
 prehending the old ones. Most of us know in- 
 stances of this. 
 
 If, however, religion be the foundation of en- 
 during culture, culture is no less needful to the 
 Catholic Church. The final truth may not be 
 with intellectualism ; we are not on that ground 
 to despise the intellect, but rather to develop 
 and direct it. Without God, human society 
 becomes barren and decays. That does not 
 mean that we are to despise human society. 
 Rather we are to show its value to the man of 
 God if he would be perfect and entire. Art, 
 if followed on lines of pure naturalism, will lose 
 its dignity and sweetness. We are not on that 
 ground to turn aside in Puritan contempt, but 
 rather to do all we can to elevate artistic motives. 
 So with all human instincts none of them but 
 may lead astray if pursued apart from God. 
 But none of them but enriches the Christian 
 if done in the right spirit. Sexual intercourse 
 may be animal merely, or worse ; Christian 
 marriage is a Sacrament of the union between 
 Christ and the Church. 
 
 On all hands we see the problem between 
 a spiritual and a non-spiritual culture. The 
 solution is not to be looked for in any form of 
 Puritanism a movement confined to no one 
 epoch and no one branch of the Church but 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 133 
 
 always seductive to austere minds ; and always 
 heretical. 
 
 If we think to convert the modern world by 
 retiring into a coterie, we shall make a grievous 
 error. Whatever the man of the present day 
 accepts, it will not be Puritanism. Half of our 
 trouble is due to this the old Puritan ideals 
 have gone, and in their stead we have licence. 
 * In those days there was no king in Israel, and 
 every man did what was right in his own eyes. 1 
 
 Let us brace ourselves to meet this need. We 
 have a world crying out for religion, but sus- 
 picious of authority, and nervously afraid lest 
 religious people are blind to the needs of humane 
 culture. That dread we must remove. 
 
 There is less inclination than there used to be 
 to suppose that you can get on comfortably 
 enough without any religion. But the religion 
 of the coterie is of no use. A religious world 
 with its ecclesiastical gossip, its clerical cliques, 
 its great preachers, and its paraphernalia of fuss 
 will not attract thinking men. What will interest 
 the world is to show that (i) we mean what we 
 say when we talk of human life as being a 
 fellowship, and (2) that on the intellectual side 
 the highest and deepest culture is that of the 
 Christian. Never shall I forget the impression 
 made on me as an undergraduate by being 
 brought into touch with a great scholar who was 
 above all things a humanist, but the very depth 
 
134 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 of whose humanism was due to his Christianity. 
 It is essential for us who glory in the name of 
 Catholics to show these two things for it is 
 useless to prate of Catholicity if you spend your 
 time sneering at all efforts after fellowship in 
 secular affairs, and it seems equally unreal to 
 boast of that name in any narrow specialist 
 spirit apart from the great tradition of European 
 culture. We have to show that we, because we 
 are Christians, have deeper social sympathies 
 and more acute intellectual interests than those 
 who are not. 
 
 I wish that this were more realised. For 
 many of the most earnest among the clergy 
 seem content with their culture at twenty-five. 
 Since then they learn nothing, though they have 
 forgotten a good deal. Too many vicars seem 
 to frown on any intellectual activities, whether 
 in clergy or laity, with disastrous results. The 
 consequence is that the professional man (or 
 woman) of high modern education finds little to 
 help him in the Church, and is often given the 
 sense that he is not wanted as compared with 
 other people. No wonder where they retain 
 religion they surrender to the vague idealism 
 guiltless of creeds 1 which is all in the air. 
 
 If there be any here whose life is not yet fixed 
 in a groove, I woujd say this : Let your sense 
 of the need of religion be equally yoked with a 
 passionate enthusiasm for all the goods of 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 135 
 
 human culture. Do not let any desire to do 
 immediate good hinder you from the develop- 
 ment of mental interests ; and do not suppose 
 that that development is ended at thirty, or 
 even at forty or fifty. We live in a difficult 
 world, but a very glorious one. Upon us, the 
 inheritors of European culture, is laid a burden 
 honourable, but onerous. We have to show that 
 in all excellences of humane activities, study, in- 
 vention, artistic enthusiasm, social grace, wise 
 and instructed statesmanship, the care for good 
 books, there reigns in the Christian not less but 
 more of the passion for knowledge than in his 
 fellows. Nobody is the master of his own gifts, 
 and talent is not a merit, but as Catholic Chris- 
 tians we can all develop the gifts that we have, 
 and show forth religion, as a harmony of many 
 hues, of many times and places, subtly inter- 
 woven. It is the office of all Christians to show 
 forth their faith in its beauty and universal 
 subtlety of gladness. 
 
IV. THE ETERNAL REFUGE 
 
 ' The Lord sitteth above the water-flood ; the Lord re- 
 maineth a King for ever.' Psalm xxix. 10. 
 
 DOES He ? That question is asked by many 
 now who did not dream a doubt four years ago. 
 Practical reality forces itself upon us. We cannot 
 but wonder how far our hopes for man are well 
 founded. Is there goodness at the heart of 
 things ? For us this involves a belief in the 
 Blessed Trinity, a God whose nature it is to love 
 and be loved and a world of human fellowship 
 based on His Fatherhood. 
 
 Ultimately the doctrine of human brotherhood 
 will not be maintained apart from Christian 
 Faith. What concerns men at the moment is 
 not so much faith in God as belief in the prin- 
 ciples of human life, which are symbolised in 
 the Golden Rule. Mr. George Santayana in 
 his brilliant volume Egotism in German Philo- 
 sophy, points out that what our new ' pedant 
 barbarism ' sets at naught is the whole complex 
 of moral and humane doctrine, the traditional 
 sanctities of men's social unity. That is what 
 we fight for. Without giving way to the German 
 
 136 
 
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 137 
 
 creed, many are in doubt about their own. We 
 ask, Can there be any real foundation for all those 
 hopes and ideals which in the past were so sup- 
 porting ? Far off they seem and faint, echoes 
 of a dying song. 
 
 First of all, in religion we see something 
 remote. This struggle absorbs our imagination. 
 Even about prayer there is an air of unreality 
 how useless to the main struggle is that which 
 is to us so full of comfort, the Holy Communion. 
 Us these things refresh and uplift. Yet are 
 they not almost fiddling whilst Rome burns ? 
 Even more is this true of our discussions and 
 movements, and ecclesiastical paraphernalia. 
 Are they not shams while realities are all in 
 France ? We must reply that these are parts of 
 life, and they cannot all be stopped and that 
 it is our duty to carry on and not mope. This 
 sense of remoteness affects many of the interests 
 honoured in this place. The manifold occu- 
 pations of art and letters the throwing the 
 imagination into the past, all recondite inquiry, 
 all learning that has not an immediate object 
 all suffer under the shadow of unreality, 
 except in so far as they can be defended as re- 
 freshment. So that it is not the religious 
 interest alone that must question itself. 
 
 But ' religion is not a luxury ; it is a neces- 
 sity/ A large part of religion has been luxury. 
 That must go. All that is mere sentiment, all 
 
 
138 UNIVERSITY SERMONS' 
 
 languorous acquiescence will prove wanting. 
 The war should destroy all religion that is not 
 vital. 
 
 That is only the beginning of the trouble. 
 Let it be that our religion is vital to us : our 
 consolation and our hope. What is going on 
 makes us doubt how far we have any right to 
 this hope. May it not be only a dream of the 
 imagination, i.e. a refuge for the spirit of man, 
 created for himself through the pressure of need, 
 but having no root in reality. The more in- 
 tensely we feel this need, the more acutely do 
 we question our right to satisfy it. Not only 
 we ; others in every age have sighed for the con- 
 solations of religion. Yet might it not be that 
 they only hypnotised themselves into the belief 
 that the universe was less cruel than it seemed. 
 Faith in an age like this is always tortured by 
 the fear of self-hypnotism. It would not be 
 faith if it were not. 
 
 Many people have believed in a good-natured, 
 sentimental Deity. That faith was the reflection 
 of their own weakness. It is not Christian ; it 
 never was. Our God is a consuming fire. In 
 Jesus of Nazareth there is deep austerity often 
 ignored by the graceful sentimentalism which 
 Renan made popular. ' There is nothing so 
 merciless as the mercy of God,' I have heard said. 
 This war has done us good in recalling us to the 
 severity of God's love so deep that He will 
 
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 139 
 
 shrink from nothing to His children's profit, 
 except that of coercing their freedom. 
 
 Freedom ! All men are free, or partly so. If 
 God be Love, He cannot desire the service of 
 machines. If He creates spirits to love Him, 
 they must be free to love themselves better : 
 in doing that they will cause vast suffering. This 
 war shows us on a colossal scale the consequence 
 of human freedom being turned to wrong ends. 
 It gives no argument against a God who is Love ; 
 but it shows a world, which was forgetting it in 
 genial tolerance, the naked horror of sin. Many 
 people who did not believe in the theological 
 doctrine of sin, now see what it means. That 
 is the reply to the often heard word, ' There can 
 be no God, or else He would stop the war.' 
 
 That does not take away our trouble. There 
 remains the Presence in the imagination. Facts 
 about us arc so terrific We cannot live in a 
 fools' Paradise. Is the time-honoured wisdom 
 of mankind anything more than a set of copy- 
 book maxims, fit for small children, and scorned 
 by any one else ? Is not there (apart from the 
 war) a great deal in the competition of commerce, 
 in the exploitation of the weak, in the methods 
 even of Western civilisation that bears out such 
 a view ? Is what is called morality as between 
 man and man anything more than the exaltation 
 of certain elements of this human life, useful at 
 all times to the weak, and obligatory between 
 
140 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 friends, but belied by the world at large ? We 
 may admire the maxim to love as brethren, and 
 honour the perfection of self-sacrificing Love 
 upon the Cross. But is not the truth of man's 
 nature rather expressed by philosophers like 
 Hobbes, with his belief in universal selfishness, 
 or like Machiavelli and Bernhardi which is the 
 same thing on the international scale ? Is there 
 indeed a ' power not ourselves that makes for 
 righteousness/ or is it all a dream ? Did Christ 
 enunciate the true law of human life after 
 all? 
 
 You cannot prove it. No belief in God or any 
 predominant power above selfishness is possible 
 save to faith. We know this by the common 
 argument of selfish men, that even a self-sacri- 
 ficing act is in some way the interest of a person 
 of special temperament. This is no matter of 
 high doctrine. It is concerned with all the 
 venerated sanctities of human life ; the love 
 of man and woman, motherhood, friendship, 
 mutual help, loyalty, truthfulness are all these 
 things to be honoured as the highest, or are they, 
 except as the playthings of a coterie, the merest 
 moonshine ? In all ages some have thought 
 this. At any moment, the mass of practice may 
 be plausibly argued to be against them, albeit, 
 from time immemorial men have given them 
 lip-service. Without faith even the ideals of 
 humane living are impossible. That makes us 
 
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 141 
 
 afraid. May not our faith be self-hypnotism ? 
 We cannot prove the contrary. We can see what 
 are the alternatives. If they should carry us to 
 conclusions even more difficult, we have grounds 
 for the venture of faith. Faith would be no 
 faith if there were no venture. 
 
