LIBRARY 
 
 OF THK 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 CHRIST AND WOMAN. Crown 8vo. 6d. net. 
 
 THI PROBLEM OP PERSONALITY. Crown 8vo. 6d. net. 
 
 London: FRANCIS GRIFFITHS 
 
THE KEEPER OF 
 THE KEYS 
 
 Being Essays on Christian Thought in the 
 Twentieth Century 
 
 BY THE 
 
 KEY. F. W. OKDE WAED, B.A., OXFORD 
 A 
 
 (Author of MATIN BELLS, NEW CENTURY HYMNS, PRISONER 
 OF LOVE, etc.) 
 
 LONDON 
 
 FKANCIS GBIFFITHS 
 34 MAIDEN LANE, STRAND, W.C. 
 
 1906. 
 
w 
 
 " I am He that Liveth and was dead; and 
 behold I am alive for evermore and have the 
 Keys of Hades and o/ Death." Rev. i. 18. 
 
 11 He that is Holy, He that is True, He that 
 hath the Key of David, He that openeth and 
 no man shutteth, and shutteth and no man 
 openeth." Rev. iii. 7. 
 
NOTE. 
 
 For permission to republish the first section, the 
 author desires to thank the Editor of the Hibbert 
 Journal, to whose sympathy any good in this book 
 is due. 
 
 175548 
 
" Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
 Whom we that have not seen Thy Face 
 By faith and faith alone embrace, 
 Believing where we cannot prove. 
 
 Our little systems have their day, 
 They have their day and cease to be ; 
 They are but broken lights of Thee, 
 And Thou, Lord, art more than they." 
 
 In Memoriam. 
 
:>F THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE JUDGMENT OF THE CROSS. 
 
 " God forbid that I should glory, save in the 
 Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world 
 is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." 
 Gal. vi. 14. 
 
 Howe'er I live, Thou judgest me, 
 
 Dear Saviour, with Thy blessed Eood, 
 Whereto I turn when most I flee ; 
 
 Though, at my wildest wayward mood, 
 I cannot hide except in Thee. 
 The lightest word, the lowliest thought 
 
 I feel is carried to that Bar, 
 Before which we are hourly brought 
 
 And standeth the remotest star. 
 Thereat is, with each hidden care, 
 The heart of everything laid bare. 
 
 Man as he is and Nature's core 
 
 Are thus unriddled, and the Truth 
 Outshines of all the bane we bore ; 
 
 Redeemed earth repairs its youth, 
 
 vii 
 
viii THE JUDGMENT OF THE CROSS 
 
 And touches now the Eternal Shore. 
 
 Matter is only veiled Mind 
 And just the Spirit's spacious dress, 
 
 That with Thy Wounds is countersigned 
 Shadow of their great Loveliness. 
 
 I see, in hallowed earth and sky, 
 
 Homely the Court of Calvary. 
 
 This body (Plato's prison) is thus 
 
 A holy Temple for Thy sake, 
 The sanctuaried soul in us 
 
 Just what Thy Passion would re-make, 
 But with its Glory tremulous. 
 
 Each Spring comes as the piercing push 
 Of Thy sweet Thorns in travail's maze, 
 
 And every plant a Burning Bush 
 With all Thy Mystery ablaze. 
 
 Dear Lord, had not those Sufferings been 
 
 The lands could wear no virgin green. 
 
 Thine Incarnation and Thy Cross 
 Lie round, beneath, and o'er us bent; 
 
 Purge us and Nature from our dross 
 By their Eternal Sacrament 
 
 I find young life within each loss ; 
 And hence, because Thy sacred Flesh 
 
 Hath in our weakness once assumed 
 These wants, the world is born afresh 
 
 Daily and with Thy Light illumed. 
 No sunrise now but, with its dew, 
 Proclaimeth earth baptized anew. 
 
THE JUDGMENT OF THE CROSS ix 
 
 Therefore I know Thou jndgest me 
 
 In everything I do or say, 
 Salvation could no moment be 
 
 But for the Sentence on my way 
 Wherein I walk, whereby I see. 
 
 The resurrection of the flower 
 Condemneth me or doth acquit, 
 
 And but for Calvary's secret Power 
 This heart were not so infinite. 
 
 The Cross, that saves, pronounces doom, 
 
 And in its death all things rebloom. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I 
 
 THE LORD is A MAN OF W\R 
 
 PAGB 
 I 
 
 II 
 ANTAGONISMS OF LIFE 
 
 . 16 
 
 Ill 
 THE SWORD OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 . 29 
 
 IV 
 COSMOS AND GOSPEL 
 
 . 42 
 
 V 
 THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 
 
 . 57 
 
 VI 
 DYNAMIC RELIGION AND HYPER-DOGMATISM . 
 
 . 70 
 
 VII 
 OXFORD v. CAMBRIDGE 
 
 . 85 
 
 VIII 
 VICARIOUS SUFFERING AND SELF-PRESERVATION 
 
 . 97 
 
 IX 
 
 THE GREAT RECONCILIATION 
 
 . 115 
 
CONTENTS 
 X 
 
 1, . 
 
 128 
 
 XI 
 
 143 
 
 XII 
 
 158 
 
 XIII 
 
 . 171 
 
 Xll 
 
 CHURCH AND WORLD. 
 UNION OF OPPOSITES 
 GOSPEL ANTINOMIES. 
 
 CHILD AND MAX 
 
 XIV 
 
 "Hfi THAT SITTETH IN THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH" . 184 
 
The Keeper of the Keys 
 
 THE LORD IS A MAN OF WAR 
 
 ULTIMATE perfection seems suggested by the union 
 of opposites in their very antagonism, emerging from 
 the everlasting clash of atoms and ions, unfolding 
 throughout the dynasties of nature and departments 
 of Thought and restated predicates, and expressing 
 itself behind and beyond the fundamental principle 
 of subject plus object. We posit one (self), and 
 immediately the other (not self) arises to confront 
 and complete the synthesis by apparent contradic- 
 tion. The perpetual interaction of these two fac- 
 tors appears the law of the Cosmos. And the syn- 
 thesis is antithesis. Indeed, the unit of knowledge 
 might be better denned (not as subject plus object 
 but) as subject contra object. Life, according to 
 both science and philosophy, appears to be a cease- 
 less conflict, a condition of unstable equilibrium, the 
 2 1 
 
2 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 product of rival forces contending for the mastery, 
 in which Evil the Eternal Minus is being gradually 
 eliminated and will perhaps go on being eliminated 
 for ever and ever. The world, yet in its giant in- 
 fancy, is simply realising itself in God, or we may 
 say, on the other hand, that God is surely realising 
 Himself in us, and will continue so to do when all 
 the relics of all the civilisations of Greece and Rome 
 and the Modern Age have been swept away like BO 
 many toys or idle epi phenomena. Man now is 
 like a sleeper darkly awakening from a dream. 
 And now and then and here and there he gets 
 glimpses of blue sky, and begins to understand some 
 simple truths, though at present he only can touch 
 their uttermost fringe. 
 
 Attraction is repulsion, and again and even more 
 so repulsion is attraction. The mysterious battle, 
 physical, moral, mental, spiritual, proceeds and 
 must proceed for ever. Time is cheap, and we 
 have all eternity before us. Deus patiens quia 
 aternus. Every day, in some moral crisis, souls 
 are infinitely attracted by the very temptations that 
 repel them most. And love, while it solicits, yet 
 at the same time bids us recoil in unspeakable de- 
 spair. The final free volition, the turning of the 
 balance, depends on the individual temperament, 
 taken in connection with the education and the 
 environment. The Lord is a Man of War, the 
 Lord is His Name. Progress by antagonism, life 
 by antagonism, issues in our consciousness as His 
 fundamental law, to which He submits Himself 
 and by which He limits Himself if indeed it be a 
 
THE LOED IS A MAN OF WAE 3 
 
 limit at all [and not the metaphysical content of 
 infinity] . The end here is the pursuit and the pur- 
 suit is the end, fighting for an attainable and yet 
 unattainable perfection. This unity in division 
 seems embedded in the mind as an integral and 
 organic part of the Cosmos. We are born both 
 Platonists and Aristotelians, both Realists arid 
 Idealists, both Materialists and Spiritualists. No 
 doubt one factor must be the predominating partner 
 or combatant, but still (the truth remains) we 
 possess by an inexorable psychological necessity the 
 two constituents and two competitors, if one only 
 exists to be always negated. Light and shade, 
 joy and sorrow, right and wrong, good and evil, 
 hope and fear, life and death, are the opposed and 
 yet united ways in which we think and feel and 
 suffer and know and live. Like the two pillars 
 Jachin and Boaz, stand before the porch of the 
 Temple of Truth the Everlasting Yea and the Ever- 
 lasting Nay. It seems almost superfluous to add 
 that we experience, we find, nothing quite pure and 
 separate and unmingled. Our emotions are mixed, 
 love is never far from hatred, nor smiles from tears. 
 No error seems to be all error, and no truth all truth. 
 Love and truth for ever keep purging themselves of 
 the contradictory alloy, and in the process become 
 love and truth. There can be no rest, no truce for 
 either antagonist. Peace would be fatal to the good, 
 and this solution would merely be its dissolution. 
 God fulfils Himself in many ways, but emphatically 
 and pre-eminently by conflict. To stand still for 
 a moment is to go backward or fall. Probably the 
 
4 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 explanation of this tremendous problem lies rooted 
 in the very Nature of God, who is at once Him- 
 self male and female, One and AH, limited and un- 
 limited, and still essentially a Personal God. Meta- 
 physically, indeed, how could He express Himself 
 otherwise than by this fundamental law of the Uni- 
 verse? Is subject without object a thinkable fact? 
 And as soon as we have subject and object as the 
 principium principiorum for any practical thought, 
 or useful conduct, we see it must inevitably be not 
 simply subject with object, but subject against 
 object, in an antagonism which alone makes life 
 possible and fruitful. There is true teaching and 
 profound philosophy in the third chapter of Eccle- 
 siastes. And again, " God hath set the one over 
 against the other." 
 
 Amid the fog and cloud of combatants who strive 
 for they know not what, appear to emerge a few 
 principles which no one disputes, that may be re- 
 ceived as certain as any facts. Man is a religious 
 being, and man is a sociable being, and sociable be- 
 cause religious. He fears, he loves, he worships a 
 Power or Powers beyond and above him, and yet 
 around and even within him. This awe, this 
 wonder, which is a kind of broken knowledge, draws 
 man to man not merely for purposes of mutual 
 defence, but also for purposes of a common 
 cult. For the Power or Powers outside man, 
 and yet somehow mysteriously associated with 
 him, must be reverenced and propitiated by rites 
 and ceremonies and offerings. Primitive man seeks 
 protection against his very God, whom he admires, 
 
THE LORD IS A MAN OF WAK 5 
 
 hates, dreads, and yet always adores, and finds it 
 in the gregarious life of the family and tribe, through 
 all the predatory stages and pastoral stages, down 
 to the colossal and glorified egotism of hostile 
 nationalities and ethnic enmities. But from the 
 very outset he believes and disbelieves, he accepts 
 and he rejects, according as the factor of faith or 
 reason predominates. For at the beginning of 
 things the religious feeling, religiousness, embraces 
 two different and opposed and yet congruous factors, 
 the sense of and the appeal to authority or tradition, 
 and the sense of and the appeal to inquiry. And 
 these two factors are one in the light of a higher 
 unity which transcends and includes them both. 
 They are absorbed and harmonised in its grasp. 
 And here we reach the bedrock of the human mind, 
 which in its constitution is compelled to work by 
 and through contraries, and can only achieve any 
 fruitful or satisfactory results by the collision of 
 opposites. It seems futile to quarrel with the 
 machinery of the given <f)povTi<TTTjpiov or thinking 
 shop. The way we are driven we must go, the way 
 we are built we must follow, for much as we may 
 modify we did not make ourselves, and even 
 Plotinus submitted to his limitations. The conflict 
 then between faith and reason, prescription and 
 the right of private judgment, Catholic and Protes- 
 tant, religion or science, is and must be eternal, 
 simply because it is rooted in a psychological neces- 
 sity. We see in the contest but the dualism of 
 Nature, the two sides of the human mind apparently 
 fighting against each other and yet really co-opera- 
 
6 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 ting to the same end ' ' to one far-off Divine 
 event." It is the everlasting twfitness of things- 
 yes, even the survival of the wnfittest that arrives 
 at any issues at all. To ask for stable equilibrium 
 is to ask for death. The perpetual friction, the 
 impertinent schisms, the strife of contending in- 
 terests, the armed and antagonistic camps, all these 
 are only so many evidences of the mind divided 
 against itself that thus attains some new and 
 higher unity. Faith and reason must quarrel, be- 
 cause in no other way can truth be elicited, but 
 their unceasing quarrel is merely the quarrel of 
 friends who agree to differ and differ to agree. We 
 cannot repudiate our nature and the very framework 
 of our minds. It is impossible to think out anything 
 except in this manner. But the misfortune re- 
 mains, that some people will have nothing to do 
 with reason. This, however, only applies to religion 
 and its collaterals. For in the ordinary affairs of 
 everyday life both parties thankfully welcome and 
 employ the assistance of both reason and faith 
 alike, or, at any rate, of the one they profess to 
 despise most. Indeed, men of science, who are 
 scornfully sceptical as to the blessings of faith, in 
 worldy matters often distinguish themselves by 
 being curiously and even childishly credulous. 
 Logic hardly enters into practical procedure yet, 
 and our greatest men display the most splendid 
 inconsistencies. The magnificent philosopher 
 descends from his mountain summits, to be the 
 easy prey of a bubble company or the idle sport of 
 some specious and fraudulent friend. Even he 
 
THE LORD IS A MAN OF WAR 7 
 
 cannot remember always to consider both sides of 
 the question, and bring both sides of his mind to 
 bear upon it to consent simply after just and ade- 
 quate criticism. It seems strange that the persons 
 who perceive most clearly the advantages of com- 
 petition, with or without equality of opportunity, 
 whether in Party Government or in fiscal discus- 
 sions, or vestry meetings, cease to be rational when 
 their own private interests are touched or their pas- 
 ticular clique is concerned, and become either 
 brutally critical or blindly credulous, till the local 
 disturbance has passed. They refuse to exercise 
 both their faith and reason, which are equally their 
 royal prerogatives. 
 
 An accurate psychological analysis would assure 
 any observer that the broadest and grandest har- 
 monies arise from the battle of incongruous ele- 
 ments. No permanent conquests can come other- 
 wise. Protestantism is only one aspect of the 
 human mind as it moves and works, and represents 
 the forces of science, reason, free inquiry, liberty 
 of thought and action, the right of individual initia- 
 tive. The word may be an offence to many, but 
 the thing remains and is and must be a fundamental 
 fact. We cannot escape from it, because we can- 
 not escape from the natural operations of our 
 minds. Whether we know it or not, whether we 
 like it or not, we are Protestants to the bitter end, 
 in so far as we ever dare to think and act for our- 
 selves, and go our own way in any deliberate path 
 of reasoned preference. The spirit is ingrained in 
 the grossest slave. At times he breaks his bonds. 
 
8 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 renounces his taskmasters, and chooses to be him- 
 self. We mast breathe the mental atmosphere that 
 we find, though we dearly love to forge fetters for 
 ourselves as well as others. Protestantism, inci- 
 dentally connected with a particular piece of history 
 and religious development, at bottom means the in- 
 stinct of independence that may be scotched but can- 
 not be killed outright. Fire burns in its coldest 
 ashes, and what is more terrible than dead fires? 
 It would be ridiculous, were it not so infinitely 
 pathetic, to see great minds repudiating their birth- 
 right and the specific regalia of their royalty, in 
 repudiating their Protestant privileges ! It is deny- 
 ing the pit from which they are dug and the rock 
 from which they are hewn. The man flying from 
 his shadow seems less absurd and pitiable than the 
 man who endeavours to elude himself and the 
 machinery of his own mind, and that which makes 
 man pre-eminently man the power of reasoning. 
 To protest is to exercise an inalienable right and to 
 take our stand upon the charter of our humanity. 
 It does not imply the narrow claims of bigotry, the 
 call of ignorance and intolerance and prejudice, in 
 spite of the accidental excrescences too frequently 
 associated with the name. The so-called Reforma- 
 tion was really the renaissance of the soul, and the 
 human mind re-awakening to its inheritance and 
 dignity, and denouncing the monopoly of freedom. 
 The protagonists in this supreme outcome did not 
 guess their own greatness, could not perhaps then 
 know its tremendous significance, were too close to 
 the events evolving to measure their dimensions, but 
 
THE LOED IS A MAN OF WAE 9 
 
 still they were fighting none the less for the liberties 
 of the human niind. That a particular creed 
 assumed all the credit and revelled in a glory that 
 was more rational than religious, and carried off the 
 apparent honours of victory, proved of small conse- 
 quence in the light of the final issues. The zealots 
 of a sombre superstition sharpened the sword that 
 they bore really against it and themselves. Con- 
 templating murder, they committed suicide. 
 
 The same necessity emerges from the opposite and 
 correlative of Protestantism, the passion for tradition 
 and the appeal to authority. As they contradict 
 and exclude each other, so they complete each other 
 in a higher synthesis. Catholicism possesses its 
 own justification in the testimonium aninuz naturali- 
 ter Catholics. Were the mind purely, simply, and 
 entirely Protestant, we should lack the needful 
 antagonism from which alone all good effects pro- 
 ceed. The clash of the rival energies tends to a 
 better balance in the long run and to fertility. Either 
 force by itself is a barren virgin. The mind that is 
 all Catholic and always and only Catholic will be 
 starved and stunted, dare nothing, do nothing, hope 
 nothing, be nothing. Its life is death, the growth 
 of the grave corruptio optimi pessima. Let 
 authority have its proper place and weight, let it be 
 respected and obeyed in reason and season, but 
 unless it is also criticised, questioned, and mercilessly 
 attacked, it will act but as the paralysing influence 
 of the dead hand. Till authority has been turned 
 upside down, pulled to pieces, dragged in the mire 
 and trampled on, it can be of little use or value. 
 
10 THE KEEPEE OF THE KEYS 
 
 It will stand out of drawing, with false proportions 
 and misleading perspective. Authority must be 
 denied, and denied again and again, before it may be 
 fully affirmed, and it must be crucified first if it 
 would be crowned hereafter. Untested, unexamined, 
 unmeasured, it exists as a source of danger and 
 breeds disease and decay. But when it has been 
 challenged, chastened, purged with flame, it comes 
 from the ordeal if storm-beaten strong, and if pruned 
 a blessing, to abide among the world's few perma- 
 nent possessions. But what would free inquiry be 
 without this salutary and solid check? An evil and 
 not a good, a tyrant and not a servant, a traitor and 
 not a friend, for there is no autocracy so cruel as the 
 licence in the masquerade of liberty. Only one 
 greater argument than authority exists, only one 
 greater power, and that is freedom. But they cor- 
 rect and qualify each other's virtues, they supple- 
 ment each other's deficiencies, they antagonise each 
 other in a fruitful embrace and are reconciled in a 
 broader and loftier unity. The uncatholic mind that 
 scorns tradition becomes hard, narrow, and unpro- 
 ductive. And just by the constant action and re- 
 action between faith and reason, authority and criti- 
 cism , do churches grow and states flourish in a com- 
 mon movement towards a civilisation which will 
 reconcile differences by merging them in a vaster 
 and deeper union. Opinion, the weapon of the one, 
 and the stormy petrel of evolution, always ahead of 
 present institutions, ;m<l inith, the weapon of the 
 other, for ever meet and for ever clash like positive 
 and negative, but yet when most divided are most 
 
THE LORD IS A MAN OF WAK 1] 
 
 agreed, and work out in friendly strife the inevitable 
 ascent. 
 
 If, indeed, religion is the ultimate interpretation 
 of life, as it appears to be, and not philosophy, we 
 may expect to find its track everywhere and the key 
 at last to all questions that really are questions. For 
 there abound inquiries that should never be asked, 
 and when asked should never be answered. We 
 mean, of course, the problems bound up with the 
 limitations of the mind, beyond the reach of experi- 
 ence and observation, in which psychology only plays 
 with words and draws mere verbal distinctions. 
 These may be the money of fools, they are certainly 
 but the counters of wise men. And now, if we 
 speak of the communities into which the social 
 instinct has grouped us, we discover immediately the 
 same dualism, the old antagonism of divided 
 interests, the two hostile camps, which yet by their 
 very opposition hold each other together, and are 
 overcome at last by the working pow r er of a higher 
 unity. As in the sphere of religion we found the 
 synthesis by contradiction in faith and inquiry, in 
 authority and reason, so here in society we find the 
 radical antithesis of the Conservative and Liberal, 
 stability and instability, progress and repose. The 
 appeal lies in one case to tradition and in the other 
 to critical opinion, and they correspond respectively 
 to the two great sides of the human mind, the faculty 
 that accepts and retains, and the faculty that dis- 
 cusses and denies and lives in the chronic condition 
 of a sort of divine discontent. And the perpetual 
 interaction and interpretation of these rival con- 
 
1-2 THE KEEPEE OF THE KEYS 
 
 tending powers keep the given community alive in 
 health and strength, compel it to put forth new 
 shoots, purge it of dead or dying branches, and 
 prove what is demonstrated every moment that the 
 world is ruled, not merely by a little sense, but by 
 not a little compromise and paradox. 
 
 It is the incompatibles, rather than the compati- 
 bles that unite at last. We follow the line of most 
 and not of least resistance, to the fret and friction of 
 unoiled wheels and unaccommodating agencies, that 
 combine best when they quarrel, and are devoted 
 friends because contending foes. Oh, the trans- 
 parent riddle of life, with its advancement by repug- 
 nant elements and reconciliation through the fiercest 
 mental repulsion ! Party government displays a true, 
 an unerring instinct. It is the one way in which 
 Nature moves and God acts. We prove our position 
 by negatives and our rules by exceptions, and in 
 each exclusion we equally include. To deny some- 
 thing is to define something, and to admit this is to 
 reject that, and to stand still in one direction is to go 
 forward in another. Life, Nature, human Nature, 
 has never got beyond the nursery rhyme, " Mistress 
 Mary, quite contrairy." Browning's lines imply a 
 vn-y great deal more than they say, and we may 
 always read infinite suggestions between his lines. 
 And what he never does say is what he says the best. 
 
 " Smooth Jacob still robs homely Esau, 
 Now up, now down, the world's one see-saw." 
 
 There is a blind spot (macula lutca) in the human 
 eye and a blind spot also in the human mind, and 
 it is the blind spot (as with Nelson) that has the 
 
THE LORD IS A MAN OF WAR 13 
 
 farthest and fairest vision. The comprehensive in- 
 tuition, which receives on trust the reconcilement 
 of the eternal dualism everywhere in a stage higher, 
 but does not understand or attempt to explain the 
 mode of operation, takes the report kneeling, and in 
 the sublime ignorance of a universal negative realises 
 the fundamental agreement in difference. Custom 
 means much, but progress means more, and their 
 internecine war stands justified by its grand results. 
 Christ called Himself the "Way," and symbolises 
 the onward march and endless victories of Truth. 
 His has been well styled the Church Militant, and 
 wherever works the spirit of healthy progress, there 
 works also the Spirit of Christ on the crest of the 
 flowing tide and in the van of aggressive good. And, 
 after all, the final appeal is to the moral sanction, 
 behind brute force, and below the ramparts of bayo- 
 nets. The mere secular arm would be paralysed 
 without, unless fortified by some sort of faith in 
 some sort of creed or Providence. And when the 
 smoke of battle has cleared away, and the thunder 
 of the guns is still, the last word will be spoken by 
 religion, and the last stand will be made at the Cross, 
 in the name and power of Him who came to bring a 
 sword, and to conciliate interests by division, 
 through perpetual Progress by Antagonism. 
 
 " The Lord is a Man of War, the Lord is His 
 name." All through the Bible, both in the Old 
 Testament and the New, we discover this teaching, 
 and the love that perpetually strives with sinners, 
 and could not be love unless it did strive and was 
 just and righteous and even cruel. The wrestling 
 
14 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 of Jacob with the angel at Peniel displays a vivid 
 object lesson of the eternal truth. " / will not let 
 thee go, except thou bless me." " As a prince 
 thou hast striven with God and men and hast pre- 
 vailed." But did Jacob seek the conflict? For 
 our purpose and the result that followed, it matters 
 not in the least. " There wrestled a man with him, 
 until the breaking of the day." The contest bore 
 abundant fruit, " And he blessed him there "and 
 we may fairly add and therefore and thereby. 
 Again, we have a similar story in Joshua. " Be- 
 hold, there stood a man over against him with his 
 sword drawn in his hand. And Joshua went unto 
 him and said unto him, Art thou for us or for our 
 adversaries? And he said, Nay, but as captain of 
 the host of the Lord I am come." 
 
 God's attitude, to say it with reverence, is provo- 
 cative, and presents an eternal challenge to the 
 human will. We are solemnly warned to stand for 
 ever on our guard, and risk no chances in the war- 
 fare. God fights for us and with us, but He also 
 fights against us by the very constitution of His own 
 law and perhaps of His own Being as our Adversary, 
 and yet (as such) our greatest Friend. " Faithful 
 are the wounds of a friend." 1 And so we read in 
 
 *In that remarkable revelation of character, called " De 
 Profundis," by the late Oscar Wilde, there are passages 
 which read like the cry wrung from a lost soul on the edge 
 of eternity, with a depth of passion not to be mistaken for 
 mere literary pose, and afford a grim confirmation of our 
 main thought. " Now it seems to me," he writes in 
 Reading Qaol, where the most conscientious and self-respec- 
 ting artist would hardly care to attitudinise, at p. 59, 
 
 (hut Love of some kind is the only possible explanation 
 
THE LOED IS A MAN OF WAR 15 
 
 Isaiah, "Therefore He was turned to be their enemy 
 and He fought against them." Blessings come by 
 the way " as they went they were healed" and 
 incidentally as it were. In a world militant, of 
 which every cell and every atom is a soldier and 
 fights for its own hand, and thus and only thus for 
 every other and for God, we (who are all co- 
 existences) cannot live a selfish separate life. 
 Happiness is no object, but life is. And there can 
 be no growth, no progress, without more resistance 
 than mere friction of bearings. " Who would be 
 free themselves must strike the blow." We have 
 life not to hoard and not to spend on ourselves, but 
 to grow 7 , through self-development, by self-sacrifice, 
 in an endless battle that wins by losing. God's 
 challenge cannot be evaded. It is the aspect of 
 Nature as well as the aspect of Grace, and to decline 
 it is to fall out of the order and fail in the very 
 reason for our existence. Si vis pacem para bellum. 
 Every new fact is a new challenge, and every old 
 truth will have to be re-interpreted, and every fresh 
 truth must find its ultimate justification at Calvary. 
 The whole Cosmos hangs upon the Cross of Christ. 
 
 of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in 
 the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I 
 am convinced that there is no other, and that if the 
 world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it 
 has been built by the hands of Love, because in no other 
 way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, 
 reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the 
 beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul." Here we 
 have a pathetic testimony to the eternal duel between the 
 flesh and the spirit, and the result in a religious awakening 
 and a higher moral synthesis. 
 
II 
 
 ANTAGONISMS OF LIFE 
 
 AN impartial observer from another planet, with 
 sufficient intelligence, after even a superficial in- 
 vestigation, would inevitably conclude Nature to be 
 a belligerent power and Man also a belligerent 
 power, and the whole earth in a kind of chronic 
 warfare, Nature and Man set against each other. 
 He would likewise see both to be at strife with 
 themselves. Nor could this inference, however 
 imperfect, be disputed, with the proper qualifica- 
 tions. It must be considered a true, if inadequate, 
 view of things. But, should the impartial observer 
 from outside continue his inquiries, he would 
 assuredly discover something more, a wider, deeper 
 law, behind and beyond the competing forces and 
 the prima facie clash of conflict. He would find 
 proceeding the vast principles of Co-operation, 
 whereby " all things work together for good." He 
 might not be able to understand all, perhaps he 
 could not understand much, of the inner meaning 
 of this tremendous process, but he would not go 
 wrong in presuming that discord was the key to the 
 ultimate concord and division the clue to the funda- 
 mental unity. At first sight, appearances are all 
 
 16 
 
"iTAGOMSMS OF LIFE 17 
 
 in favour of a mere internecine contest. But a 
 closer scrutiny reveals the truth that the antagonism 
 is not real, and dissolves from a broader and loftier 
 point of view in a grander cosmic transaction , which 
 gathers up into itself the opposed energies, while it 
 transforms and glorifies and reconciles them. 
 
 Physically, morally, mentally, spiritually, a 
 disharmony underlies and runs through the whole 
 Cosmos, to disappear in a more transcendent 
 union and communion. To speak with all 
 reverence, the Scripture itself recognizes this 
 fact even in the case of the Trinity. Ubi 
 amor (concordia) ibi Trinitas yes, and therefore, 
 Ubi discordia ibi Trinitas. At any rate, this 
 must be metaphorically and metaphysically true. 
 " Awake, sword, against My Shepherd, and 
 against the Man that is My Fellow, saith the Lord 
 of Hosts." Wherever we trace Love, and we trace 
 it everywhere, we meet with it as the Blessed Ad- 
 versary whose perpetual challenge provokes us to 
 a warmer response and richer activities. Its eter- 
 nal antipathy is eternal sympathy. God works for 
 us and with us and in us, and therefore always 
 against us, in a helpful hostility whose opposition 
 inspires us more than the allurements of any mere 
 easy friendship, that surrenders without a struggle. 
 He " resisteth the proud." We want no open and 
 idle Capua. Some sort of resistance seems indis- 
 pensable for any upward fruitful progress. Unless 
 difficulties and dangers are being constantly faced 
 and overcome, there can be no good and lasting 
 growth. Development arises out of friction and 
 3 
 
18 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 denial. Children, that do not keep daily falling 
 and fighting with their environment and measuring 
 themselves against odds, and educating themselves 
 by repeated failures, would remain children to the 
 end. They would grow downwards in body and 
 mind, or remain starved and stunted, without the 
 defeats that lead to victory. Nature Calvinizes, 
 and her election is as sure as it is universal. But 
 then all are her favourites, and she admits neither 
 waste nor disappointment in the evolution of which 
 ages tell the moments. She reckons no bye- 
 products and no failures, because it is just these that 
 out of their very superfluousness and inefficiency 
 prepare the final triumph. Eubbish not only goes 
 into the foundation but makes the foundation, and 
 so it negates itself and ceases to be rubbish. No 
 battle was ever fought without apparent ruin and 
 loss and recoil in some direction. But this is just 
 the cosmic process. The strife here can have no 
 end, for issue opens out of issue on and on for ever. 
 Nature makes no mistakes, but she is always trying 
 Divine experiments and presenting a new armed 
 front of antagonism. How can Beauty and Good- 
 ness and Truth unfold or even state themselves, 
 except by way of contrast and through the shock of 
 collision? Our earth, our hearts, our souls, consti- 
 tute the battleground, on which they fight out their 
 quarrels with Ugliness and Evil and Falsehood at 
 our expense. But the good news they bring us 
 from the better land, is purchased cheaply at any 
 price. Ubi discordia ibi concordia ac ibi Deus. 
 Could the gifts of God be bestowed otherwise, 
 
ANTAGONISMS OF LIFE 19 
 
 acquired at no cost, attained with no conflict, they 
 would be valueless and no gifts at all. Nay, they 
 would be curses. The fall repeats itself in every 
 life and proves by Divine Grace an upward and not 
 a downward fall. And the sentence of death has 
 become the sentence of life, " In the sweat of thy 
 face shait thou eat bread." 
 
 Keligion and Science, the ethical and the 
 cosmic process, stand only in antithesis, as 
 they must always stand, to be embraced in a 
 supreme synthesis. Their disagreement is produc- 
 tive of light. Faith and reason, faith and sight, 
 faith and works, faith and fear or doubt thus do 
 we elicit, from their fruitful opposition, knowledge 
 and righteousness and peace. That, for which we 
 pay nothing, is worth nothing. We give little and 
 we get little, but we sow in tears arid we reap in 
 joy. Body and soul contend for the mastery in 
 order some day to be subsumed in a glorious recon- 
 ciliation, and to expand again for yet more fertile 
 rivalries. Matter and force merge in ether, to re- 
 turn in fresh life. No fact, no truth, can possess 
 a single aspect, everything is bifacial just as no 
 plate has one side, and no stick one end alone. Com- 
 petition passes into co-operation, and was co-opera- 
 tive from the very first. But an eternal selection 
 of the fittest emerges from the struggle till all at 
 last is fittest and has fulfilled its purpose and can be 
 carried up and on to bigger stages. Ormuzd and 
 Ahriman express a sublime principle which operates 
 alike in souls and ions and systems. God asks of 
 us nothing that He has not imposed on Himself. 
 
20 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 The battle is the Lord's and was His from the first, 
 and will be to all eternity. Love whets the sword 
 first on itself, and blunts the edge and point there 
 and thus, before turning it against us. Nor could 
 God be Love, if He had not felt the sword, or if 
 He had not proved His care for us by letting it fall 
 on our heads, and becoming our gracious Adversary. 
 The one primal passion, the one universal force 
 below all other forces, the instinct or appetite ever 
 behind the desire of self-preservation, is that of self- 
 assertion. This explains every process. The sense 
 of resistance, which synchronises with the first? 
 flicker of self -consciousness, when subject is 
 revealed (not as added to or in conjunction with 
 but) as pitted against object, means the initial dis- 
 covery that we enter on a world of war and are 
 armed and equipped for ceaseless military service. 
 We feel at the outset a longing to accept the chal- 
 lenge. The resistance we meet calls forth what- 
 ever is best in us, evokes our powers and faculties, 
 and strictly educates us. No other method seems 
 equal to produce the splendid and spacious results 
 that are produced thereby. The first thing a healthy, 
 happy, thriving baby does, is to fight and pull in 
 pieces objects within his reach. Mother and nurse 
 prove this in their own persons by abundant experi- 
 ence. Thoughtless people set this combative atti- 
 tude down to pure wantonness, mere mischief or 
 love of destruction for destruction's sake, or it 
 is put down to inherent original sin. This is 
 utterly absurd. The child knows better, recog- 
 nizes he is a soldier in a world militant, bravely and 
 
ANTAGONISMS OF LIFE 21 
 
 proudly accepts the situation, begins to define his 
 position and trace the exact lines of his limitations. 
 At first, of course, everything seems more or less 
 an enemy and its attitude as hostile. Gradually 
 a perception of agreement reinforces the perception 
 of difference, but to the end of life the perception 
 of difference is the ruling motive, as it should be, 
 the peace is armed and the neutrality not only vigi- 
 lant but aggressive. With adults the aboriginal in- 
 stinct remains, the aptitude and love for conflict. 
 Nobody cares even for pleasures that offer no ob- 
 stacles to be overcome, cheap and easy amusements 
 soon go the way of all cheap and easy pursuits. We 
 are born into a fighting world, to fight our path of 
 progress through it and over it towards something 
 higher and better, that we dimly apprehend beyond. 
 
 " Eternal process moving on, 
 From state to state the spirit walks." 
 
 And the walk maintains and manifests itself as a 
 crusade. 
 
 It is not Englishmen alone that court dangers, 
 and seek overwhelming odds, and run a thousand 
 unnecessary risks. No distinction in kind lies here, 
 but simply in degree. We, all of us, if not in equal 
 measure, think that life were not worth living with- 
 out a considerable infusion and confusion of peril. 
 The stiff er the fences to be crossed, the more we 
 like them. We reckon existence, not by its dull 
 days but by the eventful days, when all appeared 
 lost and all was therefore won. The story in 
 Punch of the bridal pair on their honeymoon, at the 
 
22 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 end of their resources, expresses a profound philo- 
 sophic truth. "0, that some friend would turn 
 up," sighed Angelina! ''Or even some enemy," 
 murmured Edwin !' Human nature is bellicose and 
 must be and ought to be. The budding-point in 
 the plant takes place at some spot of arrested growth, 
 where the plant has to fight for itself and in the 
 antagonism confronted and conquered evolves the 
 final flower. A quarrelsome temper may be 
 troublesome and go too far, it may and will en- 
 croach on the rights and liberties of others, but it 
 is better to boil over than not to boil at all. The 
 quick, angry answer, the hasty blow, no doubt are 
 survivals of savagery, but in their very excess they 
 demonstrate more admirably the constitutional and 
 needful pugnacity of man, the vital self-assertion 
 which declares at the same time his passionate de- 
 sire and determination for self-preservation at any 
 cost. 
 
 But so far we have been considering chiefly a state 
 of Nature, and we have yet to consider the state of 
 Grace, when the soul has passed from the sense 
 of a general relationship towards God to a special 
 and private and personal relationship. Here the 
 sense of resistance continues, but the self-assertion 
 is realised in self-denial and self-sacrifice. The 
 Cross of Christ becomes the supreme and ultimate 
 test for each of us. No other, no lesser criterion, 
 now can be accepted or feel acceptable. The con- 
 flict abides, the armour must be worn, and we fight 
 on still to the bitter blessed end, but a change has 
 come over the spirit of the strife. We wage war 
 
ANTAGONISMS OF LIFE 23 
 
 yet against the " world " a compendious expres- 
 sion for the evil without us, against the " flesh "a 
 compendious expression for the evil within us, and 
 against the devil or the organized and accumulated 
 evil that works through both. God goes on reveal- 
 ing Himself as the Friendly Foe, who could not be 
 the immanent God and with us and in us always, 
 unless He were beautifully and helpfully and 
 happily against us, to quicken old healthy energies 
 and bring new powers into play and productive ser- 
 vice. As our Divine Adversary, Love touches us 
 at our most human point. In the Garden of Geth- 
 semane and the Agony, w r hen Christ asked for the 
 cup of woe to be removed and then refused the 
 relief in submission to the Father's Will, and again 
 upon the Cross of Calvary when He cried, " My 
 God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" He 
 confessed the solemn truth we are discussing. The 
 best gifts come to us in denials, the finest assistance 
 in opposition. True character, lasting graces, 
 emerge out of the fiery ordeal and are wrung from 
 the icy grip of the grave. " Awake, north ivind ! 
 And come, thou south! Blow upon My garden, 
 that the spices thereof may flow out." We should 
 expect this teaching in the New Testament, which 
 is philosophy teaching by example and the sole true 
 history, but it speaks with clear trumpet tones in 
 the Old Testament from the first page to the last. 
 The milk and honey of Canaan had to be paid for to 
 the uttermost farthing, by the burdens and bondage 
 of Egypt and the plagues, and the iron experiences of 
 the wilderness through which a nation of emanci- 
 
24 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 pated slaves was shaken and shaped into a nation of 
 heroes and martyrs and poets. " Neither will I offer 
 .... unto the Lord my God of that which cost me 
 nothing !" Even when Shelley talked of " the in- 
 finite malice of destiny," not perhaps too seriously, 
 he had a glimmer of the great fact and was uncon- 
 sciously giving his testimony to the Christianity 
 which he professed to despise. He recognised in 
 those words something of the contrariety of things, 
 and the Cross on which we must be crucified to be 
 masters of ourselves, because thus the servants of 
 Christ in newness of life. But the record of Israel 
 is repeated every day in every life. There were 
 giants in those days, and there arise giants still to 
 contest every inch of the way. Anakim inside us, 
 and Anakim outside us abound. Goliath yet says, 
 " Choose you a man for you, and let him come doivn 
 to me." Even when Jordan has been passed, 
 Jericho walled up to the sky and darkening the sun 
 with its " battlements and bartisans " bestrides the 
 road, and must be levelled with the dust, before we 
 can call our own the Pleasant Land. There, too, 
 fresh adversaries lie in wait for us, seeking to resist 
 us so that the sword once drawn can never more be 
 sheathed. But if it be " bathed in Heaven" we 
 need fear no enemy. " // ye will not drive out the 
 inhabitants of the land from before you .... those 
 which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your 
 eyes and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in 
 the land wherein ye dwell." Yes, the " Pilgrim's 
 Progress " must be also the " Holy War." Grace, 
 like Nature, through all its steps and stages, with all 
 
ANTAGONISMS OF LIFE 25 
 
 new " shoots of everlastingness," works by the law 
 of antagonism. We see, we hear, we feel the chal- 
 lenge of foes around us and everywhere and that of 
 the traitor in the camp, and we have no choice but 
 to go forth with the shield of faith and the sword of 
 the Spirit and fight to the death. Each fresh up- 
 ward station of the Cross is a battle-ground, gained 
 by loss. Evil personifies itself in some new form 
 day by day, and frequently approaches us in the 
 garb of piety like the " Holy Satan." And when 
 " transformed into an angel of light " he becomes 
 doubly dangerous. 
 
 Individualism, a salient factor or element of the 
 cosmos, is then at once our strength and our weak- 
 ness, our opportunity and our extremity. On the 
 one hand we stand alone, and on the other hand all 
 helpful forces of the universe that make for 
 righteousness lie behind us and within us. Each 
 Christian, though he fights single-handed, has the 
 strength of all. God is " the God of Abraham and 
 the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob." And the 
 Master, who said, by His angel, " Tell His disciples 
 and Peter/ 9 entrenches Himself in our infirmities. 
 For the individual in resisting the cosmos, and the 
 cosmos in denying the individual, define and aid 
 each other, and they would possess no meaning 
 apart. Evil attacks man qua individual, not as a 
 member of a church or a community or a part of 
 Nature. And this vulnerable side, as it appears, 
 through incorporation with Christ is invulnerable. 
 Out of weakness we are made strong. Each indi- 
 vidual acquires the power of every other individual 
 
26 THE KEEPEE OF THE KEYS 
 
 in and through this mystical union. Christ reveals 
 Himself in the religious conflict as the Eternal Plus, 
 and Evil resolves itself into the Eternal Minus. 
 Spiritual progress is an ascending transvaluation of 
 life. We pass, fighting, from grace to grace and 
 from glory to glory. Evil embraced depreciates our 
 vital coin, evil resisted and overcome appreciates it. 
 And so the struggle proceeds for ever. Even the 
 eddies of reaction only in the end swell the volume 
 and increase the strength of the main current. The 
 cosmic movement cannot be checked by idle bubbles 
 or empty backwash. 
 
 " Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." 
 Yes, we have all read this passage and probably 
 accepted it without much reflection. Yet we must 
 take this text in connection with our Lord's own 
 express teaching upon which Tolstoy has built up 
 his imposing superstructure of consecrated fatalism. 
 " But I say unto you that ye resist not evil." We 
 may well pause for a moment and wonder how many 
 gorgeous fabrics have been erected upon some mere 
 metaphor or mistranslated sentence or misunder- 
 standing. And the great Eussian Quietist has 
 raised his Utopia above the flimsiest of foundations. 
 By scholars and thinkers and theologians, the mat- 
 ter does not require discussion, but the appeal in 
 these days is to the man in the street. And the 
 words, read with the context, can only mean, " Re- 
 sist not the evil man" in "the evil man's" own 
 way and with " the evil man's " own weapons, i.e., 
 of fraud and force. That we at the present day in 
 a Christian community should even tamely submit 
 
ANTAGONISMS OF LIFE 27 
 
 to wanton encroachments, and so by our cowardice 
 imperil the person and property of others, as well as 
 our own, Christ never contemplated and never 
 could have contemplated. This would indeed have 
 amounted to an indirect encouragement of evil. 
 And how could our Lord, who was always opposing 
 wickedness in every shape, have possibly connived 
 at its success and stultified Himself and His preach- 
 ing? He founded the Church Militant, and was 
 and is our Captain. We dare not put a premium 
 upon evil, by silently condoning its offences. At 
 the same time it may be freely admitted, a passive 
 attitude of patience and endurance was often the 
 only course open to the Apostles. 
 
 No church can prosper that is not a missionary 
 and a martyr church. Conflict was ever the 
 breath of life and the promise of victory for the 
 faith. Of course we have no Inquisition now, no 
 religion propagated by the faggot or the gibbet, and 
 S. Bartholomew's day and massacre are not likely 
 to repeat themselves. But persecution of a kind 
 there will be and must be, if the light is to shine 
 and the truth to spread. Ignorance, superstition, 
 bigotry, still flourish and have grown polite and 
 pious if not civilized at heart. They stab now but 
 with slander, and they wear white kid gloves and 
 a charming smile. The poison in our time does 
 not hide itself in a convenient glass of wine or cup 
 of chocolate, but contaminates the springs of learn- 
 ing at which we drink. Decorum has gone abroad, 
 and fashion forbids overt violence, but takes the 
 libeller to its bosom and showers its sugar plums 
 
28 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 and favours upon him. And after all, no murder 
 can ever be quite so bad as the destruction of charac- 
 ter, though done in a dainty drawing room by 
 golden insolence or lisped gently out by rose red 
 lips. Those who contend for the truth, and care 
 for nothing but the truth, who refuse to label them- 
 selves by party names and prefer principle to mere 
 worldly achievements or popularity, will have 
 fighting enough. But they remain in the majority, 
 however few in number, because they are on the 
 side of progress and eternal facts, and they know 
 that lasting progress was never accomplished ex- 
 cept by antagonism and under the Cross of Christ. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE SWOED OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 IN the sublime message of mercy, appealing in- 
 timately to our love and faith, one side of the Gos- 
 pel proclamation has been exaggerated and exalted 
 at the expense of the other. " Good tidings of 
 great joy, which shall be to all people on earth 
 peace, good-will toward men " a child can under- 
 stand this. But it contains only half the truth. 
 And unless we see the revelation whole it will be 
 no real revelation, and it may merely lead us astray 
 into some pet heresy masquerading under the dis- 
 guise of a severe orthodoxy. Christ certainly came 
 with the olive branch, but He brought also the 
 Sword. " Think not that I am come to send peace, 
 on earth : I came not to send peace but a Sword.' 1 
 We many, perhaps most of us prefer to overlook 
 this disagreeable fact, and fix our eyes and feast 
 our hearts on what appears so much more pleasant 
 and palatable. That is to say, we like cheap and 
 easy ways, or short cuts to the end desired. But, 
 to be honest with ourselves, salvation has never 
 been offered on these terms. The Sword that 
 guards the gate of Paradise, after the expulsion of 
 Adam and Eve, guards it still. But now it is held 
 
 29 
 
30 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 by the Gospel and not by the Law. We must all 
 pass under it, we must all submit to it, as even the 
 Blessed Virgin did "yea, a sword shall pierce 
 through thy own soul also" though it has been 
 stript of its chief terrors. It no longer comes sim- 
 ply as a Sword of condemnation and death, but 
 to winnow and separate. " For the word of God 
 is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two- 
 edged Sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder 
 of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and 
 is a-discerner of the thoughts and intents of the 
 heart." The meaning seems plain enough. We 
 are clearly taught, the office of the Cross, under the 
 figure of the Sword, is to draw us by division into 
 a closer unity. Wherever it speaks or moves or 
 acts, it operates automatically, so to speak, and by 
 its very presence protests against evil and encourages 
 good. It pronounces judgment immediately, by the 
 simple constitution of its character, and sets the 
 two kingdoms, the two natures, the two camps, 
 over against each other in fruitful rivalry, and end- 
 less antagonism. It cannot indeed be otherwise. 
 The Sword falls as a crucial test, and compels us 
 to fight even if unconsciously and ignorantly, and 
 decide one way or the other between right and 
 wrong and truth and falsehood and the just and the 
 unjust. In the secret soul of the individual, in the 
 bosom of society, in the counsels of "the senate, in 
 the course of history, it pursues its silent and irre- 
 sistible work. Yes, and the very men and women 
 who reject the Gospel and follow some fancy 
 religion of their own , are af ten those most influenced 
 
THE SWORD OF THE GOSPEL 31 
 
 by its action. We are aware or may easily be be- 
 ware in consciousness, how our thoughts and 
 feelings, our motives and wishes, inevitably group 
 themselves into armed opposition. Thereby we 
 confess, if we do not recognise, the piercing of the 
 Cross and the rending of the Sword. We need not 
 deny that Christianity in a sense existed before 
 Christ. We read of Moses, " esteeming the re- 
 proach of Christ greater riches than the treasures 
 in Egypt." But, however this may be, none can 
 reasonably deny, that what was only implicit in the 
 Old Testament became explicit in the New Testa- 
 ment. While admitting the retrospective energy 
 of the Cross, and the fact that all great events must 
 necessarily be prepared for and thus cast the 
 shadows of their coming before they do come on sus- 
 ceptible persons and periods, it is absolutely cer- 
 tain that the Cross could not manifest it's whole 
 force until Christ had lived and died and risen again. 
 And since the Incarnation and the Atonement and 
 the Resurrection and the preaching of the Gospel, 
 we have been lifted up in humanity and yet above 
 humanity on to a higher plane of thought and being. 
 The moral axis, the mental axis of the world, has 
 been changed. Everything now is spiritualized, 
 everything is sacramental. We see holy symbols 
 in the dust that has been quickened for all time 
 by the open (not the empty) Grave of Christ. If 
 we only analysed in the most careless manner our 
 simplest processes of thought, we should be stupe- 
 fied at the discovery that we cannot keep ourselves 
 now from thinking in terms of the Cross. Our 
 
32 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 very syllogisms become little Calvaries. Our pre- 
 dicates may sound worldly and be clogged with the 
 miry clay of earth, our premisses may be Agnostic 
 or Atheist, but these when honestly examined will 
 betray the presence of other elements and the 
 colour and mould of the Cross. Language, in 
 metaphor and simile and etymology, witnesses to 
 the truth and is a living tomb from which the 
 Saviour keeps perpetually arising. And history, 
 though falsified and cut into fancy shapes by cun- 
 ning theorists with a purpose, jealously guards the 
 truth. 
 
 The present age seems in danger of forgetting one 
 solemn fact, one of the foundation stones on which 
 the Gospel builds up the new Church namely, 
 Repentance. We like to confess other persons' 
 sins, our neighbours' faults or our country's wicked- 
 ness, and pre-eminently that of the political party 
 to which we do not belong, but we do not like to 
 confess our own. Yet we will believe anything if 
 need be and under sufficient pressure of evidence or 
 prejudice especially prejudice. The consequence 
 is a new efflorescence of Pharisaism, a fashion of 
 self-righteousness. People suppose the Sword of 
 the Gospel has been sheathed, and in a Christian 
 community, which in spite of occasional revivals in 
 religion thinks at heart there is no need of any 
 conversion except of stock and on the money mar- 
 ket, the idea of Repentance is preposterous. But 
 though the idea may be neither acknowledged nor 
 honoured, the chief offenders who repudiate its 
 hold yet by repeated changes of conduct bear wit- 
 
THE SWORD OF THE GOSPEL 33 
 
 ness to the fact in their lives. They blindly feel 
 the operation of the Sword, constantly putting be- 
 fore them the antagonism of things and saying 
 faintly to the Christian conscience, " Choose you 
 this day whom ye will serve," "come out from 
 them, and be ye separate." We talk of the per- 
 verseuess of people and the irony of events, and it 
 is at such moments that our testimony is given, and 
 it is then we are compelled to fight against our will 
 with the adverse forces. A new policy, a new in- 
 vestment even, may be directly or indirectly a proof, 
 however small, of the unceasing conflict and the 
 Sword that guards the entrance into a state of peace 
 and happiness. 
 
 Christianity has moralized the world and every- 
 thing in it, and made infidelity appear respectable. 
 For that too preaches, and cannot help itself, from 
 a church pulpit, and it is the curve of this singular 
 incongruity that produces an effect at once tragic 
 and comic. We know not whether to laugh or 
 w r eep, when the greatest anti-Christian minds 
 coolly borrow the images of our faith, with which 
 to refute that faith itself unconscious of the in- 
 consistency. 
 
 " Who would not laugh if such a man there be, 
 Who would not weep if Atticus were he?" 
 
 The man w y ho renounces his birthright, in the 
 very act of renunciation accepts it, and could by no 
 possibility do this unless he possessed it. The 
 shadow of the Cross has added an ethical meaning 
 to every fact of life, and to the most material. 
 4 
 
34 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 Some thinkers have tried to exempt Art from the 
 operation of this universal principle, but they have 
 tried in vain. Why, even Science has been con- 
 strained again and again though with reluctant lips 
 to bow before the conqueror, and by its very blas- 
 phemies to admit what it would not admit. " Art 
 for Art's sake " never had such meaning. At the 
 best, what is it but an identical proposition that A 
 is A or Art is Art? Of course, it must be autotelic 
 and have an end and a character of its own. But 
 he would be a bold man, who claimed for it but one 
 side, and that the most obvious and least important. 
 We see everything now in the light of the Cross, and 
 beneath its Sword of judgment that divides instan- 
 taneously the good from the bad, the right from the 
 wrong, and the false from the true. And so the 
 picture or the statue stands before us moralised and 
 spiritualised at once. We do not, we cannot con- 
 template either alone, as an abstract thing and in 
 isolation. We must behold them through an ethical 
 medium and an ethical reaction. They are in 
 some relation to us as moral agents, and 
 do not appeal to the mere artistic taste. They 
 enter into the atmosphere which we breathe, 
 and therefore partake of its tone and temper. The 
 chalk sketch or caricature, scribbled by a child's 
 hand on the dirty canvas of a common wall or gate, 
 in its measure becomes a definite factor in morals. 
 It teaches something, it conveys a message, it im- 
 presses us for better or worse, and though infinitesi- 
 mal ly it connects itself with logical issues and cosmic 
 processes. The drawing is not simply good or bad 
 
THE SWOED OF THE GOSPEL 35 
 
 as a work of art, it is also and inexorably good or 
 bad from the highest point of view, as we see it and 
 as it affects us spiritually. We feel the winnowing 
 power within us, as we regard it with praise or 
 blame, and go away from it discouraged by its de- 
 cadence and pessimism, or encouraged by a glimpse 
 of that eternal optimism which the Gospel reveals 
 and inspires. Art, that rose from the sepulchre of 
 pagan centuries with the Cross in its hand, refuses to 
 be robbed of its privileges and to forget the Church, 
 its mother, at whose sacramental breasts it first 
 drew in the preciousness of life and light. Ecce, 
 ancilla Domini! Over-didactic Art, obviously didac- 
 tic Art, cannot be commended, but we may surely 
 forgive its errors, as we forgive the innocent ex- 
 posures of the ignorant child. But it may be added, 
 that its message is incomplete unless it conveys a 
 moral teaching, and makes us wish to be better than 
 we are and makes us realise our own unworthiness. 
 One ought to feel, before a work of art, as one would 
 feel in the presence of a pure and beautiful woman 
 or in some great cathedral, a conviction of personal 
 sin and a hatred of evil. Art, under the Sword of 
 the Gospel, while this unfolds the antithesis of right 
 and wrong, invites us to repentance. 
 
 " The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." 
 This must not be interpreted in a superficial 
 commonplace sense, as just meaning the bondage of 
 the one agent and the liberty of the other. The 
 passage may indeed bear such an explanation, but 
 it implies a great deal more and a very profound 
 truth. It is the office of the " letter " to kill by 
 
36 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 convicting us of sin. The law leads us to Christ 
 through the gates of the grave, and the corruption 
 in us must be slain before we can live. And the 
 " killing " must always precede the " quickening." 
 For the Spirit uses the " letter" of the law, that 
 by breaking on it we may be made whole in Christ 
 who fulfilled it and satisfied it. And when St. 
 Paul said, " / die daily," he intended us to under- 
 stand that he recognized the office of the " letter," 
 and the necessity of continual confession and con- 
 tinual repentance at the foot of the Cross and in the 
 completeness of the Eternal Sacrifice. But now 
 we are starved with a mutilated Gospel, in an age 
 that hurries to be rich and hurries to be religious 
 and demands the best bargain, by giving as little and 
 getting as much as possible. We say we are sinners 
 and sing the fact to solemn music in ornate services, 
 but we do not believe a word we say. We object 
 to the sifting pain, and the separating ordeal. And 
 we determine to have a maximum of devotion 
 at a minimum of expense. Why should our 
 feelings be needlessly harrowed by the reality 
 of repentance, when the appearance passes as good 
 coin though it is but a miserable counterfeit? And 
 yet if we would just fairly face the truth that the 
 Sword of the Gospel still does its work in us and 
 with us, whether we know it or not, whether we 
 accept it or not, because the Blood of the Cross is 
 now the life of the world and we are saturated with 
 its virtues, we shall see how much better it is to be 
 consciously and willingly in the order of things. Let 
 us resist evil by all means, but let us not resist good, 
 
THE SWORD OF THE GOSPEL 37 
 
 " lest haply " we " be found to fight against God." 
 The daily practice of repentance is the best way in 
 which we can carry on the Holy War within us and 
 equip ourselves for the campaign outside us. It 
 enables us as no other method will, to discern the 
 rift (so to speak) which runs through the cosmos, 
 by which right and wrong are eternally antagonized, 
 and a vaster spiritual synthesis evolves itself. Ours 
 we find is a party world, with a party government, 
 inherent alike in mind and matter, and we must 
 take sides, because we are always both sides, and 
 only by opposition and counter-opposition, by action 
 and reaction, do we grow intellectually and 
 religiously and attain to higher results. And un- 
 less our nature w 7 ere so divided we could never reach 
 the fullest unity. 
 
 Yes, the Cross divides to unite by a Divine anti- 
 thesis. And but for the division there could be no 
 real ultimate reconciliation of progress within us or 
 without. But if God's rule proceeds by comple- 
 mentary factors that through their very clashing 
 consummate and fructify things and attain to a 
 loftier and larger issue, by altruism and egoism, by 
 optimism and pessimism, by correlatives and corres- 
 pondences than in denying each other affirm a prin- 
 ciple that embraces both, we should antecedently 
 expect to find breaches or gaps everywhere in the 
 world of mind and in the world of matter. And 
 this is exactly what we do discover. Continuity 
 stands for ever confronted by Discontinuity, order 
 by disorder, rules by exceptions. Indeed, we might 
 almost reverse the old dictum and say, Natura non 
 
38 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 nisi per saltum progreditur. Some day these faults 
 or flaws, these gulfs, will be bridged over by some 
 wider conception, and we shall prove a periodicity 
 in time and a regular irregularity, and the miracles 
 will not seem interruptions but supplements of 
 Nature. Evolution must be eventually explained 
 in terms of its contrast Revolution. 
 
 E tenebris lux. A pre-established harmony will 
 arise out of the eternal battle between conflicting 
 principles. There is a leap across a chasm to lan- 
 guage, from inarticulate sounds to articulate words, 
 a leap across a chasm to reason, and a leap across a 
 chasm to morality from inanimate to animate, 
 from physical to psychical, and from mechanism to 
 mentality. No doubt, the interval between matter 
 and mind tends to contract, but the void as it 
 appears will remain like the dark lines in the spec- 
 trum, not because it is so empty, but because it is 
 so full of meaning and packed with infinite possibili- 
 ties. Yet faith takes the leap without a pause, and 
 in the integrating flash of a cosmic intuition supplies 
 the key or clue to the insoluble problem, which it 
 could not do unless this were what we call insoluble. 
 Mysteries are its proper food, and but few remain. 
 Even chance now is amenable to law. But we may 
 hazard the conjecture, that, after an impartial sur- 
 vey of the cosmos, it does look as if rooted in its 
 very framework resided a fundamental contradiction 
 of things positive and negative poles. And here 
 we trace a fatal error of Theology, in its mere 
 denunciation of " nature " as opposed to " grace." 
 No doubt, the opposition is real, but it is pro- 
 
THE SWORD OF THE GOSPEL 39 
 
 ductive. "Nature" so-called plays a very im- 
 portant and fruitful part in the development of the 
 soul, nor can it be eradicated without abolishing 
 humanity. God compels evil, which works through 
 
 nature ' ' not to be a co-efficient but certainly to 
 be a co-operative force in our amelioration, and out 
 of its raw material evokes a new character and a new 
 world in a vaster conception. It may be urged 
 that, if we consider God as our Adversary we de- 
 grade Him to the level of Satan. But, in reply to 
 this superficial contention, we may say that the 
 Devil tempts us by enticing into sin and God only 
 tempts us by trial. There are the precious enmities 
 of Love, and the malignant enmities of Hatred. 
 And if just now lacunae here and there abide un- 
 explained, the inexplicable of to-day is the explicable 
 of to-morrow. And if we knew a little more and 
 could see a little further, we should find the lacunae 
 all fitting in somehow and be able even to prophesy 
 their recurrence, as we do the return of comets and 
 eclipses, in mysteries still grander and more inexpli- 
 cable to be again interpreted and subsumed in a 
 superior synthesis. 
 
 We need never be afraid of logical conclusions. 
 And the teaching of the more advanced mathematics 
 tends to prove that any conception, however ex- 
 treme or impossible it may seem, if consistent with 
 itself and obedient to its own laws must be accepted 
 as a fact of a kind and is eternally true as far as it 
 goes. So the principle of unity in difference 
 appears justified by the records of history and the 
 reading of the human mind, and universal testi- 
 
40 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 mony. " For this purpose the Son of God icas 
 manifested, that He might destroy." The present 
 easy-going age wants to forget the Sword of the 
 Gospel, and keep it shut up in the sheath of a vague 
 and general tolerance or a feeble benevolence. Yet 
 even the New Testament superabounds with the 
 contrary doctrine. " Whom the Lord loveth He 
 chasteneth and scourgeth every son whom He 
 receiveth." He chasteneth "/or our profit, that 
 we might be partakers of His Holiness." And 
 "afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of 
 righteousness unto them which are exercised 
 thereby." Here we have the discipline of the 
 Sword, the need of daily confession of sin, daily re- 
 pentance for sin, daily contrition, daily dying, in 
 order that we may thus rise to a new and better 
 life. " // any man ivill come after Me, let him 
 deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me." 
 We have no necessity to multiply instances in sup- 
 port of our assertion. The Gospel, in the way of 
 Nature as well as in the way of Grace, appeals to 
 the psychological constitution of our minds, that 
 sees things set over against each other in fertile an- 
 tagonism, and must fight for salvation as it fights for 
 everything else. The presence, the picture of the 
 Cross with its Sword, suggests and invites the ever- 
 lasting contest between good and evil to which we 
 are born and without which life would have no use 
 and no meaning. Christ links Himself on to the 
 order, that comes through and by disorder, and is 
 justified in us and in His Church by the glorious 
 harvest. We thence are kings and we are slaves, 
 
THE SWORD OF THE GOSPEL 41 
 
 but kings because we are slaves, to Him and to one 
 another. We are priests and we are victims, but 
 we could not be priests unless we were victims first. 
 The virgin element in the cosmos, to which it per- 
 petually returns to repair itself, repeats itself in 
 every new heart and new life. And every soul born 
 again means a baptism for the whole world and a 
 fresh creation and not merely in metaphor. The 
 Sword of the Spirit keeps reaping still. And no 
 one has expressed the fact of conflict and the princi- 
 ple of the Gospel better than the greatest of the 
 apostles who was also " the least." "By honour 
 and dishonour, by evil report and good report, as 
 deceivers and yet true, as unknown and yet wett- 
 known, as dying and behold ice live, as chastened 
 and not killed, as sorrowful yet alway rejoicing, as 
 poor yet making many rich, as having nothing and 
 yet possessing all things." " The earth," says the 
 Haggada, " shook and trembled and would not find 
 rest, until God created Repentance then it stood 
 fast." 
 
 But it stands fast alone in the strength of eternal 
 conflict and Divine instability, through which God 
 walks as Christ of old walked on the stormy waters 
 bringing Peace. " Benedictus Dominus Deus meus : 
 Qui docet manus meas ad prcelium et digitos meos 
 ad bellum." 
 
IV 
 
 COSMOS AND GOSPEL 
 
 WE find the cosmic process given in the Gospel 
 scheme. The economy of Grace, the system of 
 Salvation, makes this immense assumption through- 
 out from the very starting point, and out to the 
 uttermost divagations in remote corollaries, and can 
 only be interpreted in terms of fundamental an- 
 tagonism, absorbed and explained in a higher unity. 
 It is St. Paul's supreme and constant text, and the 
 topic of his most sublime speculations. And the 
 simplest and plainest preaching, from the Epi- 
 Christian age down to our own, whatever its short- 
 comings and however feeble its philosophy, has 
 grasped even through the thick darkness this tre- 
 mendous fact. " Fight the good fight of faith, lay 
 hold on eternal life." The perpetual war between 
 the subject and the object, the external and the 
 internal, the greater and the less, the flesh and the 
 spirit, the church and the world, was recognised in 
 practice if not always understood in principle. It 
 has been too often rashly assumed that Science and 
 Religion, Progress and Faith, are entirely anti- 
 pathetic. No doubt, ultimate truth can only be 
 evolved by this endless opposition, and yet the 
 
 42 
 
COSMOS AND GOSPEL 43 
 
 machinery at the heart of each appears to Be Identi- 
 cal. Science realizes itself, by being eternally di- 
 vided against itself, through the interrogation of 
 Nature. Religion realizes itself by being eternally 
 divided against itself, in the interrogation of Grace. 
 Errors thus are resolved into approximations to fact, 
 and partial verities into more complete verities. For 
 no statement is or ever can be final. 
 
 The slightest consideration should have led 
 thinkers to suspect a common character, common 
 postulates, common operations, in the two worlds 
 so utterly at variance and yet so utterly and inti- 
 mately one. The unit of knowledge in Science and 
 in Philosophy, is subject contra object, and the unit 
 of Religion is subject contra object. And in both 
 spheres we ascend step by step, stage by stage, 
 through the collision of repugnant elements to new 
 conceptions and larger reconciliations. There could 
 be no doubt except for faith. It is the faith behind 
 the doubt that gives it any virtue or vitality. And 
 it may be urged with equal force, vice versa, there 
 could be no faith except for doubt. It is the doubt 
 within the faith, that renders the faith creative and 
 encroaching, and conducts it by countless revisions 
 and readjustments to something vaster and stronger 
 still. The one implies and suggests the other. 
 They work together, by working in opposition, 
 through an infinitely fruitful interaction, and it is 
 impossible to imagine any useful or solid results 
 without. " Fight the good fight of faith." It is 
 a cosmic process, and a principle of Grace, by which 
 we continually restate our premisses and reformu- 
 
44 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 late our theories and advance slowly by every dis- 
 puted fact. The pathway of Progress lies across 
 the Campo Santo of imperfect creeds and beautiful 
 yet buried superstitions. Faith keeps affirming and 
 accepting dogma after dogma, and doubt moves 
 pari passu for ever refusing and denying them, and 
 by the unceasing contest fresh inspirations flash out 
 like fire and new revelations build up a new heaven 
 and earth for society, till the old crystallizing period 
 begins again and again a scornful scepticism com- 
 pels inquiry and reconstruction. An uncritical be- 
 lief is a doomed belief, a dying belief, even a dead 
 belief, that contained in it from the first the seed 
 of its own eventual dissolution. The conservative 
 part of us dislikes the judicial spirit and resents its 
 action, when it weighs effects and doctrines in its 
 balances and finds them wanting. The writing on 
 the wall disturbs the easy-going arm chair 
 Christianity, when it only asks for peace and quiet- 
 ness, in pious ignorance that they are only the 
 peace and quietness of the grave and the worms of 
 corruption have already commenced to crawl and 
 devour. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin! Lite the 
 Persian assault, free inquiry, the one best friend of 
 truth, subverts established relations and overthrows 
 the ancient vested interests. And yet we ought to 
 be grateful for the Higher Criticism. It has merely 
 given the Bible a fresh and longer lease of life, and 
 set Christianity upon a firmer basis. The road to 
 Heaven will be found ultimately paved with the 
 bones of the Higher Critics, and the geography 
 mainly German to the very door. The learned artil- 
 
COSMOS AKD GOSPEL 45 
 
 lery of cultivated doubt has perhaps undermined a 
 few trembling tenets and obsolete outworks, but the 
 apparent loss is real gain and the citadel remains 
 strong as ever and inexpugnable. Faith does not 
 demand or require the aid of the Ephesian mob. 
 Better by far the open attacks of educated doubt, . 
 than the fatal defence of ignorance and bigotry. 
 From its very nature, as a fighting religion, the 
 Gospel invites the fullest inquiry, and only thus can 
 it ascertain its weak points and unguarded aspects. 
 A doctrine, that is but at the utmost a splendid in- . 
 firmity, though dressed in royal robes and supported 
 by the conspiracy of centuries, must give its place 
 and crown to the humblest truth. King Cophetua 
 chose the beggar maid. 
 
 The truths which correspond to the Death and 
 Eesurrection of Christ are eternal acts, and possess 
 a continuous efficacy. He was "the Lamb slain 
 from the foundation of the world." In a meta- 
 physical sense Christianity was nothing new, or it 
 would not have been true. The verity, of which 
 the Cross is our sacred symbol, was from ever- 
 lasting and will be to everlasting. History gives 
 no uncertain testimony to the endless antagonism of 
 light and darkness, the imperfect and the relatively 
 perfect idea, as civilization unfolded itself in a re- 
 ligious atmosphere. We have competing facts and 
 fancies, contending illusions and feelings, each suc- 
 ceeding battle issuing in mighty products of thought 
 to be soon in their turn yet mightier problems. 
 Quod erat demonstrandum we say. And, before the 
 echo of the confident words has fully died away, 
 
46 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 the proof which could only be effective for a period 
 is disproved, and the eternal enigma presents it- 
 self to be stated and solved again in some novel 
 culture or creed, some solemn institution with its 
 immortality of a passing moment in the never- 
 ceasing cosmic process. Anaxagoras or Archimedes 
 cried " Eureka," and the very shout of triumph 
 shows the hour has gone, and different conditions 
 clamour imperiously for different interpretations. 
 IIov crroi we ask, but the locus standi when dis- 
 covered only becomes a locus movendi. Subject 
 contra object, grows into subject versus object, and 
 then subject plus object, in a superior generaliza- 
 tion of disagreements that agree to divide and 
 evolve richer fruits. We start with the family or 
 tribe against the individual, then in a more complex 
 social synthesis we see the individual against the 
 community and asserting his rights with a passionate 
 prominence, and now we have once more the State 
 against the individual and claiming more and con- 
 ceding less. Each fresh stage of development has 
 been achieved by the conflict of rival forces, by 
 giving and taking and through gain and loss. In 
 every upward and onward movement we may note 
 after the temporary clash of struggling elements a 
 certain fusion and ascent in a wider principle. The 
 individual and the community are now at war, and 
 years or centuries hence we shall have a kind of 
 Christian Socialism, in which the private person 
 will be merged to rediscover himself in a fuller form. 
 Surrender of particular rights in the end emerges 
 as the acquisition of finer powers and fuller interests. 
 
COSMOS AND GOSPEL 47 
 
 The sacrifice of the one is the benefit and liberty 
 of all, and in turn and inexorably the sacrifice of 
 all is the benefit and liberty of the one. Labour 
 and capital, classes and masses, ability and dis- 
 ability, antagonize each other and keep perpetually 
 changing their fronts to re-appear in other and 
 broader shapes. Privilege or monopoly first held 
 the field, the few against the many, the rulers 
 against the slaves. From ages of discussion and 
 strife, reformation and revolution tardily wrung the 
 conception of rights. Equality and inequality, 
 feudalism and freedom, opportunity and unen- 
 franchisement, quarrelled and shed blood in rivers 
 till the charters arrived at last bestowed by the 
 benediction of the Cross. And now we have among 
 us the action and counteraction of Conformity and 
 Nonconformity, representing modern statements of 
 eternal opposition and the mind divided against 
 itself in order to understand and realize itself. And 
 yet, no sooner has the Nonconformist defined his 
 position and seceded into his camp of ' ' passive re- 
 sistance " than he ceases to be a Nonconformist and 
 becomes ipso facto a bigoted Conformist and pillar 
 of his Establishment. And, as the warfare pro- 
 ceeds, he grows into something higher and better 
 and more liberal, though without any renunciation of 
 the party name in his mental outlook and practice. 
 So with the nominal Conformist, in accepting his 
 limitations he already sees farther ahead and has 
 stepped across them into a region beyond all ex- 
 ternal bounds and rites. Both Conformist and Non- 
 conformist, in the very act of self-definition, trans- 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
48 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 cended their respective fixed points of view, and 
 could not indeed justify themselves or their beliefs 
 unless they did so. This psychological necessity 
 arises from the presence and influence of the Cross 
 as the dominating factor in life. Christ, whether 
 known or unknown, rejected or received, operates 
 thus by the inherent antagonism of thoughts and 
 things. And where His Spirit breathes and moves 
 and works, and His Spirit energises everywhere, 
 we meet the radical antithesis, the armies of good 
 and evil, greater benefit and less benefit, advance 
 and retrogression, confronting each other on a thou- 
 sand Calvaries and crucifying Christ again for new 
 atonements and new resurrections, for new ascen- 
 sions and new Pentecosts. History repeats itself 
 yes, but never on exactly the same plane, and 
 never in precisely the same manner. For 
 past and present and future are all one, each may 
 be expressed in the terms of the other two. And 
 still " non pendebit semper inter latroncs Christus, 
 resurget aliquando crucifixa vcritas." 
 
 If we can ask any transcendental questions, that 
 postulate or presume a higher synthesis, how shall 
 we explain this? Here is a fact like any other fact 
 of consciousness or experience, that must fall into 
 some sort of order and come under some kind of 
 category. The very questions imply a logical cor- 
 respondence, an organic connexion, and as soon as 
 they are stated they cease to be transcendental and 
 are overcome and rise into a larger union. What- 
 ever we see clearly must be true for the individual 
 on his particular plane of existence at any rate and 
 
COSMOS AND GOSPEL 49 
 
 true for his society in so far as he reacts upon it 
 in that direction. Increased knowledge means in- 
 creased light, and light is a solvent. It breaks 
 down old systems, and from the ruins and deeps of 
 disintegration it builds up new systems. Illu- 
 minated learning in its turn and time, by its 
 antagonism to fresh discoveries that open out still 
 wider horizons and avenues of thought, passes 
 inevitably under the eclipse of age and decay and is 
 once more resolved into a statelier and stronger 
 form. The glorious errors or fancies or visions of 
 yesterday, are the commonplaces of to-day. The 
 wildest romance soon grows into a working reality 
 and daily practical procedure. The preposterous 
 absurdities of to-day will be the current coin of to- 
 morrow, and the contemporary philosopher or his 
 theory will be a toy for his grandchildren to play 
 with. The impossible Utopia of Home Eulers and 
 Idealists is merely preparing a bed on which the man 
 in the street may lie. Facts every moment prove 
 stronger than fiction. The mathematician's heaven 
 in its most subtle and curious extension, is sure to 
 be surpassed by more cunning solutions, as he goes 
 from infinity to infinity. 
 