 But first of all even the alternative, the selfish 
 ideal, requires faith. You must make a venture 
 even to accept the ethics of Thomas Hobbes of 
 Malmesbury. For to do that you have to ex- 
 plain away all the acts of love and fellowship ; 
 and also the high value mankind has put on 
 them. I do not say that that cannot be done. 
 But the explanation does not satisfy. It seems 
 unreal, just what they call our view. The com- 
 mon man is revolted when he is bidden to hold 
 that an act of heroism like that of the bomb- 
 ing officer who saved his men's lives at the cost 
 of his own is no more than his form of selfishness. 
 In some ways the war may make things harder 
 to believe for those on the side of the angels. 
 But the uncounted acts of devotion to others, 
 and mutual help, have added to the spiritual 
 assets of the race. They make the cynical view 
 even less probable than before. 
 
 Neither the cynical nor the fraternal theory 
 of life can be proved. Both have some facts, 
 and neither has them all. Whichever way you 
 take, you must choose one set of facts and rank 
 them higher. Are the qualities hitherto thought 
 
142 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 nobler in reality so ? We need not enhance our 
 difficulties. Christian and humane ethics do 
 not teach an absolute altruism, but bid us ' love 
 our neighbour as ourselves.' It does not destroy 
 individuality, but asserts that true self-develop- 
 ment is found in service. Is not that the lesson 
 taught us shrinking Christians by thousands of 
 quite ordinary privates ? Even the State wor- 
 ship of Prussia is by no means all on the side 
 of the selfish doctrine. True, it annihilates every 
 moral restraint in politics or war. But to do 
 this it has to develop in a high degree the selfless 
 devotion of the individual. It makes the State 
 his conscience. It might be argued that the 
 successes of our foes are due more to their good 
 than to their bad qualities. They are a people 
 really at one, willing to endure all for the father- 
 land, and sacrificing everything to the herd- 
 instinct. This cohesion is not, cannot be, 
 merely created by force it is in the mind of the 
 people. Within the limits of the nation, we 
 may find many instances of the paramount 
 claims of human fellowship. They all point 
 to the individual reaching his real life in devotion 
 to a cause national immorality, but individual 
 sacrifice, is their motto. Indeed, I have seen it 
 argued, by one who hates Christian ethics, that 
 modern Prussia is their chief embodiment. 
 Whether you take" the family, or the State, or 
 any social union, you find that human life cannot 
 
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 143 
 
 be understood without some infusion of the 
 despised doctrine of mutual service. 
 
 Still, we have an alternative. Let us consider 
 it. We want to see what it involves, whether 
 it does not bring us into greater difficulties even 
 than our own ideal. Friedrich Nietzsche repu- 
 diated with scorn all those ethical values, save 
 courage, which the human race, Buddhist and 
 Chinese no less than Christian, has at all times 
 chosen for honour. But while he did this, he 
 was also saying the universe is chaos ; it has no 
 order, no meaning, no goal. The rejection of 
 ethical values leads to the doctrine that the 
 world is nonsense : this he reiterates with the 
 lyrical raptures in which he is a master. You 
 may say that he is not consistent, that he did 
 find in it a meaning the will to power. But 
 
 it has no end. The world is a recurring 
 decimal ; the will to power goes on producing 
 a series of cycles of never-ending struggle, 
 leading to nothing. That is ' his eternal return/ 
 
 Can it not be said that at blackest moments 
 our view is less improbable than this, and there- 
 fore that the world somehow gives warrant to 
 ethics of human fellowship. Besides, there is 
 a sense in that we all have a right to argue 
 that the deepest aspirations have some warrant 
 in the constitution of things. Ultimately this 
 comes to mean that existence cannot be entirely 
 nonsense. This it is, and not any individual 
 
144 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 sense of permanence, that is the argument for 
 the life beyond (apart from Revelation). Just 
 now this is enhanced. It is not so hard to believe 
 that death closes all in those who die with work 
 done at the evening of life. It is all but im- 
 possible to credit that some great character cut 
 off in the height of power, or some youth noble 
 and heroic killed in fight, has gone out into the 
 dark for ever. If the world be not meaningless, 
 we must think of them as alive. That is the 
 real argument for an eternal world which shall 
 ratify all that is noble in this : it is expressed in 
 Browning's ' Abt Vogler,' in lines almost too 
 well known to quote. 
 
 The contrary is to make the devil Lord of all 
 things. That is not thinkable. You cannot 
 conceive, though Nietzsche suggested it, that 
 the ground of all being is a lie. The argument 
 that the deepest needs of human nature have 
 their satisfaction in reality may rest on faith. 
 It does. But it is not unreasonable. It is the 
 faith that the world has a meaning, and that 
 man is not a freak of nature. 
 
 This faith in the inner permanence of good 
 guarantees no result either way in the present 
 struggle. We greatly err if we suppose that 
 because we are right, more than right, therefore 
 military triumph is assured. That would be to 
 make success the measure of right, and to justify 
 the worst crimes. In the Old Testament, tern- 
 
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 145 
 
 poral blessings are the meed of right being. 
 Precisely the opposite is the lesson of Jesus Christ 
 in word and fact. The war shows how apparent 
 defeat is the cause of spiritual triumph. The 
 success of the British Empire and its justice 
 have made us forget that. It may be that we 
 have to learn it afresh, and the process will be 
 hard. 
 
 At the sack of Rome by Alaric, all human 
 ideals suffered shipwreck ; the grandeur of the 
 eternal city had seemed part of the nature of 
 things, and all faith was shattered. The greatest 
 of St. Augustine's works was designed to rebuild 
 it. The DC Civitate Dei removed the notion 
 that, because earthly props were gone, God was 
 the less with us and Christianity false. In words 
 all have accepted that view. Nobody now pro- 
 fesses to believe that earthly blessings attend on 
 the virtuous man, as a thing of course. All 
 Christians accept the doctrine of the Cross, that 
 strength may be made perfect in weakness that 
 apparent loss, even of power to work for God, 
 may bring real gain. In words we believe that, 
 but we find it hard in act in our own case. 
 Still harder is it in the national cause. Yet 
 nations, like individuals, may be the greatest 
 when they have to tread the via dolorosa, like 
 Belgium now. The age-long triumph of English 
 freedom might conceivably come, not after a 
 victory but out of a disaster unparalleled. I am 
 
 K 
 
146 UNIVERSITY SERMONS 
 
 not saying that this need be, or that we should 
 not strain every nerve. Only let us not cease 
 to remind ourselves that our faith in God's love 
 as the ground of life must not be made depen- 
 dent on the issue of any actual struggle. 
 
 Too wide for our ken is the sweeping orbit of 
 human history. We have but a clear vision of 
 a piece of it. What may be the future of the 
 peoples of West Europe and America we cannot 
 say, any more than four years ago we could have 
 said what was the destiny of so many gone forth 
 from here, and now dead in our defence. 
 
 Either our virtues or our vices might lose us 
 the war. The sins of West Europe, the worship 
 of gold and pleasure, the class-selfishness, ex- 
 ploitation of the weak, commercial and industrial 
 ruthlessness all may need the punishment of a 
 power, which displays the same principles on a 
 vaster scale with less of restraint. For the 
 scientific barbarism of Prussia might win in the 
 same way that the hard barbarians of the West 
 broke into the peace-lapped Roman Empire in 
 the fifth century. God forfend this. Yet it 
 might be. We must face facts. 
 
 We are in the most awful hour yet of this 
 war. What we need is not prophecy, but hope. 
 Hope, if it be unconquerable, must be indepen- 
 dent of any earthly vicissitude. It must have 
 its vision in the world beyond. No hope save 
 that in the eternal God can satisfy us at any 
 
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 147 
 
 time. Yet now it is clearer than ever that if 
 we are not to sink in the sea of trouble we need 
 some refuge beyond the stress of life, that also 
 can sustain us in the faith that our cause is at 
 one with the heart of God that our life, whether 
 a nation or as individual, is in His hands. Not 
 in bright but in dark times do we feel most 
 the reality of the eternal consolation. 
 
 4 The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want. 
 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures : 
 He leadeth me beside the still waters. He re- 
 storeth my soul : He leadeth me in the paths of 
 righteousness for His name's sake. Yea, though 
 I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, 
 I will fear no evil : for Thou art with me ; Thy 
 rod and Thy staff they comfort me. 
 
 1 Thou preparest a table before me in the pres- 
 ence of mine enemies : Thou anointest my head 
 with oil ; my cup runneth over. Surely good- 
 ness and mercy shall follow me all the days of 
 my life : and I will dwell in the house of the 
 Lord for ever/ 
 
THE NEED OF GOD 
 
 'Hitherto the Lord hath helped us.' I Sam. vii. 12. 
 
 WORDS are little needed to-day. The solemnity 
 of the hour preaches its own sermon. Since 
 August, 1914, what ages have passed ! Each 
 year has come to us with a graver sense of the 
 issues ; each year we have felt more deeply how 
 hard is the task. Each year there is an increas- 
 ing inability to foretell the end. Every month 
 the prophets grow fewer as to how and when it 
 will close. To many the chief asset is only this 
 that after four years we must be making some 
 approach to mutual exhaustion. But of an end 
 we see no sign, and have less hope than a year 
 ago. 
 
 Every year has deepened our knowledge of the 
 greatness of our task. Has it in an equal degree 
 deepened our dependence upon God ? Has it 
 done this even among Christian people ? I 
 doubt it. Not long since I had a letter from an 
 Englishwoman who had lived in Rumania until 
 this year. Once, early in the war, had she been 
 home, and is now returned. She felt that she 
 was breathing a different atmosphere from what 
 there was in 1915. Then the ideals of sacrifice 
 
 148 
 
THE NEED OF GOD 149 
 
 and noble aims and brotherhood in freedom 
 were all in the air. Now it was not so. Instead, 
 there is a dogged will to hold on ; and absorp- 
 tion in the things of the moment. Is there no 
 truth in that ? Partly it may be right. In any 
 struggle, if serious, a period comes in which the 
 mind is taken up with holding on. The far aim 
 may be there, but it cannot hold the attention. 
 That is so now alike in those who fight and 
 those who watch. The war has paralysed all 
 activities whether of mind or soul, which do not 
 have a direct bearing on victory. At least, it 
 tends to paralyse them. 
 