 No conception can transcend in the regions of 
 imagination the evolutions of fact. St. Paul's great 
 doctrine of Obedience anticipates Modern Science. 
 " Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the 
 Truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love." 
 Here we have religious enlightenment by a process 
 of purging, or the contention of opposites, through 
 discipline and the acceptance of conditions. 
 5 
 
50 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 " Natura vincitur parendo." Again, the Apostle 
 declares " obedience " is " unto righteousness.' 1 
 The fight of faith issues in the annexation of fresh 
 and fairer territories for the support of the soul. No 
 height, no good thing, stands outside or above the 
 reach of a militant love and hope and trust. Obedi- 
 ence means conformity to the given conditions. 
 Each acceptance involves a proportionate gain and 
 a religious growth. We rise from heaven to heaven, 
 from harmony to harmony, through obedience unto 
 obedience. Byron finely expresses it, in his per- 
 fect picture of the gladiator's death : 
 
 "Consents to death, but conquers agony." 
 Submission to the strife is victory over the strife, 
 and a loftier stage acquired to be surmounted itself 
 when outworn. God Himself recognizes and em- 
 braces the limits which He imposes upon us. 
 " Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience 
 by the things which He suffered." That makes 
 the problem of innocent suffering comparatively 
 easy, in the light of Christ's Cross and the con- 
 sequent solidarity of the human race. Fight by 
 obedience, by yielding cheerfully to the yoke of the 
 law laid down, and engrained in the very vital con- 
 stitution and organic meaning and mystery of the 
 whole cosmos. There is one Leader, and the sol- 
 dier follows Him and thus in his part and place and 
 time learns how to govern or command. Obedi- 
 ence necessarily implies in its very act a new and 
 higher synthesis. Discordant elements are recon- 
 ciled at last, through a belligerent process of purifi- 
 cation, and unite to form by conquest on the one 
 
COSMOS AND GOSPEL 51 
 
 hand and by captivity on the other hand a nobler 
 attitude and a larger prospect. The most out- 
 rageous errors and excesses, abuses and adultera- 
 tions, fused in the crucible of criticism, make 
 materials for further advances and reappear trans- 
 figured in a grander truth. Nothing is or can be 
 wasted, if all is rightly considered. Nature must 
 be economical, and the apparent spendthrift proves 
 on re-examination to be but a jealous miser seek- 
 ing for new and richer investments, though the 
 action may seem at first sight circuitous and extra- 
 vagant. A severe parsimony really regulates the 
 treatment of what seems superficially mere slag and 
 refuse, and from the rubbish of discarded bye- 
 products come jewels of thought and greater powers 
 for our service. And we can only remain in the 
 fundamental order by being against it, and obey by 
 disobeying. The world perpetually defies us, and 
 challenges us to the contest, till we overcome it by 
 accepting its terms and laws, that we may use them 
 as our servants and extend them at last in other 
 and even contrary directions. By capitulation to 
 the conditions we find, we subdue them to be our 
 instruments. The sword of meekness, sharpened 
 on defeats, proves in the end irresistible. The 
 dyer's hand takes the colour of the material but yet 
 he makes the material what he will. We learn 
 by failure, we rise by falling. 
 
 In the commercial world, we find increasingly the 
 spectacle of combination arrayed against combina- 
 tion, the employers against the employed, and con- 
 tinually re-adjusted relations in the promotion of 
 
52 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 trade. This is as it should be, and as it always 
 will be. In the organic system of Society, each 
 member of the body only does his duty and fulfils 
 his part and produces the proper amount of work 
 by competing and therefore co-operating with every 
 other. The oscillating balance between the 
 different members maintains the health of each one 
 and the life of the whole community. Where we 
 meet an unfair predominance either of the 
 employers or the employed, we discover a diseased 
 organism which can only recover its rights and tone 
 by some fundamental disturbance. We have to 
 choose between evolution and revolution. In trade 
 at the present time we can discern a steady move- 
 ment upwards towards a new synthesis, in which 
 again the new elements will antagonise each other 
 and rise to a yet fuller development. The indivi- 
 dual tends to become a kind of collective man, and 
 the collective man will then be re-individualised to 
 undergo the same process once more. We have 
 a rhythmical recurrence, but always on a higher and 
 higher plane. Teuton and Celt, to take a larger 
 field, Scandinavian and Slav, old world and new 
 world, mother country and colony, North and South, 
 Occidental and Oriental, all possess different ideals, 
 aspirations, theories and conducts of life. Their 
 hopes and fears and ambitions seem diametrically 
 opposed. We see work arrayed against rest, the 
 useful condemning the beautiful, the energy con- 
 fronting fatalism, aggression conquering indiffer- 
 ence. Turk and American divided by centuries 
 and irreconcilable interests stand at dnpgors drawn 
 
COSMOS AND GOSPEL 53 
 
 diyladiantur . To. the Buddhist life hereafter, 
 immortality, is neither desired nor desirable it 
 appears to him an unmitigated curse. Not merely 
 are peoples divided by continents and oceans, by 
 mountains and deserts, but by racial instincts and 
 ingrained antipathies. The conflict of nationalities 
 is a real one, because the idea is as real as that of 
 empire philosophically false and unmeaning. Arti- 
 ficial distinctions only suit artificial periods. For 
 
 " Bright and fierce and fickle is the South, 
 And dark and true and tender is the North." 
 
 What will be the final outcome of contending 
 races, nobody can guess. But, to judge by analogy, 
 the white and the brown and the yellow and the 
 red and the black will draw nearer and nearer to 
 each other, acting and re-acting on each other, 
 giving to and taking from each other, and slowly 
 improving each other, never quite losing all their 
 differences while growing into fairer types. We 
 may perhaps at last arrive at a supreme synthesis 
 of United States of all the continents, held by the 
 attachment of their very disunited qualities. Thus 
 the cosmic process continues, while Jewish separa- 
 tion meets Gentile fusion, expediency quarrels 
 with principle, and precedent or prescription clashes 
 with reason or argument, approaching in the end 
 by some celestial casuistry to some fresh transcen- 
 dent compromise. Everything seems at once 
 autotelic and heterotelic, self-regarding and self- 
 ending because other-regarding and other-ending. 
 Automata do not and cannot exist, and mechanism 
 interprets nothing and not even itself. Christianity 
 
54 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 is the final explanation of life through death, and 
 its instrument Antagonism (the Cross) an educa- 
 tion that prepares the soul for the reception of God 
 and ushers us into His Presence. The person 
 widens through contact with the supreme Divine 
 Personality. Character, or the individual will, 
 working in a definite direction through and against 
 the indefinite, grows by constant warfare. Religion 
 introduces us to ourselves in God, through morality 
 its raw material. We cannot logically stop at man as 
 the ultimate terminus a quo and ad quern. We must 
 travel further still, to find the longest way about the 
 shortest way home. Even the useful amoeba and 
 convenient protoplasm or bathybius need not arrest 
 us long. We trace antagonism in the very incuna- 
 bala of animals and even plants, and where we trace 
 antagonism w r e trace also rudimentary ethics. The 
 lowliest vegetation, that rejects the evil and accepts 
 and assimilates the good, though but by way of 
 nutriment, displays the dawn of a moral sense which 
 discriminates between competing alternatives, the 
 right and the wrong. Egotistic man wants to keep 
 God and Heaven and Free Will and Immortality 
 all to himself, and to close with the false issue of 
 dead matter which we meet nowhere. Animals 
 can make out a respectable claim to share in his 
 monopoly. In the first (if there ever was a first) 
 response of so-called matter to its environment, and 
 a preference exhibited in the selection of one object 
 out of many, religion begins. Mind has been 
 called educated matter, but is not matter rather 
 uneducated mind? And yet we do matter grave 
 
COSMOS AND GOSPEL 55 
 
 injustice by saying so much or rather so little, 
 for its potentialities appear to be absolutely infinite. 
 Heaven is first material and local, then universal 
 and spiritual ; first a place , then a point of view ; 
 first a locus and then the focus of everything. And 
 hell can only be its opposite, the damnation of re- 
 fused conditions, the endless torment of death that 
 chooses to die and not to live. Sin is negation that 
 remains negation, and declines to return to the posi- 
 tive. It rejects Christ, revealing Himself by the 
 Cross as the Eeconciler of all differences, and the 
 connecting-point of all possible and impossible rela- 
 tions, in an ever-ascending revelation by with- 
 drawal and progress by antagonism. 
 
 " I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and 
 hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest 
 know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy 
 name, am the God of Israel . . . . / form the light 
 and create darkness: 1 make peace and create evil: 
 I the Lord do all these things." "And God said, 
 Let there be light, and there was Light." 
 
 We see the operation of this vast and vital law, 
 progress by antagonism, through ten thousand 
 varied manifestations. It confronts us everywhere, 
 from the first Scriptural statement of it at the be- 
 ginning of the Bible, in the action of the Divine 
 Spirit on Chaos, while we read its enunciation in 
 the blessing of the curse pronounced on man, " / 
 will put enmity between thee and the woman and 
 between thy seed and her seed: it shall bruise thy 
 head, and thou shall bruise his heel." We have a 
 glimpse of it, or seem to have a glimpse of it, per- 
 
56 THE KEEPEB OF THE KEYS 
 
 haps, in cosmic and hyper-cosmic, inimical and yet 
 not unfriendly inter-relations, that open a door to 
 miracles or unrecognised laws. It meets us 
 through the daily, hourly, momently conflict in our 
 universal consciousness and experience of intelli- 
 gence and feeling, issuing in a new balance 
 which partakes of both intelligence and feeling, 
 and yet is neither, because it carries up both 
 on to a higher level, though feeling has always 
 a tendency to predominate. We find it in 
 the irreconcilable attitude of liberty and order 
 or discipline, in the hostility between the ideas of 
 private property and communism, whether articu- 
 late or inarticulate, in the interaction of Church 
 and State and the last new phase of religious or 
 irreligious decadence and common-sense, and the 
 perpetual conflict of expediency and principle. 
 
 " The old order changeth. yielding place to new, 
 And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 
 
V 
 
 THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 
 
 THE art and science and literature of any given 
 period will be found upon examination to present a 
 clear family likeness, because they all work in a 
 common medium and draw out of a common fund 
 of ideas. Plagiarism does not enter here. Con- 
 fronted by the same problems, baptized into the 
 same spirit, we cannot but think in similar terms, 
 locally or imperially, as the case may be and as the 
 circumstances require. Nobody altogether escapes 
 the tone of his environment which touches him at 
 a thousand points, and everyone, more or less, must 
 take the form and pressure of the age. Even the 
 man of genius only sees a little farther than the 
 others, and only feels the constraint of his condi- 
 tions a little less. We all so far dance in fetters, 
 but some dance with greater grace. And it is the 
 bondage itself, that, by a pre-determined recoil, be- 
 comes our very freedom. Cast-iron customs, ideas 
 that not only rule us but tyrannise over us, grow a 
 grinding yoke and invite the response of an inevit- 
 able reaction. Thoughts and institutions go again 
 into the great melting-pot of discussion or concus- 
 sion, and re-appear in a new harmony of higher 
 
 57 
 
58 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 forms and conceptions. Eeligion is certainly no 
 exception to the universal rule, and perhaps more 
 than anything else keeps demanding a new 
 philosophy, expressing the colour and feeling of the 
 time, to re-adjust its shape in accordance with the 
 vital needs and new vision of hungry souls, that 
 cannot live unless this is done. 
 
 Now the prevailing ideas of our own period seem 
 obvious enough, and exhibit a curious conformity 
 to no uncertain type. They are freedom or liberty, 
 tolerance, charity, altruism, philanthropy, socialism, 
 an open mind and an open door not merely to other 
 people's property but to the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 The public benefactor still may and does empty the 
 contents of his neighbour's pockets into the alms- 
 bag, in the greatness of his concern, but he also 
 contributes something of his own. Leniency has 
 become almost criminal in its regard for the alleged 
 rights of the most depraved, and often would almost 
 rather compound a felony than let the offender bear 
 the appropriate penalty. We not only explain away 
 the worst offences, and lay the onus on heredity, 
 and the ancestral germ-plasm or the surroundings, 
 but we even excuse them with a light heart. 
 Science itself has its large credulities and generous 
 superstitions, and will cheerfully re-open any ques- 
 tion and shelter any craze that appeals to its um- 
 brageous protection and approaches with the sweet 
 sop of judicious flattery. It is easy then to see 
 the menace of an invertebrate religion and a flabby 
 multicellular morality. The temper that considers all 
 faiths equally good and welcomes with effusion to 
 
THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 59 
 
 the hospitable shelter of its Pantheon any new god 
 or creed, and only asks us to be earnest in some- 
 thing, runs a serious risk of relaxing the foundations 
 on which all cults and ethics finally repose. Liberty 
 tends to licence, forbearance to weakness, and kind- 
 ness to the worst kind of cruelty, if it lays aside the 
 rod of correction and rejects the knife, when only a 
 severe surgical operation can save the patient's life. 
 What this century, that is so namby-pamby in 
 spite of noble efforts, really and truly demands is a 
 doctrine of definite contrasts in a more virile faith 
 and a less visionary love. " / am come," said 
 Christ, " to set a man at variance against his father, 
 and the daughter against her mother, and the 
 daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And 
 a man's foes shall be they of his own household. 1 ' 
 Here we have a Divine forecast of the necessary 
 antagonism involved in the Gospel, and the only 
 manner in which it can operate with lasting effect. 
 Decision is and must be in its particular area divi- 
 sion. The choice may not always lie only between 
 the good and the bad, but between the good and 
 the better, or between the better and the best. 
 "Not Lancelot nor another." " Le meilleur est 
 toujours 1'ennemi du bien." Countless things are 
 in themselves good and desirable, or for ourselves 
 up to a certain point or for a certain time or in cer- 
 tain ways, or for others and not for us. The fact 
 that they once were spiritual food or may eventually 
 become spiritual food, does not make them so just 
 now, " / have many things to say unto you, but ye 
 cannot bear them now. 1 ' The law of accommodation 
 
60 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 holds good everywhere. And unless the greater love 
 casts out (not simply fear but) the lesser love, we 
 shall never grow and shall remain intellectually and 
 religiously children. Growth means gradual and per- 
 petual revising of ideas, restatement of our predi- 
 cates and re-adjustment to our conditions, or it 
 means nothing. Endless conflict, between friendly 
 no less than hostile forces, conducts us by an im- 
 placable logic to higher reconciliations. For 
 instance, to incipient industries and new-born insti- 
 tutions, State support, Protection, the assurance of 
 the secular arm, seem legitimate and indispensable. 
 But the stately fabric, in its adult magnificence, 
 would be merely injured by artificial props. The 
 scaffolding falls off, the swaddling bands automati- 
 cally release themselves, and the edifice stands alone 
 whether trade or church, pondcribus librata suis. 
 The higher expels the lower, the greater the less, 
 the better the w r orse, and the fresh buds of Spring 
 extrude the dead leaves that linger yet. Religion 
 or Christianity is a song of degrees, a pilgrimage of 
 ascents. We rise from lower levels, from love to 
 love, from grace to grace, from glory to glory, 
 through unceasing contests in which the smaller 
 good eternally disputes the invasion of the grander 
 good, till it is conquered in a loftier and completer 
 synthesis. Every now and then our faith arises 
 from a temporary eclipse or slumber, for in the 
 awful rhythm of progress intervals of torpor appear 
 requisite and the heart itself sleeps between its beats 
 or it would soon wear out the machinery, and we 
 have a resurrection of the dry bones as in the gor- 
 
THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH Gl 
 
 geous prophecy of Ezekiel. Systole and diastole, 
 inspiration and exspiration. Religion, so to speak, 
 at times, retreats into itself to recuperate its powers, 
 and then returns with oceanic impulse and more 
 than tidal energy. The slumbering strife breaks 
 out again, with redoubled might, and society is 
 shaken to its foundations by some colossal per- 
 sonality or spiritual force, a Wesley, a Whitefield, 
 a Newman, a Loisy. Then the old problem asserts 
 itself once more, as it has from the days of Abra- 
 ham and Lot down to the modern statesman's last 
 resolution or irresolution, policy or impolicy, and the 
 present weird revival on the bleak hills of wild 
 Wales. " // any man come to Me and hate not 
 his father and mother and wife and children yea, 
 and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.' 1 
 No one will contend that parents and wife and chil- 
 dren are not good and precious possessions, and yet 
 any one of them may be thrust between us and 
 something dearer and better far in the gift of God 
 alone, and become an enemy of the latter. A 
 higher call, a deeper claim, a revolution in the evolu- 
 tion of the soul, may compel us to decide against 
 these tender ties in the clash of opposing interests. 
 " Forget also thine own people and thy father's 
 house." The state militant declares itself and 
 commands us to remember we are always first and 
 last fighting units in a fighting world. But the 
 tendency of our time is to make things easy, to 
 smooth over difficulties, to acquiesce in the norm of 
 indifference, and to turn the sword of the Gospel 
 into a ploughshare or plaything, or to regard it as 
 
62 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 but an interesting relic or anachronism surviving 
 from the savagery of Puritanism. But feeble and 
 fatuous benevolence, whatever it may be, is not love 
 or true charity. Kindness may be merciless, a 
 consuming fire, and what wrath can be compared to 
 " the wrath of the Lamb?" Love seeks to justify 
 its existence, and proves itself by the sharpness of 
 its weapons and the tremendous range of its exac- 
 tions. It will have all or nothing, and brooks no 
 rival near its throne. " And from the days of John 
 the Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven 
 stiff ereth violence and the violent take it by force.'' 
 " Strive (agonise) to enter in at the straight gate." 
 Some may object, that strong expressions appro- 
 priate in an age of ethnic enmity and universal war, 
 in spite of the boasted Pax Romana, have no value 
 or significance now. And yet experience refutes 
 this immediately, the testimony of our own hearts 
 maintains that nothing worth having was ever won 
 without a determined struggle. Our Saviour spoke 
 not as a politician or the representative of a con- 
 quered country, He took no petty national point of 
 view, but He spoke as the Captain of our salvation 
 calling His faithful soldiers to follow Him and walk 
 in His footsteps from one battlefield to another. No 
 doubt He bade us love our enemies, but He also 
 bade us hate the very nearest and dearest if they 
 would drag us down or if they conflicted with our 
 sublimest and supreme interests. St. Paul, on the 
 same lines and continuing and completing His Mas- 
 ter's thought, said he was determined henceforth 
 to know no man any more after the flesh. The 
 
THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 63 
 
 demands of the earthly home and the heavenly home 
 antagonise each other, and the submission of the 
 former lifts us up into the broader union of the great 
 cosmic Christian family. Domestic ties are strong, 
 but spiritual ties are stronger. And no bonds on 
 earth were ever formed but to be broken, and finally 
 merged in other bonds, more beautiful and great. 
 Love cannot define itself, unless it appeals to higher 
 and yet higher vantage posts. And these will never 
 be attained or apprehended, without a process of 
 everlasting renunciation, by w r hich our hearts are 
 purged of mortal grossness and the grave of each 
 buried idol becomes a resurrection ground. And 
 the Christ, who reveals Himself in the breaking of 
 bread, reveals Himself also in the breaking of lives 
 and thus as Love. 
 
 The chronic belligerency of Nature meets us at 
 every turning of the road. We find, not merely 
 in the laboratory with its artificial products and for 
 each toxin its equivalent antitoxin, the poison and 
 the antidote side by side and upon the same stalk, 
 drawn up in battle array for the everlasting conflict, 
 to evolve in the end a vaster harmony. The opposi- 
 tion of the two is the corner stone of the gigantic 
 building, and at the heart of the storm and above the 
 hostile shock is born of it a perpetual peace. Even 
 in the very circulation of the blood science dis- 
 covers two contending armies in constant collision, 
 the white corpuscles of health (called phagocytes or 
 leucocytes) and the microbes of disease, now it is 
 asserted daintily dressed with a peculiar " opsonin " 
 sauce, to render them more palatable. The sound 
 
64 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 and the unsound fight for the mastery, the destruc- 
 tive and the constructive elements, and out of their 
 salutary strife emerge better tone and tissue for the 
 body and brain. The appetite for fasting, if the 
 paradox may be permitted, appears a true and 
 proper instinct. Repletion and depletion for ever 
 war with each other to effect the most beneficial 
 results. And, as breeders know, prepotency in the 
 sexes or the determination of either sex desired owes 
 much and perhaps most to the preponderance of the 
 former or the latter. We oscillate naturally be- 
 tween feasts and fasts, as every religion has felt, 
 from the time when the meal and the sacrifice were 
 one. And " grace " before meals seems a survival 
 of the fact, and points to a sacramental value. Our 
 great Church has acted wisely in appointing a regu- 
 lar series of fasts and feasts and vigils, which 
 testify to a permanent truth and are a profound 
 recognition of the eternal cosmic order. Life, 
 wherever we look, is a beautiful poem with marked 
 strophe and antistrophe, and a splendid periodicity 
 in the recurring pendulum of passion and action, 
 pulse and counter pulse. Tidal winds and waves, 
 cold and heat, summer and winter, rain and drought, 
 in an oscillating balance maintain that unstable 
 equilibrium which makes the world go round. 
 Vergil's science was faulty, but he may have had a 
 dim and distant glimpse of the great law, when he 
 wrote " omnia ventorum concurrere prcelia vidi." 
 And why, to visit a different province altogether, is 
 poetry so defective now poetry with its lost predi- 
 cate? Why, since the death of Browning nml 
 
THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 65 
 
 Tennyson " serene creators of immortal things," 
 have we found no successor to fill or even occupy 
 their thrones, and no one could proudly say, " Sunt 
 mihi quce possint sceptra decere rnanus." We have 
 plenty of true and brilliant poetry still, and none 
 more virile than John Davidson's, but it is purely 
 unifocal and not as it should be (like great poetry) 
 bifocal and bifacial. It is either thought or feeling, 
 when it should be both thought and feeling, either 
 subjective or objective when it should be both sub- 
 jective and objective either optimist or pessimist, 
 when it should be both optimist and pessimist 
 either personal or cosmopolitan, when it should be 
 both personal and cosmopolitan Either particular 
 or universal, when it should be both particular and 
 universal. We want both the private accent of 
 the individual and the larger utterance of the cos- 
 mos. Vox populi is sometimes vox Dei. And the 
 popular judgment in this case seems justified. It 
 is only as Browning and Tennyson and all great 
 poets knew so well in practice if they never formu- 
 lated the actual theory, by the interaction of these 
 rival elements that the masterpieces of art can be 
 produced. Even our uncrowned king, the man in 
 the street, who is so true a guide, has a hazy 
 perception that there is something wrong and some- 
 thing wanting about our present poetry, and so 
 publishers cannot sell it and readers will not buy it. 
 And hence it stands before us one-sided and there- 
 fore self -condemned. 
 
 The same disease or defect holds good unfortu- 
 nately as to the preaching of the present day 
 6 
 
66 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 preaching often fluent, ready, resourceful, culti- 
 vated, but with a fatal shortcoming. Not so much 
 because the immoral doctrine of Vicarious Punish- 
 ment, rather than the moral doctrine of Vicarious 
 Suffering, too frequently confronts us. Nor even 
 because the lost language of Symbolism is still not 
 understood and not appreciated by so many teachers, 
 who should have learned from a study of both Tes- 
 taments that the very best possible words can never 
 interpret the deepest mysteries, and we need a 
 different tongue. An ineradicable craving, seated 
 in the ultimate foundations of human nature, 
 demands rite and form and ceremony and music and 
 colour and movement, to express our spiritual needs 
 and afford, however faintly, some sort of religious 
 satisfaction. Grave as these two errors are, they 
 do not seem so dangerous as the fumbling kind of 
 faith which our pulpits generally announce and 
 require. No wonder, " the hungry sheep look up 
 and are not fed." No wonder the masses remain 
 untouched and unimpressed, and the old triumphant 
 dictum of the Church might be fairly reversed and 
 stated as "extra ecclesiam omnis salus." The 
 preaching is too often a semblance of dream 
 preaching, without any definite relation to hard 
 facts and the present world. It looks more like the 
 diffusive life of sleep with its wild visions, than the 
 concentrated life of reality and working men. 
 Faith possesses no meaning and no message, unless 
 it presents itself as a fighting force and a definite 
 challenge to the indefinite which surrounds us, 
 from which by a succession of conquering postulates 
 
THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 67 
 
 it builds up a definite religion. It is will applied 
 to the speculative and spiritual, that maintains 
 eternal war with any form of doubt. The cheap 
 and vulgar faith, expressed as a purely passive atti- 
 tude and simple reception of certain alleged truths, 
 will never regenerate mankind. The most ignorant, 
 by a wise intuition, indignantly reject it. Of 
 course, the unhappy separation of action from faith 
 is to a great extent responsible for the mutilated and 
 mumbling Gospel of to-day. And yet the great 
 Apostle stated the one position and gave the one 
 explanation, when he wrote of the " work of faith 
 and labour of love." Worshippers, who repose 
 under the shadows of the " flapdoodle trees," and 
 wait and wait and expect the "flapdoodle juice" to 
 drip down into their open mouths, will wait and 
 wait and expect for ever, as the " rusticus expectat 
 dum defluat amnis." Lethargy is not faith, and 
 inert hope is not faith. No, for faith is creative and 
 wields all the powers of the imagination and has 
 behind it the divine omnipotence of a free volition, 
 and faith makes what it wills, as it wills what it 
 makes. What the Christian world is dying for, 
 what the slums and the submerged tenth insistently 
 demand as a spiritual and moral minimum, is an 
 aggressive militant faith, which by a perpetual 
 negation of the doubting and indefinite carries its 
 crusade into the enemy's country and thus, so to 
 speak, recovers the lost Holy Grail. Mealy- 
 mouthed benevolence, a nebulous feeling of tepid 
 good-will towards all men, good and bad alike, rich 
 in pious platitudes and comfortable generalities and 
 
68 THE KEfiPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 convenient abstractions, will never save a soul nor 
 vanquish the vicious Trinity of Infidelity and In- 
 temperance and Impurity. We want, in the first 
 place, a faith that believes in itself and is sure of 
 itself, because it has renounced itself, and in the 
 act of renunciation recovered itself in Christ alone. 
 And, in the second place, when we have found in 
 Christ the one mediating term, we ask for a fight- 
 ing faith that in its very defeats yet overcomes its 
 enemies the most, and by unending missionary 
 effort and martyrdom, realises itself in every resist- 
 ance and annexes new converts and new territories 
 for the truth of the Cross. It has been said, that, 
 if our Lord is Life to the Church and to the indivi- 
 dual we have an immediate contact and direct Pre- 
 sence. No doubt this view expresses an important 
 truth, but it seems to ignore the fact of the eternal 
 conflict between subject and object. No antagonism 
 would ever be overcome and reconciled in a higher 
 unity unless there were an ultimate connecting 
 ground. The radical antithesis of mind and matter 
 and everything could not be resolved without a 
 mediatorial agency. And on the least analysis, it 
 is Christ and Christ alone in Nature and in Grace 
 who fulfils the ministry of reconciliation. 
 
 The grand One Mediator extends Himself through 
 ways and means, symbols and sacraments, and 
 operates through awful mysteries embodied in out- 
 ward and visible forms. And the Church still 
 possesses the gift of tongues, in that she 
 addresses her various members in various lan- 
 guages and not in mere words alone words 
 
THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 69 
 
 too often tainted at the source by material images 
 and false analogies that suggest anything but spiri- 
 tual realities. Thus is Christ multiplied, in His 
 servants and in Church ceremonies, a thousandfold. 
 But unless we remember religion is a battle seen 
 or unseen, between everlasting adverse forces, " for 
 we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but 
 against principalities, against powers, against spiri- 
 tual wickedness " and faith is sword as well as 
 shield, and unless the trumpet gives a certain 
 sound, we shall be recreant soldiers of the Cross. 
 The faith that prophesies smooth things and makes 
 compromises and desires to please everybody and 
 really conciliates none, but trims and truckles and 
 tergiversates and ranges itself on the side of the 
 majority or Mammon or the folly of the present 
 fashion, and never commits itself and cannot even 
 fall into one splendid error, breeds heresies and cor- 
 rupts the doctrine of the Church in her chosen 
 sanctuary. Better downright sacrilege and open 
 blasphemy, than such timid and temporizing facing- 
 both-ways. " This is the victory that overcometh 
 the world, even our faith. Who is he that over- 
 cometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus 
 is the Son of God." We appeal to the ordeal of 
 battle, " Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine 
 own soul also." 
 
VI 
 
 DYNAMIC BELIGION AND HYPEK- 
 DOGMATISM 
 
 DYNAMIC religion and dogmatic theology appear 
 equally necessary for the soul of the individual and 
 the soul of the people, in the course of their evolu- 
 tion. We want alike the symmetry of the con- 
 taining form, and the fire of the leavening spirit. 
 To suppose that we can dispense with dogma, dis- 
 plays a curious ignorance of human nature as 
 revealed in history or attested by experience. A 
 religion without dogma is no religion, and a church 
 without definite creeds is a church without a faith. 
 Doctrine must be stated, clearly if possible, but 
 stated it must be, though our great mysteries can 
 only be presented in the language of symbol and 
 accommodation and metaphor. Such solemn truths, 
 beyond the range of reason , seem absorbed by a kind 
 of sacred instinct above the ordinary interventions of 
 steps and stages and logical inferences, and enter 
 into the texture of our fundamental intuitions. We 
 believe them because they are impossible, we love 
 them because they are absurd. But when dogmatic 
 theology becomes hyperdogmatic theology, and in 
 its natural and necessary antagonism to dynamic 
 
 70 
 
DYNAMIC EELIGION 71 
 
 religion grows encroaching and denies the claims of 
 the spirit altogether and endeavours to monopolize 
 the power of both and refuses to advance or expand 
 with new periods and different needs, then indeed it 
 mistakes its vocation and is an obstruction and not 
 an assistant on the forward road of the highest 
 development. 
 
 We are given at the outset a revelation, and we 
 must make the best of oar materials. And by re- 
 velation is meant literally an unveiling, inevitably 
 adapted to the time and place and persons and ex- 
 pressed in the ordinary terms of the age, and there- 
 fore unquestionably and even ostentatiously partial, 
 and not an explanation. God announces, but He 
 never explains. To expect this would be unreason- 
 able, because we find ourselves equipped with an in- 
 telligence equal to the solution of all the problems 
 offered us, at any rate for the practical purposes of 
 immediate interest and guidance. Besides, ex- 
 planations never explain, they invite familiarity and 
 the consequent contempt. And, when we begin to 
 explain a thing, we have already passed beyond its 
 influence, and it can do nothing more for us. We 
 capitulate to the unexplained, we are moved by the 
 inexplicable. The truth, that has yielded up all its 
 contents and leaves no romance behind to check and 
 cheat the reality out of its grosser obviousness, that 
 cherishes no saving clause of mystery, has descended 
 into the limbo of obsolete facts. Omne ignotum 
 pro magnifico. Even the fullest revelation only 
 withdraws one veil or two, it admits us into the Holy 
 Place, but it still reserves as its own the Holy of 
 
72 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 Holies behind the ultimate forbidding veil, into 
 which flesh and blood and human infirmities and 
 finite intelligence can neither dare nor hope to enter. 
 We may learn something of its secret meaning at 
 dissolution, if death be indeed the light that slays. 
 When we cease to wonder we cease to adore, as the 
 great Mystics and even Bacon himself have plainly 
 seen. But the revelation is not so much of God to 
 man, or of heaven to earth, as of man to man. 
 When we understand ourselves, we understand God, 
 and the one key still is yvo>9i creavTov. Mistaken 
 notions about the significance and service of revela- 
 tion have led to many and bitter disappointments. 
 And yet a moment's consideration will assure us 
 that no religion would be of the least vital or perma- 
 nent use or benefit, if it professed to explain what 
 is by its very constitution and for all possible profit 
 absolutely inexplicable. The revelation that tells 
 too much and enters into earthly (and not heavenly) 
 particulars, like the book of Mormon and even the 
 Koran, ipso facto, defeats its own object and com- 
 mits suicide. To catalogue the angels and classify 
 their qualities or virtues, to depict in glowing 
 colours the scenery of the spiritual world, to fasten 
 inappropriate labels on the various objects, though it 
 be done in the language of poetry and genius, is to 
 materialise the immaterial and import the methods 
 of the naturalist into the awful arcana of the 
 supreme sanctuary. Swedenborg attempted this 
 invasion, and astronomy records his falsified prophe- 
 cies and ignorant failures. There we find the in- 
 exorable fate of all hyperdogmatism , and the theo- 
 
DYNAMIC KELIGION 73 
 
 logical finalities. Eevelation, on its subjective side, 
 is fluid and not fixed. When we crystallize its con- 
 tents, the temporary forms thus given and aping 
 eternity condemn themselves and are stamped with 
 hopeless impotence and sterility. Cast-iron dog- 
 mas mean decay. Eeligion, that commences to 
 justify itself and apologise for its existence, com- 
 mences to die. Truth requires no explanation of 
 this kind, the very statement is its own proof. It 
 shines with the light it carries, and appeals directly 
 and immediately to those cosmic instincts and that 
 universal consciousness which we ali possess, beyond 
 the need of evidence and the reach of sordid syl- 
 logisms. Spirit does not refuse the aid of reason, 
 because it is itself the quintessence of reason and 
 that which makes reason reasonable, but neverthe- 
 less it speaks to spirit first and last. Deep calls 
 unto deep, height communes with kindred height, 
 and the heaven within cries to the native heaven 
 without us only in so far as it includes us. A re- 
 ligion, dissected in all its various limbs and organs, 
 may be exceedingly rational, while the arguments in 
 its support seem superfluously conclusive, but it pro- 
 tests too much, and we end by despising it and dis- 
 carding it. Spiritual mysteries, by the simple or 
 complex nature of the case, stand above the instru- 
 ments of the laboratory, the scale and the scoop, 
 and the petty qualitative and quantitative analyses 
 of Science, or their corresponding equivalents. We 
 may (we must) agree to call everything in a sense 
 sacred, even the most secular things, and such a 
 view expresses a great and beautiful truth, but not- 
 
74 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 withstanding this concession the fact remains that 
 the touch of mere earthiness, the atmosphere of the 
 class-room, the odour of the operation table, must 
 be fatal sooner or later to any religion. Look at 
 those coarse, we might say profane, particulars in 
 certain anatomical hymns. The presence of these 
 revolting details, in themselves so pure and innocent 
 when confined to their proper place and a reverend 
 obscurity, and the fact that they have been sung in 
 public by thousands of congregations for many years 
 with passionate warmth, demonstrate by their sen- 
 suous savour and disastrous physiological sugges- 
 tiveness the death so far of true devotion. We can- 
 not dilate on sexual features or differences in the 
 sanctuary. The worshipper who does it may prac- 
 tise a cult, but he does not really adore God. He 
 is, to recall Wordsworth's famous lines, a man who 
 would "peep and botanise upon his mother's grave-" 
 We desire a religious Science, but we dread a 
 scientific Religion. And this, as no honest critic 
 can dispute, has become the great and growing dan- 
 ger of our time. The halo of the saint under the 
 microscope disappears, the riddle of the universe has 
 been read by the philosopher, and by the mathe- 
 maticians who with lavish generosity have called up 
 out of their inner consciousness and their amazing 
 calculations a multitude of new infinities to redress 
 the balance of the old one world. The atom now 
 betrays its secret and is an atom no more but a 
 microcosm of electric ions, and "quantitative pre- 
 vision " (as Herbert Spencer called it) already 
 salutes from afar a fresh Godhead in the sweet sim- 
 
DYNAMIC RELIGION 75 
 
 plicity of unadulterated Ether alone. And neither 
 Eeligion nor Theology has any quarrel with Science 
 so long as it respects their integrity and does not 
 threaten their peculiar scope with the inappropriate 
 scalpel, or the table of weights and measures, or the 
 rule of three. 
 
 We want more faith and less reason. Paley never 
 said a more false and foolish thing than this, when 
 he made discovery co-extensive with proof. The 
 very opposite, at any rate in Eeligion, happens to 
 be the case. A demonstrated revelation is a damned 
 revelation. Logic sounds its death knell, and Aca- 
 demic undertakers (with haM the letters of the alpha- 
 bet after their venerable names) are always abun- 
 dant and ready to provide at the briefest notice the 
 most gorgeous of funerals, and learned professors 
 will take a melancholy pleasure in digging its grave. 
 We may well revise Paley 's reckless dictum, and 
 declare that he alone discovers spiritual facts who 
 abandons proof and consigns it to its proper place 
 to Mathematics or the morals of Utopia. Here, in 
 the province of religion, we require faith. And 
 by this we do not quite understand the definition of 
 Vinet, who has called it the will applied to objects 
 of speculation, though he was groping grandly in the 
 right direction. Faith means rather the recogni- 
 tion of the Divine Will as revealed in the heart of 
 man. To speak popularly, it is simply an open 
 mind, or a mind purged from cant and passion and 
 prejudice, willing to receive and be taught. It im- 
 plies no stiff attitude, no strain or stress, but a simple 
 surrender of the whole attention to God, the con- 
 
76 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 centration that the child gives to his mother when 
 he expects something the liberating of the will of 
 man from all particular entanglements or bias, for 
 communication with the Will of God. To put faith 
 into a theological formula is to put it into its coffin. 
 We possess it at birth as one of our fundamental 
 faculties, that asserts itself immediately and enters 
 into every department of life. We can no more 
 explain it than we can explain the mystery of life 
 itself to the satisfaction of the theorist. Its pre- 
 sence, its power, its universal usefulness as the most 
 practical as well as the most imaginative of all 
 powers we know, and this is all we need to know- 
 We believe because we must. A woman's reason 
 or absence of reason, it will be asserted, but still the 
 best and simplest creed in the world. And the 
 people who will never be convinced without proof 
 are just the very people who are not convinced with 
 proof when it does come. Faith, explaining itself, 
 is faith stultifying itself. It amounts to a demand 
 for the meaning of meaning, or the proof of proof. 
 We cannot get beyond the very bottom of Nature. 
 The significance of faith will always be best inter- 
 preted by the action and reaction and interaction, 
 and the perpetual contradictions, of its twin sister 
 doubt. If we want to confirm ourselves in our 
 creeds, we must go to our brother the Agnostic and 
 sit at his feet for a time, till we recover our lost 
 strength and get new cheer from the ineptitude of 
 his idle negations. The eternal Thou shall not, bids 
 us recoil on the eternal Thou shalt. The univer- 
 sal We know not because we cannot know, finds its 
 
DYNAMIC KELIGION 77 
 
 reply and refutation in the universal We know be- 
 cause we must. Yes, paradoxical as it may appear, 
 the truth remains that faith is proved and justified 
 by doubt. It is not merely Tennyson's obvious 
 view 
 
 " There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds-" 
 
 but doubt by its very negation sends the soul vio- 
 lently back upon the opposite attitude, and to that 
 extent defines the indefinable of faith. Doubt it- 
 self is the sufficient antidote. Trust and distrust, 
 in their endless conflicts, pave the path for broader 
 beliefs and yet more magnificent misgivings. So- 
 called faith, that embraces absurdities and runs 
 riot in extravagant details, and tickets its most 
 grotesque utterances as Divine oracles, should be 
 described properly as fanaticism. But there is no 
 open mind here, no universality, no glorious inde- 
 terminism of the will trembling towards God. Our 
 primitive aboriginal instincts or intuitions never 
 lie, they are infallible. Science may call them the 
 organized inheritance of the race, or ancestral germ 
 plasm, but where is the difference at root? Eeve- 
 lation speaks to the open mind, the universal feel- 
 ing, the unsophisticated appetite for the Eternal 
 Element namely, God. Religion, thus necessarily 
 and naturally born, offers no credentials to mere 
 Metaphysics or a Science that perpetually changes 
 its front, and is its own evidence. The local 
 colours, the temporary tones, attached to it as 
 passing accidents, do not touch the essentials and 
 
78 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 fall off when the purposes they served require their 
 presence no more. 
 
 Christianity existed before Christ and there never 
 was a time when it did not exist, and the Cross grew 
 in the Garden of Eden side by side with the Tree of 
 Life. The strange thing is this, that theology 
 which too often in the matter of the Scriptures Las 
 denned and refined de omnibus rebus et quibusdam 
 aliis, especially de quisbusdam aliis, has overlooked 
 some of the most important points, in discussing 
 others that perhaps have no root in reality or in- 
 ference from reality. Yet the principal teaching of 
 the Old Testament is simple enough and resides in 
 this. It has but one burden from the first page to 
 the last, from the beginning to the end namely, 
 the Incarnation of God. Agnostics and idle, shallow 
 critics have always held up to ridicule its gross 
 pervading anthropomorphism, as if it were matter 
 for condemnation. When, in fact, the Old Testa- 
 ment was only written with this express object, to 
 announce the truth that from the very outset God 
 was Man the Humanity of God, the Human in 
 Divine. And here the instinct of the untutored 
 savage, the earliest inhabitant of the earth, was in 
 its essentials a veridical conviction. Ignorance had 
 yet a saving and certain knowledge. Take away 
 this proclamation from the Old Testament, and the 
 first revelation in the Bible will be eviscerated of 
 its most valuable contents and its ruling idea. All 
 along, the Holy Spirit, through the prophets and 
 inspired writers, kept endeavouring to make man 
 perceive his Maker, his Father, was necessarily in 
 
DYNAMIC RELIGION 79 
 
 kind just like man himself. The language used, 
 the excess of details particularizing the bodily re- 
 semblance in limbs and senses and all the various 
 parts and powers, were so many witnesses to the 
 stupendous truth. Indeed how could man have 
 been created otherwise, and remained or even been 
 religious? Unless he w r ere like God in kind, no 
 common ground for intercourse, no room for the 
 tender and intimate relation of worship, could have 
 existed. "I am a Man just like you yourself," 
 the sacred oracles kept always crying. Religion 
 presupposes some sort of common measure or 
 mutual interests through which the Worshipped and 
 the worshipper spiritually act and react upon each 
 other. So the violent anthropomorphism, instead 
 of being watered down and explained away as the 
 artifice of accommodation or the desperate expedient 
 of an encroaching and superstitious priestcraft, 
 must be allowed to predominate and be insisted 
 upon as the crowning glory of the Old Testament, 
 and not its crushing shame. We shall admit then 
 that the current conception of early religion, as 
 one founded mainly upon fear and sustained essen- 
 tially by force and the terrors of law, has but a 
 superficial support and no ultimate sanction in any 
 honest inner interpretation of the most ancient 
 books. The thunder and lightning of Sinai, the 
 earthquake and eclipse, the penalties written in 
 blood, were after all but the husk and not the 
 kernel of revelation, the circumstance and not the 
 soul of the religion, and mere outward accessories 
 demanded by a barbarous age. God spoke as a 
 
80 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 Human Being to human beings, with precisely the 
 same kind of nature though of course infinitely 
 greater, but He spoke in the language and sym- 
 bolism of the period when there was little reverence 
 for life. It formed no part of the Divine intention 
 to frighten man by an overwhelming exhibition of 
 majesty. God walked and talked, acted and spoke 
 in every province of life, less as God than as a Man 
 among men. The appeal to force and fear, in so 
 far as these did prevail, were only the current coin 
 of the age which would not have understood milder 
 methods and could not have developed in any other 
 way. The restraints did not seem cruel then, and 
 Jehovah had to be translated more or less into 
 terms of Oriental despotism. But still there was 
 the Incarnation ages before Christ came. 
 
 Theology again has missed the peculiar note, the 
 passionate outcome of the whole New Testament, 
 namely its Theanthropism. After the sublime and 
 sustained teaching of the ancient prophets and the 
 ancient order of things, it followed by a process 
 more inexorable than any mere logic, as a con- 
 tinuation and complement of the early faith, that 
 man was God. Revelation could not possibly take 
 any other course. The one naturally, beautifully, 
 irresistibly implied the other. They were two 
 sides, two harmonious halves of one stupendous 
 fact, beyond and above the groping thought of the 
 Hyperdogmatism which petrifies and kills whatever 
 it touches. Finding a living truth, it always leaves 
 a fossil. Of a fluid, vital, elastic, comprehensive 
 and universal creed it makes a coffin, and turns a 
 
DYNAMIC RELIGION 81 
 
 cradle into a grave. The anthropomorphism of the 
 first dispensation predicted and demanded the the- 
 anthropism of the second dispensation. Then and 
 there the divine economy of grace stood revealed, 
 self -justified, perfect. Nothing essential can be 
 added to it now, and nothing essential can be taken 
 away from it. The last word is spoken. Veritas locuta 
 est, causa finita est. God is Man and ever was and 
 ever will be, and therefore by a reason above reason 
 man is God and ever will be. Religion now through 
 Society and the growing solidarity of the race will 
 work out its own salvation, in the Power of the 
 Cross. Christ's infinite Resurrection repeats it- 
 self every day, every hour, every minute, in the 
 resurrection of the masses, and the perpetual 
 renaissance of the human mind. When man 
 realises the fact that he is Divine, he will gradually 
 become Divine. His life, his conversation, his law, 
 even his international ethics, at present the ethics 
 of a burglar, will display the tone and temper re- 
 quired by that inheritance. The Divine right of 
 the king, translated at last into its proper signifi- 
 cance, will be the Divine right of his lowliest 
 subject. 
 
 Millennia may elapse before this knowledge is 
 power nam ipsa scientia potentia est and is 
 possessed as the common property of all. Baptism 
 acknowledges it, the Holy Eucharist confesses it 
 and imparts it, and every act or office in the end 
 performed or exercised in the right temper of rever- 
 ence and in a religious spirit will be recognised as 
 Divine, and every meal when bread is broken will 
 7 
 
82 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 become a sacrament. But owing largely to the 
 caricature of theology, hyperdogmatism , we learn 
 slowly and man enters only by painful degrees into 
 his mighty heritage. We are tardily discovering that 
 the distinction between the secular and the sacred 
 must be abolished, and we have (strange paradox) 
 Christians conducting a crusade against miracles. 
 What is Revelation, what is Inspiration, what is 
 Religion, if not a miracle? Each and all protest 
 for ever against the vapid vulgarity of the common- 
 place and a cheap and vulgar materialism. There 
 is nothing that is not at the same time a wonder 
 and a orj^lov, a presage of something more, a 
 promise of something behind the beggarly surface, 
 and an evidence of the immanent Divinity. Take 
 the very simplest fact. Who knows how the 
 chlorophyll or the green colouring matter is worked 
 up in the dim laboratory of the plant's cells and 
 how what we call dead matter (though nothing is 
 dead but hyperdogmatism) or rather one kind of 
 matter is completely transformed into another kind ? 
 They say indeed, but we can never be sure to which 
 theory Science will stick, that the bridge between 
 the organic and the inorganic has been found and 
 the great gulf crossed. But the chasm between 
 thought and matter and motion remains where it 
 was and what it was, as wide and deep as ever. 
 Everything, if we only look below the outside sur- 
 face, grows miraculous, from the step that is but 
 an arrested fall, to the fall which initiates a new 
 and loftier ascent. Revelation appeals to miracle, 
 Inspiration arises out of miracle, and Religion lives 
 
DYNAMIC KELIGION 83 
 
 by miracle. Destroy man's inherent sense of awe 
 and craving for the wonderful, and you destroy not 
 merely miracle but man. Such wanton brutality 
 robs us of our blue sky, our lovely shadows and land 
 of far distances, our heavenly atmosphere, the golden 
 halo in the misty mountain peaks, the rose of dawn, 
 and the Divine dream which renders life worth 
 living. It is our ideals, our aspirations, our unsyl- 
 logised creeds, our cosmic intuitions, which form the 
 raw and real material of progress by antagonism and 
 civilisation in spite of bayoneted battalions and de- 
 struction made easy, no less than of Eeligion. The 
 true high priests of Science, who opened new doors 
 into eternity and new windows out of Space and 
 Time, were always the sublimest visionaries. For 
 each great step of Science is an act of faith. And 
 miracles are just the outflashings of the Divine, 
 the virtue that must flow forth, the odour of 
 the ointment that cannot be hid. God can- 
 not help being God, for (to speak with all reverence) 
 He is built that way. And man likewise cannot 
 help being divine, because he likewise is built 
 that way. There is in us the upward trend, that 
 infinite curve, sic itur ad astra. Nay, more yet, 
 " sublimi feriam sidera vertice." Do we dare to 
 quarrel with the very terms of existence, the awful 
 tenure by which we hold on to anything and every- 
 thing? We believe just because we cannot believe. 
 The possible for us remains eternally the impossible, 
 and the impossible the possible. Our credo is, 
 " Possunt quia (non) posse videntur." We might 
 even venture to assert on the other hand that 
 
84 THE KEEPEB OF THE KEYS 
 
 nothing is miraculous, because all is miraculous. 
 But, on the last analysis and frequently on the very 
 first, what does not appear or transpire as wonder- 
 ful, and supernormal if not supernatural? The 
 commonest feature of the commonest object, if ex- 
 amined closely and carefully resists our scrutiny and 
 resolves itself into something inexplicable. Omnia 
 exeunt in mysteria. At the same time, there seem 
 to be two great cosmic laws, continuity or evolution, 
 and discontinuity or interruption, which contradict 
 and therefore explain each other. Of the former 
 we think we know a great deal, and of the latter we 
 admit that we know nothing. But faith can teach 
 us a little even about this, but not Science and not 
 Hyperdogmatism with its fossilized forms. We 
 must not define too much. Definitions announce 
 the doom of Keligion, and Hyperdogmatism always 
 and only arrives just in time to be too late to render 
 any service but that of the sexton. It tolls the bell of 
 some departing form, and shows us that Religion 
 (though in essentials for ever one and the same) is 
 now girding up its loins for a new course, and is 
 about to take another giant curve. 
 
VII 
 OXFOBD v. CAMBEIDGE 
 
 THIS match has been played ever since the promoted 
 or developed amoeba, thanks to the care and clever- 
 ness of its wet nurse Evolution, began to differen- 
 tiate itself from the environing cosmos and call it- 
 self human, and will continue when the names of 
 the two great sister Universities are no more than 
 a beautiful tradition. It is a duel that really had 
 no beginning and can certainly have no end. We 
 must all of us, willingly or unwillingly, consciously 
 or unconsciously, play on and play up and play the 
 game in the eternal tragedy of thought. Doubt pre- 
 sents itself to us as a truth in the making, and one 
 noble misgiving counts more than a whole world of 
 figures and blue books and statistics and so-called 
 " facts." It matters little in the long run and on 
 a stage of perpetual transitions, what the predicate 
 affirms itself to be for the moment, while the neces- 
 sary negation synchronizes with its birth and im- 
 mediately defines it, so long as we have a subject 
 to which it can be harnessed. And Progress is sim- 
 ply a restatement of any given particular predicate 
 in terms of a new time. And to love Truth, with 
 an undivided heart, is to be immortal. He who 
 
 85 
 
80 THE KEEPEE OF THE KEYS 
 
 has had but a fleeting glimpse of God can never die. 
 It is the vision alone that constitutes a future with- 
 out a close. Not to love the Truth, not to see God, 
 means death and the lowermost hell of all possible 
 and impossible hells. 
 
 Everything that lies about us is not " fact," but 
 symbol or sacrament. The fire burns not to warm 
 us or yield a passing light, but to teach us and spiri- 
 tualise us as a " live coal from off the altar " of 
 Heaven. Unless the bread we eat and the water 
 we drink become moral acts and religious services 
 and raise us nearer to God, they are useless and 
 merely injurious. We had better starve nay, we 
 are actually starving towards the better and higher 
 and greater. Each morsel we take should be a 
 confession of faith and a testimony to the Truth. 
 Matter confronts us as a vehicle of mind, body comes 
 as a witness to the spirit, and the outward form that 
 does not touch an inward and yet visible eternity at 
 some point is formless and renounces its right or 
 forsakes its office. Nothing at bottom is altogether 
 common or unclean, nothing can be altogether void. 
 If we see or fancy we see just a blot or a blank, we 
 but visualise ourselves and our own vital defects, but 
 nothing else. It is the dull brute phenomenal 
 " fact " of life, that renders it so empty and mean. 
 Everything must be sacred, somehow and some- 
 where, and everything is, and nothing was or will 
 be quite secular, because all from the loftiest point 
 of view is bathed in Heaven and God. We have 
 been told by statesmen and others to think imperi- 
 ally and in kingdoms and continents. Not so, but 
 
OXFOKD v. CAMBEIDGE 87 
 
 let us rather try to think after God and like God and 
 with God, and then we shall think truly and 
 Divinely, not in empires, but in heavens and hells, 
 and spiritually, in accordance with the mandate of 
 our psychological dualism. 
 
 Oxford v. Cambridge. Yes, the classical temper 
 and sense of curve and colour and line and form, the 
 devotion to principles and poetry and light, the pas- 
 sion for liberty even in the darkest conspiracies of 
 Conservatism, the reign of the spirit on the one 
 hand and in this camp. But on the other hand and 
 in the opposite camp, the veneration of the law and 
 servile submission to mathematical proof and the 
 barren letter. Yet withal a loyal scientific alle- 
 giance and a craving for accuracy and irrefrangible 
 demonstration. The gospel according to Paley 
 (and not Paul) " he alone discovers who proves " 
 a fatal contempt for imagination and the grandest 
 part of Science, its sublime intuitions and guesses, 
 and gracious Keplerisms. Ah, and superstition 
 attaches not only to religions and politics and ideas 
 and institutions, but to the dreadful sanctuary of 
 Induction itself. A business-like manner may and 
 often does co-exist with an unbusiness-like mind. 
 Accurate language will frequentlv be but a mask 
 endeavouring to conceal inaccurate thoughts. And 
 exact methods can be inexactly applied. Consider, 
 for an instant, that amazing imposition labelled, 
 "law," to which the Teutonic (but not the Celtic or 
 even the Slav) races egregiously and grotesquely and 
 ignorantly bow down in abject servitude, as if "law" 
 were some tremendous Creative Force, rival or co- 
 
88 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 assessor of the Supreme Deity, and not merely a 
 sort of luggage label for cosmic despatch purposes 
 a particular way of looking at a particular class of 
 things, and a way invariably soon superseded and 
 absorbed into some higher " law " or generality. 
 We are all of us, Oxford and Cambridge alike, but 
 especially Cambridge, slaves of this empty super- 
 stition and idle reverence, which rests at the utter- 
 most, as every mere " law " must, on an imperfect 
 induction. It is thus we glorify our infirmities, and 
 try to persuade ourselves they are as infallible 
 as they seem sublime. The world would go on 
 just as w r ell, and probably much better, if we emanci- 
 pated ourselves from this preposterous yoke, and 
 recognised the truth that the cosmos has even more 
 room in it for miracle than for the transiency of any 
 "fact" however certain and solid it may look. 
 " Blessed are they who expect nothing." Here 
 we find all unsuspected in a popular phrase a funda- 
 mental verity. This too has been well expressed in 
 another vulgar saying, "It is the unexpected that 
 happens." Yea, almost in the same breath, we 
 declare our belief and disbelief in miracles. For 
 while as men of science we reject such a creed with 
 scorn, nevertheless as men of sense we accept it and 
 act upon it every day and every hour and every 
 moment. And even Herbert Spencer himself, in 
 his latest publication was gravitating in the direction 
 of a faith, in which the paradox and the popular be- 
 lief and saying were identical, when he admitted 
 that Feeling and not Reason was the most impor- 
 tant part of man's equipment. Though, of course, 
 
OXFORD v. CAMBRIDGE 89 
 
 they never can be separated. And it is only by their 
 endless antagonism, we find beauty and life. 
 
 Oxford v. Cambridge, light against law. But we 
 need them both, we cannot dispense with either, 
 and the spirit without the letter would be unfruit- 
 ful. They make together the eternal and infinite 
 oxymoron or union of contraries. By the universal 
 clash of things we move, we progress, we produce 
 better and still better results, we arrive at ends that 
 prove to be only vaster new beginnings. We spiri- 
 tualise the " letter," we illuminate the " law." And 
 thereby we obtain fresher and fuller statements of 
 the everlasting questions asked by the Sphinx of 
 Nature that is being perpetually unriddled and then 
 riddled again. Oxford takes from Cambridge, and 
 Cambridge takes from Oxford. Now one exercises 
 the ascendency, and now the other stands forth as 
 the predominant partner, in the unceasing and fertile 
 struggle of life. We have periods of " law " and 
 "letter" domination, in which Science distributes 
 her passionless favours and re-arranges the old land- 
 marks to the satisfaction of most. And then comes 
 the reaction, the recoil of the pendulum, and the 
 rule of light and sweetness, the championship of for- 
 lorn faiths and impossible ideals that are yet the 
 true saving faiths and only possible ideals. Victrix 
 causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni. And here it 
 is Newman against Newton, and Oxford wins all 
 along the line intellectual, whether ethics or meta- 
 physics, and the charm at once mediaeval and 
 modern compels even her enemies for a while to 
 murmur though with reluctant lips her new and 
 
90 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 ancient credo yes, still, credo quia impossibile. 
 Oxford could not be Oxford, would not be true to 
 her splendid traditions of inconsistency, and the 
 glorious idealism of her transfigured egotism, if she 
 always lingered to determine the logical sequence of 
 every act or step, and waited for the proof or the to- 
 morrow that never comes. The cold shadow of 
 demonstration in her esteem only kills whatever it 
 touches, and wherever it falls. Knowing the two 
 scientific positions in this unscientific world of ours, 
 this congeries of discontented atoms, are Romanism 
 and Agnosticism, she coquets with both and will 
 have neither and yet oscillates with culti- 
 vated indifference between the two, believing 
 and disbelieving alike with all her heart, 
 by conviction one and in sentiment the other 
 and particularly the other. Evolution amuses 
 Oxford. It promises so much, like a new toy, but 
 it displays a dangerous side and may disturb vested 
 interests or darling abuses, and so she handles it with 
 the serious smile of that educated ease which suffers 
 fools and theories gladly. Gravitation, she remem- 
 bers and Cambridge remembers, was to have been 
 the key to unlock every door, but failed to do so. And 
 perhaps Evolution, the fresh bauble, may break in 
 her hand. History assures us, and history so far 
 repeats itself, that truths (never at the very utmost 
 more than partial truths) are at first discredited and 
 denounced as pernicious doctrines, fraught with 
 peril to the bases of morality and the foundations of 
 religion, and then are accepted as panaceas for every 
 ill and solutions of every problem, till in the end 
 
OXFORD v. CAMBRIDGE 91 
 
 they become as grossly revered as they were bar- 
 barously rejected, only to go into the great crucible 
 of further inquiry again. To speak honestly, we 
 know nothing final about anything in terms of 
 absolute knowledge, except that we do know this 
 much. But the lines of future development lie in 
 the direction of more faith and not less faith, arid 
 miracle and not law or beggarly fact. 6 eyyvs pov 
 eyyus TOV TTV/OOS [KCLL Trjs fjia^aipa^]. Oxford at 
 any rate has learned this elementary principle of the 
 ordeal of the fire and the test of the separating 
 sword. In the glorious insolence of her youth, the 
 flower of the whole cosmos, she perpetually renews 
 herself and is born again to cherish the same lost 
 causes and certain uncertainties, so ancient and yet 
 so modern in fresh and flagrant efflorescence. And 
 yet not quite like Penelope and her web, though her 
 suitors now are many and come from the ends of the 
 earth. The old problems appear in other forms, 
 the old materials in other patterns. Which shall 
 we designate it, comedy or tragedy, this superb tri- 
 fling and leisured luxury of thought , in dealing with 
 the eternal questions? Is it an Olympic interlude 
 only, between two infinities the state before birth 
 and the state after death? Sometimes her voice 
 sounds like the inspired babble of a divine child, 
 sporting with the great mysteries of the unknown 
 Yesterday and the unknown To-morrow, and grandly 
 careless of both. But notwithstanding, or rather 
 because of, the beautiful impertinence of her im- 
 mortal youth, framed in its goodly setting of 
 mediaeval magic, the Oxford spirit at the core of 
 
92 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 things seems true to life and the gallant conflicts of 
 life. Chivalry yet remains in her gracious retreats 
 and her cloistered souls. 
 
 Sin, regarded in its essence, appears to be the 
 moral obliquity which for the sake of a sordid com- 
 fort and miserable convenience evades the awful and 
 endless conflict, to which God and Nature for ever 
 summon us. It is that fatal cowardice which re- 
 fuses to fight, and declines the challenge offered in 
 the very conditions of life. We sin when we tamely 
 stand aside and let the saving tumult of battle pass 
 by us and roll on. The guilt resides less in the 
 breach of boundaries or transgression, less in 
 missing the mark, or a bad shot, as the 
 old Greeks thought, when the bow was the 
 life, than in standing still and capitulating 
 to the first temptation, and in not sending a single 
 arrow or prayer up to God for deliverance. The 
 sinner does not so much fight badly or on the wrong 
 side, as not fight at all. To strive even against the 
 Truth is still a step in the right direction. It dis- 
 plays a realisation of conflict and difficulty and a 
 sense of enigmas to be faced and answered some- 
 how. Light reveals itself during the process and 
 the Redemption of the Cross never stays far distant 
 from the humblest soldier. The knight errant for 
 Christ's sake has been often at first simply a knight 
 erring. We may avoid, possibly, the given facts of 
 life, but we cannot deny them that all things are 
 set over against each other. Day contends with 
 night, town with country, body with spirit, present 
 with past, mystery with surface meaning, the pas- 
 
OXFOED v. CAMBRIDGE 93 
 
 toral state with the predatory and the agricultural 
 with the industrial, and Oxford with Cambridge. 
 Errors, however widely they roam, return to the 
 fold at last, and by addition or subtraction through 
 their militant marchings and counter-marchings are 
 resolved into homely truths with which an arch- 
 deacon might lie down in peace and safety. But 
 even a verity may be either a curse or a blessing, 
 according as we use it. And Mount Ebal is not far 
 from Mount Gerizim. All depends on the kind of 
 separation or devotion, whether for good or evil, for 
 life or death, rest or work. The sweetest and 1 
 truest truth, if consecrated to disuse and stagnation, 
 like a sword kept in its scabbard, or merely hoarded 
 in some secret chamber like uninvested treasure, will 
 accomplish nothing and earn nothing and produce 
 nothing. As the manna stored too long, it breeds 
 worms and stinks, and we have pycemia of the soul, 
 or the growth of corruption and the life of death. 
 Empire has waxed with conflict and waned with its 
 absence. If we glance at the epochs of history, 
 we shall find greatness and expansion accurately 
 traced and explained by antagonism. The one 
 appears the exact measure of the other. Periods 
 of peace and stagnation never achieved an impor- 
 tant conquest and never will. Adventure, aggres- 
 sion, whatever we choose to term it, implies an 
 alert intelligence and a heart awake to the infinite 
 possibilities of life. Happy perhaps the people 
 whose annals are dull yes, happy in a mean con- 
 tent, but not healthy or helpful or vitally and uni-i 
 versally stimulating to the whole cosmos. 
 
94 THE KEEPER OP THE KEYS 
 
 pet,. Heaven is movement, change, and hell 
 stagnation or death. Even a change of or to evils 
 were almost better than none at all. Mera/3oX^ 
 TrdvTuv y\vKVTOLTov. We must move on and fight 
 on and play the game, or go under. It is idle to 
 quarrel with the game to which we are invited 
 and the terms imposed. Movement against, and 
 therefore movement with things, since only thus 
 can we neutralize defects and complete our begin- 
 nings and realise ourselves, is the law of Nature. 
 It merely means that we must be something and 
 not nothing in society, we must justify our exis- 
 tence by giving a reason for it and a proof of it. 
 Religion, for instance, occasionally grows too com- 
 fortable and grants concessions to or makes terms 
 with its natural enemy, the world. It falls asleep, 
 it dies. Compromise may be needful, capitulation 
 is not. Then comes the revival, rude and crude 
 generally, but nevertheless salvation. Alas, the 
 grand old Church even sometimes nay, too fre- 
 quently nods aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus. 
 Spiritual earthquakes regenerate religion, they 
 arouse the grand old fighting instincts and the for- 
 gotten facts, that where the missionary and martyr 
 spirit is cold the institution also is cold and a useless 
 encumbrance. Keligion must account for what it 
 feels and says, by work done and by moral 
 miracles. Eevivals may be little more than the 
 dust that goes before the wind, but they show that 
 the Spirit is beginning to stir among the dry bones. 
 And when the storm does come, it will be the 
 breath of Omnipotence. 
 
OXFOKD v. CAMBKIDGE 95 
 
 Oxford v. Cambridge. Science and industries 
 against Literature and Art, the analytic against the 
 synthetic faculty, painful process against the intui- 
 tive flashes of inspiration, talent against genius. 
 Oxford by preference constructive, Cambridge des- 
 tructive, and the world old contest between the 
 useful and the beautiful, the picture and the 
 machine, and the cosmos incomplete and even 
 unlovely without both aspects and both energies. 
 The one with a natural and necessary orientation 
 of the soul, through her glorious faiths and yet 
 more glorious doubts or fears seeing God in every- 
 thing and everything in God. The other studious, 
 enterprising, walking circumspectly or accurately 
 (oLKpiftws) through the paths of laborious problems, 
 to be made productive and proper rather than 
 pretty, like a cat carefully picking its way along a 
 wall that is hedged and topped with broken glass 
 festinans lente. Book-learned, letter-perfect, 
 magnifying her grammar and her Greek texts, 
 classical in appearance but not in spirit, marvelling 
 that the sun does not stand still because some 
 audacious German scholar has punctuated a line 
 of ^Eschylus with a comma where there was no 
 comma before, pedantic, precise, cumbered with 
 much knowledge such is Cambridge. 
 
 But where and what would the dreamer be with- 
 out the man of action, practical and plodding, to 
 correct his visions and apply his fancies and yoke 
 them between the shafts of work-a-day procedure? 
 And how should the matter-of-fact manufacturer 
 gather grist for his labouring mills, unless he 
 
96 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 sought it from the merchant of ideas? Yet after 
 all it is the dreamer that pioneers the road of pro- 
 gress and officers the vanguard, and from his study 
 moves the levers of the world. And assuredly it 
 is Oxford that has discovered the secret of happi- 
 ness, and that is to make a religion of service and 
 a worship of work. Laborare est orare. Her his- 
 tory reads as a record of the Church, not without 
 the witness of martyrdoms, and in her very denials 
 she has confessed most her Lord and Master as 
 unworthy to be crucified on His Cross. In her the 
 cosmic and the hypercosmic meet and mingle. At 
 every Movement, and the Oxford (Church) Move- 
 ment was but one among many, she accepted the 
 fact that time and space were not mere limits to 
 be overcome by the spirit, but portals into eter- 
 nity, through which the spirit asserted by opposition 
 its Divine transcendency. Each new baptism of 
 life arose from the Church's inherent power to 
 renew itself by fresh charities and chivalries and 
 the tolerance that pardoned all because it under- 
 stood all, as part of the universal progress. And 
 no soldier fights like the dreamer of dreams, whose 
 splendid speculations unceasingly clash with the 
 actual present and the pinch of squalid toil and the 
 mean magnificences of commerce. So the battle 
 rages for ever, Oxford v. Cambridge. And, as 
 Heraclitus said, IldXe/uios 7rdi>TO)V p,ev irarrip lorn, 
 Se 
 
VIII 
 
 VICAKIOUS SUFFERING AND 
 SELF-PEESEKVAT10N 
 
 REASON has always ridiculed the theory of Vicarious 
 Suffering, as the fond invention of a dead or 
 dying theology, and yet it is Eeason now which 
 supplies the evidence which tends to trans- 
 form a supposed fancy into a wonderful if unin- 
 telligible fact. But mysteries are none the less 
 real because they remain mysteries, nor do we 
 lightly reject problems because at first they seem 
 insoluble. In the light of the accepted solidarity 
 of the human race and the intimate unity of the 
 cosmos, the teaching alike of Philosophy and 
 Science, we see the faint beginnings to an interpre- 
 tation of a difficult doctrine and the beautiful gleam 
 of the distant dawn. If we all are one, bound up 
 together in the same bundle of life, the reproach of 
 immorality imputed to Vicarious Suffering loses 
 much of its weight. It is the price we pay for our 
 unity and the Divine prerogative of Free Will, 
 which, however severely limited its range, appears 
 to be a stubborn fact. And though the purchase 
 money is undoubtedly a heavy toll, for the privilege 
 procured it cannot be called excessive. But, it 
 will be alleged, this assertion does not hold good 
 8 1)7 
 
98 THE KEEPEE OF THE KEYS 
 
 at any rate of the animal and vegetable worlds. 
 There, too, we find the shadow of Vicarious Suffer- 
 ing without any corresponding gain of Free Will 
 to leave a balance in their favour. But this seems 
 an unsupported statement, an idle assumption. 
 
 In the law of Evolution and the survival of the 
 fittest by Natural Selection, neither animals nor 
 plants act or can act like pure automata. They must 
 possess something like our feeling of preference or 
 power of discrimination, and an ability to choose 
 between competing alternatives. We might even 
 maintain that they enjoy a rudimentary kind of 
 self-consciousness, because they can hardly fail to 
 discern the difference between themselves and a 
 world of external stimuli for ever impinging kindly 
 or unkindly upon them. And it is this sense of 
 resistance, and nothing more or less, from which 
 gradually evolves the conception of self-conscious- 
 ness. As soon as any creature or thing feels 
 there is another than itself, it has begun to be 
 self-conscious. Dim and confused and contradic- 
 tory this sense may be, but it must be a fact. 
 Evolution could hardly work as an efficient and 
 sufficient cause, unless all the components involved 
 in the universal struggle for existence were endowed 
 with some faculty resembling choice and some true 
 if nebulous perception of personal identity an 
 identity abiding unchanged in the midst of a chang- 
 ing world and even a changing form. 1 In short, 
 
 1 I found after writing this, Professor Ward in his Gifford 
 Lectures attributing tcleological energy and even a kind of 
 consciousness to plant-life. 
 
VICAKIOUS SUFFEKING 99 
 
 if the cosmos is one, we should expect to find every- 
 where the same laws, though inevitably and 
 naturally the further back we go the more obscure 
 their operation becomes. Increase of organised 
 and elaborate differentiation, implies increase of 
 light. And the reverse holds equally true. 
 
 Now if our Saviour came to teach us anything by 
 way of example, it certainly was the great law of 
 Vicarious Suffering. Whether we know it or not, 
 whether we like it or not, whether we will it or not, 
 the solidarity of the race and the unity of creation 
 forbid us ever to live entirely for ourselves. " He 
 saved others, Himself He cannot save." Christ's 
 very crucifiers unconsciously testified to this. 
 " Greater love hath no man than this, that a man 
 lay down his life for his friends." It will be readily 
 objected that self-sacrifice for enemies is a far 
 grander act of devotion. But this, on examination, 
 will prove to be one of those cheap and easy criti- 
 cisms of which we have far too many. The answer 
 is, that our Lord recognised no enemies, or rather 
 He treated His enemies as friends and admitted 
 no distinction between them. How could He do 
 otherwise than He had taught so clearly and so 
 long? " Love your enemies, bless them that 
 curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray 
 for them which despitefully use you and persecute 
 you." Besides, our Saviour, as a matter of course, 
 anticipated the protomartyr St. Stephen when He 
 cried on the Cross, " Father, forgive them for they 
 know not what they do" He could not exhibit 
 Himself as acting on a lower plane of being, and 
 
100 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 He did not. This is one of the Divine impossibili- 
 ties, that even God is unable to deny Himself. If it 
 might be otherwise, He would ipso facto cease to be 
 Divine. And all through His Life on earth we 
 find the Saviour negating His own peace and com- 
 fort and safety, surrendering His Human Body and 
 earthly ties, in order to affirm His Divinity. The 
 kenosis of the one was the pleroma of the other. 
 He was perpetually losing Himself, that He might 
 find Himself and fulfil Himself the more in and 
 through the suffering of the Perpetual Cross. Had 
 He ever for one moment acted with a view to save 
 Himself, or even only permitted the thought to 
 enter His mind, He would still have remained the 
 best and greatest Man that ever lived, He might 
 even have remained a God of a kind, but He could 
 not have been our Kedeemer. We remember well, 
 at the beginning of His Ministry during the Temp- 
 tation after the terrible fast of forty days and forty 
 nights, how He refused any compromise and de- 
 clined to do anything to help Himself by releasing 
 the forces of Omnipotence. He could have turned 
 stones into bread, were it worth while, He could 
 have cast Himself down from the Temple top un- 
 injured, if He wished for cheap and vulgar glory. 
 But such acts were morally, Divinely impossible. 
 For others in the extremity of need He might have 
 performed both miracles, but for Himself never. 
 Had He stooped so low He would have renounced 
 His eternal work and abdicated His Godhead. Such 
 a course is inconceivable, when we bear in mind 
 Christ's own statements and His own definition of 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFERING 101 
 
 the highest spiritual life. "He that findeth his 
 life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for My 
 sake shall find it." Here we have the programme, 
 the policy of Heaven, the very innermost law 
 according to which it works and works out infinite 
 and supreme results. Nulla salus extra crucem 
 nulla vita sine morte nulla pax nisi ex bello. And 
 again vita via, and mors janua vitae. There has 
 never been a religion, something more than a mere 
 form, which has not had some glimpse or glimmer 
 though infinitely remote of this stupendous strife 
 and fundamental cosmic fact call it what we will 
 salvation, apotheosis, consummation, through 
 Vicarious Suffering. Self is only realised and 
 realisable in others. Thus does God justify Him- 
 self and vindicate His moral government, and thus 
 does man discover He is Divine. Of course, if we 
 choose, we can repudiate the testimony of our} 
 own experience and the evidence of history, and 
 declare the truth is no truth. But in this way we 
 stultify ourselves and put ourselves to endless con- 
 fusion. Queen Mary Tudor is sometimes said to 
 have said, that, after her death, the name Calais 
 would be found engraven on her heart. And on 
 the heart of the most virulent opponent of the light, 
 nay, if it might be, even on the heart of Anti- 
 christ himself, is written for good or evil, the Cross 
 of Christ. We cannot go outside our experience, 
 we cannot get away from cosmic principles. And 
 if we refuse to confront the facts, we thereby con- 
 demn ourselves and our idle speculations to a sterile 
 circle of impotence and the treadmill of futility. 
 