 So far as prayer is regarded, it might seem 
 that to believers it would have the opposite 
 result. So it has to some. They are not many. 
 Prayer is little understood even by those who 
 pray. The immediate pressure of anxiety, or of 
 sorrow, or more often simply of work, is so acute, 
 that prayer and everything other-worldly seem 
 unreal. People may not disbelieve it all seems 
 remote, irrelevant like going to Church to a 
 child who wants to go on with its game. It is 
 well then that at this time we should remind 
 ourselves (a) of our duty, (b) of our grounds of 
 thanks. 
 
 First comes the thought of thanksgiving. 
 Horrors the war has shown. History has no 
 parallel for the suffering it has entailed, or for 
 the elaborated evil mind at the back of it. If 
 
ISO THE NEED OF GOD 
 
 the world does not know more of God, it under- 
 stands the devil better. Despite this our grounds 
 for thanksgiving are large. 
 
 We now know in a way we had no conception 
 of four years ago, how terrific is the force of our 
 adversary. The magnitude of our peril in 1914 
 was not realised till after. This year has its 
 special grounds for thanks. Four months ago, 
 one month ago, our feelings had undergone a 
 great change. I do not say that one expected 
 the enemy to win. But most believed that ere 
 this the position would be far more unfavour- 
 able than it is. Do not mistake me. We are 
 in no sense secure. Even now, by some stroke 
 of skill or fortune, the enemy might secure gains 
 which would more than make up for the last 
 fortnight. Still, on the soberest estimate, this 
 is less likely than it was. The Allies' power of 
 repercussion against attack is far greater. 
 
 If we are to thank our Heavenly Father for 
 deliverance, we must thank Him also for achieve- 
 ment. Who could have foreseen this four years 
 ago ? Who would have been believed if he had ? 
 England has won imperishable renown : and 
 France, the eldest son of the Church, the parent 
 of the Crusades, has added to the glory of her 
 title. Even the proudest believers in the his- 
 toric glory of this century could hardly have 
 imagined what has come about. Hysteria is 
 nauseous. But beyond hyperbole the fact re- 
 
THE NEED OF GOD 151 
 
 mains. Our troops by land and sea, no longer 
 a small body of trained professionals, but the 
 life of the nation, have set an example of heroism 
 and devoted unselfishness which might shame 
 saints. The value of any nation, its gift to the 
 world, is spiritual. The real treasures of the 
 Allies are indefinitely greater than they were. 
 
 Secondly, there is a treasure more hardly won 
 than the heroism of youth the union in spirit 
 between the Allies. That union sacree, which 
 silenced political battle-cries in France, is more 
 than paralleled by our four years' intimacy 
 with a nation so diverse. The fineness of 
 English culture will be vastly enhanced as a 
 result of this rapprochement if it lead to a real 
 interpenetration. French and Italian, all Latin 
 culture indeed, has been undervalued by us. 
 Now it is to be hoped we shall do this no more. 
 It may be the beginnings not only of a new 
 England, but of a new Europe a true Renais- 
 sance. Even greater, some think, will be the 
 results of our alliance with ' U.S.A. 1 Certain 
 things united us with them before, but less than 
 most people thought or than newspapers told. 
 Now there are noble auguries for civilised pro- 
 gress. Already the American President seems 
 more than any other statesman the spokesman 
 of the common mind of the Allied peoples. 
 
 All these things are grounds of thanks. The 
 wonder of deliverance ; the treasure of human 
 
152 THE NEED OF GOD 
 
 devotion alike in field and hospital ; the accom- 
 plished and enduring union of spirit among the 
 nations. 
 
 All these enhance the need of prayer. All are 
 spiritual treasures. Except the patriotic effort 
 none could have been at all counted upon. 
 No less unexpected than failures have been the 
 successes of this war. The retreat from Mons, 
 the victory of the Marne, the First Battle of 
 Ypres, were triumphs not of brains only but 
 of the spirit. The union between the Allied 
 Powers for so long was a thing almost beyond 
 hope. So much so that even now German 
 cunning is ever occupied with expedients to 
 break it up. 
 
 Apart from this there is the habit not yet 
 abandoned of speaking of victory as a mathe- 
 matical certainty because we have more money, 
 more man-power. This war has shown that 
 we cannot bank on mathematical certainties of 
 that sort. Machinery counts greatly we know. 
 But if you forget that all machines must be 
 constructed, worked, and directed by human 
 beings, you may lose your war in a day, either by 
 a strike or a mutiny, or stupidity at the top, or 
 intuition on the other side, or lack of moral 
 cohesion, or a tired mind, or mere flightiness. 
 Who could have guessed that Russia would make 
 the Treaty of Brest-Li to vsk ? Too much of this 
 talk leads to over-confidence ; and even in the 
 
THE NEED OF GOD 153 
 
 field leaves out the great factor of generalship. 
 It was generalship that won the second victory 
 of the Marne as it won the first and that is all 
 a matter not of intelligence but of the spirit. 
 This ignores, too, the spirit and moral of 
 armies, and still more the subtle problems that 
 arise in such numbers from a body of allied 
 nations with different governments, presiding 
 over people of different temper, different history, 
 different climate and language and culture. 
 
 Even in a human sense, prayer can help us. It 
 puts the mind of those who pray in that state in 
 which they will be best in a crisis. Even though 
 he may not know it, the mind of a man who prays 
 has a certain inward peace. He has a sort of 
 sub-conscious rest, while all the surface, even his 
 own brain and nerves, may be tossed with storms. 
 Besides, prayer does more than calm. It en- 
 larges horizons and gives vistas : ' I will lift up 
 mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my 
 help/ Prayer gives spaces and leisure, so that 
 the man of prayer has (so to say) extra holidays. 
 Unfortunately he sometimes trusts to this, and 
 breaks down. 
 
 The temper of the people at home will affect 
 that of the armies. Here, if anywhere, prayer 
 is needed. Always there are many who do 
 not pray. War breaks down barriers. It has 
 changed the outlook of millions. It has cut 
 many from their moorings. It has enlarged 
 
154 THE NEED OF GOD 
 
 their opportunities and multiplied their temp- 
 tations. Much as we have cause for thanks- 
 giving, what man of reflection can deny that 
 there are at this time great dangers dangers 
 of licence, of corruption, of hysteria, and of a 
 fanatical nationalism, which in a panic could 
 win the war by stains on the great name of 
 England. We had an instance last week in the 
 House of Lords when a motion was introduced 
 with an implied insult to the Royal Family, so 
 unbalanced was the fear of even suspects of alien 
 blood. There are all the dangers too of a people 
 living up to concert pitch danger especially for 
 the youth of both sexes. Victory of itself will 
 not make us a better nation, or England a better 
 place to live in. We need to pray as we never 
 prayed before for the realisation in acts not words 
 of the objects of the war freedom, and that for 
 all, not for some ; ordered liberty ; the mingling 
 of the gains of the past with the hopes of a new 
 world. Above all we need prayer, that God 
 may enter more fully into the life of humanity. 
 
THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN 
 
 ' God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are, or 
 even as this publican.' St Luke xviii. n. 
 
 THIS flash of insight revealed the unconscious 
 mind of the Pharisees. We are apt to think of 
 its particular application. Were not the Phari- 
 sees the wicked enemies who brought Jesus of 
 Nazareth to the Cross ? No wonder, if such 
 was their arrogance. How good to see them 
 shown up. Let us look and pass on. 
 
 Not so. The Pharisees are not an uncommon 
 type. Still less were they hardened criminals. 
 What they were hardened in was religiosity. 
 Religion to them was the supreme interest. 
 Their politics were also their religion. Nowhere 
 was such devoted nationalism. Their cause 
 was noble the free theocracy of the old Hebrew 
 Church-State. The Pharisees were the spear- 
 point of the Jewish people in a world hostile and 
 indifferent. What wonder if they had some 
 pride ? They were strict in observance ; so 
 they won respect. They were patriots, and had 
 on their side all men who were moved by historic 
 sentiment. They were the leaders of respecta- 
 bility, keeping high their private morals, yet 
 
 166 
 
156 PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN 
 
 finding their financial account in existing eco- 
 nomic conditions. Sometimes they were hard 
 at a bargain, merciless to the weak, greedy of 
 their interest, and careless as to how it was won. 
 They had no eyes for the problem of riches and 
 power, and thought that all things were the best 
 in the economic world, provided people would 
 abstain from trying to make them better. What 
 should surprise us in that ? These were the 
 faults incident to their place, often noticed 
 by prophets among the Jews. The Pharisees 
 had the defects of their qualities. Who has 
 not ? 
 
 These defects brought Jesus to the Cross. They 
 cast an indelible stain on the memory of their 
 party, and upon all parties in history which set 
 up religion as a party cause, and in the process 
 neglect God, Who is Love. To you and me this 
 warning comes afresh. Always it is needed. To 
 us the Church may be a cause, and to many of 
 us religion may be the chief interest in life. 
 All of us have temptations akin to those which 
 were too strong for the Pharisees the temptation 
 to make of religion the interest of nice people and 
 of religious activity the promotion of a party 
 cause. It is easy to serve God if you picture 
 Him as no more than the figure-head of your 
 party. Also this sense produces contempt for 
 all whose ways are not the same as ours. Cannot 
 we see this on all hands in the prominent religious 
 
PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN 157 
 
 parties of the day ? I am not sure that it has 
 not increased of late. 
 
 This, however, is not the fault of most English- 
 men. Their fault is the opposite. They make 
 a Pharisaism out of Publicanism. ' God, I 
 thank Thee that I am not as other men are, or 
 even as this parson. I do not fast once a week, 
 and strongly disapprove of such nonsense in my 
 sister-in-law. I give what I like, and will not be 
 meddled with. I make no profession, but I 
 believe in the maxim Live and let Live.' This 
 pose of religious indifference is taken by many 
 some of them are far from being indifferent. 
 But they are afraid of one another, and dare not 
 show what they feel. Most of us men are prigs 
 in our fear of being thought priggish. In the 
 clergy this produces an affectation of one sort, 
 in the laity that of callousness. Such people 
 like a clergyman to be conventional, and are 
 horrified if he makes jokes. They want some 
 one else to preserve the pose of religion, as they 
 do the opposite. 
 
 At this moment this is particularly dangerous. 
 It leads people to think that people are afraid 
 of their religion, or that it is unreal. Somewhere 
 Mr. H. G. Wells talks of ' muffled Christianity.' 
 That is precisely what the new generation will 
 not endure. A Christianity of half tones and 
 half beliefs, with the Eucharist tucked away in 
 hours when most people are in bed, so that 
 
158 PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN 
 
 pious folk are almost like Nicodemus who came 
 to Jesus by night a Christianity with no power 
 of natural utterance in an age when every other 
 interest artistic, intellectual, poetic, moral, poli- 
 tical, economic blares its creed like a steam 
 organ. This twilight religion is to them worse 
 than none. Something indeed it has in its 
 power. Danger lies the other way. Every 
 priest knows this. To have to talk about 
 religion leads to a pose which may create some 
 self-deception ; it is almost certain to lead at 
 times to an attempt to force the note. That is 
 why the men of the eighteenth century had such 
 a horror of what they called ' enthusiasm * the 
 peril of a religion which was more than the ex- 
 pression of a certain tension of the nerves. 
 