102 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 Even those who are loudest in their denunciations 
 of Vicarious Suffering, as unreasonable and immoral, 
 the very men and women who would if they could, 
 tear this brightest jewel from the Saviour's crown, 
 are often the men and women who by domestic 
 virtues and philanthropic enterprises constitute the 
 most splendid refutations in practice of their own 
 preaching. They bear the blessed Cross in their 
 lives, while their lips thunder curses against the 
 doctrine. Their own glorious self-denial is their 
 own glorious self-assertion. After all, there exists 
 a great deal of beautiful faith in the fiercest Agnos- 
 ticism, and the most rabid unbelievers extract at 
 least as much comfort from the Unknowable as we 
 do from the Knowable. Mystery should be no 
 stumbling block, at any rate to men of science and 
 thinkers. For everything, sooner or later, be- 
 comes more or less unintelligible, but not therefore 
 less true. Yes, and even at the very outset of 
 things, directly we penetrate beneath the surface, 
 we reach the inexplicable. But that proves to be, 
 upon the deepest reflection, the very bedrock of the 
 universe. The foundations are laid in eternal dark- 
 ness, but on the mountain tops in spite of the be- 
 setting cloud (and because of the besetting cloud) 
 though we fear with a natural fear as we enter into 
 it, the light never sets. We have always stars and 
 landmarks to steer by. Nautis aperitur Apollo. 
 
 Yet, in the face of this everlasting verity, inter- 
 woven in the cosmic framework and constitution of 
 things, wo find theologians sublimely unconscious 
 of their own b< -firings and best arguments and 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFEKING 103 
 
 lightly giving the whole Gospel away by dangerous 
 and deadly admissions. As if they had not mas- 
 tered the elements of their case. And here again 
 we see, as always, the unwise advocate who does 
 not know his brief is far more damaging by his 
 airy and easy surrenders than the antagonist of the 
 cause. Science is science and occupies its own 
 legitimate sphere, and employs its own legitimate 
 methods or instruments. But one cannot paint or 
 lay colour on with a trowel, and cut diamonds with 
 a hatchet. And again problems will remain prob- 
 lems for ever and ever, until they are rightly re- 
 stated. So theologians should at any rate under- 
 stand their proper field of labour and what has to 
 be proved and what has to be safeguarded. And 
 many timid commentators and divines have been 
 so fearful about their orthodoxy and so anxious to 
 retain hiiracles, that they have acknowledged them 
 where they never existed. Heaven save the poor 
 Church from such irrelevant and destructive con- 
 fessions of faith. Why invoke the dens ex machina 
 when no such violent intervention is demanded or 
 required? If the true explanation has been given 
 in the Gospel itself, why go afar to introduce (to 
 drag in by cart-ropes) a bootless and barren thau- 
 maturgic display? 
 
 We read in St. John viii. 59, " Then took they 
 up stones to cast at Him: but Jesus hid Himself 
 and went out of the Temple, going through the 
 midst of them, and so passed by." We may com- 
 pare with this the incident at Nazareth, when they 
 " rose up and thrust Him out of the city, and led 
 
104 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 Him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city 
 was built, that they might cast Him down headlong. 
 But He, passing through the midst of them, went 
 His way." And the Gospel which creates the 
 difficulty, gives the key and provides the proper and 
 obvious solution, in St. John v. 13. " And He that 
 was healed wist not who it was: for Jesus had con- 
 veyed Himself away, a multitude being in that 
 place." No miracle evidently was wrought in any 
 one of the three recorded instances. The safest 
 hiding-place, it has often been said and truly said, 
 lies in a crowd. Jews dressed all very much in the 
 same way and never shaved except for vows. Jesus 
 also had many supporters who sympathised with 
 Him in secret and openly. And in a crowd, and a 
 Teacher or Hakim like Him w 7 ould always be fol- 
 lowed by disciples and curious critical hearers, the 
 door of escape (nay, numerous doors of escape) stood 
 ready wide open. Christ wanted no miracle to 
 make Him invisible. In the crowd" a mult-it nd*- 
 being in that place " He was in a moment invisi- 
 ble, swallowed up and lost among hundreds of simi- 
 lar units. Friends would of course conceal His 
 Presence with their own persons, and to His 
 enemies He would be frequently a stranger and 
 imperfectly known. Nothing, then, would be 
 easier than to elude ignorant pursuit ' ' going 
 through the midst of them." Even at Nazareth, we 
 read the same explanation. Though there His 
 Face must have been familiar to most, the numbers 
 that attacked Him proved really His safety and not 
 a source of peril. " But He, passing through the 
 
VICAEIOUS SUFFEKING 105 
 
 midst of them, went His ivay." Why then manu- 
 facture a serious problem, when the elucidation 
 offered us is both true and adequate? We venture 
 to say far more than this. For in the fierce light 
 of the Temptation it seems absolutely certain that 
 our Lord would have considered any miracle 
 wrought for His Personal security a betrayal of His 
 awful trust, a breach of the principle by which alone 
 He not merely gave, but was Salvation for us and 
 for all, and even an act of sin. It is not saying too 
 much, it is not travelling beyond the limits of 
 severe truth, to say that theologians who teach that 
 Jesus wrought a miracle to extricate Himself from 
 danger commit the unpardonable offence of turning 
 the Sinless into the sinful Bedeemer. It was the 
 crowning glory of the Buddha to have been an 
 erring man among erring men and by his own pri- 
 vate lapses to have learned at first hand the hate- 
 fulness of sin. But from the first Christology has 
 taken the one Scriptural position that Jesus, though 
 He was " made sin " (a sin-offering) " for us who 
 kneio no sin," yet never in word or deed or thought 
 or feeling yielded or could have yielded to the temp- 
 tations of any sordid or selfish enticement. He 
 was tempted or He would not have been human. 
 He " was in all points tempted like as we are, yet 
 without sin," but He refused to submit His will to 
 such solicitings. Presented to and in His con- 
 sciousness the evil allurement certainly must have 
 been, but it was never represented there as a thing 
 dear and desirable. " Perfect through suffering " 
 and over temptation, " He is able to succour them 
 
106 THE KEEPEB OF THE KEYS 
 
 that are tempted." A Saviour, however great 
 and good and beautiful, who saves himself, 
 is not a Saviour at all. And if we are to 
 believe, as theologians would have us believe, that 
 Christ stooped to negate His very office and Nature 
 and wrought three contemptible miracles for mere 
 Personal deliverance, then the entire fabric of Chris- 
 tianity with redemption collapses like a house of 
 cards. Concessions of this kind undermine the bases 
 of our faith. The defence of miracles here amounts to 
 an attack from the inside upon our religion, and a 
 sacrifice of the title-deeds. Well may the Church 
 fear the enemies of her own household, in these 
 misguided zealots who posing as friends give up the 
 keys of the sacred citadel to her opponents, and 
 think that thus they are jealous for her honour and 
 their Master's and do God service. Salvation has 
 no meaning, unless it means the Cross. And we 
 empty the Cross of all content, when we violate its 
 first principles and take away its ' ' offence ' ' and 
 transform or degrade it into a matter of compromise 
 or conscience or self-seeking. Christ came just to 
 offer up in a daily offering, of which Calvary was 
 but the last link or term, His Life for others. And 
 the assertion that He ever broke or stained this 
 glorious service of Self-immolation by a piece of 
 common jugglery and by making Himself invisible, 
 displays a singular fatuity and a startling ignorance 
 of His work. In uncanonical books we do find 
 such acts attributed to Him , and the stigma stamps 
 them at once as uninspired. But from Revelation 
 we expect and we receive a very different testimony. 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFERING 107 
 
 There is no congruity between such puerile exhibi- 
 tions of power and the attested conduct of our Lord. 
 The miracle-mongers of this kind and the Divine 
 Sufferer, who felt the extremes of hunger and thirst 
 and labour and weariness, and sorrow and pain, 
 have no common ground and no common measure. 
 But, it may be urged as a forlorn argument, the 
 Saviour did work these miracles undoubtedly for the 
 sake of His disciples and not for Himself. To this 
 we reply at once, that the disciples on these three 
 occasions ran no risk to themselves, and were not 
 attacked. And there is nothing in any of the Gos- 
 pel narratives to prove they ever were in any 
 danger until the closing scene in Gethsemane. 
 
 Christianity begins and ends, stands or falls, with 
 the doctrine of Vicarious Suffering, that it is our 
 privilege as it was that of Jesus to live and die for 
 others. The whole Gospel lies in a nutshell " He 
 saved others, Himself He cannot save." Freedom 
 in service, life by death, the daily burden of the 
 Cross and its self-realisation through self-sacrifice. 
 Theology should at least be consistent and logical. 
 To accept a portion of the Truth and to refuse the 
 rest of the doctrine, through which alone it stands 
 complete and harmonious and justified, seems a sui- 
 cidal theology. Christ could not both save Himself 
 and save others, and He never did so. And 
 no deadlier blow has been struck at the 
 root of Redemption than the fatal inability 
 to see it honestly and see it wholly. In 
 these days and when part after part of the Bible 
 has been whittled away, not in the interests of theo- 
 
108 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 logy, but of theory, under a false appeal to the sacred 
 name of free inquiry, we can ill afford to surrender 
 more, especially when it happens to be of the essence 
 of our faith and in organic and vital union with what 
 we hold nearest and dearest of all our most precious 
 possessions. Let the cloud of selfishness for one 
 moment, or in the faintest degree, cast the shadow of 
 a shadow over the Saviour's life, and it loses immedi- 
 ately its unique inspiration. His Death then is no 
 Atonement and the Cross becomes at the utmost a 
 sublime metaphor. And our Christianity descends 
 to the level of a poem or a dream. 
 
 But the profound truth of Vicarious Suffering 
 would possess but little meaning, unless taken in 
 connection with its antithesis and complement, 
 namely Self-preservation. It is at once obvious 
 that, unless this last principle operated as a check 
 and counterpoise, the race must speedily become 
 extinct. Here we have no apology for a cowardly 
 selfishness, the abject egotism that in defending and 
 securing its own life at all costs forfeits the very 
 reason for existence. This is not self-preservation 
 but self-destruction. Asceticism, that very well 
 may be and often has been an edifying example of 
 devotion and altruistic sacrifice, that certainly pre- 
 sents a wide field of useful labours for the few and 
 the fit, yet runs a risk of degenerating into a sancti- 
 fied and inglorious egotism. Self-preservation, to 
 be of any practical and permanent service, must be 
 self-preservation not for oneself but for others., 
 Look at our Saviour's own behaviour in this direc- 
 tion. " When Jesus therefore perceived that they 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFEBING 109 
 
 would come by force to make Him a King, He de- 
 parted again into a mountain Himself alone." And 
 again, we may quote another instance, after the be- 
 heading of John the Baptist. " When Jesus heard 
 of it, He departed thence by ship into a desert place 
 apart." Now in both these cases there was no 
 danger to our Lord, and His conduct bore no refer- 
 ence to any regard for His own Personal safety. 
 This could not be in question then. Yet it was a 
 splendid display of the vital importance of Self- 
 preservation for others. Precious lives are idly 
 squandered every year, and perhaps every day, from 
 lack of attention to this great qualifying rule. Each 
 act of each Christian should undoubtedly be a little 
 altar of whole-hearted surrender for any whom we 
 can help by the offering, but if we make this rule 
 excessive by wanton abuse of our powers we do 
 neither them nor God service. Talents of body and 
 mind and spirit, talents of wealth and leisure and 
 sympathy, were never bestowed on us to be wasted 
 and to expire in the blaze of a brief prodigal magni- 
 ficence. When our Saviour perceived the approach 
 of a crisis that could abbreviate His Ministry and 
 impair His usefulness, He withdrew from the world 
 into a temporary seclusion. In this attitude we 
 discover a Divine Selfishness. Labour, suffering, 
 healing, witnessing, teaching and preaching, were 
 all, if we may venture to speak in earthly figures, 
 more congenial to Him. But for the sake of sinners, 
 for the sake of His disciples, for the sake of His 
 friends and the Jews His enemies, retirement and 
 repose were for a season necessary. Nulla crux, 
 
110 THE KEEPEE OF THE KEYS 
 
 quanta crux! The hardest, heaviest Cross to Him 
 was having none, when all the immensity of His 
 human and Divine Love cried out for action and 
 sacrifice and daily death. The unquenchable 
 thirst for Self-immolation impelled Him to face the 
 ordeal of popular enthusiasm in its misdirected zeal, 
 or confront the paralysis of national depression at 
 the martyrdom of a prophet, but the resolve of Self- 
 preservation for others dictated a retreat into the 
 hill country or desert. We have not merely to 
 guard against the invasion of the bad, but the 
 encroachment of the good when it would clash with 
 something better. Le meilleur est toujours Vennemi 
 du bien. 
 
 Vicarious sacrifice, if it stood alone, would simply 
 be sublime foolishness. It might be beautiful, per- 
 haps, always, but when the element of foolhardiness 
 or irrelevancy or misdirection enters it incurs the 
 hazard of becoming ridiculous. Don Quixote might 
 be a valorous knight, in spite of his assaults on 
 windmills, but he could never be a saviour of 
 society. We want something better than honour 
 and chivalry for this. They may be, they are, very 
 respectable human attributes, but they are not 
 Divine. They have an earthly basis and an earthly 
 leaven. To call God "honourable" or "chival- 
 rous," would be absurd nay, it would be positively 
 profane. But any man might be distinguished by 
 the application of such epithets. Yet, on the other 
 hand, we can speak of a Suffering Saviour, or a 
 Self-sacrificing Saviour without offence and in the 
 language of admiration or adoring love. The 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFEKING 111 
 
 philanthropist who, probably not without a little 
 latent desire for notoriety, takes off his coat and puts 
 it upon the shivering beggar in rags who 
 immediately pawns it for a tenth of its value for 
 baser delights, or the Lady Bountiful who with her 
 own fair hands carries the dinner from her table 
 to the lusty whining mendicant at her door both 
 of these may be very benevolent in their deeds of 
 self-denial, but they are both merely Quixotic. 
 
 It is needless now to elaborate this point in the 
 economy of Nature, as it forms one of the common- 
 places of books that deal with the subject and con- 
 stitutes one of the most interesting chapters. Mimi- 
 cry of animals, their protective colouring and defen- 
 sive characters for the furtherance of self-preserva- 
 tion, abound and superabound in the narratives of 
 competent observers. But what is vaguely and 
 dimly and imperfectly conscious here and partially 
 developed, in the kingdom of Nature as differen- 
 tiated for the sake of convenience from the world of 
 man, emerges as definitely and deliberately con- 
 scious in the Kingdom of Grace. The impulse for 
 self-sacrifice and vicarious suffering common to 
 martyrs and confessors of the faith and all the 
 highest types of humanity, whether pioneers of the 
 Gospel or of Science, the exponents of a new creed 
 or a new grammar, who would die for the rejection 
 or retention of a single letter, for an iota more or 
 an iota less, as Christianity slowly evolves itself and 
 Culture (even the most Agnostic Culture) surely 
 absorbs something of its complexion, has to fight 
 with a conflicting power or principle that forbids 
 
112 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 absolute and unprofitable suicide. At the begin- 
 ning of any particular civilisation, east or west, 
 north or south, classical or Christian, we find a pre- 
 ponderance of the ill-regulated devotion. Waves 
 of fanaticism, frequently heroic and lovely fanati- 
 cism, lay hold of a community and convulse it to 
 its innermost depths. Society is shaken to its 
 foundations from centre to circumference. Candi- 
 dates for the glory of martyrdom follow each other 
 in rapid succession, and all ranks catch the infection 
 of the divine frenzy. Women and children, the 
 frailest and the fairest and the youngest go singing 
 to their fate, and endure the most agonising tortures 
 with the rapture of bride and bridegroom. They 
 fall in love with death and mount the scaffold as 
 a monarch mounts the throne. And no new cause, 
 no new crusade, religious or non-religious, would 
 exist a day without the awful engineering energy of 
 this irresponsible initiative, which counts no cost 
 and heeds no consequences and marches straight 
 onward, and with the rapture of its faith desiccates 
 seas and creates dry land, and accepts flooded rivers 
 and frowning battlemented walls as but daily steps 
 or stepping stones in the pathway of progress. But, 
 as the Gospel prevails and penetrates both masses 
 and classes, as Culture broadens and deepens, these 
 passionate paroxysms of spiritual enthusiasm, 
 choosing death in preference to life and making a 
 festival of martyrdom, though they never can dis- 
 appear altogether, still tend to grow fewer and 
 fewer. They begin to recognise the qualifying 
 antagonistic factor of self-preservation. It was 
 
VICARIOUS SUFFERING- 113 
 
 always present, at the very origin of the civilising 
 movement, though more or less latent and held in 
 abeyance by the fresh young forces of devotion 
 which demand the surrender of life and the offering 
 of blood. The aggressive fury of a fresh belief, 
 supposed to be sent direct from heaven, burning and 
 bursting with sacred fire, kept for a while in the 
 background this cold and calculating principle. But 
 there it lay all along, waiting its time for inter- 
 vention, mustering its strength, husbanding its 
 resources, till the first fervour of an iconoclastic 
 enthusiasm abated, and the destructive process gave 
 place to the constructive. And yet, to be of any 
 enduring worth, it ever was and it ever will be, 
 with increasing effect, Self-preservation only for 
 others. 
 
 Sin stands condemned, not only as an offence 
 against God, but as a breach in the cosmic order 
 and therefore a sin against the individual and the 
 race, that cannot be divided, or rather are perpetu- 
 ally divided towards the achievement of a higher 
 spiritual synthesis. And the Shakers and Mor- 
 mons and Dancing Dervishes, and even the new 
 American Salii as represented by Brother Hubbard 
 in his perspiring piety and hideous saltatory services, 
 approach the truth nearer, though thousands of 
 miles away from it, than those religious egomaniacs 
 whose sole conception of Christianity is to secure 
 themselves and their squalid souls. The worship- 
 per, with but one idea, to be sound or safe or 
 saved, or whatever be the last pitiful expression of a 
 beggarly belief, commits the worst possible and 
 
114 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 worst conceivable kind of sin. His creed 
 amounts to nothing but a cowardly and con- 
 temptible self-preservation for himself. We 
 cannot denounce too strongly or sternly this in- 
 famous caricature of a religion that begins and 
 ends and exists but in the Cross. It exhibits the 
 methods of an Insurance Society and the morals 
 of a fiend. What did S. Paul say? " For I could 
 wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my 
 brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." 
 What is even the teaching of the Old Testament? 
 Moses said " Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their 
 sin and if not, blot me, I pray Thee out of Thy 
 book." Here we find the ethics, the religion, of 
 thousands of years ago, immeasurably superior to 
 that creeping, crawling caterwauling orthodoxy, 
 which so long as the individual is saved, cares not 
 if the whole world be damned. 
 
IX 
 
 THE GREAT RECONCILIATION 
 
 EVERY step we take is an arrested fall, in the 
 case of adults. And for children, just beginning 
 to walk, every step is an unarrested fall, until they 
 have acquired the ability to balance themselves in 
 motion and though perpetually on the edge of 
 lapsing from the upright state rarely to lapse in- 
 deed. Grown up people are quite unconscious of 
 the many antagonisms and correspondences, check 
 against check, that go to regulate the simplest 
 piece of progress, though it be but the passage from 
 one room to another. A whole system of the most 
 complicated machinery with countless inter-rela- 
 tions, part drawing against part, and yet all pulling 
 together towards one and the same simple result, 
 is liberated even if we only cross the road. But 
 what concerns us just now may be stated briefly. 
 Every act of locomotion appears to be, not merely 
 a figure of eight movement, as Dr. Pettigrew's 
 observation appears to prove, but also and especially 
 a conflict between the standing and falling positions. 
 We stand because we fall forward, and our onward 
 walk is the effective resultant of two competing 
 forces that which drags us down, and that which 
 
 115 
 
116 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 raises us up. To put it simply, we could not stand 
 unless we fell, and we could not walk unless we 
 did both acts and repeated them in our continued 
 progress. We have the counterpoise of opposite 
 powers issuing in a new and higher fact. 
 
 Exactly the same process occurs in moral ad- 
 vances, and religious developments. Man's spiri- 
 tual lapses are continually ascents and not descents, 
 because in the long run and final account of things 
 he falls upward and not downward. The ethical 
 sense, as history shows us in the experience of 
 individuals and in the experience of nations, grows 
 by reiterated defeats and reiterated recoveries in 
 the everlasting warfare between right and wrong, 
 truth and falsehood, good and evil, and even the 
 battle between contending virtues struggling for the 
 pre-eminence at particular times in particular places 
 and by particular ways. The useful amoeba, our 
 accepted ancestor in a long and singular line of 
 pedigree, at the dim dawn of life, when creative 
 energy seemed blindly groping its way through 
 grotesque and humble forms towards the sun-blaze 
 of Dantes and Shakespeares, was darkly feeling for 
 something more and something better when it' 
 established some sort of connection with a nebulous 
 world outside and proceeded, however slowly and 
 feebly to individuate itself from others. The re- 
 sistance perceived, and recognised as a working fact, 
 out of constant collisions and failures, giving and 
 taking, rinding and losing, progress and retrogres- 
 sion, was really the nucleus of nil future morality 
 and contained the germ of the religious Simeon 
 
THE GKEAT EE CONCILIATION 117 
 
 revival in Cambridge and the Oxford (Church) 
 Movement. Without eternal contests, there could 
 have been and would have been no Pascal, no New- 
 man, no Loisy. " The Spirit of God moved upon 
 the face of the waters." Chaos and order fought for 
 the mastery, and light and darkness met in the 
 death grip which was the promise and prophecy of 
 civilisation. There must be two terms, two factors, 
 at the ultimate analysis upon which to work the 
 two sides, the two ends, the two pieces of the Cross. 
 Without subject and object in unceasing belli- 
 gerency we shall have no action and reaction, and 
 nothing but the stable equilibrium of corruption 
 that feeds upon itself. Production or productive- 
 ness demands the endless duel between growth and 
 decay. Subject and object, for ever agreeing to 
 disagree and disagreeing to agree, may only thus 
 define and explain and realise themselves in each 
 other by this sublime negation. " Most gladly 
 therefore," said St. Paul, " I will rather glory in my 
 infirmities, that the Power of Christ may rest upon 
 me." The mighty apostle had read the riddle of 
 philosophy, he knew the secret of life, and prac- 
 tised what he preached in a glorious missionary life 
 of protracted martyrdom. He saw we must keep 
 fighting, if we would live and grow and become 
 Christly ourselves. And he touched the innermost 
 core of the truth, when he boldly declared the 
 astounding paradox that in his weakness lay his 
 strength, in his beggary his wealth, and in over- 
 throws his victories. He had been taught at the 
 Cross, by the crucifixion of the flesh and the denial 
 
118 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 of self, that in these apparent defects or disasters 
 resided the raw materials for a better triumph and 
 a deeper, broader evolution. Poverty was his 
 bride, sorrow a daily sacrament, pain his brother. 
 He had learned, at the sword's point of perpetual 
 conflict, the ideal will be always more real than 
 reality and more natural than Nature, and the 
 human and even the historical in the grandest forms 
 never existed and never can exist as mortal on earth 
 but are written in the secret chronicles of souls and 
 registered in the heavenlies. Life, spiritual life, 
 he knew was the sum of our moral antagonisms. 
 Individuality, he would have said, was the out- 
 ward character which separated us from others and 
 therefore by the fundamental law of contradiction 
 to others in ourselves. While personality was the 
 inward character, " the hidden man of the heart," 
 that separated us from God, and therefore in our- 
 selves to God. And the individuality and per- 
 sonality together compose the total amount of our 
 being in their relationships and antagonisms. The 
 soul thus keeps drawing nearer and nearer to God 
 by an endless contradiction, in which it justifies 
 itself and manifests Him. How clearly our Lord 
 proclaimed this fact, the most superficial reader 
 must be well aware. " And a man's foes shall be 
 they of his own household." Character, moral 
 force, spiritual initiative, can arise and expand 
 simply out of the divided house and the civil war 
 in the heart. Temptation resisted and overcome 
 means a great deal more than the bare words seem 
 to connote, and was never and never will be a pure 
 
THE GREAT RECONCILIATION 11.9 
 
 blind negation. The positive contents of the trans- 
 action are indefinitely vast or practically infinite. 
 The vice, the fault, the error, the obliquity, when 
 fairly conquered becomes an ally, a servant, a 
 friend. By a moral transformation it is revolu^ 
 tionised and built into the edifice of the soul, it 
 becomes material for the foundations or the walls. 
 No sin even may be wasted. Nature is parsi- 
 monious, God is economical. And by adding to a 
 defect or subtracting from an excess and above all 
 by giving the right direction, He takes our very 
 vilest qualities and moulds them afresh. He passes 
 them through the flames of eternal Love, He who 
 is " consuming fire," and brings them forth as 
 blessings and joys, to enter in the jewelled ramparts 
 of New Jerusalem. 
 
 Combinations out of resolution and dissolution, 
 to be broken up again for re-combinations, in grand 
 cosmic rhythm, physical, mental, moral, religious- 
 such appears to be the way of the universe, as re- 
 flected in our experience. The deepest impression 
 of the consciousness, when we travel farthest back, 
 is antithesis, and nothing evidently can be known 
 except in terms of contradiction which only states 
 itself to be absorbed in a wider unity. In the 
 offence (or antagonism) of the Cross and in Christ 
 alone all mysteries are solved, all problems settled, 
 all connexions grounded, all enigmas opened, and 
 all truths find their full value and virtue and sanc- 
 tion. And we are thereby elevated by agreement 
 in difference to still higher reconciliations of Calvary 
 on Calvary. God is and must be a jealous God, 
 
120 THE KEEi'EK OF THE KEYS 
 
 and this we soon discover to be the attitude of 
 Nature. " Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, 
 and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth." 
 And the Trial of Jealousy recorded in the book of 
 Numbers, exactly expresses the main aspect of the 
 Divine Government. Life approaches us, step by 
 step, and stage by stage, as a series of ordeals or 
 disciplinary combats to elicit the best in us and 
 fortify our characters. Every breath we draw 
 should be a sort of vital experiment, every pace 
 should be a moral probation, testing our powers and 
 establishing our position. Each judgment we 
 form must be an appeal to the decision of the sword. 
 The arbitrament of battle is the price we pay for 
 all our acquisitions, for more liberty and more 
 knowledge and more suffering. God gives us 
 most when He takes away most. He reveals Him- 
 self just by hiding Himself, and the revelation of 
 darkness proves the revelation of light. ,. " Verily 
 Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, God of Israel 
 the Saviour." The way of the Maker with His 
 child, to say it with all reverence, resembles the 
 way of a maid with a man. He withdraws to en- 
 tice us, He denies that He may bestow all that He 
 possibly can. Refusals signify His choicest favours, 
 and when He would attract He repels. We are 
 emptied by Him in order to be filled, made beggars 
 and bankrupts in perpetual impoverishments to be 
 enriched for ever. Out of our frailties God weaves 
 the royal raiment of Kings and in our grossest infir- 
 mities and imperfections He lays the foundation 
 stones of His eternal temple. We are fed by 
 
THE GEEAT RECONCILIATION 121 
 
 famishing, and stripped and starved to be clothed 
 and nourished. Omnipotence realises itself in the 
 spiritual might of spiritual meekness. St. Paul, to 
 quote his experience again, exhibited this sublime 
 truth in its fairest fulness. " / know both how to 
 be abased, and I know how to abound; everywhere 
 and in all things I am instructed both to be full and 
 to be hungry, both to abound and suffer need.. I 
 can do all things through Christ ivhich strengtheneth 
 me." He recognised boldly the infinite and ever- 
 lasting contradiction of things, the hostile flesh and 
 the hostile world, and the Divine Adversary who 
 fought against him thus to render him worthy of 
 the Divine friendship. Every new provocation un- 
 folded itself at last as a new proof of God's Love, 
 and even the repeated challenges of evil all helped, 
 though out of disaster and defeat and death , to bring 
 in the new Creation and the new heaven and earth 
 of righteousness. St. Paul testified, as few have 
 done, to the terrible reality of the battle-ground in 
 his moral consciousness, where spirit and flesh, 
 Grace and Nature, perpetually struggled for pre- 
 dominance. And none has described the contest 
 in more vivid language. " For I delight in the law 
 of God after the inward man : but I see another law 
 in my members warring against the law of my 
 mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of 
 sin which is in my members." No chapter written 
 by man has been more sadly abused than this, as 
 if we could avoid the imputation of evil, which after 
 all did not concern or injure the soul. The spirit 
 and the flesh accordingly have been treated as dis- 
 
122 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 tinct from each other, like separate watertight com- 
 partments. And the apostle, from this point of 
 view, anticipated the latest and best design of) 
 modern shipbuilding. He might almost have been 
 laying down the lines of a new battleship. But 
 this perverse interpretation of St. Paul's witness to 
 the unceasing moral fight, carefully omits the chief 
 actor or protagonist, namely, the will of man. To 
 argue that the spirit is independent of the acts of 
 the flesh, and uninterested in and unaffected by 
 them, gives the lie direct to human nature and our 
 universal knowledge. Unless the will consented 
 actively, or stood passively aloof and in abeyance, 
 unless it co-operated positively or negatively, the 
 principle of evil would be impotent. And the very 
 quintessence of sin consists in this, not the defeat 
 when we are overcome by wrong after a stern strife 
 more or less protracted, but when we refuse the 
 very conditions of our existence and decline to fight 
 at all. This attitude places us lower than the 
 meanest organism with the feeblest pulse of life, 
 whether protozoa or protophyta or their connecting 
 links. They, at any rate, can and do fight for 
 their own hand, if they can do little or nothing elso. 
 Even the rolling moss, when all moisture fails nnd 
 drought lies heavy upon it, seems able to detach it- 
 self from one habitat and finds wings in the wind 
 that transport it to another in the presence or neigh- 
 bourhood of water. Refusal to fight lowers a m:m 
 to the level of a mineral or a vegetable, ;i slock or ;i 
 stone. The rolling moss will not tamely succumb 
 without an effort, and contends to the last against 
 
THE GKEAT EECONCILIATION 123 
 
 overwhelming odds. And in a world of militant 
 units, the soldier, whether man or microbe, or mole- 
 cule, that will not fight is lost, and commits the one 
 unpardonable sin. On reflection, if we analyse the 
 constituents of any moral lapse, we shall find among 
 its fateful contents the most fateful is evading the 
 wager of battle, which confronts us all alike. More- 
 over the defaulting soldier, who retires to the rear 
 or attempts to hide himself behind his figleaves or 
 fiction, neither gains a conquest thus nor escapes 
 the inexorable issues. Justice appears to be the 
 twin brother of evil, and relentlessly follows to 
 avenge the misdeeds done. He may often seem 
 blind and lame, but he arrives at length, and makes 
 no mistakes : 
 
 " Raro antecedentem scelestum 
 Deseruit pcde Poena claudo." 
 
 Only we now, in the light of the Gospel, should read 
 instead of " raro " the truer word " nunquam." To 
 evade the fight in the present, or to sin, means 
 simply to postpone the struggle to the future and 
 face severer penalties. 
 
 Assuming, as everyone must now, the progressive 
 character of revelation and light that gradually 
 emerges from the clash of competing factors, begin- 
 ning with the first fire-cloud of primeval palpitating 
 ether which was only a fresh departure from an 
 older and earlier system, we understand that nothing 
 is or can be perfectly clear to us. Evil, for instance, 
 the original and most comprehensive of terms, re- 
 mains still an insoluble mystery. It declines to 
 
124 THE KEEPEE OF THE KEYS 
 
 be compressed within the mould of any definition, 
 however convincing and apparently complete. The 
 ultimate meaning for ever defies us. Its disguises 
 are many, and the angel of darkness frequently 
 looks when closely examined more like an angel of 
 light. We must never confound evil with sin. 
 Physical, mental, moral, spiritual, it takes a multi- 
 tude of transformations and never continues in one 
 stay. Sometimes it errs by defect, and sometimes 
 it errs by excess. God Himself in the Bible proudly 
 claims the authorship, as if it were part of the 
 protoplasmic material in which He delighted to 
 work. And the hand of Omnipotence, to say it with 
 bowed head and bated breath, seems like the dyer's 
 hand occasionally dyed and stained with its com- 
 plexion. We measure evil by degrees, but some 
 evils merge in the final outcome like supremely 
 blessed goods and not evils. Who, with the most 
 rudimentary experience of life within him and with- 
 out him, will venture for a moment to dispute the 
 incontestable fact, that so-called evils like suffering 
 and sorrow and pain are frequently not only essen- 
 tial benefits but immediate? It seems, on more 
 profound and accurate consideration, that we want 
 a new vocabulary or at least new definitions of m;my 
 old terms, intended to express certain fundamental 
 truths which they merely murder or obscure. What- 
 ever evil may be, it cannot possibly be all bad. The 
 world, quite as clearly as the Church, acknowledges 
 this fact. Evil may be imperfect or qualified or 
 incipient good, or good in the making or sometimes 
 just good out of season and place. And here we 
 
THE GREAT RECONCILIATION 125 
 
 may find a sort of partial solution, in the relativity 
 of things. Inopportune ''good" may be worse 
 than any evil , and opportune ' ' evil ' ' may be better 
 than any "good," as one man's meat is another 
 man's poison, and the blessing for a child might be 
 a curse for the adult. Evil, at a particular time or 
 spot, and for a particular state or stage of a particu- 
 lar person's moral evolution, may be and often is 
 unmitigated good. It seems sad and humiliating 
 but we must confess it, that though the Scriptures 
 proclaimed the fact from the outset of written reve- 
 lation, yet the pagan world before Christ and the 
 unbelieving world since Christ, has readily received 
 always and published this truth. To cite Horace 
 alone, in the " splendide mendax " and the " splen- 
 didus error," we have a faithful and luminous wit- 
 ness to the good of evil at times and its awful 
 nobility. Milton, in his portrait of Satan through- 
 out Paradise Lost has quite innocently and unwil- 
 lingly yielded precisely the same testimony. It 
 follows then, logically, that in dealing with facts 
 incompletely understood and describing them in 
 symbols or words which we feel to be painfully in- 
 adequate and but remotely or but metaphorically 
 correct, we cannot expect clear and solid results. 
 And the poet, who sang of "the supreme evil, 
 God," was not so profane as he seemed. 
 
 Man, called "a compound of dirt and Deity," 
 embraces certainly a human element and a Divine. 
 The Incarnation of our Lord was and is the one 
 great historical evidence of this tremendous truth. 
 And tho reconciliation at the Cross in Christ of these 
 
126 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 two conflicting and yet by necessity complementary 
 factors stands forth eternally as the pledge and pro- 
 mise of our own. Our Master fought on the same 
 battlefield, fought with the same weapons, fought 
 the same enemies, fought to the same end, and in 
 the magnificent failure of His Life accomplished 
 what no earthly successes have achieved. Armed 
 with our mortality, clothed in our weakness, exposed 
 to our temptations, He did not, like Buddha, glory 
 in repentance, but took the sin and suffering around 
 him, the extortion of the publican and the unchas- 
 tity of the harlot, and out of this unlovely rubbish, 
 as He quarried deeper than ever man quarried into 
 the dregs of degraded humanity, He wrought a new 
 humanity that was like Himself Divine. St. Paul 
 discovered this. " wretched man that I am, who 
 shall deliver me from the body of this death ? I 
 thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord." The 
 mighty Apostle, equally great as a sinner and as a 
 saint, under the pressure of the dreadful distraction 
 of the daily contradiction w r hich he carried about 
 with him in his body, sought and found the media- 
 ting term in Christ crucified alone. He was, He 
 is, the single satisfaction, the solitary Atonement. 
 Two in ourselves, divided against ourselves, we 
 recover, we realise the lost or unestablished unity 
 in Him, by living His life to death and dying His 
 death to life. Calvary, and nothing but Calvary, 
 provides the key and proves the remedy. 
 
 " My brethren, count it all joy, when ye fall into 
 divers temptations " or trials. St. James assuredly 
 saw no evil here. As an officer in the army of the 
 
THE GREAT EE CONCILIATION 127 
 
 Church Militant he could form no other conception, 
 and advocate no lesser teaching. We are to be 
 " winnowed in," and not according to Messrs. 
 Romanes and Mallock "winnowed out"; yes, 
 " winnowed in " to the Kingdom of God, though 
 nothing but chaff at the outset. For the threshing 
 of the Divine Tribulation, by some moral magic or 
 spiritual alchemy, transmutes the base metal or 
 dross into gold, and turns the very dust of the 
 granary into rich grain. " And this is the Father's 
 loill which hath sent Me, that of all which He 
 hath given me I should lose nothing." The weak 
 love that merely expresses itself in emotional ten- 
 derness, and perhaps overflows in idle tears, that 
 begins and ends in soft words and unmeaning 
 caresses, has nothing in common with the gracious 
 cruelties of Divine Love. The friend who can offer 
 but empty praises or excuses, when we have failed 
 in duty if Mr. Garrod will permit so immoral an 
 expression only betrays his sacred trust, and acts 
 as an enemy. Refining comes from the crucible of 
 the everlasting conflict, redemption out of every 
 cross borne for Christ's sake. For the Passion re- 
 vealed itself in time, not to relieve us from doing 
 or suffering, but to armour and enable us to under- 
 go the same ordeal according to our measure. And 
 at the Cross, where our Lord keeps perpetual tryst, 
 we meet Him and unite with Him and share the 
 privileges of pain, in daily death the price of daily 
 liberty and life. Thither, too, the world repairs, 
 at each fresh budding point or new beginning, to 
 renew its youth and realise itself in God. 
 
CHUKCH AND WOELD 
 
 GOD governs the world by appointments and dis- 
 appointments, through the perpetual warfare of the 
 critical with the creative faculty, and keeps drawing 
 us closer and closer to Himself by a process of 
 separation which only accomplishes at last a vital 
 union and communion. For the Cross at once 
 divides and combines. Mere happiness, the fond 
 dream of poets and philosophers and even saints, 
 was never intended to be our goal. It is really but 
 the grave of all our highest powers and parts, and 
 the aspirations that are inspirations. Reflection 
 convinces us that in the Divine Economy of Grace, 
 spiritual development or more life and loftier life 
 emerges as the goal of the human race. The 
 ordinary Elysium of happiness, even immaterial 
 happiness, if nothing more and just an end in itself, 
 instead of being an upward and onward step in an 
 eternal series, stands condemned immediately on 
 consideration as a fool's paradise. What we dis- 
 cern as the cosmic principle or ultimate basis of all 
 things appears to be movement, work, progress, by 
 militant states. We ascend and descend continu- 
 ally, but we descend simply to ascend again. 
 
 128 
 
CHUECH AND WORLD 129 
 
 Nature, the world, even God Himself, is at once the 
 tomb and the womb of everything, and this as 
 far as we can comprehend without any assignable 
 limit. The sign Thau, the Cross, seems stamped 
 on the whole of the universe, above and below, 
 within and without. It offers the clue to our inter- 
 pretation of each mystery that besets us, and when 
 we would shrink from the shadow of the unequal 
 contest, we are compelled to read its inscription. 
 In hoc signo vinccs. 
 
 It is pitiful to hear the constant admission of de- 
 feat going up to Heaven everywhere like the wail of 
 a departing God, in the blurred and broken records 
 of contemporary Church chronicles. Whether we 
 turn to Mr. Charles Booth's monumental labours 
 and the testimony yielded by London, or the Rev. 
 Richard Free's bitter experiences told by " Seven 
 Years Hard ' ' in the Isle of Dogs , or leave the town 
 and ask the witness of the country, we are still con- 
 fronted by the same forlorn confession of impotence 
 and failure. Yes, the Church, though officered by 
 her best men and most enthusiastic champions, has 
 proved powerless to reach the masses and touch the 
 hearts of the people. Believing in her Divine mis- 
 sion and mandate, and armed with all the authority 
 of holy sacraments and immemorial usages, and the 
 ever new message of the Gospel, she cannot grapple 
 either with the passionate opposition of the world 
 or the far more fatal dead weight of inertia, or apathy 
 and indifference. The prisons are full and the 
 churches are empty. The last new senseless or im- 
 moral popular ballad crowds the music halls 
 10 
 
130 THE KEEPEE OF THE KEYS 
 
 and places of amusement to the point of 
 suffocation, while the grandest truth that can 
 be uttered remains unheeded or invites ridi- 
 cule or receives hostile attacks. Has the 
 mental axis of man changed so that he is no 
 longer able to entertain the Christian creed fairly 
 and adequately as he once did? Are our modes of 
 living and our ways of thinking so different now, 
 that we really cannot help being unjust against our 
 will and knowledge to the old Story of the Cross? 
 Have we, in our commercial greed and scientific in- 
 quiry, wandered away too far from 1 the Oriental 
 vision and the Oriental voice in its foreign Syrian 
 setting to appreciate now the force and the fact that 
 undertook to conquer the world? Is this contem- 
 porary coldness of ours simply the revenge of time, 
 the natural and inevitable reaction in the awful 
 rhythm of thought, the recoil of the Occidental mind 
 on its own Occidental methods, that will issue at 
 last in a gigantic cleavage between the two antagonis- 
 tic hemispheres, a contradiction rooted in some 
 fundamental necessity of things? Can there ever 
 be any true permanent sympathy between such radi- 
 cally divided worlds, with such contrary ideals and 
 ambitions ? We may say at once that the difficulty 
 does not lie here, and the ancient antagonism of 
 feelings and tastes and fears so different from each 
 other, presents the most hopeful sign and promise of 
 eventual reconciliation. Coclum non animinti 
 mutant qui trans mare currunt. After all, in spite 
 of surface and even interior disagreements, human 
 nature at bottom is very much the same everywhere, 
 
CHUKCH AND WOKLD 131 
 
 at all times and in all places. Souls, in their essence 
 and elemental bearings, vary little whether east or 
 west of Suez , if we only go deep enough , TT^ev/mTi- 
 KOIS TrvevfjiCLTLKa crvyKpivovres. The same anti- 
 thesis is the same synthesis. A vulgar misappre- 
 hension will soon reveal itself as accounting for all 
 the seeming unsuccess of the Church. Critics have 
 been discussing the question utterly and entirely in 
 the dark, with an ignorance that would be unpar- 
 donable if it were not universal, and in the highest 
 seats even more than in the lowest. The whole 
 matter has been and is an ignoratio elenchi. 
 
 The course of Church history has been just what 
 might and should have been antecedently expected. 
 Given such a creed and such materials to work 
 upon, and a philosopher should a priori have been 
 able to predict every stage in the evolution, the cold 
 and hot fits or obsessions, down to the movement 
 of " passive resistance " at any price, even at the 
 price of active hostility. As, at the very com- 
 mencement of human records whether sacred or 
 secular, God still works in one and the same man- 
 ner. He governs the world, He educates it, by 
 Election or Selection, through the competition of 
 the few against the many, classes against masses, 
 individuals against bulk and brute force. Quantity 
 in itself means nothing, and a single thought 
 weighs more than the matter of the whole stellar 
 universe. The process towards improvement in 
 evolution is purely qualitative. " For many are 
 called but few are chosen." Not only are the 
 leaders and teachers, the reformers and pioneers, 
 
132 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 the captains of intelligence and industry alike, the 
 protagonists of suffering and princes of sorrow, but 
 scanty in number, as they always must be, but the 
 followers or disciples also influenced by these splen- 
 did specimens of the human race are and will be 
 scanty and share in that glorious and God-like iso- 
 lation of thought, by which the world with all its 
 antagonism is spiritually leavened. Time, like 
 quantity, conveys no significance whatever to the 
 soul. And the very paucity of the Christ-loving 
 and Christ-like individuals rightly considered, is 
 the most triumphant proof that the Church's work 
 is Divine and carried on now along the lines which 
 the Master Himself established. The foolishness 
 of the Cross, the foolishness of preaching, we may 
 venture to say the foolishness of God and His faith- 
 ful few, must ever overcome the wisdom of the 
 world. The dynamic heart of fire, in the breast 
 of weakness, that is spiritual meekness, carries a 
 more tremendous energy in its truth than any crude 
 might, however crowned or propped by bayonets. 
 And, had we eyes to see and minds to understand, 
 we should perceive the Cross of Christ victorious 
 now, not in spite of the empty churches and 
 crowded pothouses and prisons or reformatories, 
 In if because of them and through them and by their 
 instrumentality as the needful foil or contrast and 
 counterpart. These gross materials are but the 
 common clay of which the heavenly bricks will be 
 fashioned in the fire. Love always wins, Truth 
 always prevails, in the end, and they neither count 
 the cost nor grudge the bitter means. And we 
 
CHUECH AND WOKLD 133 
 
 often, perhaps usually, choose to forget the infinite 
 blessings of Christianity that indirectly reach the 
 uttermost dregs and saturate the length and breadth 
 and depth of all Society. Vox in deserto claman- 
 tis. Yes, but the wilderness, if an empty church or 
 a populous city, hears the voice though it does 
 not listen and recognises it as an echo of eternity 
 and receives in its most recondite and antipathetic 
 recesses a vital and a saving impression. The 
 drunken beast staggering in his prostituted 
 strength from the tavern, to beat his wife and 
 starve his children has yet somewhere in his de- 
 graded and brutalized being a spark of the divine 
 fire, which, if only in other worlds, will eventually 
 rise up in a reclaiming fact and a redeeming force. 
 The impenitent thief or Magdalene, though not 
 even at second hand or third hand, has nevertheless 
 been spiritually affected by some ray of light that 
 has filtered through a thousand errors and found 
 a home at last in a hot-bed of corruption and im- 
 purity. The dynamic value of the Cross, in reac- 
 tions and resistances and apparently crushing de- 
 feats, has not been realized yet. God is never in 
 a hurry, He has no need. Besides, if the lesson 
 Calvary has taught us is anything it is surely this. 
 God works by failure, and not by success as we call 
 it, and brings victory out of defeat. It is by his 
 fools and paupers and nobodies that He conquers 
 still and governs the world. We see it proved abun- 
 dantly in politics every day, at least. For the 
 Gospel is not a commercial speculation, warranted 
 to produce a maximum of results with a minimum 
 
134 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 of expenditure. On the contrary, it was and is 
 and must be always a losing fight. " He saved 
 others, Himself He cannot save." Christ from the 
 earthly point of view, stands forth as a Divine 
 Failure, a miscarriage of Godhead. And so the 
 Gospel is and must be also a failure, and that 
 constitutes its sole chance of success. " God hath 
 chosen the foolish things of the world to confound 
 the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of 
 the world to confound the things which are mighty, 
 and base things of the world and things which are 
 despised hath God chosen yea, and things which 
 are not, to bring to nought things that are." We 
 ask for outward and visible proofs and palatial evi- 
 dences, jewelled walls and bulwarks, and all the 
 pomp and circumstance of sordid and material 
 magnificence. That is not God's method. He 
 sends us adversities and misfortunes, broken 
 hearts and lives, and by the hands of His lepers 
 and outcasts and pariahs He regenerates the world, 
 through the least promising and least powerful 
 individuals. Christianity, therefore, is and ought 
 to be a failure, just because Christ Himself was a 
 Failure judged by normal standards. And yet this 
 Divine Impotence, so to express it with all rever- 
 ence, has begun slowly, silently, secretly, but 
 surely, to transform the earth, even more by Agnos- 
 tics than by believers. We forget that we possess 
 exactly the same Gospel now and the same Cross 
 guides and rules us, and we must accept the same 
 process from the same principles with the same 
 fruits. And bore arisefc the difficulty. For the Church 
 
CHUKCH AND WORLD 135 
 
 that conquered the world has now in its turn been 
 conquered (as far as this is possible) by the world, 
 and formed with it an adulterous or rather inces- 
 tuous union. Compromise and accommodation, ex- 
 cellent practices in their way, have gone to a per- 
 nicious extent, even to the sacrifice of living truths. 
 Disestablishment, however painful, appears to be 
 the sole logical position and remedy. The Church 
 would be more and not less national, if the adul- 
 terous connexion with the State were severed, and 
 if that artificial scaffolding were removed. Protec- 
 tion here, with the pious odour of an insidious Eras- 
 tianism, seems clearly and indefensibly wrong. In 
 the face of our Lord's unqualified proclamations 
 such an alliance cannot be maintained for a 
 moment, and when we remember the State was 
 originally the child of the Church it becomes not 
 merely unholy but positively incestuous. ' l My 
 kingdom is not of this world. The Kingdom of 
 God is within you." It is impossible to escape the 
 prohibitive pressure of these announcements, which 
 condemn utterly and for ever any sort of institution 
 such as a State Church. It may savour of paradox, 
 but it remains perfectly true that the Church and 
 the State would be much better friends if they were 
 enemies. The union of the two reposes on a com- 
 plete misconception of their respective functions. 
 Each within their own province is supreme and 
 each should be autonomous with their proper and 
 peculiar courts ecclesiastical and civil. And a 
 Church that is at the mercy of a chance division or 
 snap vote in Parliament, can hardly be considered a 
 
136 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 Church at all. That bastard progress, which in 
 the name of light and liberty and for the sake of a 
 false civilisation, hurrying it knows not and cares 
 not whither except to accumulate wealth too costly 
 to be enjoyed, is responsible for this misdevelop- 
 ment of things. Better far to disestablish the 
 Church than to disestablish her doctrines and spiri- 
 tual powers. We are often told that there cannot 
 be a dual Government, in the teeth of the impreg- 
 nable fact that this is the way of the world and no 
 other, and the cosmos could do nothing to any pur- 
 pose and would arrive at no higher synthesis unless 
 it were always and everywhere divided against it- 
 self in order to attain a better unity. Progress, 
 while it boasts of its charters and increases of 
 equality and opportunity for all, fears to allow tho 
 Church a free hand and in a Spartan spirit fetters 
 the arm uplifted in blessing and gilds the chain. 
 It seems really as if Society or Culture had not yet 
 obtained a clear insight into the most elemenf.nv 
 fact that the Church is a spiritual organisation im.l 
 can recognise no laws imposed on it from without. 
 
 We often see and understand in a sense particu- 
 lar points laid before us. But they abide inopera- 
 tive, because they are only grasped intellectually. 
 To be vital and fruitful and lasting possessions, per- 
 sonally appropriated and absorbed and assimilated, 
 verities must be spiritually recognised. They then 
 become our intimate property, a portion of the soul's 
 furniture. And the spiritual recognition carries 
 with it another fact, and is indirectly a proof of and 
 testimony to our immortal ancestry. On tin- physi- 
 
CHURCH AND WOULD 137 
 
 cal plane, the human eye repeatedly observes with- 
 out observing a host of little features, when the 
 mind has not been concentrated upon them. Their 
 very nearness and familiarity render them obscure 
 or even invisible. But as soon as the attention is 
 directed to them, and focussed upon them, we won- 
 der we did not distinguish them before, when under 
 the stress of scrutiny they assume almost startling 
 proportions. And in the same way it may reason- 
 ably be questioned if most of us really assimilate 
 many or indeed any of the simplest facts or prin- 
 ciples. Learned mechanically in youth, by mere 
 dull, constant repetition, before the intelligence 
 could understand or the heart had awakened, they 
 were soon relegated to the automatic sub-conscious- 
 ness and grew into a part of the working machinery 
 of the mind without meaning and without benefit. 
 This irrational acceptance of other persons^ con- 
 clusions causes half the confusion and mischief 
 about us. Experience, that we borrow, without 
 examination and without any personal justification 
 may be possessed, but only as a barren and often 
 fatal inheritance. The vast majority of people take 
 the Church they find awaiting them, in the State 
 leading strings, as they take the fact of maternity 
 and the good things of life. It does not occur to 
 them, that the connection may be wrong, and the 
 Church has been shorn of her heavenly charters and 
 sacred powers and thereby becomes an accomplice 
 in the errors or evils of the State. 
 
 We may be certain that such an unhallo\ved and 
 easy-going arrangement was never for a moment 
 
138 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 entertained by the Divine Founder of the Church. 
 He knew it must remain in the world, but was not 
 to be of the world. It should live as an imperium 
 in imperio, gradually leavening the whole lump by 
 its eternal opposition to vice and fraud and violence 
 and wrong of every description, thus strengthening 
 itself and transforming all the competing seculari- 
 ties. The protest against sin would arise without 
 ceasing, in true mercy sparing no offender and wit* 
 nessing to the Presence of Christ in the sanctuary 
 of His shrines, and in the daily ministration of the 
 Word and Sacraments. The cheap and vulgar 
 sneer at an official faith and stipendiary devotion 
 would soon lose its sting, in lives religiously lived 
 under the shadow of God's very throne. And a 
 Church such as this, wedded to poverty and with 
 no pecuniary prizes, would quickly weed out its un- 
 worthy servants, and merely retain those thaifc 
 sought not ease in Sion and worked not for honour 
 and glory and worldly inducements, and aimed not 
 at a sordid career, but at the conquest of sin. But 
 the priest of the present day, whether beneficed 
 clergyman or ecclesiastical dignitary, usually meets 
 us just as a cultivated man of the world and member 
 of polite society, who at certain seasons and in cer- 
 tain places wears a different dress and performs 
 (and sometimes it is mere performance) particular 
 duties for which he receives due emoluments. He 
 contrives to make the best of both worlds, especially 
 of this. And what could possibly be more danger- 
 ous for himself, and disastrous to the community 
 than his success? He must move in the very best 
 
CHUKCH AND WOULD 139 
 
 circles, and why should he not indeed? But he 
 enters it not as the representative or officer of a 
 conquering Church rather of a conquered Church. 
 No doubt, we have glorious exceptions, and by these 
 the fire is kept burning and the light shining, yet 
 the rule remains in exact accordance with our state- 
 ment. As captive Greece led captive her great 
 conqueror, so the captive world speedily turned 
 round and enslaved its conqueror. Now we have 
 a fashionable Church for fashionable persons, and a 
 worldly church for worldly congregations. Eites 
 and ceremonies and vestments, and not the battle 
 with sin, occupy and absorb the interest of idle 
 clergymen as well as idle young ladies. The men- 
 tal outfit of many spiritual guides now consists 
 mainly of Church millinery. And the cut of a 
 surplice or the colour of a stole will often reach 
 hearts and raise emotions in people whom the moral 
 earthquake would not touch if they were spectators. 
 All because the Church has grown such a social 
 success. 
 
 We do not want a Church that condones sin for a 
 valuable consideration, and stands ready to excuse 
 or explain away any scandalous offence, for a suffi- 
 cient price. No, but we do ask for an army of 
 fighting soldiers who are prepared to go anywhere 
 and do anything for Christ's sake, and refuse to 
 exercise their functions on the terms of the world 
 and at the measurement of the world. Half the 
 officers of the Church now seem ashamed of their 
 colours, and act as if they desired to merge their 
 character in the vapid effort of a general amiability 
 
140 THE KEEPER OB 1 THE KEYS 
 
 all round, and only strive for popularity. But they 
 may be sure of this, that nobody respects them for 
 their cowardice, and they are secretly despised by 
 most. The bold confessor of the faith, who de- 
 clines to conceal his office or his most cherished 
 opinions, soon inspires a healthy regard followed 
 by affection and wins souls. No wonder the 
 w r orking men stand aloof from the Church and are 
 only tickled superficially and remotely by Settle- 
 ments in the East End of London and elsewhere. 
 " The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the 
 hands of Esau." The priest appears to them to 
 preach one thing and practise another perhaps 
 not their own particular priest, but the ordinary 
 average vicar or curate. He says one thing to them, 
 and another thing to the Society which essentially 
 conditions his every word and act and clings to him 
 with a paralysing force. " Ambiguos Troas mctuo, 
 Tyriosque bilingues." The double-tongued man, 
 the hypocrite, the person who runs with the hare 
 and hunts with the hounds, excites no confidence 
 and 'commands no response to his most rhetorical 
 appeals. English working men demand something 
 very different. Behind the stalking horse of a 
 flagrant philanthropy, and the precious baits 
 dangled unblushingly before their eyes, they see 
 not so much of the Cross as the badge of a party, 
 the snare of a system, the iron mould of uniformity, 
 and not the spacious speech and glory of a new life 
 compelling them to come into the Kingdom of God. 
 Enthusiasm, benevolence, alone will never stir the 
 heart of working men with their strenuous ideals, 
 
CHUECH AND WOULD 141 
 
 nor even the squalid magnificence of our idle and 
 useless aristocracy. Absolute unvarnished sin- 
 cerity is what both need, below the coarseness or 
 the gilt, and both alike require to be reclaimed the 
 West perhaps considerably more than the East. 
 When people do not take seriously what is said, 
 and begin to make deductions and allow reser- 
 vations for the professional point of view, 
 the Gospel, has lost its power. The simple 
 cry of the Cross will ever pierce attentive 
 souls and arrest their hearing. But the present 
 necessity calls for less of the Church and more of 
 the Christ, less of the apparatus and intercepting 
 ceremonial and more of the Spirit. Not that the 
 message of the Gospel at any one time can ever 
 be interpreted in exactly the terms of any other 
 time, because the needs vary. But the offer of 
 Christ remains fundamentally the same, though it 
 must be translated into the language of the period. 
 " Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy 
 laden, and I will give you rest." " / am the Way, 
 the Truth, and the Life." The working man now 
 questions if Christ can give him any help, if Christ 
 understands his wants and temptations or approves 
 of his progress, and if the resurrection of the masses 
 is really a vital fact involved in the beautiful and 
 awful teaching of Easter. Of course, it may take 
 many years and it will imply immense sacrifices, 
 before the preachers of the new age have learnt the 
 precise accent and proper shape of the doctrine to 
 be delivered by them and accepted by the people. 
 During a transition things naturally all seem afc 
 
142 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 cross purposes, they have not yet found their right 
 respective places and settled down into their work- 
 ing channels. New centres of energy have arisen, 
 new productive and distributing agencies, and the 
 man and the message must equally be re-adapted 
 to these fresh forms and influences. There must 
 be a universal revision of methods, and a readjust- 
 ment of the old machinery to the novel materials. 
 1 ' Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing 
 grooves of change." When we consider the havoc 
 wrought in the views of orthodoxy by Bible 
 criticism, and the altered aspects of inspiration and 
 revelation, the shattering of idols and the terrible 
 modern purging of the Temple, the complete revo- 
 lution in religious ideas, we may rather be sur- 
 prised that the Cross still not only holds its ground 
 but steadily, if sometimes almost imperceptibly, 
 advances. The very fact of the outcry within 
 the Church and without the Church, that it can- 
 not cope with the present distress, should be a 
 convincing proof of the contrary. We may be 
 sure that the dead bones are beginning to move 
 beneath the quickening breath of the Spirit and a 
 new baptism of fire. Ah, if we look under the 
 sin and sorrow of the world, the clash of con- 
 flicting passions, the discord of competing cries 
 and interests, we shall find the soul itself of suf- 
 fering is a great joy, which justifies an eternal 
 optimism. The world may still say with warped 
 lips, "Not this Man, but Barabbas\" Yet it 
 really means, " Vicisti, Galilaee." 
 
XI 
 UNION OF OPPOSITE S 
 
 WHENEVER we attain to results that appear diame- 
 trically to contradict each other, we may be sure 
 that the direction is divinely right, and we move 
 in the immediate neighbourhood of some great new 
 royal law and larger synthesis. Antagonism 
 heralds the approach of God Himself, Jehovah 
 Sabaoth. In the universal and inexplicable union 
 of opposites alone, do we discover the real vast 
 and varied and vital Truth, above and beyond the 
 range or necessity of vulgar demonstration, those 
 eternal intuitions which justify themselves as soon 
 as they arise within consciousness and are their own 
 sufficient proof. For instance, we believe God to 
 be Perfect in Goodness as well as Almighty, and 
 yet if we employ the empty logic of the schools, 
 instead of the higher metaphysic of faith and love 
 that transcend our blind blundering morality, we 
 find it impossible to reconcile these two great at- 
 tributes with the facts before us. Nature, life, 
 experience, interpreted by the holy muddle of an 
 arrested theology, seem to give the lie direct. God 
 cannot be both one and the other. We are con- 
 fronted by the common spectacle of weakness suf- 
 fering rather than wickedness, and helpless inno- 
 
 143 
 
144 THE KEEPEE OF THE KEYS 
 
 cence nailed to its usual glorious cross. How then 
 shall we attempt to explain such awful anomalies 
 and such a flagrant defiance of the most elemen- 
 tary canons of justice? Eight and reason, we 
 might suppose, have no place or portion in a world 
 that recognises no rule but that of brute force, 
 and wallows in a weltering chaos of ethical con- 
 fusion. But in a system governed by the funda- 
 mental law of antagonism, we should antecedently 
 expect something of this sort, a perpetual conflict 
 between the cosmic process and the moral process, 
 which yet at bottom agree the most when the most 
 apparently they clash with each other. But the 
 battle would be idle and useless if it began and 
 ended in mere fighting for fighting's sake. By no 
 other way can spiritual strength and stability be 
 evolved. Christianity is essentially the principle 
 of Progress, because it alone provides the true 
 impulse and inspiration for growth in character 
 and a new cometary curve to humanity. And how 
 shall we define it? We possess no clue excepting 
 the Cross, and on the Cross we find the Innocent 
 ;nid Sinless Sufferer crucified. And if Calvary does 
 not offer a solution for the problem of evil, nothing 
 ever can or will. If our Lord Jesus Christ 
 accepted and stooped to the yoke of sublime jmd 
 supreme law, in His life by Incarnation, .nxl in 
 His Death for the Atonement, we can hardly oil 
 it unjust. It may be perhaps always a mystery, 
 it must be intolerable to flesh and blood, but it is 
 an infinite blessing to all who follow in the Master's 
 footsteps and embrace His Cross. Every truth, 
 
UNION OF OPPOSITE S 145 
 
 the very simplest, will be found to embody at the 
 core two opposed elements, two incongruous fac- 
 tors, two mutually inconsistent and exclusive sig- 
 nifications which illuminate one another by denial. 
 Bight, by way of example, rules the world, and yet 
 might prevails, or seems to prevail. Love is the 
 law of God, and yet cruelty abounds and super- 
 abounds, and some organisms (we may say confi- 
 dently, all organisms, more or less) are equipped 
 with structures and functions that often prove but 
 superlative instruments of torture. Honesty, say 
 the copy books, is the best policy, and yet the 
 rogue succeeds and amasses a colossal fortune, 
 while his honourable competitor ends as a bankrupt 
 and pauper. But all these instances of what we 
 call undeserved suffering do not disprove or con- 
 demn the great principle at stake. For the Cross 
 does not promise material prosperity. We have 
 invariably to consider the permanent part of us, in 
 the light of eternity, namely, the spirit and the 
 moral and religious development of the spirit. 
 Christ's recognition of the stupendous law of 
 vicarious and innocent suffering does not con- 
 vict God of injustice or unkindness, but shows 
 plainly our ethical codes and standards must be 
 at fault, if wrong exists anywhere. We rashly 
 assume, and the error (should it be an 
 error) must vitiate all our conclusions that 
 innocent suffering is an evil and a shame. But, 
 when we measure it by the Cross, it becomes trans- 
 figured and glorified, and it stands forth not merely 
 as a pain, but as a privilege. To give and not to 
 11 
 
146 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 get, to bear another's burden for him, and not to 
 impose on him our cross, to suffer for Christ's sake, 
 emerges by Divine sanction and illustration as the 
 ultimate culmination of morality. Stagnant peace, 
 mechanical accumulation of property, exemption 
 from sickness and sorrow, a regular reception of the 
 exact dues, freedom from all aggression and en- 
 croachment, may suit a vegetable but not a virile 
 man. " It is more blessed to give than to receive." 
 The tremendous transaction on Calvary has revised 
 all our earlier estimates of ethical conduct, a mil 
 made selfishness for ever impossible, as the one 
 unpractical and impracticable thing. Christians 
 acquire eternal possessions by sacrificing all. In 
 every act of surrender they are enriched with spiri- 
 tual treasures beyond the reach of avarice's wildest 
 dreams. The historical Great Obedience of the 
 Cross compels them, by the sweetest of Divine 
 necessities, to reign by service and live by daily 
 death. We can admit no compromise here. And 
 every genuine deed of self-denial presents us, so to 
 speak, with a piece of the True Cross. 
 
 The standards of morals and aesthetics keep per- 
 petually changing, and are to a great extent rela- 
 tive. This admission does not abolish the fact that 
 they both have also certain absolute and eternal 
 principles. But much of what we call evil and 
 ugliness is justified by no conclusive arguments of 
 right or reason, but depends on mere general agree- 
 ment, because most persons have consented to look 
 upon it and label it as such. Mnny tilings that we 
 designate bad are not l>;id in flu-inselves, not in- 
 
UNION OF OPPOSITE S 147 
 
 herently and essentially bad. The ascetics soon 
 discovered this fallacy, and all the sturdiest culture 
 has been shaken into shape by rough conditions and 
 rude cradling. So-called evils frequently prove 
 the finest incunabula of the fairest individual lives 
 and civilisations. Poverty, hardship, privations, 
 severe discipline, may be hateful to luxury and 
 indolence, but they form, the school of heroes and 
 saints. Great losses constitute the grandest edu- 
 cation, and to the patient soul the riches at the 
 heart of sorrow are infinitely sweet. True per- 
 sonality, the Divine attribute we share with and 
 receive from God, will only attain to rich propor- 
 tions in the rocky soil of suffering. And, if planted 
 elsewhere and nourished in a hothouse atmosphere, 
 carefully shielded and sheltered from every angry 
 blast and buffet, individuality (the private contribu- 
 tion of each man or woman) will display no separate 
 note and present no intelligible difference. Evil, 
 as we misconceive and miscall it, appears to be the 
 main determining factor in the development of all 
 that lends distinction to us and make us other than 
 a flock of sheep. Only by the constant interchange 
 of action and passion, doing and suffering, giving 
 and taking, triumph and defeat, energy and inertia, 
 self-building and self-breaking, acquisition and 
 sacrifice, do we reach the dimensions of respon- 
 sible beings, moral agents and spiritual con- 
 querors. We learn to reconcile these discords, 
 and to find the soul's saving compatibles lie in 
 apparent incompatibles. Forces on the surface 
 antagonistic at the centre of things seem mutually 
 
148 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 and inextricably interdependent. It is only God 
 at play, because it is all Love. Indeed, framed as 
 we are, and composed of warring elements, atoms 
 or electric ions, we should find it difficult and even 
 impossible to represent to ourselves a world or state 
 of life that does not finally repose upon the one 
 basis of action and reaction. Perfect peace has no 
 place anywhere but in the grave. Nay, on exami- 
 nation the grave itself gives up its dead and shows 
 itself to be just the beginning of other life or lives. 
 The external and the internal, the vital and perma- 
 nent and the temporary, contend with unceasing 
 antipathies, and hearts are purified and horizons 
 enlarged by the process. Stage after stage the 
 accidental is exfoliated and drops off and dies, and 
 the eternal factor assumes fresh forms and wider 
 syntheses, and the path of progress goes for ever 
 upward and rises by crosses and upon graves that 
 are yet no graves. God from the beginning, though 
 of course there never was and never could have been 
 a beginning, was a Creator and resolution (not 
 death) was His instrument, and He consigns no 
 sinner to any tomb or hell that He has not first 
 suffered Himself and conquered. Pain and its 
 Divine remedy grow side by side on one and the 
 same stalk, and so the bitterness of every sting is 
 destroyed before we feel it. 
 
 In the Incarnation we have the triumph, the 
 blossoming-point, the supreme manifestation of the 
 Individual, when the Infinite God put on a human 
 form. We have the highest testimony to the fact 
 that the limits which enclose us at the same time 
 
UJS1JON OF OPPOSITE S 149 
 
 act as avenues of communication and touch all 
 things at all points. Separation means relation, and 
 
 man is only excluded to include. Progress teaches 
 us this, that boundaries merely exist and operate 
 to be overleaped. Their very obstructiveness comes 
 as a challenge from a worthy foe, to educate us and 
 elicit the best possible in us. Isolation reveals it- 
 self as our friend. Eed Seas and Jordans and 
 Jerichos, the restrictions of sense and even reason, 
 contracted arenas of effort, disease, death, just by 
 their pure impertinence and opposition inspire us 
 with the determination for victory. Hindrances 
 grow into helps, difficulties and dangers are our 
 stepping-stones. Old resistances, transformed by 
 the touch of faith and the accepted challenge, 
 simply interpret themselves into new relations not 
 yet quite understood, to increase our activities and 
 enlarge the field of our energies. We learn there- 
 by that only thus we enter into our Kingdom. The 
 illusions of childhood and imperfect knowledge, 
 though it cannot be allowed that God really 
 sends them, nevertheless when they confront 
 us as the phantoms of our own creation and 
 ignorance, are beautifully controlled, over-ruled, 
 and used by Him for our better discipline and in- 
 struction. So He works through and by gross 
 superstitions and foolishnesses of myths or ritual, 
 which concofil the germ of religious fire. The ker- 
 nel and the envelope of the sacred light reciprocally 
 act and react on each other, till the truth finds at 
 last a fresh body with a wider blessing, more 
 adapted to the time and the place and the people. 
 
150 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 The external and the internal, form and spirit, 
 must be at perpetual variance, for the benefit of 
 both. Perils, barriers, infirmities, approach not 
 as stoppages but as starting-points and appeal to the 
 fighting instinct or passion for improvement, the 
 self -development by self-sacrifice. A life without 
 an ordeal, a world without an enemy, could never 
 make explicit the Divine nature implicit in us. 
 Nothing was or will be or can be obtained, worth 
 having, without conflict. If we possessed no 
 adversaries or adversities we should make them our- 
 selves, and at the bottom of all processes and up- 
 ward movements lies fundamental antagonism. 
 The closed doors entice us, and not the open doors. 
 When we read anywhere in the cosmos written up, 
 as it were, " No Thoroughfare," we insist on tres- 
 passing. We tear down the offensive notice-board, 
 and gaily welcome all the pains and penalties that 
 seem threatened, but prove to be nothing beyond 
 pleasant stimuli. Nature's rewards are often disguised 
 as punishments. The suffering exercises a salutary 
 effect, it braces us for further and yet grander exer- 
 tions. The measure of a man's capacity is his 
 measure for endurance. The prizes we covet most 
 stand before us baited, not with easy attainment 
 .UK I the sugared sweetness of idle reception, but 
 with spikes of anguish, and jagged teeth of sorrows. 
 Their denials are their exceeding allurements. 
 In the Divine economy of things there are no cheap 
 short cuts to Progress. Nature rewards by punish- 
 ment, we must pay her uttermost price to the 
 uttermost farthing in her own uttermost way, and 
 
UNION OF OPPOSITE S 151 
 
 not suppose for a single moment the work to be 
 done can be scamlped by evasion of the costs or 
 hurried through like jerry-building. 
 