 The way to counter that danger is not for the 
 normal balanced person to refuse to speak of it. 
 Rather he should take it for granted. In a 
 Christian society it ought to be as easy to talk 
 of going to Holy Communion as it is to talk of 
 going to a concert. All this shyness comes from 
 that neglect of prayer as an atmosphere, of 
 which I spoke last week. Until prayer becomes 
 really natural, no dealings with religion but 
 must seem a little strange. 
 
 The second evil that results from this is the 
 treatment of religion as departmental. ' It is 
 your affair, your own affair, what you believe. 
 If it pleases you to spend certain parts of your 
 
PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN 159 
 
 time in Church, do so by all means. I don't 
 seek to interfere. It does not appeal to me, it 
 is waste of time. But then I never go to church. 
 Some people never look at pictures. Every man 
 to his taste. Let him fill his spare time as he 
 pleases/ 
 
 Is not that the modern attitude ? Anti- 
 religious fanatics there are. But more common 
 is that I have outlined. This is due to many 
 causes. But one is this reserve about religion 
 this treating of it as a private luxury, a mere 
 question of how you employ your leisure, of 
 little more importance than whether you prefer 
 eau-de-cologne to lavender water. Partly it 
 comes from this inverted Pharisaism, this keeping 
 our religion to ourselves, except that a certain 
 order of men the clergy is supported in order 
 to do all the needful public representations of it. 
 A religion which is apart from life has ceased 
 to make appeal. Unless our religion can conse- 
 crate all our life, the new age will have nothing 
 to do with it it will not keep it in a separate 
 compartment. Much of the unrest is due to 
 that. The age needs a religion, but it feels that 
 the present organisation of life is out of relation 
 to it. That may mean a new arrangement of 
 life, but it inevitably means the death of the 
 idea that religion is a matter merely of private 
 taste. 
 
1 REJOICE EVERMORE ' 
 
 THESE words are in the Gospel for to-day. 
 St. Paul lays down a duty. Most of us think 
 of joy as the expression of a mood. The first 
 Christians were full of joy. ' A conquering, new- 
 born joy awoke,' said Matthew Arnold, in lines 
 well known. That joy was indeed a conqueror. 
 By grace of it the Church triumphed in three 
 hundred years of conflict with the worldly 
 power organised and splendid as it had never 
 been. Joy is shown by the newly converted. 
 Sometimes this takes a form which moves us to 
 smile. We should do better to reflect : How 
 poor an example of Christian joy am I. Little 
 joy do most of us show in our lives except when 
 our spirits are high. 
 
 St. Paul was assuredly not telling the people 
 to be hilarious when they felt, as we say, 'jolly.' 
 Nobody needs telling that. A man newly in love, 
 one who has just won a triumph, a youth at the 
 call of some new venture with hopes of El 
 Dorado, a man of science with a discovery, an 
 artist in sound or words or colour knowing that 
 a new work is good such people are full of joy. 
 
 160 
 
REJOICE EVERMORE 161 
 
 They cannot help it. So are we when we are like 
 that. 
 
 St. Paul meant his Christians to know that they 
 had within them a source of joy independent of 
 the state of their bodies or their prospects in 
 life. That inner feeling is what the Christian 
 has a right to claim, and a duty to set forth. 
 Why is it that we fail to do this ? 
 
 Lack of faith is one cause. Even now many 
 people accept their religion and make use of it. 
 Still to some it is as natural as the air they 
 breathe from the days of childhood onwards. 
 The world about us is imperfect enough, but in 
 some sort Christianity is a part of it. It enters 
 into its daily surroundings, and is part of our 
 history. All this we can think away. Some 
 do. This needs effort. That is why many un- 
 believers are so self-conscious. In such a society 
 as ours, with Christianity a part of the furniture 
 of national life, individual faith is often weak. 
 (These conditions are passing, but for many 
 people they remain.) Consequently when gloom 
 comes, or trouble, or great perplexity, such 
 people have no standing-ground. ' My religion 
 is no use to me. f How many have not said that 
 in recent years ? Their house is built on the 
 shifting sands of social tradition. When the 
 storm comes, it is swept away. 
 
 Others are not like that. They have felt the 
 changing forces of the modern world and known 
 
 L 
 
162 REJOICE EVERMORE 
 
 doubt. Perhaps, for there are not a few so 
 placed ; they have been bred up in circles which 
 disbelieve in Christian Faith. Their faith then is 
 a hard-won treasure. It seems real. Yet all the 
 time they live in a world of doubt, hostility, 
 denial. Temptation comes to such in a different 
 way. At times of crisis they wonder whether 
 they have been right, whether after all it is not 
 those who take the other side who are justified. 
 The very intensity of their faith at some moments 
 makes them ask themselves at others whether it 
 be more than self -hypnotism, something they 
 took up because it soothed, or because it served 
 to give unity to their scattered purposes, and 
 now that seeming is no more. The power to 
 soothe is gone. They forget. Our Lord never 
 promised us a faith or a joy that should do away 
 with trouble. What He promised to all His 
 disciples was the Cross. ' If any man will not 
 take his Cross and deny himself, he cannot be 
 My disciple.' Many people find that. They 
 have used these words, but meant little by them. 
 Then they find the Cross laid upon them. But 
 our Lord said, ' The disciple is not above his 
 master.' ' In the world ye shall have tribulation.' 
 But He added : ' Be of good cheer, I have over- 
 come the world.' Our faith must embrace that, 
 or else it is not Christian faith at all. Only as we 
 learn that ' grace is sufficient ' not to take away 
 the Cross, but to help us to bear a harder one, 
 
REJOICE EVERMORE 163 
 
 can we have the spring of Christian joy. This 
 comes only by experience. You cannot take 
 the Cross by deputy. You may have thought 
 of the Passion of our Lord and of the early 
 martyrs as doing away with the need of any such 
 joy in suffering on our part. It does nothing 
 of the kind. It shows us the way in which we 
 may encounter ' the changes and chances of this 
 mortal life.' It makes no profession. It never 
 has made any profession to lessen for us those 
 1 changes and chances/ 
 
 Selfishness is one of the causes of our lack of 
 joy. Years of settled peace, a prosperous and 
 developing civilisation, the thousand and one 
 newnesses of the modern world, induced in most 
 people an imperious demand for happiness con- 
 ditioned in external joy. When the conditions 
 were taken away there was a corresponding 
 sense of wrong. Yet in some way and at some 
 time they are taken from most persons during 
 this lifetime. Bereavement, broken friendship, 
 failure, sudden ill-health, the oncoming of age, 
 money troubles anything may be the cause of 
 the loss. Never, I suppose, has the loss befallen 
 so many at once as that which the War has 
 wrought. It has changed the horizon of all of us. 
 We find it hard to bear. We have thought so 
 much about ourselves, even our work has been 
 too much our own ; not enough God's work, our 
 affections have been self-centred so that any- 
 
164 REJOICE EVERMORE 
 
 thing that interferes with them destroys all our 
 joy. We tend to make others gloomy, so as to 
 have all in tune. We throw our own gloom over 
 the work!. We are apt to make all things dull 
 that they may accord with our melancholy. 
 
 How are we to remedy this ? Not by meditat- 
 ing on our blessings. Moods of this sort will not 
 give a man much profit from the perusal of The 
 Saints 1 Everlasting Rest. The Imitation of Christ 
 will only make him want to give up a task which 
 seems too hard for him. In all conditions of 
 dulness it is never wise to say, ' Try and be 
 cheerful.' The maxim strikes one with a chill 
 like the photographer saying : ' Now, sir, a 
 smile if you please.' The best antidote is to do 
 something for others. No one feels the joy of 
 doing an unselfish action like a man or woman in 
 a fit of gloom. Our religious life is not real, but 
 it is too often a separate, private thing ; our own 
 special patent medicine, not something we com- 
 municate to others. We have been so greedy 
 to take, so churlish to give. That is why we find 
 it so hard to stand up against the temptations 
 to be absorbed in our earthly sorrows, and to 
 neglect or deny the inward power of Christian 
 joy. 
 
 In this way, then, by a stronger faith coming 
 from a selfless activity, shall we hope to fulfil 
 our duty of joy in times of darkness. Such times 
 must come. They are meant to come. The 
 
REJOICE EVERMORE 165 
 
 only matter is how we take them. Do we, for 
 instance, take them as well as our soldiers do ? 
 We know we do not. They shame us. Yet our 
 duty is the same as theirs a cheerful courage. 
 This might give us that sense of union with them 
 of which many people just now feel the lack. 
 At this moment most people at home, if they 
 are not absorbed in work, have a special temp- 
 tation to gloom in that malaise which comes to 
 those who perforce have to watch while others 
 are in the furnace. They feel they can do so 
 little in this supreme crisis that they are apt to 
 do nothing at all. We ought to be making others 
 happy by showing ' where true joys are to be 
 found.' Instead of this we are apt to mope. 
 
 Yet could we give this help, could we show 
 forth the grace of joy, we should do more to 
 convert the world than any preacher, more very 
 often than can be done by those with more shin- 
 ing virtues. Joy is contagious. The Catholic 
 Church has been, as we said, the greatest treasury 
 of joy in human history. It is partly our fault 
 if it seems to many now a dull, spiritless insti- 
 tution, resting only on the past without any 
 principle but conservative sentiment, lacking in 
 colour and charm. Such notions are wrong. 
 They are not all our fault. Partly they are. 
 Let us ' live more nearly as we pray.' 
 
 1 O Almighty Lord and Everlasting God, Who 
 alone canst order the unruly wills and affections 
 
166 REJOICE EVERMORE 
 
 of sinful men ; grant unto Thy people, that they 
 may love the thing which Thou commandest, 
 and desire that which Thou dost promise ; that 
 so, among the sundry and manifold changes of 
 the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, 
 where true joys are to be found/ 
 
SERVICE 
 
 * I am among you as he that serveth. 1 St. Luke xxiL 7. 
 
 THESE well-known words of our Lord are out of 
 the Gospel for St. Bartholomew's Festival, which 
 we kept on Saturday. Now they come to us 
 with special force. Service is in the air. Every- 
 where we hear about the duty of service. Most 
 of us are swift to see the call of it for other 
 people. We condemn whole classes for any 
 lapse or supposed lapse in this. 
 
 The right to a self-centred life on individual- 
 istic lines is challenged as it has not been before 
 or rather the challenge which used to be cried 
 by the few is now echoed from all sides. All this 
 in regard to the crisis of our country. 
 
 The appeal of Christianity as a religion of 
 service will therefore come home to many in a 
 new way. At least it ought. We Christians 
 need to examine ourselves with a new severity. 
 How far are we followers in act of Him who spoke 
 the words ? Words like these are familiar to us. 
 They seem the obvious expression of Jesus' 
 character. To those who heard them they 
 were startling. The disciples knew indeed that 
 the Master was no grandee, but they hoped 
 that He soon would be. At that moment He 
 
 107 
 
1 68 SERVICE 
 
 was in the eye of the world even the small 
 world of Palestine nobody, or at most a new 
 popular leader. Picture the evening conver- 
 sation of some tolerant Rabbi with a young 
 zealot of the Law. ( Have you heard the latest ' 
 the youth might say ' the new prophet is 
 setting the Jordan on fire. Crowds follow him 
 large crowds. Yesterday there was a scene 
 in the Temple such a scene, the interference 
 with legitimate trade by a provincial fanatic and 
 his rabble. He makes the ignorant imagine that 
 they are cured, so he leads them on to revolution. 
 Why don't the Sanhedrin do something ? What 
 are they for ? It is their office to foresee dangers 
 and to nip in the bud these disturbing move- 
 ments. It will be awkward, uncommonly awk- 
 ward, for you and me if this absurd Galilean pro- 
 paganda makes headway. Not that I think it 
 will. Our people, even the lower orders of 
 Jerusalem, are too quick-witted. They will soon 
 see through this mystery. The peasants of 
 Galilee are gullible. What else could you ex- 
 pect ? But at the worst there is some culture 
 in the capital. Still, it is time something were 
 done. I always said the old gentlemen had no 
 backbone. We want new blood, new blood, sir, 
 in the council.' To this tirade the elder and 
 man of the world would reply : ' I do not quite 
 take you ; I think you mistake fireworks for light- 
 ning. You are very quick, and can see many 
 
SERVICE 169 
 
 things. I tell you there are some things it is 
 better for a man not to see. This prophet 
 what is his name ? oh, Jesus of Nazareth I saw 
 him once. There is no danger there. The 
 whole thing is too absurd. We need pay no 
 regard to a fanatic (I grant you he is sincere) 
 who talks about giving bread which is flesh, 
 and tells pretty stories with a moral. The cures 
 alleged might do some damage. A few effects 
 on those of weak nerves may be real but they 
 will not differentiate him from many others. 
 Some charm he has, and the ignorant almost love 
 him. That will pass. It always does. They '11 
 grow tired, and run after another mountebank. 
 The best thing to do with a movement like this 
 o leave it alone. It will burn itself out. 
 Likely enough these peasants crying Hosanna 
 will soon be crying for his blood/ Well, they did. 
 
 To the disciples He was never like this. That 
 is not because He seemed to them ' as one that 
 serveth.' These works healing and helping, 
 this going about doing good, were to them so 
 many expedients. They were the means needful 
 to reach the crowd that end was political 
 dominion. When the Kingdom was established 
 the Master would be seen in His true light 
 leader and commander of the people. 
 
 They too would all find this account. Like 
 Napoleon's marshals, they might now be only 
 private soldiers, but each had the baton in his 
 
i;o SERVICE 
 
 girdle. One day they would reach their goal 
 and be hailed as friends. 
 
 So they are. But princes of the royal high- 
 way of the Holy Cross, not palace officials with 
 honours and earthly wealth. That is what they 
 hoped. This is clear from the request of the 
 mother of James and John. 
 
 We know what a mistake they made. So well 
 are we aware of it that yet we cannot think of 
 ourselves doing anything like it. Are we so 
 sure ? How do we interpret to ourselves this 
 maxim, ' I am among you as He that serve th ' ? 
 True, we are willing to serve. We don't want, 
 at least we should not admit that we want, to lead 
 selfish, isolated lives. But what sort of service 
 is it that we want to give ? Is it not curiously 
 like that of the sons of Zebedee ? They wanted 
 to serve who doubts it, but to serve in a place 
 of rule. We want to be known as having a right 
 to command. We need a sphere of work where 
 our talents and character are recognised. Some 
 people serve the world best as leaders. That 
 we know. Commanders there must be. We 
 think we are born for that. In the mid-nine- 
 teenth century the religious life was being re- 
 vived. It was a not uncommon gibe that many 
 devout persons believed that they had vocations 
 to be a Superior. Is not that like most of us ? 
 Serve ! ' Oh, yes, of course I serve, but honour 
 me for serving ' is our word to the world. That 
 
SERVICE 171 
 
 is the one condition. Like the Scribes and 
 Pharisees, we like to be called Rabbis and love 
 greetings in the market-places and the reserved 
 enclosure at public functions. What depth of 
 insight there is in these words of Jesus. The 
 humble, obscure tasks are not for us with our 
 gifts. We are by nature different from the mob 
 (the uneducated, or the untrained, or the un- 
 disciplined). Either brain or tact or control 
 gives us rank. Now it is true that any man or 
 woman has his own special gift of God one star 
 differs from another star in glory. But we err 
 in supposing that we alone are exceptional. 
 Every one is exceptional. Not a single Christian 
 in the Church, not a single citizen in a State, 
 but has his own peculiar contribution to make. 
 Yet the world can only see a few, and we want 
 to be one of these few. 
 
 Where the Christian disciple falls below his 
 Master is here. Not because he thinks he has 
 a special task ; he has but because he wants 
 to deny that other people have, and looks for a 
 pedestal. How little do we take to heart the 
 hackneyed lines : 
 
 All service ranks the same with God, 
 
 If now as formerly He trod 
 
 Paradise. His presence fills the earth, 
 
 Each only as God wills 
 
 Can work : God's puppets and worst 
 
 Are we ; there is no last nor worst. 
 
' THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN' 
 
 THIS festival, it may be said, has no practical 
 value. Every day we have the Eucharist, and 
 we can kneel in adoration before the Sacrament 
 always. True. God's gifts, however, go beyond 
 immediate practice they give us joy. Some of 
 our troubles would be less if more people could 
 think of the Eucharist as a source of joy, and 
 not merely of help. Let us fix our minds now 
 on this joy. That joy is a fact. Those who 
 deride us, or patronise as useful but unimportant 
 a Sacramental Christianity, do not seem to realise 
 the great experience we have. It is possible even 
 to believe in the Real Presence, and to make 
 much personal use of the Communion, and yet 
 to know little of its joy. To this end we need 
 leisure and spaces set apart. Most people are 
 in a hurry. Western men and women always 
 want to ' get something ' in their religion. Let 
 us then for the moment make abstraction of 
 all the other and so necessary aspects of the 
 Eucharist, its assurance of pardon, its gift of 
 strength, and think only of this, its deep under- 
 lying joy. 
 
 The joy of the Eucharist, apart from the joy 
 
 172 
 
THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN 173 
 
 of common worship, is of more than one kind. 
 There is the joy of wander. Men may say what 
 they like about needing a religion everywhere 
 intelligible, and I do not deny the efforts, nowhere 
 greater than in so grand an upholder of the 
 Eucharist as St. Thomas, to put the whole 
 Catholic faith into a coherent system. Still 
 there remains in the religious mind an irreducible 
 sense of mystery. No religion without mystery 
 will long hold the allegiance of men. They never 
 have. Even an agnostic like Herbert Spencer 
 was willing to claim for his faith in the Unknown 
 and Unknowable Reality that it kept alive the 
 consciousness of mystery. That he thought was 
 all that the religious spirit needed. It is not all, 
 it is a part. The sense of the mystery of 
 life of ourselves, of any single fact is over- 
 whelming. Science does not remove it, science 
 describes but does not explain. Science tells us 
 that it depends on the number and rapidity of 
 vibrations whether we see blue or red, but that 
 statement leaves more crying than ever the 
 difference of blueness and redness to the mind. 
 Omnia exeunt in mysterium said the old adage, and 
 the joy of the Eucharist is that it keeps ever alive 
 this sense of wonder, and gives us the right to cry, 
 O altitude. It gives us the outward and visible 
 presentment, that sense of the depth and height 
 and length of the Love of Jesus, which passeth 
 knowledge. As we revere that strange humility 
 
174 THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN 
 
 of God which permits us to adore Jesus present 
 in the Sacrament of the Altar, we are more and 
 not less able than before to see God in every hue 
 and sound of nature, and feel Him in every 
 breath of air. This mystery does but focus 
 and concentrate our wonder. It prevents that 
 most precious gift from fading in the light of 
 common day. 
 
 Secondly, there is the joy of rest. We have 
 come home. As we kneel before the altar, 
 knowing that here indeed we have Emmanuel, 
 we have the sense that we are at rest. Rest does 
 not come from inaction, and is often contrary 
 thereto. The sense of rest belongs to one who 
 feels that he is in harmony with what is. The 
 storms of the world, and the anxieties of the 
 mind, and the distracting irritation of sin, and 
 the pressure of temptation, and the fever of 
 thought, and the whirring machinery of this life, 
 both inward and outward, may go on, but they 
 are superficial. He is at peace, and his mind 
 is stayed on God, and, though the base of his 
 life may rock, the life itself is secure. 
 
 Lastly, we have the joy of faith. To many in 
 this age of doubt and denial the Eucharist has 
 that chief joy. The sense that here is the very 
 centre of opposition makes them the more 
 courageous to stand by it. The impugners of 
 the supernatural can never be brought to faith 
 in sacramental religion, though with pious 
 
 
THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN 175 
 
 phrases some may honour it as a symbol of the 
 sanctity of all things, or as a venerable monu- 
 ment of historic faith. But we know that at 
 bottom they deride us, and so, like a soldier 
 laughing at the foe, we cling with the elan of 
 faith to the blessed fact. We have perchance a 
 feeling somewhat akin to that of early martyrs, 
 who stood for this faith the more boldly though 
 all the world poured scorn. Only this joy needs 
 control, or we may merely use it in pride, and 
 plume ourselves on imagined superiority. We 
 are right to have this joy, but we need it to 
 deepen our own faith. If we use it merely to 
 ding defiance at our foes, we are taking the means 
 for the end, and are like to lose the very faith 
 we so delight in. Faith must be deepened, and 
 made more serene by the Eucharist. The faith 
 which is partly the joy of battle is like the faith 
 of the controversialist, who seems to think that 
 the object of faith is not so much for life as for 
 defence, just as a barrister values his brief not 
 for any truth it contains, but as a material for 
 forensic triumphs. All we who have to defend 
 the faith and which of us has not ? are liable 
 to this snare. They think more or the debate 
 than the object. Obsessed with argument, they 
 have so much lived in dialectics that their faith 
 has no reality in it when dialectic palls. 
 