 Stagnation, standing still, resting in the ground 
 gained, as if any step or stage could be final for the 
 infinite spirit, means the negation of Progress. To 
 stop on the road is suicide. The tide must flow, 
 because that is the way of things, and we must go 
 with it and hitch our wagons or vessels to its course. 
 " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." 
 Everything is busy, whether God or man, man or 
 midge, life or death, hell or heaven. We can afford 
 to lose no chances, no time. " Move on," says 
 Nature, that only asks to serve us, to be used and 
 even abused, to be questioned and tortured by us 
 and in us. Soul-building and body-building, new 
 forms or houses for the new spirit, allow no idle 
 intervals for useless quietude. Willingly or un- 
 willingly we rear the edifice, and move or are moved 
 on. Religion, like all other things, is progressive. 
 It hungers, we hunger, for eternity and for a larger 
 deeper knowledge of ourselves and therefore of God. 
 And so religion, personal religion, has an endless 
 quarrel with theology, the vital with the perishable 
 element, the passing with the permanent. If it 
 were possible for any soul, however mediaeval in 
 it? tendencies and tastes, to be absolutely content 
 with the divinity of its day, further revelations of 
 truth could not, would not open out. Polytheism 
 was cast out by Henotheism, Henotheism by Mono- 
 theism, Monotheism gave up its secret in Christ and 
 the Trinity. And here theology would anchor us, 
 
152 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 and leave us chained to old mborings now emptied 
 of all their spiritual contents and earlier passionate 
 significance, when the whole world cries out for a 
 revaluation and a transvaluation of all terms and 
 creeds. But we need not fear for the result. It 
 is God's own quarrel, and personal religion through 
 broader experience is only fighting His battles, and 
 its very failures will be Divine. Theology with its 
 ancient formularies and vested interests, naturally 
 desires to remain where it is, repeating the 
 same old round of the same old dogmatisms, 
 in utter forgetfulness that the point of view 
 keeps changing and w r hat w r as wise and good 
 and adequate and stimulating ages ago may not 
 possibly be so now. To check free inquiry is to 
 check free growth. Yet the pabulum of the first 
 century or the tenth century or even the nineteenth 
 century, could not reasonably be expected to satisfy 
 the cravings and deficiencies of the present twen- 
 tieth century. Truths, in their innermost essential 
 life, do not alter. But they demand with each suc- 
 cessive generation other shapes and other vehicles 
 for expressing their adaptation to the time. Half- 
 filled churches, condemned sermons, convey but one 
 meaning. The untouched masses, the indifferent 
 laity, the thinning ranks of the clergy themselves, 
 all suggest the same remedy. Theology has not 
 grown with the times, with the thoughts and needs 
 and aspirations of men, and it does not represent 
 the high-water-mark of the best (not necessarily 
 the most advanced) thought, and it does not meet 
 the requirements of personal religion. Christianity 
 
UNION OF OPPOSITBS 153 
 
 has a thousand thousand sides, inexhaustible riches, 
 and it invites us to tap new sources and set free fresh 
 streams of life and teaching, which will reach the 
 lowest residuum of idle apathy or cultivated Agnos- 
 ticism or aggressive hatred and hostility. The 
 Cross of Christ, when translated into the current 
 language of any given period, will always be found 
 sufficient for any gravest emergency. The dullest 
 observers perceive the contradiction between active 
 personal religion and negative belated passive theo- 
 logy, but do not discern the remedy or reconcilia- 
 tion. So they denounce both alike as equal dis- 
 comfitures the one as hypocrisy and the other as 
 fraud. We can hardly find fault with this sen- 
 tence, however superficial and erroneous, w r hen we 
 reflect on the unfruitful incongruity of things. The 
 conflict must continue and ought to continue, but 
 it should be a productive conflict. " Sit-at-ease-in- 
 Zion " w T ill never regenerate society or evangelise 
 the world, and corruptio optimi pessima. A church 
 dying of dignity, a faith rusting out, a creed rotting 
 because it has nothing to fight for, or fight with, 
 may suit obese placeholders, but present a sorry 
 spectacle to others. Individuality, the salvation of 
 peoples and beliefs, seems smothered between the 
 grave-clothes of respectability, miserable conven- 
 tions and a barren uniformity. And here abides 
 our redeeming hope. Luthers and Wesleys and 
 Newmans exist somewhere and will yet arise in 
 their strength, and shake off the dead weight of 
 prosperity and unloose the healthy forces of perse- 
 cution. The new religious synthesis only awaits 
 
154 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 its predestined protagonist, who will find the in- 
 evitable formula and lead to victory the broken but- 
 unbeaten vanguard of Progress. The cult, sup- 
 ported by a mythopoeic caste, stands foredoomed 
 and foredamned. Its confident assertions, rightly 
 understood, are but the murmur of impending dis- 
 solution. When once we find a fusion and con- 
 fusion of form and spirit, means and ends, and the 
 worshipper deifies his tools, the iconoclast must fol- 
 low and commence the purging of the Temple of 
 Truth. Sanctuaries and ceremonies, however 
 awful or holy, sign their own death-warrant when 
 they supersede Christ. National churches are as 
 necessary as sacred books, forms to convey and 
 crystallise their doctrines are indispensable, but if 
 they presume to usurp higher functions, and de- 
 throne the Power which gives them all their 
 meaning and value and sanctity, they become im- 
 postures (if legalised and glorified impostures) and 
 must make way for more obedient ;m<l arcommn- 
 dating instruments. Establishments are pre- 
 carious baggage and in the nature of things seem 
 but temporary makeshifts, and like railroads too 
 often rest on " sleepers." Paleolithic man. many 
 surmise, had no religion, but we shall unearth the 
 sen Hold ing poles some day. And whether he 
 an anthropoid ape or an embryo Agnostic he must 
 have possessed a rudimentary conscience, which we 
 find in animals, and therefore some sort of religious 
 furniture. There may conceivably be myriads of 
 rl inrch establishments, each successive one im- 
 proving en its predecessor, but there can be only 
 
UNION OF OPPOSITES 155 
 
 One Christ. The strength of any religious institu- 
 tion consists in its mysteries or sacraments, its 
 truths and ultimate doctrines. . But if the system 
 has ceased to be organic, and has become purely 
 and simply mechanical, it has ceased to be service- 
 able and vital. It is an encumbrance self -convicted 
 and self-condemned. Every true helpful synthesis 
 must be both autotelic and heterotelic, alike an 
 end and a new beginning. The rule exists, to be 
 broken, and it is the splendid exceptions that alone 
 propagate the truth and extend its life and carry on 
 our progress. As soon as we have measured our 
 bars we have abolished them. Their defiance 
 sounds their own death knell. And everywhere we 
 meet contradictions, but if we take them to Calvary 
 they are reconciled in the light of Eternal Love. 
 This holds the keys of all the problems. God 
 sends us then a blessed blindness, which is really 
 clearer and wider vision , and the clouds disappear 
 and die. They were internal and not external, sub- 
 jective and not objective, clinging to the circumfer- 
 ence and not to the centre. Yet but for sturdy 
 doubts, what should we ever have known? And 
 but for trials, probations, the sweetest proofs of 
 Divine Care and Kindness, how should we have 
 heard of any Cross or Christ at all? We keep 
 praying " Lead us not into temptation, but deliver 
 us from evil." And yet how does God in His 
 infinite Mercy enfranchise us? He leads us not 
 into temptation by leading us into it, and letting all 
 His billows and waves pass over us, and going with 
 us Himself. He " delivers us from evil " (or the 
 
156 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 evil one) by delivering us up to evil and going with 
 us Himself. When He is tempted with us and in 
 us, we feel no temptation. When He is delivered 
 up with us and in us to some evil or cross, we find 
 no bondage. His own Hand holds our sword, His 
 own Breast is our buckler. And the victory that 
 finally overcomes, whether for individual or church, 
 is the enduring faith and the life of love in the Spirit 
 and Power of Christ. But the mercies, that make 
 us soldiers of His Church militant, would be less 
 kind if they were less cruel. 
 
 Every new negation, rightly understood, be- 
 comes a new affirmation. As of old, among primi- 
 tive and aboriginal savages, Taboo included both 
 reverence and abhorrence, so now we unearth a 
 common root idea at the bottom of such apparent 
 antagonisms as the sacred and the accursed, the 
 abominable and the worshipf ul , the negative and the 
 positive. Apartness for good or evil, recovery in 
 the very recoil, personality expressed most clearly 
 when most broken down and diffused and extended 
 in art and science and industry, and each fresh 
 application or acquirement, the religious by the 
 secular, and again the secular by the religious, all 
 invite us to ulterior Lands of Promise and healthy, 
 happy conflicts. An age that has forgotten how 
 to preach and knows not how to pray, may well? 
 remember the petition ascribed to Ewald. "0 
 Yahweh, whom that blockhead Gescnius calls 
 Jehovah." It may be we also even now are sup- 
 plicating an unknown God, and devote ourselves to 
 what is unthinkable in thought and possesses but a 
 
UNION OF OPPOSITES 157 
 
 verbal insignificance. And yet the Christ of the first 
 century is the Christ of the twentieth. He only 
 asks for the old faith and the old love, married to! 
 the light of our larger truth, to set the world again 
 on fire. 
 
XIT 
 GOSPEL ANTINOMIES 
 
 FAITH and Keason are not co-ordinate and not co- 
 extensive in range or value. Because the former 
 comes first in time, as revealed by the contents of 
 consciousness, and in logic, and appears the premier 
 fact to salute the awakening soul. History begins 
 with Faith and not with Reason, as also does Re- 
 ligion and indeed everything else. Credo ut sciam, 
 1 believe to know. Life would possess no worth 
 and no meaning without Faith, which is its truest 
 and most compendious expression. The real, the 
 highest existence, the existence of the spirit, can 
 only be interpreted in terms of Faith. It was Faith 
 and not Reason, that saw the Saviour's open tomb, 
 and accepted so simply and devoutly and surely the 
 Incarnation and the Virgin Birth. And none but 
 open hearts and virgin souls to the end of time will 
 behold and witness to such solemn mysteries and 
 stupendous facts. Who but believers shall discern 
 the Risen or Ascending Christ? Had all the 
 Agnostics of every age been present then, with the 
 unbelieving Bishop or the doubtful Dean at their 
 head, they would have marked nothing extra- 
 ordinary and wondered what all the commotion was 
 
 158 
 
GOSPEL ANTINOMIES 159 
 
 about. And if the Daily Mail had been published 
 then, they would have returned in triumph and 
 written letters to it, indignantly declaring that 
 clergymen had a perfect right to criticise the Bible 
 and any doctrine or mystery of the Church and 
 everything, excepting, of course, the conditions by 
 which they held their own Orders. One explana- 
 tion of the present depreciation of Faith and the 
 present appreciation of Eeason seems to be this. 
 Civilisation has a natural tendency to exalt unduly _ 
 its latest processes and powers and developments, 
 those that are more acquired, at the expense of 
 what merely seems given. We enter the world 
 with this great heavenly inheritance, the dower of 
 Faith. No doubt, it becomes strengthened by use 
 and action, but not to the same extent as that to 
 which we bring our cultivated Eeason, which there- 
 by looks more and more appropriately our own, 
 though at the best and greatest a faulty instrument. 
 Unearned property never has the preciousness of 
 property earned by years of hard labour. The 
 first principle, we have said, that greets the dawn 
 of intelligence, rises up as Faith. But at its very 
 birth it is checked and chastened by another prin- 
 ciple, its shadow and rival and competitor and 
 friend, namely, Doubt. Any parent may prove 
 this obvious fact easily, by observing the first faint 
 stirrings of consciousness in a child. Doubt, the 
 drag, the safeguard, waits and watches at the cradle 
 of Faith, ready to draw it back if too adventurous. 
 Here, then, we have the simplest possible form of 
 all conceivable antinomies a divided presentation 
 
160 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 in consciousness. And it is to this ultimate, 
 aboriginal fact, starting from a hidden stem or root 
 below consciousness, that Religion or the Gospel of 
 Christ appeals with such startling effect. Edu- 
 cation, worship, life, begins in these secret sources 
 that connect us with God Himself and the Infinite. 
 If the Cross of Calvary, repeated in every true Chris- 
 tian experience, were not a blessed contradiction 
 itself, it would speak in vain to these awful springs 
 and energies at the base of all being. For they, 
 too, greet us as a contradiction and pour forth from 
 the same fountain-head cleansing floods of sweet 
 and bitter water. This must date from all eter- 
 nity, or from the determination of the infinite by 
 the finite, the only way in which God could reveal 
 Himself. And as the antagonism had no com- 
 mencement in time, it can have no close. The 
 finite denies the infinite, and in the denial assumes 
 it. And the infinite excludes the finite, and in the 
 exclusion includes it. Omnis determinatio est 
 negatio, and no less Omnis negatio est determinatio. 
 But, if the behaviour of a child's nascent under- 
 standing be carefully studied, the parent will notice 
 that the contradiction of Faith and Doubt, the 
 eternal problem for all babies as well as all philoso- 
 phers, appears to present no insuperable obstacles 
 nor even a grave difficulty, and is overcome at once 
 by a deeper intuition which carries on and up into 
 a higher world the competition, to solve and re- 
 concile it in a superior synthesis. We find pre- 
 cisely the same attitude of transcended hesitation 
 in the literature of primitive nations and uncivilised 
 
GOSPEL ANTINOMIES 161 
 
 peoples. At the same time, it must be admitted, 
 that the contradiction though felt is never clearly 
 recognised or formulated in so many words. It 
 confronts the barbarian or the baby as a fact to be 
 accepted somehow, and a fact that must and will 
 soon find its own level and justify its presence by 
 fitting somewhere and sometime into the machinery 
 of things, when all is more or less mysterious and 
 nothing absolutely intelligible and harmonious. 
 
 The simplest truths of Christianity, as delivered 
 by our Lord Himself and expounded and expanded 
 in the Epistles, are pure Antinomies. Yet no one, 
 the greatest and most convinced sceptics, ever 
 dreamed of disputing them. There they stand as 
 fundamental and final verities, embraced alike by 
 Faith and Unfaith or Doubt. For instance, let us 
 take one of the most familiar, a contradiction in 
 terms and yet an unquestionable and unquestioned 
 truth, which the infidel holds and prizes as much 
 as the Christian, who differ to agree here and in 
 many other kindred points. ' Whosoever exalteth 
 himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth him- 
 self shall be exalted." Who is stumbled by the 
 glaring and staring Antinomy? The trained meta- 
 physician , who has grown grey with serious thought , 
 and the child with its haloed head of gold, both 
 alike accept it in the same sort of way and meet 
 on common sacred ground here under the shadow of 
 the Cross. Who desires proof? Paley himself 
 would hardly expect or ask it, and Herbert Spencer 
 might even bend his head. Theologia symbolica, 
 non est demonstrativa. We do not invoke the 
 12 
 
162 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 ordinary rules of evidence to inquire whether our 
 food is properly cooked or not, whatever Bentham 
 may say. Because, if we did, the dinner would 
 grow cold and our appetites too urgent, before we 
 could thus satisfactorily settle the question. The 
 homely saying remains true, the proof of the pud- 
 ding is in the eating. And, in like manner, with 
 the great Gospel Antinomies, the challenge falls on 
 Faith and not on Eeason. The example just given 
 appeals immediately to something within us, above 
 and beyond demonstration or any mathematical 
 steps of rigorous conclusiveness. We feel, with- 
 out wishing for further inquiry or examination, that 
 we are in the presence of an ultimate fact that is its 
 own proof and shines by its own light, and needs 
 no other. It emerges at once superlatively and 
 even superfluously self-evident. The heart of man 
 answers the Heart of God, and acquiesces in the 
 revelation that would b? only degraded by mere 
 rational arguments and requires no further support. 
 Reason, if enlisted in the service of criticism, would 
 inevitably suggest misgivings. It might declare, 
 ' This, of course, is nonsense, though sublime non- 
 sensepoetrybeautiful sentiment, but utterly un- 
 practical, and therefore no good working principle 
 for a rough working world like ours." And it is 
 perhaps, this lurking shadow in the background, 
 this latent suspicion , that as a foil or setting makes 
 the precious truth shine out more clearly and con- 
 vincingly. We inevitably cling the closer to our 
 treasures when we entertain the least doubt that our 
 possession of them may be imperilled. And the 
 
GOSPEL ANTINOMIES 163 
 
 truths, which anchor the soul to eternity and unite 
 us to God in Christ, we shall not surrender at any 
 cost. By the terms of our tenure of existence, we 
 must fight for all we have and hope to retain. And 
 the more confident the opposing doubt, the more 
 secure grows our grip of the belief that is dearer 
 than life itself. 
 
 Every line of thought infallibly begins and ends in 
 some paradox or antinomy. And the presumption 
 then arises that we stand in the immediate neigh- 
 bourhood of some tremendous truth, to which our 
 earthly faculties can only be stated in this contradic- 
 tory way. It is just when we feel and find no bottom, 
 when the ordinary chart fails us and the ordinary 
 compass gives no direction, that we know we are 
 nearest land and the haven where we would be. 
 As the Indian juggler appears to throw his ladder 
 of rope into mid-air and attach it firmly to nothing 
 in empty space, so we who step out boldly into the 
 great void of the Unknown in quest of God, not- 
 withstanding deadly dilemmas and insoluble anti- 
 theses, find the very antagonism our main support, 
 and rest ourselves on the rock of eternity. The 
 average (garden wall) thinker, the speculator who 
 on principle never digs below the practical and the 
 surface of things, argues thus. ' Whosoever 
 
 exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that 
 humbleth himself shall be exalted." I must traverse 
 this assertion as contrary to all my experience and 
 the testimony of all historical records. We know the 
 very opposite to be the right version of the fact. 
 Does not Emerson, a mystic and muddler himself, 
 
164 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 admit that people will always accept you at your 
 own measurement, and value you according to the 
 price you put on your own services and reflections? 
 I fear some miserable copyist has read into the text 
 the unhappy gloss he found on the margin of the 
 manuscript. And I should amend the Gospel de- 
 claration in this manner, " Whosoever exalteth 
 himself shall be exalted, and he that humbleth him- 
 self shall be humbled." 
 
 We may profitably, after this gross miscarriage of 
 thought or criticism, look at another magnificent 
 Gospel Antinomy. ' Whosoever will save his life 
 shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for My 
 sake shall find it." Here we have the superb and 
 supreme high-water mark of Divine Philosophy, 
 from the lips of Christ Himself. It stands, divided 
 toto coelo from vulgar criticism, as one of the final 
 consummate proclamations of Truth for all time. 
 Let no misconception be made here. Nothing in 
 heaven and on earth can escape or ought to escape 
 reverent and often adoring criticism, seeking the 
 light on its knees and at the foot of the Cross. 
 Only a bigot or an ignorant fanatic would deny this. 
 We are allowed nay, we are even commanded to 
 criticise not merely the Bible but also the Character 
 and Conduct of God. Life is and always was and 
 always will be a criticism of Nature and therefore of 
 Nature's God, as He intended who implanted in 
 every heart the right and desire of judgment, 
 and only asks it to be reverent and religious. 
 " Put Me in remembrance, let us plead toge- 
 ther." The Church itself grew into definite 
 
GOSPEL ANTINOMIES 165 
 
 shape as the sublime product of criticism 
 namely, that of the Holy Spirit speaking through 
 holy men. And the Bible, too, has been handed 
 down to us as the result of prolonged and exhaus- 
 tive criticism, and our Lord and His apostles and 
 evangelists following His example in their treat- 
 ment of the Old Testament carried on the process. 
 " Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye 
 have eternal life, and they are they which testify 
 of Me." Even if we translate the word " search " 
 as "ye search," the doctrine remains the same. 
 Again we may quote, " Come now, and let us reason 
 together, saith the Lord." And again, " Righteous 
 are Thou, Lord, when I plead with Thee: yet 
 let me talk with thee of Thy judgments." When we 
 have received not merely Divine permission, but 
 even actual Divine orders, to criticise the Word of 
 God and the Way of God, always in humble faith 
 and love and reverence, we need hardly hesitate to 
 do so. Christ courted this, and invited the Jews to 
 find a fault in His moral character, if they could. 
 " Which of you convinceth Me of sin?" But the 
 Divine Paradoxes, the Eternal Antinomies of the 
 Gospel, lie in a world by themselves, in which criti- 
 cism of any kind would have no reverence and im- 
 part no illumination. What they demand is sur- 
 render, obedience, absolute acceptance, as the 
 alphabet of the spiritual life. Postulates, axioms, 
 which every philosophy or science requires, we 
 assume we take for granted. We draw our in- 
 ferences, we deduce the consequences, we attempt 
 to unfold by degrees their innumerable lessons of 
 
166 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 infinite purpose. But to sit in judgment on them 
 would be absurd. They form, so to speak, the cos- 
 mic stuff, the primordial data, the spiritual proto- 
 plasm, of which we build up the higher spiritual 
 world. We arrive everywhere at last at some 
 seminal centre, beyond which we can travel no 
 more by reason. There are certain fundamental 
 or suprafundamental foci and loci, which arise at 
 once as goals and starting-points. They cannot be 
 proved, and demonstration or attempts at demon- 
 stration would but excite doubt. But there they 
 are, we find them awaiting us at either pole of con- 
 sciousness, our elements and finalities. We recog- 
 nise them intuitively as the framework of the spiri- 
 tual universe, cosmic and perhaps hypercosmic 
 conceptions. Through immediate Faith we admit 
 them into consciousness with our whole being, the 
 totality of our powers, and not through any particu- 
 lar faculty. It is this entire acceptance of them 
 by our entire nature that puts mere Reason out of 
 court at once. Reason may humbly follow after 
 and strive to judge. But it resembles then an 
 ordinary bird of the air endeavouring to fly in the 
 ocean, or an ordinary fish of the ocean endeavour- 
 ing to swim in the air. We perceive it directly to 
 be out of its place, and exercising a false function. 
 Faith alone is able to entertain mysteries. And it 
 appropriates them, enters into them, not by a cir- 
 cuitous process of ratiocination or by the syllogisms 
 of logic, but by immediate vision. Psychology 
 seems yet in its cradle, and Science generally in its 
 go-cart, and neither can honestly condemn this. 
 
GOSPEL ANTINOMIES 167 
 
 We stand still on the threshold of ultimate know- 
 ledge, and we shall never pass beyond and enter 
 the awful penetralia unless upon our knees and with 
 our faces in the dust. It may be declared, and we 
 need not dispute the declaration, that Divine utter- 
 ances corresponding verbally and essentially with the 
 Gospels can be discovered in earlier religions and 
 older doctrines. But, if we concede this, we con- 
 cede but little. For the point of our Kevelation 
 resides in the infinite fact that Christ applied these 
 inspired words to Himself and made Himself the 
 Centre round which they all should constellate., 
 ' Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and who- 
 soever will lose hie life for My sake shall find it." 
 The pith of all the teaching lies in the reference to 
 Christ, in His calm unconscious claim on every one 
 for nothing less than the sacrifice of life, to be re- 
 gained through death and thus transfigured and 
 glorified for ever in and by His own Resurrection. 
 Nobody now, worth hearing, will deny that Chris- 
 tianity existed before Christ and the Spirit of Christ 
 spoke tremendous truths through the mouths of 
 pagan prophets and heathen seers or poets. In- 
 deed, it seems utterly impossible that the world 
 could have existed a day without some portion or 
 broken glimmer of the Eternal Word. But the 
 Gospel Antinomies stand on a loftier plane of 
 thought and being than any previous proclamations 
 of the Truth. We know, by an infallible interior 
 conviction that now they are complete in them- 
 selves, and it is Christ that fills them and makes 
 them perfect. The simple and the sublime, the 
 
168 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 crown of the finite and the climax of the infinite, 
 meet and merge in Him alone. " Never man 
 spake like this Man." Such awful doctrines, such 
 solemn verities, personally adopted by anyone else, 
 a Plato or a Hegel, would be but horribly profane, 
 and the quintessence of blasphemy. Falling from 
 the lips of Christ, they sound natural, reasonable 
 and right, and give out the certain ring of full and 
 final inevitableness. They rise beyond the reach 
 of addition or subtraction. Paradoxes, contradic- 
 tions, yet they address our hearts and the satisfied 
 sum of our human powers, as the last and best 
 possible expression of harmony. The spirit of man, 
 face to face with the Spirit of God, remembers its 
 high descent and its heavenly birthright, and rushes 
 with rejoicing steps into its inheritance. 
 
 In the great Gospel Antinomies we find the re- 
 vision of all older earthly notions, and the reversal 
 of all ancient standards. Ethnic morality has to 
 be rewritten in terms of universal jind absolute 
 morality. We have an ethical revolution, and the 
 dethronement of mere relative codes and categories. 
 Brute strength (debellare superbos) departs in con- 
 fusion, discrowned by baby hands and the apotheosis 
 of Divine Weakness. " Most gladly therefore will 
 I rather glory in my infirmities, that the Power of 
 Christ may rest upon me," " For when I am 
 weak, then am I strong." Wealth with its stupid 
 insolence and studied vulgarity, goes away with void 
 hands and vacant heart to feed upon its emptiness. 
 While the " poor of this world " is " rich in faith " 
 and " rich towards God" one perhaps "having 
 
GOSPEL ANTINOMIES 169 
 
 nothing and yet possessing all things." Christ, at 
 a breath, swept away the old false and familiar land- 
 marks, and made the Cross and not man in his pros- 
 perity and power the measure of all things. He 
 announced sorrow, and not gladness, to be the source 
 of joy. " Blessed are they that are persecuted for 
 righteousness' sake: for theirs is the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. Rejoice and be exceeding glad: for great 
 is your reward in Heaven." Old estimates of 
 specious honour and spurious virility crumble up 
 into contempt, blasted by the dignity of Divine 
 Meekness and Koyal Servitude. ' Whosoever will 
 be great among you, let him be your minister: and 
 ivhosoever will be chief among you, let him be your 
 servant." Christ had no need to argue, He an- 
 nounced, He revealed, He just laid bare the bases 
 of Truth, the foundations of Eight, the fountains of 
 Holiness, and He knew the sight would be sufficient. 
 To behold them was to accept them, and to bless 
 Him and adore Him for ever. 
 
 It seems futile to ask, why the deepest verities 
 that transcend the utmost flights of reason and the 
 farthest resources of learning can only be stated as 
 contradictions. If a sinner is persuaded that a 
 Gospel Antinomy alone can save him, if nothing 
 else can reach and touch his heart and reveal him 
 to himself in the light of eternity, if in no other way 
 he can approach God and obtain His pardon and 
 His sanctifying Spirit, if faith and love and peni- 
 tence make the union of contraries as clear as that 
 of chemical compatibles, if he recognises in and yet 
 above the apparent antagonism an elective spiritual 
 
170 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 affinity, and realises that the rational explanations 
 of the unilluminated mind would rathei obscure 
 than interpret the meaning, he has no choice but 
 to seize with all his soul what he can and must live 
 by though he does not pretend to understand it. 
 The battle of the cosmos, the riddle of the universe, 
 the history of the world, repeats itself in every heart 
 and must be fought out, solved, enacted, in each 
 individual. All that ever has been and will be 
 must pass through us, be presented to us, accepted 
 and interpreted in some sort of fashion. We have 
 thereby to construct our spiritual mansion, trans- 
 forming the earthly stuff into heavenly strength , by 
 that Divine Grace which appeals to us in the certain 
 sense of uncertain sounds, through the imperfect 
 medium of human language, under the luminous 
 disguise of the Gospel Antinomies. And cis our 
 faith expands and our love increases and our hate of 
 sin develops, we seem to read in their very contra- 
 dictions truer and higher unities, and begin to 
 believe the darkness is but excess of light. 
 
XIII 
 CHILD AND MAN 
 
 THE inherent constitutional passion for taking an 
 opposite view or attitude, noticeable even in the 
 youngest children, is part of the fundamental con- 
 trariety of thoughts and things. " Out of the 
 mouth of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained 
 strength." A love of contradiction declares itself 
 at once, and it is and must be a wholesome instinct, 
 a portion of the racial inheritance transmitted in- 
 evitably from parent to child. The boy or girl who 
 does not cross your will must be in mischief or un- 
 well. This sense of antithesis, which makes the 
 individual at first regard everyone else as a kind of 
 Dr. Fell, is by no means as unreasonable as it 
 appears without due consideration. It arises as a 
 principle of self-protection, and operates as the most 
 important factor in the growth of the person and 
 the development of character. Children are often 
 ignorantly scolded or severely punished on this 
 account, when they might rather be rewarded. 
 Nature will out. Naturam expellas furca tamen 
 usque recurret, and if the healthy spirit of opposition 
 is kicked out of the door it will come in again 
 through the window. Or, if we do disastrously 
 
 171 
 
172 THE KEEPEK OF THE KEYS 
 
 succeed in cowing the youthful inquirer and crush- 
 ing the Divine endowment of antagonism, we gain 
 as a result a child that is no child and becomes a 
 man that is no man and no use in Society, colour- 
 less, obsequious, cringing, tamely treading with list- 
 less, unintelligent feet the weary, dreary mill-round 
 of a monotonous life that does not really live and 
 never can. 
 
 A proper boy or girl should have plenty of angles 
 only give us the angles and the angels will take 
 care of themselves and pugnacious bristles ready to 
 give and take with a hearty good will. Your child 
 will never be shaken into any decent shape, till he 
 has first tested his budding powers and broken them 
 on the rocks of resistance. These fractures do no 
 harm. On the contrary they call out of the inner- 
 most humanity all its best qualities. Unless chil- 
 dren look upon their parents not merely as parents 
 but as beautiful enemies to be attacked while loved 
 and honoured, and unless they consider theii 1 
 teachers not merely as teachers but as "beasts" 
 though " just beasts " to be respected and yet fought 
 with to the bitter end, as St. Paul "fought with 
 beasts at Ephesus," they will never attain to any 
 robust feeling of independence. To nip in the bud 
 youthful enmity, when it simply means the flutter- 
 ing of the unrealised wings of self-reliance, is a fatal 
 and foolish act. Parents and teachers will suffer 
 from this ruinous error in the end almost as much 
 themselves. Let the natural, sound, wise attitude 
 of antagonism be confronted properly with the 
 weapons of sympathy and understanding. Negative 
 
CHILD AND MAN 173 
 
 defiance will produce no sane or desirable effect. 
 The innocent savagery of the child, rebelling against 
 all restrictions and discipline even when visibly im- 
 posed by love, must not be met by cold repression 
 and the " mailed fist," with apologies to the Kaiser, 
 but answered cheerily in the tone of comradeship 
 with easy explanations and infinite faith. Cosmic 
 impulses will always justify themselves in the end, 
 and must work out their full value in benign con- 1 
 sequences, unless we interfere with the process. 
 Perhaps the best boy, and we only want the best, 
 will never say more for his father by way of acknow- 
 ledgment for kindnesses received and gratitude felt, 
 than that he is "really rather decent." But no 
 better tribute of love and esteem could be offered. 
 We may be sure of this that self-reliance, if only 
 encouraged and not thwarted by iron rules, will 
 only tend to elicit more and more its correlative and 
 complementary principle of dependency. They 
 invariably grow together on one and the same stalk 
 and mutually correct each other's failings. The 
 child who has learned to trust himself will make a 
 good follower as well as a good leader, and the mostf 
 dutiful son is he who has been taught and permitted 
 to stand alone. Only the one, who has ventured 
 much and proved himself and tested his capabilities 
 by conflict and acquired the knowledge of the battle- 
 field, can be fully aware of his own limits and there- 
 fore willing to rely on other people and other re- 
 sources when the necessity emerges. And the child, 
 in early stages, will fight against the good as well 
 as against the evil. He has to take his moral bear- 
 
174 THE KEEPEli OF THE KEYS 
 
 iiigs, and the brute in him (the shadow and survival 
 of his far-off ancestry) that must be crucified at last 
 but is never killed, has to find its place and own its 
 master. The eternal war between the higher and 
 the lower is our cosmic diathesis. And the 
 youngest almost too soon finds he must buckle on his 
 armour, and go forth to fight as a good soldier and 
 servant of Christ beneath the banner of the Cross. 
 If our children become good fighters and fair 1 
 fighters, we need not grudge them a few hard blows 
 at our expense. It is the privilege of love, that it 
 may blunt on its own breast the edge of anger and 
 the point of enmity, but with the parents' wounds 
 the children are healed. 
 
 The very infant has a sort of blind consciousness 
 that evil is present somewhere or even everywhere as 
 an opponent, and until his ethical eyes are open, he 
 naturally vents on the nearest and dearest the 
 hostility evoked by this feeling, not that he hates 
 father or mother or nurse, but he darkly knows he 
 has been born into a belligerent world and must 
 fight for his own hand and his own life immediately. 
 He remotely realises the struggle for existence im- 
 posed upon all from their very birth, and the en- 
 vironment of antagonistic forces that would if they 
 could deprive him of everything. Sin, though he 
 cannot understand it, yet infects his atmosphere 
 and casts a dim shadow across his cradle and even 
 the Paradise of his mother's bosom. The organised 
 and inherited race instinct warns him that he may 
 be wronged and he recoils at the far-off approach of 
 injury. His first business is to fight, to take care 
 
CHILD AND MAN 175 
 
 of himself aud be independent of others as soon as 
 possible. And the more and the oftener he lets 
 the combative craving expend itself on all around 
 him, the more readily he becomes self-reliant. The 
 very protection, lavished so generously upon him by 
 those who minister to his wants, only stimulates him 
 to outgrow it and shake it oil. And this clearly 
 demonstrates the importance of directing at once in 
 the right channels this aggressive energy and hos- 
 tile turbulence. Bad temper, bad habits, even bad 
 friends, may well be battlefields for the evolution 
 of character and independence. There can be no 
 real lasting progress without daily, hourly contests, 
 and no victory will be of much value unless it has 
 been secured at the cost of many desperate 
 defeats. 
 
 This psychological attitude, at the genesis of the 
 human mind, would be absolutely impossible if the 
 attitude of the world did not correspond to it* 
 Nature runs on these lines, and on no others. The 
 fighting instinct fits exactly into a fighting universe. 
 Knowledge also is built up in precisely the same 
 wa y> by the clash of theory and experience. It has 
 been rashly supposed by some that we cannot travel 
 beyond the latter and all we are able ever to ascer- 
 tain is relative and phenomenal. And in a sense 
 undoubtedly this may be true enough. Yet religion 
 teaches us that the soul, when in union and com- 
 munion with Christ, shares His consciousness so far 
 and becomes a partaker of the Divine Nature. The 
 influx of new life may be called experience, but it 
 is a reality that transcends experience and a know- 
 
176 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 ledge above knowledge. Nevertheless, the fact 
 does hold good that for ordinary purposes and prac- 
 tical work we do not get beyond experience, just 
 because we do not get beyond our own minds , 
 Though St. Paul said " / knew such a man 
 whether in the body or out of the body I cannot tell, 
 God knowethhow that he was caught up into 
 Paradise and heard unspeakable words, which it is 
 not lawful for a man to utter." Theory, specula- 
 lation, however, runs before, and keeps making 
 daring guesses, often false and sometimes true, and 
 experience slowly follows qualifying its assertions 
 or drawing different conclusions from the same pre- 
 misses. The error itself, by the sheer force of mis- 
 direction, and by the recoil from the blunder, may 
 indicate the right road to patient observation. Just 
 as mercy and justice are reconciled in a loftier unity, 
 so imagination and fact only quarrel to arrive even- 
 tually at a better synthesis. What would history 
 be without the halo of legend and myth? It is 
 these that add the requisite romantic element, which 
 give the dry bones of the bare details their vital 
 splendour and spiritual power. Mere facts possess 
 no significance or use whatever. They lie dend or 
 dormant, unhelpful and unproductive, till fancy 
 comes with the divine fire (divince particula aurce) 
 and breathes upon them the breath of life. Thru 
 they begin to arrange themselves, they are charged 
 with a definite meaning, they sf>r;ik to the spirit, 
 they instruct, they edify. Information imparted by 
 statistics, with no kindling and creative principles 
 behind them, is no information but the letter that 
 
CHILD AND MAN 177 
 
 kills. Collision between fact and fancy, between 
 poetry and truth, between sentiment and science, 
 brings light and beauty. No lesson, that lives in 
 the memory of man, could have attained is 
 place as a spring of mental action, unless it had been 
 a battle-ground on which contending opinions 
 struggled to the death, and had fought itself into 
 an eternal joy and possession. Facts do not, can- 
 not fructify, till the aureole of the imagination has 
 played about them and glorified the ugly blots and 
 transfigured the naked blanks. We want spiritual 
 food, even when we are least aware of the need, and 
 dreary tables of figures and bald statements of 
 results will never furnish this. Metaphor and 
 humanity must come to the rescue and open out all 
 the resources of the soul to quicken the body of dust. 
 But when facts have been interpreted thus, they 
 become symbols and meet us with a sacramental 
 service and infinite suggestiveness. Before they 
 were rubbish, now they are a religion. 
 
 The individual, the child here repeats the story of 
 the race, in its dim cradle and the twilight border- 
 land of origins. The young have a marked prefer- 
 ence for fiction. And to punish them for untruth- 
 fulness, before they have grasped the distinction be- 
 tween fact and fable, is to be stupid and cruel. The 
 lies of children are often beautiful and even true 
 relatively, true to their age and feelings and point of 
 view and limitations, but the lies of adults are 
 seldom otherwise than hideous, because usually the 
 refuge of the cowardly and contemptible. The 
 young are constitutionally incapable of seeing any- 
 
 13 
 
178 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 thing whole, fair and square in all its bearings. 
 They see what they wish to see and expect to see, in 
 connection with a fresh vivid fancy and the poetic 
 colouring of primitive periods. The tragedies and 
 comedies and legendries of early ages come surging 
 up from the dusky regions of the past, and shed 
 their eclipse on the present. These unforgotten 
 racial memories forbid the possibility of severe} 
 accuracy. And the falsehood of the child, punished 
 invariably in some brutal manner without the 
 remotest relation to the offence, is not so much a 
 lie frequently as an echo of other times and other 
 climes. He rights the battle of the past. An 
 average healthy child is probably unable to speak the 
 truth, according to the standard of grown-up people, 
 just as the manufacturer of a quack medicine or a 
 modern statesman before an election is unable. To 
 the former the dull world of fact, that we contem- 
 plate through the spectacles of age or interest or 
 party or prejudice or class or creed, seems a fairy- 
 land of marvel and mystery. He has not yet dis- 
 covered or established his working adjustments. As 
 a little knight errant he roams about seeking for 
 dragons to destroy and difficulties to overcome. He 
 cannot look beyond his own peculiar horizon, from 
 a standpoint steeped in all the hues of the imagina- 
 tion. Right and wrong, good and evil, truth and 
 falsehood, with him melt into each other, they are 
 not divided by inexorable and impassable gulfs. 
 He has not yet acquired all the advantages of copy 
 book morality. Indeed he will probably build his 
 code of ethics in quite another way. Breaches of 
 
CHILD AND MAN 179 
 
 the moral law, under the dispensation of kind or un- 
 kind parents and wise or unwise teachers, will bring 
 the inevitable consequences and penalties. And he 
 will learn, rather by the pain or suffering inflicted on 
 others through his transgressing acts and words, 
 than by the punishment inflicted on himself, that he 
 must choose the good and reject the evil, and fight 
 against the three great devils of impurity and intem- 
 perance and infidelity. The real danger and real 
 crux, however, for children lies here. Parents and 
 teachers say one thing and do another, and their 
 lives contradict the profession of the lips. If only 
 their early guides always practised what they! 
 preached, our children would have a better chance 
 in the eternal war betwen light and darkness. As/ 
 things are, it is astonishing how little the young are 
 tainted by the pestilent example of their elders, and 
 how often their innocence passes unstained through 
 a moral or immoral atmosphere that would poison 
 an angel from heaven. 
 