 Let us, then, have our joy in the Blessed Sacra- 
 ment, a joy of wonder, a joy of home-coming, a 
 
i;6 THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN 
 
 joy of courageous adventure, but let us above 
 all keep the feast in the spirit of quiet. Not 
 the music, not the incense, not the light, nor all 
 the decor express so fully the joy that is ours, as 
 the hush before the Blessed Sacrament. Only as 
 we live in that spirit of silent awe can we have 
 this joy about us always or take it into all our 
 outside actions and keep it in our troubles, like 
 that purest of all knights : 
 
 And at the sacring of the mass I saw 
 
 The holy elements alone ; but he, 
 
 ' Saw ye no more ? I, Galahad, saw the Grail, 
 
 The Holy Grail, descend upon the shrine : 
 
 I saw the fiery face as of a child 
 
 That smote itself into the bread, and went ; 
 
 And hither am I come ; and never yet 
 
 Hath what thy sister taught me first to see, 
 
 This Holy Thing, fail'd from my side, nor come 
 
 Cover'd, but moving with me night and day, 
 
 Fainter by day, but always in the night 
 
 Blood-red, and sliding down the blacken'd marsh 
 
 Blood-red, and on the naked mountain-top 
 
 Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below 
 
 Blood-red. And in the strength of this I rode, 
 
 Shattering all evil customs everywhere, 
 
 And past thro' Pagan realms, and made them mine, 
 
 And clash'd with Pagan hordes, and bore them down, 
 
 And broke thro' all, and in the strength of this 
 
 Came victor.' 
 
 You and I know many such knights to-day ; 
 their life is more like that of Galahad, than a 
 
THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN 177 
 
 little while ago we would have dreamed. As 
 we pray for them, some of whom know not this 
 mystery, let us pray that the joy of the Eucharist 
 may unite us, and that its glory may dawn on 
 some who do not see it yet. 
 
 
ANGELIC MINISTRY 
 
 ' That they may succour and defend us on earth.' 
 
 Collect for Michaelmas Day. 
 
 How many Churchmen use these words with 
 reality ? Has not the belief in angels vanished 
 from most ? To many it is at best no more 
 than a poetic fancy. It pictures in imagination 
 a belief in something without us which prevents 
 us being alone. Few have any real belief ilf 
 angels, real living beings, out of sight, created 
 for praise and helping us. A pious fancy, we 
 think. People might not be the worse if they 
 gave it credence. Hardly could they be the 
 better. For the doctrine of angels is no use. 
 It does not help us in the moral conflict. That, 
 to many, is the essence of religious life. Let us 
 keep to what we feel sure of God our Father, 
 and His Son Jesus Christ, our Redeemer. That 
 expresses the mind of the larger number of 
 English Christians at this moment. 
 
 This has been developing since the sixteenth 
 century. The worship of angels, as of saints, 
 had grown vastly in the later Middle Ages 
 perhaps too much. To some of the simpler folk 
 this worship may have obscured not their faith, 
 but their devotion and sense of intimacy with 
 
 178 
 
ANGELIC MINISTRY 179 
 
 God. In reaction against this the Protestants 
 made a clean sweep. Invocation of Saints was 
 done away, and treated as idolatrous. Atten- 
 tion was withdrawn from angelic ministries. 
 Few people saw what was meant even by the 
 terms in Milton's Paradise Lost. Yet more 
 remote are they from the serene and gracious 
 mind of Hooker who, as he lay dying, was 
 asked on what he mused, and gave answer ' The 
 number and nature of the angels and their 
 blessed obedience and order/ More and more 
 did men lay stress on the practical nature of 
 religion. Great was their hostility to any ela- 
 boration of a cult which could not plead utility 
 and a rather obvious utility at that. The 
 words of Queen Elizabeth, ' Take away those 
 lights, we see very well,' are typical of the Pro- 
 testant spirit. For some time the effect desired 
 was produced. A minority never more than a 
 minority did have an in tenser concentration 
 upon the central truths. The ardour of spiritual 
 >n among the Puritans (the flight of the alone 
 to the alone) was a fact. Even that was only 
 produced at a cost the cost of making religion 
 for the mass of men a vague, formless thing 
 and prayer a wish breathed into the void. 
 
 To the mediaeval mind the unseen world was 
 concrete, alive with individuals. Saints and 
 angels seemed natural to them. When deprived 
 of these, the popular mind had nothing to fix 
 
i8o ANGELIC MINISTRY 
 
 upon the heavens so bright and coloured and 
 gay to their fathers, Jerusalem the Golden, 
 became to them a vague entity, without form, 
 and void. The other world had been a home 
 the happy home to which the pilgrim looked 
 passionately forward now it was a waste howl- 
 ing wilderness, swept by no winds of love. Dante 
 may have been too concrete, too full of parti- 
 cularity in description. This is a less error than 
 that of being too abstract, too negative. In 
 the result there was nothing left to interest people 
 in the world beyond. After interest had gone, 
 faith quickly began to go. Belief in our Lord 
 became vaguer and vaguer, when all His attend- 
 ants, ' the solemn pomps and sweet societies,' 
 had gone. Christ became no more than a name 
 for religious experience. The other world was 
 whittled down to a vague providence. Life 
 beyond lost its meaning when it was no -longer 
 possible to picture it. True, many who gave 
 up all real sense of Communion with saints and 
 angels believed still in individual immortality, 
 and looked to see, 
 
 ' With the morn, those angel faces smile, 
 Which they had loved long since, and lost awhile.' 
 
 In the last generation that, too, began to 
 vanish. Modern science defined the intimate 
 relation between inner consciousness and matter. 
 It did not prove, but it made plausible, the view 
 
ANGELIC MINISTRY 181 
 
 that our personality is a mere effluence from the 
 body, and dies along with it. This went along 
 with the tendency to confine religion to what 
 was immediately useful. Men settled down 
 under the influence of all these forces into a 
 state in which vast numbers not only have no 
 belief in saints and angels, but no value for 
 Christ, except as an impressive but antique 
 moralist ; no faith in a living God, though the 
 word is an elevated name for the sum of realities ; 
 no belief in their own personality for how can 
 you believe in a self which will go out like a 
 candle extinguished ? Men faced this world 
 with hope, but the hope is only for a few short 
 days of frost and sun : they faced death with 
 courage, but without faith. Strangers they 
 wander in an enemy universe, without meaning, 
 without love and without joy, save for those 
 transient and melancholy delights with which, 
 like opiates, they seek to dull the knowledge of 
 the ineluctable end. 
 
 Then came the War. The immediate rending 
 of ties with the youths of a thousand homes 
 made insupportable the thought of annihilation. 
 When you have to do with those who die in the 
 natural order work done, careers achieved, 
 and powers failing, and children and grand- 
 children to carry on then it is not so hard 
 to think that death closes all. But when the 
 splendour of youth is reft from us, youth with 
 
182 ANGELIC MINISTRY 
 
 its wealth in promise, its gifts of potency, its 
 work all yet to do its wistful gaze into the 
 unknown when this is smitten, it is hard to 
 think that all is done, and all that treasure of 
 power is lost. Consequently there was a great 
 turning to the thought of a life hereafter. Those 
 who believed were eager to restore a practice, 
 deemed noxious for ages, praying for the dead. 
 Others less fortunate ran this way and that, 
 crying for light giving credence to any prac- 
 titioner in the occult who could assure them that 
 all was not lost. Spiritualism increased upon 
 us by leaps and bounds. Why should we 
 be surprised ? The fact that with so many 
 these things have taken the place of Christian 
 Faith is a Nemesis on the Church for neglect. 
 Religion has been to many either a thing of 
 this world, or merely a system of ideas. Its 
 accredited and official spokesmen have been so 
 timid of all doings that make a concrete reality 
 of communion with the world beyond, that 
 our generation has turned otherwhere for the 
 springs of consolation. Instead of getting angry, 
 we should do better to revive our faith in the 
 unseen presences, and go back to the doctrine 
 of the Prayer Book for it is Prayer Book doc- 
 trine, not sentimental nor exotic devotions, of 
 which I speak. 
 
 Either we believe or we do not believe in the 
 supernatural, i.e. in a world beyond and includ- 
 
ANGELIC MINISTRY 183 
 
 ing this universe of time and space. If we do 
 believe in it and faith in God means that let 
 us take our belief seriously and not be afraid of 
 its consequences. In that view there can be 
 nothing improbable in the existence or the 
 presence about us of beings invisible and of an 
 order different from ours. The corrective to all 
 exaggerated spiritualism is the doctrine of angels. 
 And the only ground for disbelieving it is the 
 materialist notion that the physical universe 
 is all. Let us, then, have the courage of our 
 convictions. Let us not be ashamed to confess 
 faith in what they involve. This faith will need 
 an effort, because for so long it has passed from 
 our minds. That effort will be easier if we fix 
 our thoughts not alone on the existence, but on 
 the fostering care of the angels as Jesus did 
 Himself. So we shall once more pray with real 
 faith the Michaelmas Collect . 
 
 1 O Everlasting God, Who hast ordained and 
 constituted the services of angels and men in 
 a wonderful order ; mercifully grant, that as 
 Thy holy angels always do Thee service in 
 heaven, so by Thy appointment they may 
 succour and defend us on earth ; through Jesus 
 Christ our Lord. Amen.' 
 
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 
 
 * O Lord, how manifold are Thy works ! in wisdom hast 
 Thou made them all ; the earth is full of Thy riches.' . . . 
 
 4 1 will sing unto the Lord as long as I live ; I will praise 
 my God while I have my being.' Ps. civ. 24, 33. 
 
 THESE words might well be inscribed on the 
 portals of every university. Herein we find the 
 ground of study, its value, and its end. 
 
 The world is a world, not an aggregate of un- 
 related items ; even a heap of sand is a heap, 
 not merely so many grains. Rich, indeed, and 
 various is this Aladdin's palace of delight, from 
 its ' widening wandering skies and clouds eter- 
 nally new,' and every incident of night and day, 
 and all the many-coloured pageant of mankind. 
 This is the first thought 
 
 ' The world is so full of a number of things, 
 I 'm sure we should all be as happy as kings,' 
 
 said Stevenson to the child ; and so, like the 
 Psalmist, ' I will sing unto the Lord as long as 
 I live ' ; and we are right to ' have our joy in 
 Him.' 
 
 Not only is the world manifold. It has a 
 meaning ; ' in wisdom hast Thou made them all. 
 
 184 
 
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 185 
 
 Were it not rich and wonderful we should not 
 want to study it. Were it not in some sense 
 the embodiment of wisdom, our study would not 
 be worth while. Some thread of secret con- 
 nection there must be, or all our toil of inquiry 
 would be vain. This sense is our unconscious 
 basis whatever we think of the nature of this 
 thread, or even if we hardly know there is one. 
 Else we are soon driven to despair ; and the 
 weariness of drudgery would have no light at 
 the last. But we do not think that. All our 
 investigations rest on the faith that ' we shall 
 see of the travail of the soul and be satisfied. 1 
 
 Many stop here. And I do not say that more 
 is absolutely needful to justify study than this 
 sense that the universe is a wonder, and that 
 we may become intimate with it if we take 
 pains ; and that some unity lies between us and 
 its secret, which will bring results. We, how- 
 ever, who come here to worship can go further ; 
 we can say with the Psalmist that this unity is 
 not merely mechanical which ultimately would 
 give a world with no meaning, for necessity is 
 blind but that all the machinery is the means 
 employed by a Personal Spirit to reach far goals ; 
 and that any beauty here is the symbol and the 
 sacrament of the ' Altogether Lovely. 1 
 
 But gathered in this place, we are witnesses 
 to one more principle the method of our search 
 is social. We seek these things together. The 
 
1 86 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 
 
 term University means, as all know, a society ; 
 a university is not only a place of universal 
 knowledge, even if it involve that ; first and fore- 
 most it is the life of a society of men and women, 
 united by a common spirit, and labouring far 
 beyond the compass of any single individual. 
 Moreover, each member is changed by that 
 very union ; the stamp of the common life is 
 on him, and he is for good and evil set beyond 
 and above his purely private ends. The river 
 is more than an aggregation of drops ; and so 
 in our common search for knowledge each of 
 us takes from the whole more than he gives. 
 
 More and more is it seen that wide and endur- 
 ing knowledge comes to men gathered in congre- 
 gations of inquiry, and is not the reward in its 
 completeness of mere lonely brooding. Even 
 in the more abstract of sciences, like mathe- 
 matics, progress is made by darts of imagination, 
 which is kindled and corrected by the common 
 life with those like-minded. In all study, and 
 certainly in those of human interest, it is when 
 a man works, not as an individual, but as one 
 of an order, that alone we gain that fine tact 
 which is almost instinct, that faculty of selection, 
 that swoop on to the relevant, all that subtlety 
 and delicacy of intellectual work, which is com- 
 pact of reason, imagination, and personal sym- 
 pathy. The great Danish critic defines style as 
 ' the determined exclusion of what is almost, but 
 
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 187 
 
 not quite right ' ; and no man learns that ascetic 
 austerity except through a social medium. Not 
 that we should undervalue the gift of the in- 
 dividual, or ever suppose through modesty that 
 even the humblest has not something to offer to 
 the whole his own and no one else's. Still 
 less should we deny the meed of honour to some 
 who, away from all studious encouragements, 
 have given themselves in lonely sacrifice to adding 
 to the sum of known truth. Yet these too are 
 social workers. Even if they stand apart from 
 the life of to-day, they are using the accumulated 
 riches of the race. Men could not, if they would, 
 reach to any fresh discovery, entirely oblivious 
 of all done before. The non-social student, like 
 the self-made man, is a figment. All depends 
 on the experience of ages, and the organised 
 life of society. 
 
 All this is yet more pertinent if we regard 
 Universities in their second aspect. To many, 
 indeed, it is their only importance : to be places 
 of education. Now education is, in its very 
 idea, social, communal. It is to secure a supply 
 of men duly qualified to serve God in Church 
 and State. It is to make them better members 
 of society ; and that, whether you mean by 
 society a cricket club or a church, a municipal 
 body, or even a joint stock company. It is to 
 make them better citizens, better Churchmen, 
 better Nonconformists, better Atheists even, if 
 
i88 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 
 
 you understand me. For the University is not 
 set to teach this or that opinion, either in politics 
 or religion. What it has to cultivate is a spirit ; 
 to help men to clear away the thickets which 
 impede the path to judgment ; to look before 
 and after in any present problem ; to maintain 
 principle without anger, and to criticise oppon- 
 ents without malice. 
 
 As John Henry Newman said in that incom- 
 parable Idea of a University, which W. Pater 
 took as an instance of a perfect presentment of 
 a theory : 
 
 1 If he engages in controversy of any kind, his 
 disciplined intellect preserves him from the 
 blundering discourtesy of better, perhaps not 
 less, educated minds, which, like blunt weapons, 
 tear and hack instead of cutting clean, mistake 
 the point in argument, misconceive their ad- 
 versary, and leave the question more unsolved 
 than they find it. He may be right or wrong 
 in his opinion ; but he is too clear-headed to be 
 unjust. He is as simple as he is forcible, and 
 as brief as he is designed. He throws himself 
 into the minds of his opponents ; he accounts 
 for their mistakes. Nowhere shall we find 
 greater candour, consideration, indulgence.' 
 
 But if education is designed to fit us to live 
 alongside of other people, we must ever bear this 
 thought in mind. The common life into which 
 we enter is not limited by those who are with us 
 
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 189 
 
 at the moment ; nor even by our own land ; 
 nor even by the world of all civilised men. Our 
 course is bright with all who lived long ago, 
 and it embraces those to come. Citizens of the 
 world, we are to enter into the gathered experi- 
 ence of all the races of every age : to make our- 
 selves akin with the far past, and to see our 
 friends in children that are not yet. 
 
 Both of these elements must go to make us. 
 That spiritual heritage, which some call culture, 
 has its roots far back, and we may not deny 
 them. Yet it is not all. Nietzsche wrote one 
 of his most piercing essays on the Use and Abuse 
 of History. Therein he showed the danger of a 
 culture which, resting only on the past, was ever 
 bidding its votaries look back. What he calls 
 the ' Culture-Philistine ' is the person whose life 
 is little but a congeries of memories. Instead 
 of marching bravely towards the unknown, they 
 cling to all that has been ; and then only at 
 second-hand. This was a needed warning. 
 Mr. Kipling cried it to the house-tops in 
 Tomlinson. 
 
 Do not let us forget this. Some in every age 
 preen themselves on their culture, boasting 
 their superiority, when for sheer vitality the 
 laziest schoolboy could shame them ; and even 
 an American millionaire has more reality. Let 
 us steer clear of this vice ; and beware of being 
 so greatly concerned with the objects and dreams 
 
190 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 
 
 of men long gone, that we have no eye for the 
 urgent interests of our age, making ourselves the 
 futile mouthpiece of a tradition instead of the 
 embodiments of a living spirit. The past enters 
 with us ; we are ' the heirs of all the ages,' but 
 also we are ' in the foremost files of time.' We 
 are to transmit what we have, not dried like a 
 mummy's face, but using all its wonder to add 
 some fresh quality, all our own ; leaving some- 
 thing better, as we pass. Each of us has life 
 to MAKE something ; and it is very true what 
 is said that ' God Himself could only create by 
 creating creators ' ; and none but has his share 
 in the great artistry of the world. 
 
 Other dangers attach to the opposed view. 
 Futurism does but put in heightened language a 
 doctrine now widely held. That is the desire 
 to cut the painter altogether ; and to live for 
 a new age regardless of all that has come down. 
 This age is very conscious of its newness ; and, 
 like all fresh epochs, scornful of the last. ' God, 
 I thank Thee that I am not as other men, ignor- 
 ant, Philistine, borne, or even as this Victorian.' 
 Once again is the eighteenth century in fashion, 
 and to young men and women just now the 
 nineteenth is prehistoric. This sense of fresh- 
 ness, of quickening life, makes on the whole for 
 good ; and it has a truth, for things have changed. 
 But if carried to extremes, it leads the wrong 
 way. First, it ignores human nature whatever 
 
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 191 
 
 their mechanical environment, and even if their 
 thoughts go faster, men and women remain the 
 same ' wise, idle, childish things/ who love and 
 struggle and suffer and sin. That is the in- 
 alienable need of the Gospel, which tells us that 
 none can sink so low but the blood of Christ 
 redeems him, and none can rise so high but 
 he needs forgiveness. Secondly, this Futurism 
 tries to do the impossible. You cannot get rid 
 of the past, so long as you deign to remain living 
 in the world. However much we deplore it, we 
 are what we are, as members of that great 
 society of which I spoke. The whole history of 
 man, rather the universe of created things, is 
 part of us ; had there not been Archimedes, 
 there would be no airmen ; but for the life of 
 Julius Caesar, we could not have the Kaiser 
 \\ilhelm to admire. 
 
 However, this boisterous effort to deny our 
 parentage is little more than the naughtiness of 
 a boy in his teens who votes his family a mistake : 
 and we know these rude ways will pass as he 
 grows to the age when he can at once comprehend 
 his ancestry and yet go beyond it. 
 
 Other dangers encompass the student: there 
 is the narrowing of sympathy. Culture at its 
 best should deepen every sympathy. Yet this 
 result is not certain. Sometimes it sets up 
 barriers, instead of pulling them down. Men 
 bore their own tunnel of private work, forgetful 
 
192 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 
 
 of the world, and blind to every interest save 
 one. Or else, wrapping their souls in a garment 
 of refinement, they sit, like the gods in Olympus, 
 peta JoWre?, scorning the crowd. Or, what is 
 more, content with some added efficiency, they 
 seek their fortune, reckless of all who lack their 
 chances. These things are not merely wrong ; 
 they are false to the notion of education. The 
 specialist's blinkers, the aesthete's proud-flesh, 
 the jingling watch-chain of the money-maker 
 all alike are parasites of the University : 
 they are not of its life, and run contrary to 
 its idea. 
 
 For that ideal of education in common, which 
 we call a University life, has its value in the 
 balance and proportion of our development. 
 Of one part of this I speak only to show it is 
 not forgotten. Training in outdoor things is 
 not often neglected by Englishmen. All that 
 we need say is this : no greater snare lies before 
 the man of intellectual interest than the itch 
 to despise it. Faults we may have in England, 
 by overrating it ; but they are faults on the 
 right side. 
 
 But this ideal of harmony is far wider in range 
 than the linking of bodily with mental activities. 
 It bids us pay due regard to those little graces 
 without which social life lacks charm, and not 
 to think courtesy silly. Also it reminds us to 
 give to the imagination its scope no less than to 
 
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 193 
 
 the reason. In broad, the power to kindle the 
 imagination is of greater moment than almost 
 any other quality ; and that, in every avenue 
 of effort, social, political, economic, religious. 
 Further, we are saved from the tyranny of any 
 one method ; from fastening on to a Procrustean 
 mechanical bed matters, which exceed all mechan- 
 ism, being, like poetry, of the breath of life. It 
 bids us so to cultivate knowledge, as not to 
 forgo wisdom ; and so to encourage the poetic, 
 as not to lose sight of the actual. It saves us 
 from that blind absorption in our own interest 
 which narrows the whole life, and ultimately is 
 fatal even to that one pursuit. Equally should 
 it guard from that other pitfall of being content 
 with a dilettante, bowing acquaintance with 
 many matters, without being at the pains to 
 fathom one of them. Above all, it keeps us 
 from the fatal twist of making culture the appan- 
 age of a clique, and narrowing into the treasures 
 of a coterie what is meant to be a gift to man- 
 kind. 
 
 All these aims depth, width, variety, har- 
 mony, sympathy find their ground in the 
 service of Jesus Christ. Here is the Light of 
 the world, no less than of the Church ; and in 
 union with that gracious and piercing Spirit we 
 shall find nothing too low to gaze at, and nothing 
 too high to climb to. 
 
 For the goal and meaning of all our striving is 
 
 N 
 
194 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 
 
 not only with ourselves alone ; it is not even 
 that larger self we call the race though to some 
 that hope is its far horizon it is God : and its 
 hallowing of all life finds its ground in those 
 sinless years beneath the Syrian blue. 
 
 Come, then, like the three kings, and make 
 your offering. Bring to that strange Child, 
 Who rose upon the world at Bethlehem, what 
 you have, and be not anxious overmuch if it 
 seems to you but mean. Bring to Him the gold 
 of your work ; and let the fruit of all toil be to 
 make this world a place where Christ could more 
 fitly come, and your fellow-men would be better 
 minded to receive Him ; bring to Him the 
 frankincense of your worship ; and remember 
 that all art, when real, is the praise of God ; 
 and that the beauty of the world, and all the 
 wonder of it, whether your part therein be that 
 of giver or receiver, is but a shadow of that 
 angelic hymn, which praises ' Him first, Him last, 
 Him midst, and without end.' 
 
 And one thing more. Bring to Him, to Jesus, 
 Who died so lonely on the Cross, the myrrh com- 
 pact of many pains ; and every sacrifice God 
 gives you strength to make. Look to an offering 
 which shall be whole ; for then it must have 
 within it not merely the gold, the fruit of pro- 
 sperous and honourable effort ; not only the in- 
 cense, the fair savour of a heart that is glad in 
 the Lord ; but even also the myrrh, the sacrifice 
 
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 195 
 
 of a life on fire for love, and the blood and tears 
 of many struggles, the gift of the pain and self- 
 lowering denials of a spirit which makes the 
 Cross its bitter help, and knows its Master in 
 the Calvary cry. 
 
THE INELUCTABLE CHARM 
 
 ' Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of 
 eternal life.' St John vi. 68. 
 
 GLOOM had come over that small band. Jesus 
 was no longer in the fashion. Hopes must be 
 given up. The rapid and complete conversion 
 of the Jewish people was out of the question. 
 Many followers left Him, as soon as they saw 
 what He meant. 
 
 Jesus turned to His intimates ; ' What of 
 you ? Are you going to leave me ? ' St. Peter's 
 answer is clear : ' How can we ? Prospects are 
 not bright, but we have no alternative no other 
 leader. Some leader we must have. Thou 
 hast the words of eternal life.' It was that or 
 nothing. Outward hopes might be few. In- 
 wardly was the assurance of power. ' Thou 
 hast the words of eternal life.' The ineluctable 
 spell was on these men. It has been on the 
 world ever since. It is so now, and that though 
 some do not feel it, and some feel it only partly. 
 4 Can we do without Jesus ? ' is the question 
 which is being asked all round us. Many people 
 think they can. Just now they proclaim such 
 thoughts freely, and cry scorn on all Christians. 
 
 190 
 
THE INELUCTABLE CHARM 197 
 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett, at home in The Five Towns, 
 tells us that Christianity is dead. From the days 
 of Voltaire onwards like claims have been made 
 in vain. Yet the shrill voice in which death 
 is decreed is evidence of panic rather than of 
 certainty. Part of the virulence of anti-Christian 
 attack is due to this. The Church, which these 
 people say is dead, and believe to be* dead, has 
 an irritating way of coming to life again. Nor 
 can we always say that this is the mere galvan- 
 ising of a corpse. When I am gloomy I always 
 think of the eighteenth century of the recovery 
 since. Nietzsche gets over this by saying that 
 the Churches are mausoleums of the dead God. 
 Yet, since the words were written forty yean 
 ago, there has been an amazing growth of real 
 religion ; the set-back is mainly on the con- 
 ventional side. 
 
 The charm of Jesus of Nazareth touches 
 many who do not admit His claims. To take 
 one instance. The Irish novelist, Mr. George 
 Moore, has no faith, and has said so with some 
 emphasis. Yet as he grows older he turns eagerly 
 to the New Testament, and gives us that strange 
 romance, The Brook Kcrith. In this book Jesus 
 is not depicted even as an ethical teacher of per- 
 manent worth. We are shown a strange mystic 
 with some compelling attraction, misled by 
 vanity to think Himself Messiah. He swoons 
 on the Cross, Joseph of Arimathea restores Him, 
 
 N 2 
 
198 THE INELUCTABLE CHARM 
 
 and He lives unknown, an Essene shepherd, 
 with all the old dreams renounced. This is the 
 fantasy of an infidel ; blasphemous, too, some 
 will say. May be. Yet over all there is this 
 weird charm, as of something beyond our ken. 
 Such a book from such a man is proof of the 
 deathless charm of the Nazarene. So do others. 
 Even the attacks of Nietzsche testify to the in- 
 exhaustible interest of the Christian motif. It 
 cannot be ignored. Moreover, the iconoclast 
 seems at times struck by a strange awe. He 
 discriminates between Jesus and all His followers. 
 In places be bows before the charm, though all 
 is qualified with the saying that Jesus was a 
 1 most interesting decadent.' 
 
 One step further men may go. Without 
 taking our Lord for anything beyond the ordi- 
 nary, men may treat Him as the noblest of all 
 teachers and regard His principles as permanent. 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw has but lately done himself 
 the honour of taking this view. All the dogmatic 
 aspects, all the Messianic and Redemptive claims 
 are to him mere moonshine. But Jesus of 
 Nazareth Himself is the eternal teacher of right 
 ways of life. He speaks not only to His own 
 world, but to us. He shows us the true relations 
 of human society. If the world would but take 
 His principles, founding all its polity thereon, alike 
 international and domestic, all would yet be well, 
 for they are the eternal truths of human society. 
 
THE INELUCTABLE CHARM 199 
 
 This position is attractive to a hurrying world 
 which wants practicable maxims and hates to be 
 bothered by ultimate problems. Yet less and 
 less can it be accepted by thoughtful men. First 
 we must cut out, as delusions, many of our 
 Lord's most striking sayings, and even much of 
 His action. If we do that, we must ask : Is it 
 likely, is it barely probable, that a provincial Jew 
 carpenter, with no outlook beyond the local 
 horizons, and no acquaintance with the culture 
 of the great world, should have been endowed 
 with insight into the eternal bases of human life ? 
 Which are more likely to be right, those men 
 who repudiate not merely His Godhead, but His 
 whole teaching, and regard it as unnatural, or 
 those who see in Him a stupendous prophet, out- 
 topping all others, causing the greatest of all 
 historical changes, yet without any nature beyond 
 that which is common, and with that nature 
 tainted by a fundamental delusion ? We in this 
 day can hardly make the dilemma that was once 
 in fashion, Aut Deus aut homo non bonus , but 
 we can say this, Aut Deus aut mens non sana. 
 Besides, that love to our neighbour, which is 
 the essence of Christ's teaching and life, was, in 
 His view, based on the Love of God. He had 
 no place for humanitarian ethics of a Positivist 
 type. God, too, is not to Jesus a vague entity, 
 the absolute of thought ; He is the tender Father 
 of us all, willing the good of His family, and 
 
200 THE INELUCTABLE CHARM 
 
 lifting us from the mire. Jesus came not to 
 teach only, but ' to seek and to save that which 
 was lost/ He saw a world in need and gave 
 1 His life a ransom for many.' His teaching 
 comes of love, and for that love ' He lays down 
 His life for His friends.' He is Redeemer asjvell 
 as Revealer. 
 
 That is why we need Him now. That is the 
 secret of His ineluctable charm. His teaching is 
 so full of wonder, because He is more than any 
 teacher. Even His life, great as it is, is ten times 
 enhanced by the glory of His death. 
 
 My friends, upon us here are come also ' the 
 ends of the world.' We see a universe ante nos. 
 Much that we deemed so secure is gone. The 
 serene and gracious harmonies of ten years back 
 are not for us. Then, indeed, people might talk 
 as though civilisation worked of itself, and pro- 
 gress was a thing of course. Then there might 
 be those sheltered in cultured pieties who believe 
 in the duty of man ' to take part in the har- 
 monious religious development of the world, and 
 to evolve,' and banish such words as hell as in- 
 decent, and sin as an ecclesiastical prejudice, 
 and salvation as ill-educated nonsense. That 
 is gone. The carnival of Flanders has put an 
 end to it. Progress, with a capital P, was tor- 
 pedoed by the man who sunk the Lusitania. We 
 know now know with a certainty unlike the 
 fancies of the ' half-believers of their casual 
 
THE INELUCTABLE CHARM 201 
 
 creeds/ that it may be given to man to increase 
 his organisations in complexity and his mastery 
 over the material world ; and yet, withal, this 
 increase may bring only a more appalling cata- 
 strophe, where the will is turned awry. Bar- 
 barity, which in the Dark Ages was nude, is now 
 clad in the shining armour of modern science 
 that is all. Goodness, kindness, truth, loyalty, 
 unselfishness these things in the past age men 
 could admire, and even, as some did, persuade 
 thmiselves to believe were developing in geo- 
 metrical progression with the process of the suns, 
 almost apart from human choice. 
 
 We are in no such delusion. We know that 
 wickedness is no result of ignorance or priest- 
 craft, but is at its foulest in the most highly 
 educated. God is saving man as by fire from 
 the facile optimism of Victorian complacency. 
 He is showing us that evil is a reality, and that 
 it is a matter of will, and how far it can go. So 
 overwhelming is the evidence that some are 
 tempted to say that all is evil, that the old values 
 are as nothing, and the doctrine of the will to 
 power alone faithful to fact. That is a transient 
 error. Most will retain the ancient ideals of 
 human life ; but they will be set against a tragic 
 background in a world where sin is sin at last, 
 and man's need very real. Like the frightened 
 jailor of old, mankind is once more crying, ' What 
 must I do to be saved ? f The answer is ever 
 
202 THE INELUCTABLE CHARM 
 
 the same : ' Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ 
 and thou shalt be saved.' 
 
 Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
 Let me hide myself in Thee ; 
 Let the water and the blood 
 From Thy riven side which flowed, 
 Be of sin the double cure, 
 Cleanse me from its guilt and power. 
 
 Not the labours of my hands 
 Can fulfil Thy law's demands ; 
 Could my zeal no respite know, 
 Could my tears for ever flow, 
 All for sin could not atone, 
 Thou must save, and Thou alone. 
 
 Nothing in my hand I bring, 
 Simply to Thy cross I cling ; 
 Naked, come to Thee for dress, 
 Helpless, look to Thee for grace ; 
 Foul, I to the Fountain fly ; 
 Wash me, Saviour, ere I die. 
 
 While I draw this fleeting breath, 
 When my eyelids close in death, 
 When I soar to worlds unknown, 
 See Thee on Thy judgment throne, 
 Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
 Let me hide myself in Thee. 
 
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