 If we turn, by way of illustration to metapolitics, 
 and try to ascertain the regulating principles at the 
 back of politics, we shall find they are mainly two 
 for ever opposed to each other in a profitable 
 antagonism namely, individualism or the conser- 
 vative bias and socialism or the liberal bias. The 
 former dwells in the present and looks backward, 
 the latter also dwells in the present but looks 
 forward. Socialism, the liberal instinct, in its 
 essence remains unselfish and gives pledges to the 
 future. All its policy is or ought to be conditioned 
 by the prospect of the coming generations, and its 
 
180 THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS 
 
 beacon star shines out along its course as a grander 
 ideal configuration of broader aims and interests. 
 Its centre of gravity, its determining point or 
 moment, realizes itself in a regard for others. 
 Immediate advantage for private personal ends con- 
 veys no meaning or attraction to its true exponent. 
 He views himself always in connexion with others, 
 with the vital expectation that the saving clue to 
 the problem of the present lies in the future which 
 will redress the balance of fortune in the favour 
 of the whole community and not a privileged sec- 
 tion. And it is difficult, almost impossible, to make 
 the average child (healthy, bellicose, sentimental, 
 imaginative, young savage, as he should be) take 
 any enlightened interest in the future, beyond the 
 absurd idea that when he is grown up he will be 
 able to go anywhere and do anything and have 
 whatever he likes. Yet the impact, the slow, con- 
 tinual pressure of what is to be and what must be, 
 contending in his mind consciously or unconsciously 
 with the present and the past, goes far towards 
 making and moulding his character. Providence 
 of any kind at first seems abhorrent to him, and 
 the calculation that considers the morrow or 
 lays by for a rainy day repels him as a cold-blooded 
 business. Child of the moment, in which he crams 
 an eternity of force and significance, he takes life at 
 the bound and the past as the present. But the 
 knocking of his dear, naughty little head against 
 various stone walls and stiff fences of older persons' 
 I m judices and Society's conventions, when repeated 
 with sufficient frequency and vigour, gradually arouse 
 
CHILD AND MAN 181 
 
 him to the knowledge that prevision may be good, 
 and Prometheus was perhaps wiser than Epime- 
 theus. If he is to live and play a virile, useful part 
 in the world, he must act as his parents and 
 teachers and kind, beautiful enemies, and look be- 
 fore he leaps. The future must be reckoned with. 
 The game of consequences, as well as the game of 
 cricket or football, comes in and presents its 
 credentials and excitements and prizes of its own. 
 He is only a boy, certainly, but still he has a 
 vested stake in his school or home or country, and 
 though a boy and indeed especially because he is a 
 boy, he must do something. A " blooming hero " 
 he need not be, he does not care to be, in the 
 cant of jingo extravagances and a spurious Im- 
 perialism, which corresponds to no true craving in 
 human nature, but nevertheless he can, he must, 
 he will play up and play the game to the finish. 
 Yes, even a boy may be in at the death. We can 
 hardly overrate the influence of the future for young 
 people, in colouring the complexion of the present 
 and giving bone and sinew to life, when the battle 
 of competing claims fairly and fully begins. Then, 
 by some glorious magic a transformation of being 
 occurs, and a new drama proceeds to evolve itself. 
 The child of the moment becomes the child of eter- 
 nity. England expects, because his parents and 
 teachers and all his friendly adversaries expect, that 
 he, too, as did his father and grandfather and ances- 
 tors who drew a long bow or wielded a battle-axe at 
 some beastly old French place (like Agincourt) 
 which he cannot spell correctly and possibly would 
 
182 THE KEEPEB OF THE KEYS 
 
 not if he could, will do or try to do his duty. It 
 is all still a manly game, a regular hurly-burly, this 
 conflict of the present with the future. But, as 
 he becomes stronger, the love of fighting for the 
 highest and the best grows upon him, till duty is 
 delight and habit a second nature. And now he 
 wages war, not so much for the desire of victory or 
 the passion of sport, or the wild joy of battle, in the 
 pride of his powers and the brute exercise of brute 
 strength, as for the pursuit of truth in faith and fear 
 and the love of God and man. The drawing of the 
 Cross constrains him. He perceives that service 
 for others, self-sacrifice, with all the claims con- 
 verging on him as if the eyes of the whole world 
 were regarding him and encouraging his individual 
 efforts, is the finest thing. And nothing but the 
 finest thing will ever move him now. He still 
 hears the call of the past, and the dim cries from 
 grand old battle-fields that with their deathless his- 
 tory yet shake the nations. But it is the call of the 
 future that compels him most. He is a trustee for 
 this, a steward for the mightier race as yet unborn, 
 that will be the better and braver for each gallant 
 word or deed of his now, and will also play on and 
 play up and play the game on larger lines. 
 
 It appears an obvious truth, that lies on the very 
 surface of things, that nothing worth having was 
 ever won without a struggle. What lightly comes, 
 lightly goes. Unearned money is quickly spent and 
 of no value to the possessor. Experience accepted, 
 at second hand or third hand from others, is no 
 experience. Character assumed, conduct imitated, 
 
CHILD AND MAN 183 
 
 at no cost and with no conflict, can only develop 
 slaves or cowards. Eternal watchfulness, eternal 
 contests, are the price we pay for all our truths and 
 treasures, our most cherished charters and liberties. 
 Japan has been called an exception to this cosmic 
 law. But a deeper knowledge, a real acquaintance 
 with Japanese history, teaches a different tale and 
 shows the one old result from the one old cause. 
 There was an adequate preparation for these splen- 
 did fruits. Progress by antagonism, conquest 
 through defeat, success after failure, and a new and 
 nobler synthesis arising out of each conflict to find 
 fresh and greater enemies overcoming first and then 
 again overcome, and so on continually this, with 
 all the passion and incident and agony of some sub- 
 lime tragedy, not without the touch of Divine laugh- 
 ter that yet is full of tears, constitutes beyond the 
 shadow of a doubt the supreme principle to which 
 we must each one submit in free and willing ser- 
 vice, which God Himself accepts in the very limits 
 of Creation. We cannot pass outside its governing 
 reach, we may not even conceive (in any thinkable 
 form) a better or another way. And we do not 
 understand it clearly, till we carry it to the Cross of 
 Christ and read it there written in His blood. But 
 at last we do realise something of its universal 
 meaning, and know indeed that its other name is 
 infinite and everlasting Love. 
 
XIV 
 
 "HE THAT SITTETH IN THE HEAVENS 
 SHALL LAUGH." 1 
 
 SIR Oliver Lodge has left on record these remark- 
 able words, which perhaps some day he may regret 
 he ever wrote. ' The higher mind of to-day is not 
 worrying about his sins at all, still less about their 
 punishment." We may conveniently compare with 
 this big utterance the testimony of the Haggada. 
 ' The earth shook and trembled and could not find 
 rest, until God created Repentance : then it stood 
 fast." It may be alleged, that the vast difference 
 between the two statements represents at root the 
 gulf between the ancient spirit and the modern, the 
 religion of fear and the religion of faith and love, 
 or theology and science. But unfortunately facts, 
 and facts of the present day, do not warrant any such 
 confident assertion. Declarations and personal ex- 
 periences, whether formal and measured announce- 
 ments ex cathedra, the ripe results of liberal learning 
 and advanced teaching, as well as passionate 
 expressions of individual sincerity from ordinary 
 
 !See my poem " The Laughter of the Lord," in " Matin 
 Bells "(F. Ballin, London). 
 
 184 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 185 
 
 persons, conspire to prove that Kepentance forms as 
 large an element in the best exponents of modern 
 or contemporary life, as it did in the earliest docu- 
 ments of the Old Testament. Man might almost be 
 defined religiously, as a being who repents. While, 
 on the other hand , a devil might be roughly described 
 as a being who does not repent. We cannot 
 change the spiritual centre of gravity, the Love 
 of God, to which the immediate response is 
 repentance before love and faith. To think, or sug- 
 gest, that we have outgrown the need of penitence 
 and the ensuing and corresponding pardon , seems as 
 ugly an idea as the poor mother's triumphant 
 remark that her boy had long passed out of mere 
 Bible reading and gone on into the newspaper. Of 
 course, Sir Oliver Lodge only intended to condemn 
 a perverse and morbid sorrow for sin, that certainly 
 " worketh death." Let us confess, he means, our 
 sins immediately and honestly, lay the burden down 
 once for all at the foot of the Cross or at the bar of 
 Conscience or the Unknowable, whatever our 
 Divinity may be, and then manifest the reality of 
 our repentance by a changed life. If we keep per- 
 petually calling up the ghosts of buried or unburied 
 sins, to humour an unhealthy craving and gratify a 
 mock religious lust, we shall not be able to do good 
 work and throw ourselves into the onward movement 
 that makes for light and liberty. No doubt, there is 
 among devout myriads a diseased pleasure in 
 dwelling upon the memories of old excesses, that can 
 be indulged no longer, and yet by their resurrection 
 on moments of imagined remorse or unhealthy 
 
186 HE THAT SITTETH IN 
 
 regret yield an illicit and fearful joy. Who has not 
 met with people, that ostentatiously boasted of their 
 "conversion," and still took a ghoulish delight in 
 recalling their ancient debauches simply as a 
 solemn warning to others, and smacked their senile 
 lips with an unctuous satisfaction they could not 
 conceal, as they duly chronicled the filthy records of 
 the past? Nevertheless, we find now among our 
 soberest preachers and sanest teachers a just 
 insistency on the need of daily confession and daily 
 repentance to be followed by regular discipline and 
 appropriate action. It would be impossible to listen 
 to one of our leading spiritual guides, or to read a 
 book of devotional instruction, at the present day, 
 and find there any sentiments at all resembling or 
 approaching Sir Oliver Lodge's unguarded words 
 and random rhetoric. For a religion, without 
 repentance as one of its principal ingredients, can- 
 not be called a religion in any accepted or acceptable 
 shape. Only a creature, conscious of no relations 
 to God, or rather unconscious of any relations to 
 God, would be destitute of a besetting sense of sin, 
 and frequent sorrow for sin inevitably arising out of 
 this. Nature sometimes produces abortions, imper- 
 fect plants, flowers, animals, and then she proceeds 
 to repent. That is to say, she endeavours to repair 
 her incompletenesses or defects by producing some- 
 thing better and something that conforms to the 
 given type. A vein of obvious Repentance, exhibited 
 in a cosmic sense and sorrow for physical sin, seems 
 to run through the whole of Creation. Indeed, it 
 may be alleged, without irreverence, that it possesses 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 187 
 
 a God-like feature, because it contains, as we shall 
 perceive presently, a very decided Divine element. 
 And, if it did not, it would afford no guarantee for 
 moral and religious reformation, and no pledge for 
 spiritual progress. Kepentance, as a principle for 
 guidance, embraces an active as well as a passive 
 side. 
 
 But what is the attitude of God and Nature to- 
 wards the impenitent? " He that sitteth in the 
 Heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in 
 derision.' '' This suggests no vindictive or penal 
 spirit, for our Father is quite incapable of revenge 
 and never punishes us, because there is no need and 
 we punish ourselves sufficiently. Some have fancied 
 in these strange and startling words of the second 
 Psalm the mocking note of contempt or scorn, as if 
 God could by the faintest possibility entertain such 
 an earthly and sordid and petty a feeling as this. He 
 is, of course, and ever was and will be, intensely 
 Human, but only on the ideal plane, purged of all 
 grossness and even the most splendid spitefulness to 
 which a great King might condescend. Irony does 
 not express the meaning of the text, nor yet 
 Humour, though it approaches nearer to a solution 
 of the tremendous truth. God's ways and God's 
 words must ultimately justify themselves in the final 
 results and their unsearchable riches. Inevitably, 
 and as it were automatically, things in the end 
 dispose themselves, not as we perhaps proposed, but 
 as the Supreme Architekton intended at the very 
 outset. So when there comes a clash between the 
 Divine Will and the human will, we find in the 
 
188 HE THAT SITTETH IN 
 
 foregone issues, we hear, so to speak the ethical 
 laugh we are broken on the rock of the Triumph 
 of Righteousness. We realize the futility, the 
 infinite presumption and absurdity, of our struggle 
 and the exceeding falsehood of the forlorn antithesis. 
 It is not the laugh of Pride or Arrogance, but rather 
 logic and reason working out through our opposition 
 itself benign and beautiful conclusions. 
 
 As we know, sunt lachrymce rerum, and recognize 
 the note of tears in everything, so also sunt risus 
 rerum or est risus rerum, we feel the Divine 
 Laughter no less than the Divine Sorrow. It is the 
 exultation at the heart of all, that wrong can never 
 be victorious at the last, the eternal consciousness 
 that all is really well for all. Some of us, when we 
 were young, had to read and perhaps learn by heart 
 an ingeniously perverse hymn, a mixture of crude 
 Deism and Calvinistic narrowness, in which we may 
 remember two lines embodying a peculiarly diabolical 
 sentiment, in case of childish errors or innocent 
 indiscretions : 
 
 " The God who dwells above the skies 
 Will look with vengeance in His eyes," etc. 
 
 It seems hardly necessary to repeat that the 
 Laughter of the Lord or the Laughter of Nature 
 signifies nothing of the sort. No, it simply means 
 that evil cannot prosper, however it may flourish 
 apparently or really for a time, and stands 
 foredoomed and foredamned for ever. Morality 
 laughs at the magnificent impositions of error and 
 superstition, and, like David of old, runs to meet 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 189 
 
 mere empty bulk and blasphemy with the confidence 
 of inspiration. " The race is not to the swift, nor 
 the battle to the strong." But in Eight alone do we 
 have the true irresistible Might, which at the court 
 oi iiiidl appeal wins all along the line, and can alone 
 aiforJ the luxury of honest laughter. Keligion, the 
 religious life, oscillates between the two poles of 
 infinite Sorrow and infinite Joy, according as good 
 or evil for the while predominates. And yet the 
 cosmos for ever smiles through its tears. On the 
 last analysis, it is the ethical laugh that prevails and 
 rings out the false and rings in the true. No doubt, 
 to the guilty soul at enmity with God, the sentence 
 has and must have the sound of discord and the 
 savour of remorseless derision. And this very inter- 
 pretation should suggest at once the hopelessness of 
 a hostile attitude. Fear and shame and hatred of 
 holiness alone import a quite alien idea, by the 
 transference of the imperfect to the perfect and the 
 earthly to the heavenly. 
 
 Here, as always, perhaps : 
 
 " We receive, but what we give, 
 And in our light alone does Nature live." 
 
 The deaf or defective ear, the diseased heart, will 
 colour whatever comes, and convey to the purest 
 sources something of their own morbid medium or 
 impurity. God is vindicated by the issue, and the 
 vindication may be discerned through faith and love 
 at the first feeble beginnings and out of the most 
 overwhelming defeat. And this irrepressible note 
 of the ultimate victory of Truth, to which the voice 
 
190 HE THAT SITTETH IN 
 
 of Nature and the voice of Conscience, and the voice 
 of Holy Scripture alike give testimony, should, if 
 rightly understood, call sinners to Eepentance as 
 nothing else can. It is the "Divine event" of 
 ethics made audible. 
 
 Religion, to be of any vital use and efficacy, wants 
 to be rediscovered now. It has lost its old original 
 charm and frank freshness, by the vulgarity of our 
 modern methods and instruments. We are waiting 
 for the revelation of some new saint or prophet. To 
 the great American Republic belongs the credit 
 of having literally rediscovered Woman. When 
 chivalry deserted the Old World it took refuge in 
 the New. Italy and France still preserve the forms 
 of chivalry, but not the spirit. England has lost 
 both the forms and the spirit, and it may be that 
 Germany has possessed neither yet. But re-dis- 
 vered Woman surely means Paradise regained, and 
 therefore it is to America that we look hopefully 
 for some restatement of the Gospel of the first 
 century in the terms of the twentieth. And who 
 shall say that the modern revelation will not come 
 from the lips of her women and from the lives of 
 her women, so helpfully idealised by a restored and 
 nobler chivalry ? Perhaps it is to some new type of 
 feminine excellence that we shall gratefully return, 
 and read yet larger lessons and more fruitful 
 principles. The whole world, sick at heart of 
 commercial greed and coarse materialism, cries out 
 for Repentance in a thorough revision of ancient 
 faiths and symbols and illusions. Deceive us, if 
 you will, it says, but deceive us to a better purpose 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 191 
 
 and deceive us as God deceives and God betrays, 
 by robbing us to enrich. But what does Eepentance 
 really mean? Is it a pose or a posture, a spirit or a 
 temper or a life, the possible or the impossible? To 
 state the question, appears to answer it. For what 
 God demands, and the age requires, is still just a 
 " broken and a contrite heart." We must offer, as 
 indeed always, not the reasonable and the possible 
 service, but the unreasonable and the impossible. 
 For of the incomplete is exacted the complete 
 sacrifice. But there Christ supplies the one unifying 
 point. Character is complete in Him alone. God, 
 the perfect Personality, makes ours also perfect thus. 
 But, we may well remember here, if it were only 
 difficult it had been done already, and if it be 
 impossible it shall be done. And, just as when God 
 orders us to execute a task He also enables us to 
 execute it, so in spiritual matters moral purpose 
 implies the power. For the penitent soul, that 
 trusts and loves and waits, the wildest dreams come 
 true. Christ told the man with the withered arm 
 to do an impossibility, to stretch forth his hand, and 
 when he obeyed he found he could do so and did it. 
 Our ethical sense is the interpreter (nay, the keeper), 
 if the bold expression may be allowed, of God's 
 conscience. It shows us the way in which the 
 Father thinks and feels Himself. But to this end, 
 in order that we may get a clear testimony, we need 
 more self-discipline. He that is free from all, is 
 master of all. If we train ourselves to care for 
 nothing worldly and value nothing earthly overmuch , 
 we soon find the world and the earth under our feet. 
 
192 HE THAT SITTETH IN 
 
 Automatically we rise above them. We possess 
 them because we possess them not, and they no 
 longer, through the senses and by dark desires, 
 tyrannize over us. Despised and rejected they 
 become our tools, and we are enfranchised, " having 
 nothing and yet possessing all things.'' 
 
 " This is the victory that overcometh the world, 
 even our faith." But we cannot separate faith from 
 repentance, they go together, and are part of one 
 great spiritual moment which looking outward and 
 upward is faith, and looking inward and downward 
 is repentance. And their spiritual co-efficient or 
 co-determinant is the " victory " or power, through 
 obedience " that worketh by love." When we 
 really repent and believe, the thing is done the 
 fight fought, the triumph gained. Natura vincitur 
 parendo. Yes, and in like manner, Deus vincitur 
 parendo. God or Heaven, or the Kingdom of Grace, 
 stoops to all who stoop themselves. The doors and 
 windows of the impossible open immediately to such 
 and let them in. They enter thereby into their 
 awful inheritance. The obedience of repentant 
 faith has the promise of both worlds, of time and 
 of eternity. There is no question of desert here, 
 
 " For merit lives from man to man 
 And not From man, O Lord, to Thee." 
 
 God rewards us no more than he punishes us. For 
 as the broken law brings its own penalties, without 
 any special Divine intervention a purely material 
 and mechanical conception so the unviolated or 
 observed law brings its own blessing. We practi- 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 193 
 
 cally reward and punish ourselves, according as we 
 obey or disobey. But still we can claim no desert. 
 " 6'o likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those 
 things which are commanded you, say " We are 
 unprofitable servants : we have done that which was 
 our duty to do." Kepentance recognizes the 
 impossible, and by accepting it overcomes it. 
 
 It has been asserted that Eepentance has some- 
 thing Godlike about it and contains a Divine 
 element. And this is in strict accordance with stern 
 everlasting fact. Humility forms one of its most 
 vital and fundamental constituents. Theologians 
 too often follow each other like sheep, treading the 
 same dear trite familiar ruts, and hedged in by the 
 same narrow regular round. Yet we have all long 
 ago given up the Gospel of Malediction in the 
 Imprecatory Psalms and other portions of the Old 
 Testament all, perhaps, except a few exclusive and 
 extreme Calvinists, who yet linger on in the friendly 
 darkness that they love. But we must now bravely 
 confront the truth that large sections and numerous 
 passages of the First Covenant, ostentatiously 
 exhibiting the glorification of God by Himself, may 
 not be taken seriously, but are only the setting of 
 the picture, pure poetry, Oriental metaphor, 
 ornament, hyperbole, lavished at a time when 
 extravagant adulation was the custom, and form 
 everything, and the King himself a ceremony. We 
 except, of course, the wholesome pride of self-respect 
 and self-reverence, and the jealousy of a jealous 
 God for His honour. This almost goes without 
 saying. Divine morality, so to speak, cannot be 
 14 
 
194 HE THAT S1TTETH IN 
 
 lower than man's or other than ours in kind, what- 
 ever the infinite difference in degree, if there is to 
 be any common ground of approach and intercourse 
 or a religion at all. But still, while Christ remains 
 "the brightness of God's glory and the express image 
 of His Person," God is and must be the very 
 humblest thing in Heaven and on earth. It was the 
 Saviour's crown, that He "came not to be mini- 
 stered unto but to minister," and was the Servant 
 of servants. " Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly 
 in Heart." Look only at the symbols of our faith, 
 the Lamb, the Dove, the Cross, beyond which we 
 cannot go, the first and last words of Christian 
 religion. Recall the ideal given by our Lord Him- 
 self, when He took a little child and set him in the 
 midst, and said, " Suffer little children to come unto 
 Me and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom 
 of Heaven. Whosoever shall not receive the 
 Kingdom of Heaven as a little child shall in no wise 
 enter therein." And this teaching, while patent in 
 the New, was also ever latent in the Old Testament, 
 when not quite as fully and forcibly expressed. " A 
 little child shall lead them." And in Isaiah again 
 we find the clearest evangelical doctrine. " Thus 
 saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, 
 whose Name is Holy : I dwell in the high and holy 
 place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble 
 spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive 
 the heart of the contrite ones." Who could worship 
 a God like an Eastern despot, who kept only 
 pursuing his own glorification? What would be 
 ethically unworthy of a man must be equally nay, 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 195 
 
 rather much more unworthy of the Supreme Being. 
 On the contrary, we are taught that our Father 
 seeks us and not Himself. God emptied Himself 
 and became a Servant or even Slave, to serve us. 
 His one universal and everlasting aim has been to 
 give, to surrender, to sacrifice, and keep back 
 nothing. And in giving all, He gave Himself. God 
 was ever exalted most by Mercy and not by anything 
 resembling Pride. " And therefore will the Lord be 
 exalted, that He may have mercy upon you: for the 
 Lord is a God of Justice : blessed are all they that 
 wait for Him." And if we turn to the New 
 Testament, we naturally find this truth everywhere 
 announced or understood. For instance, in the very 
 act of seeming humiliation, our Lord exclaimed with 
 tones of triumph, when the treachery of Judas began 
 to work, " Now is the Son of Man glorified." The 
 shadow of shame, as it appeared to ordinary esti- 
 mates, He assumed as a shining royal robe. Indeed, 
 from those events, which looked like utter defeat and 
 entire degradation before the world, proceeded the 
 greatest outflashings of Divinity and the sublime 
 assurance of overwhelming and irresistible success. 
 Christ was grandest, most Christ-like, most God-like, 
 in His darkest hours and most dreadful extremities. 
 The lower He descended to conquer, the higher He 
 rose as Redeemer. And though absolutely sinless, 
 yet in His glorious Humility He touched, as it were, 
 the uttermost hem of Repentance, and thus conse- 
 crated it and made it evermore Divine. So His 
 precepts have about them a characteristic sweet 
 unreasonableness, because they ask so much and 
 
196 HE THAT SITTETH IN 
 
 demand of us the impossible as if any sinner might 
 be penitent to order. And yet how could it be 
 otherwise ? We recognize no challenge in the appeal 
 to the merely difficult. But when we are told to 
 vanquish insuperable obstacles, like an evil spirit or 
 a splendid vice, we grow conscious of our powers, 
 we feel behind us the breath of Omnipotence, and 
 go to the battle armed with the forces of eternity. 
 " Homo capax Deitatis." 
 
 One marvellous effect of Eepentance is its 
 retrospective as well as its prospective energy. By 
 the Grace of God, it undoes the past as w r ell as 
 provides a safeguard for the future. It unites us 
 to the Life of our Lord, and the outflow of that 
 Regenerating Love which can transform even the 
 consequences of evil acts in the remotest past. For, 
 if Christ lived Himself the representative and typical 
 and universal human life, as He did, our repentance 
 makes us capable of receiving its benefits which 
 abolish time. Joined to Him and resting in Him, 
 our own imperfections and vilest infirmities are 
 gathered up and included and transubstantiated and 
 transvaluated in His Perfection. All our blemishes 
 and blanks, by a celestial alchemy or metamorphosis, 
 reappear resolved and over-ruled and redeemed in 
 His own stainless Conduct. The very blots now 
 stand out as stars in heaven. Our sins, the 
 (so-called) irrevocable word and the (so-called) 
 irreparable deed, judged by a new and nobler 
 estimate, rise up as if they had been the polar 
 opposites in that Eternal Transfiguration of the 
 Cross of Christ. The natural and necessary results 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 197 
 
 of wickedness are disposed for good and not for evil 
 by that stupendous Sacrifice, which looks both ways, 
 before and after, as the supreme Centre round which 
 the universe revolves. " And the angel lifted up his 
 hand to heaven, and sware by Him that liveth for 
 ever and ever . . . that there should be time no 
 longer." Measured by the standard of the Cross, 
 there can be no past and no future, but one vast 
 present. And in that light the effects of byegone 
 transgressions receive at once their interpretation 
 and remedy. God, not Man, makes the ultimate 
 history. " / am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold 
 into Egypt. Now therefore be not grieved nor angry 
 with yourselves, that ye sold me hither : for God did 
 send me before you to preserve life. . . And God 
 sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the 
 earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. 
 So now it was not you that sent me hither, but 
 God." Joseph, the seer, the dreamer of dreams, 
 the truth-teller, and the truth-teller because a 
 dreamer of dreams, felt a shadow of the Cross falling 
 upon him and rejoiced. Just as Moses, flying for 
 his life, and yet exulting in "the reproach of Christ." 
 Both anticipated the future and discounted the past, 
 assured that the vision was one and perceiving it 
 whole. For, in our Lord's great and Corporate 
 Passion none were excepted, all were embraced, 
 from the beginning to the end of things, and reaped 
 and shall reap the benefits of His sufferings and " the 
 Lamb slain from (yes, and before) the Foundation 
 of the world " and from all eternity in the Mind 
 and Will and Love of God. We can never hope to 
 
198 HE THAT SITTETH IN 
 
 get to the bottom of the meaning of the mystery of 
 Redemption. In it potentially were included each 
 subsequent fresh revelation of light and love, each 
 advance of Science, each solution of some ancient 
 riddle, each development of Progress, each new page 
 opened in macrocosm or microcosm. For the mind of 
 man, no less than the heart of man, was baptized at 
 the Cross in the precious Blood and discovered there 
 other and grander powers only waiting to be sum- 
 moned forth and conquer the world for Christ. It 
 may be, we shall find, there were prophecies also of 
 higher faculties unfolding like flowers in the gradual 
 and glorious evolution of the race a pledge that 
 humanity should some day be indeed clothed with 
 all the armour of God Himself, and do as much as 
 Jesus did and even more, through the increasing 
 ascendency of the spiritual powers. " Thou shalt see 
 greater things than these." " Verily, verily, I say 
 unto you, He that believeth on Me, the works that 
 I do, shall he do also ; and greater works than these 
 shall he do; because I go unto My Father." For 
 the Redemption still operates, the Redemption still 
 proceeds, leavening the lump of the cosmos, minds 
 and matter likewise. Unsuspected features of latent 
 loveliness, undreamed of treasures of Truth, keep 
 pouring out their riches at our feet and filling our 
 hands till they overflow and drip with fragrance like 
 the wooer's hands in the Song of Solomon. We 
 draw from unexhausted and inexhaustible sources 
 and resources. Each new invention, each new 
 discovery, implies another and opens another door 
 into our expanding inheritance and the invisible 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 199 
 
 world. Every end becomes a fresh beginning, and 
 we are realizing at last that to our knowledge and 
 power there are no assigned or assignable limits. The 
 rich and the poor, the wise and the foolish, the old 
 and the young meet together on equal terms and on 
 common ground in the Shadow of the Cross, and 
 godly sorrow proves there that it is joy, and godly 
 fear is hope, and Repentance knows there is a portion 
 for each and even for Dan. There the lost tribes 
 are found, and there lost Eden is restored. Ah, when 
 Christ walked the earth and lived His Life of Suffer- 
 ing, and died His daily Death, when He hung cruci- 
 fied on the Cross of Calvary, and the ribald mocking 
 cry went up " He saved others, Himself He cannot 
 save "then, had faith only been able to see, love 
 would have understood and beheld the blinding glory 
 of Eternity and the great white Throne of thunder 
 and Omnipotence reigning and ruling over all, and 
 just because of that supreme surrender and perfect 
 Sacrifice. And the priests and scribes, at the high 
 tide of their false and fatal victory, had they 
 possessed ears to hear, would have caught an echo 
 of the knell of doom and their own condemnation, 
 " He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, the 
 Lord shall have them in derision." 
 
 Right, Truth, call the fact what we will, 
 represents the principle of order, without which there 
 could be no unity. And this invariably results from 
 the perpetual adjustments and re-adjustments, and 
 antagonism of the moral and physical processes and 
 the interaction of cosmic evolution and free will. 
 The attitude of the worshipper vacillates, so to speak, 
 
200 HE THAT SITTETH IN 
 
 between faith and fear, which are subsumed in a 
 higher synthesis that includes both trust and doubt, 
 for ever giving and taking and checking each other 
 in order to obtain the proper balance. God presents 
 Himself as Father and Master, Friend and Adver- 
 sary, Saviour and Judge, Light and Darkness, One 
 and Many, Local and Universal. Nothing is harder 
 than to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the rich and 
 wise and mighty (as rich and wise and mighty) 
 cannot do so. And at the same time, nothing is 
 easier a little child can, and does. One step (out 
 of self) will accomplish it, and yet a long life finds it 
 impossible. Joy proves the redeeming element of 
 sorrow, and sorrow of joy, and hope and fear 
 mutually deny, exclude, fulfil, and save each other. 
 Ebal and Gerizim, blessing and cursing, lie never 
 far apart, and sometimes appear to meet and mingle. 
 In old languages, they almost merge in the common 
 root of separation apartness for good which issues 
 in consecration, and apartness for evil which develops 
 in a ban or condemnation. But at first they were 
 nearly interchangeable, and even now they touch at 
 certain points. Anathema had a similar history, 
 though here the holy aspect has been somehow 
 suppressed, probably from its connection with votive 
 offerings and heathen temples. We see here morality 
 in the making, religion at the parting of the ways, 
 in a sort of hendiadys or complexio oppositorum, 
 and we catch a dim and distant suggestion of 
 the aboriginal act of consciousness subject contra 
 object. But, though the law is competition, Right 
 emerges from every conflict the stronger for the 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 201 
 
 struggle and revealing new ranges of thought and 
 new vistas or visions of love. Justice is the minister 
 of Bight or Righteousness, and only terrible from its 
 awful and unutterable purity. " And the seven 
 Angels came out of the Temple, having the seven 
 plagues, clothed in pure and white linen and having 
 their breasts girded with golden girdles." St. Peter 
 had a lightning flash of this conviction when he fell 
 down on his knees and cried, " Depart from me, JOT 
 1 am a sinful man, Lord" What conquers and 
 crushes us into the very dust is, not the terrors of 
 Omnipotence or the blasting flames of Sinai or the 
 majesty of judgment, but Innocence, Weakness, 
 Purity, Helplessness, and gentle forgiving Love. It 
 was thus God chose to manifest Himself in Christ, 
 unarmed, defenceless, and, as it were, appealing to 
 our human pity. But that picture only displays one 
 half of the truth. Over against it, as its supplement, 
 we confront " the wrath of the Lamb." And what 
 is more terrible than the spectacle of outraged Love ? 
 And to empty it of all severity, leaving behind 
 nothing but a feeble Benevolence, although boundless 
 in its operation , is to misunderstand and misrepresent 
 Christ and substitute a pale and bloodless and 
 contemptible Abstraction. Divine Love is merci- 
 less, inexorable as the stately march of physical law, 
 but then it remains Love. Cruel it may often be, 
 but it is a thousand thousand times more really kind, 
 though it uses the cross and the altar knife, than a 
 flabby false philanthropy which connives at evil 
 because it has not the courage to strike hard and do 
 good. Of all the shameful shams and mocking 
 
202 HE THAT SITTETH IN 
 
 masquerades of the present day, nothing seems quite 
 so ugly and pernicious and absolutely demoralizing 
 as this. It tends to poison and pauperize human 
 nature at its most sacred source. In the name of 
 the most solemn and beautiful verity, and beneath 
 the shelter of a mere shoddy mimicry of virtue, it 
 goes about degrading society because it will not take 
 the trouble to inquire a little and run the risk of 
 offending a public opinion that needs to be educated 
 and turned into more wholesome channels. It 
 debases the moral currency and offers us the counter- 
 feit coin of sickly hysterical sentiments. It cannot 
 be urged too frequently or too firmly that Love will 
 not continue Love unless it is a good hater and 
 comes prepared to destroy before it proceeds to build 
 up. Tolerance has much to answer for, when it 
 becomes criminal connivance and fatal leniency. 
 Better almost the fires of Smithfield, better almost 
 the axe and rope and gibbet and all the ten plagues 
 of persecution, than a maudlin sympathy which 
 rewards roguery and pampers the worst passions of 
 the heart. Religion's deadliest enemy no longer 
 comes from the ranks of open vice, from impurity 
 and intemperance and infidelity, but from its own 
 household. Wearing its holy badges, appealing to 
 its holy sanctions, equipped with its holy resources, 
 this flagrant Philanthropy slays its tens of thousands 
 while the grosser sins slay but thousands. And we 
 find the explanation of this damning fact, in the 
 studied depreciation or omission of Repentance, as 
 the foremost necessity in any vital scheme of reform. 
 It has become the fashion to excuse and extenuate 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 203 
 
 the very vilest excesses, as only human and tolerable. 
 Men and women even find it convenient sometimes 
 to explain away the existence of hampering wives 
 or husbands. What is the use of being so parti- 
 cular, when " good form " will carry you successfully 
 through the blackest cloud? Youth must enjoy its 
 little abuses and indiscretions, and youth is rather 
 an elastic term and will now perhaps cover a hoary 
 head. We must not be hard, from the scientific 
 point of view, on the poor victims of misfortune and 
 circumstance. The devil of heredity, or the devil 
 of unequal opportunity, will account for most 
 breaches of the law. If we had possessed the same 
 inheritance and suffered the same training or want 
 of training, we should have fallen as low or lower 
 still. " There gees John Bradford, but for the 
 grace of God ! ' ' We can all quote this and 
 understand this, and it sounds so plausible and 
 satisfactory, and anything is better than making a 
 fuss or flushing the drains. Was not Mr. W. H. 
 Stead sent to prison because he would poke his nose 
 into matters that did not concern him? Let things 
 alone, and matters will assuredly right themselves 
 in the long run. They inevitably do, and, at any 
 rate, we have Fashion and Science and popular 
 preaching all on our side. " Our brother the hooli- 
 gan," says the pet pulpiteer, and tears rise to the 
 eyes of beautiful women as they think of joining some 
 mission in the East End of London and thank God 
 they feel so virtuous and emotional for the moment. 
 But national movements or reforms cannot be made 
 with rose water. And meanwhile, the hero of the 
 
204 HE THAT SITTETH IN 
 
 hour and the idol of the drawing-room, " our brother 
 the hooligan," finding his faults so easily condoned, 
 and knowing he can be whitewashed again whenever 
 he likes, without any trouble or cost to himself, goes 
 on his "virile" way, breaking heads, "cracking 
 cribs," and picking our pockets. He is a fine fellow 
 at bottom, explains his ardent admirer, and only 
 wants a little judicious coaxing and humouring, but 
 he must never be forced and never bluntly contra- 
 dicted. Pat him on the back, and tell him he is the 
 most splendid specimen of the English race, and 
 w r e are all dying to help him , and then you can lead 
 him about by a thread of silk or like Mary's little 
 lamb. But as for corporal punishment or iron 
 discipline, or proper punishment for acts of violence, 
 we must never dream of such dreadful things. They 
 would hurt his feelings, harden his sensitive nature, 
 and fix him for ever in his naughty habits. We 
 must plead with him, encourage him, make allow- 
 ances for wild animal spirits and riotous indulgences, 
 but never drive him and never beat him. No wonder 
 the prisons are full and the churches are empty, and 
 the clergyman complains that he is the voice of one 
 crying in the wilderness. 
 
 Nor will matters improve while morality (in the 
 form of misguided and feeble benevolence) differs in 
 principle from the teaching of the Gospel, and 
 ignores the redeeming factor of Repentance with its 
 collateral reform and restitution. Here we have 
 the missing link. This, and this alone, is the key 
 that will open the door of a great and growing diffi- 
 cultynay, a deadly danger and let in a saving 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 205 
 
 flood of fresh light and life. History seems to show 
 that when nations have gone to Capua and people 
 pride themselves on an easygoing indifference, when 
 enthusiasm has become a byword and aspiration an 
 annoyance, when the sanctity of marriage is openly 
 ridiculed and its bond relaxed, when woman has lost 
 her halo of holiness and mystery, and purity its 
 message, when the sense of sin is dead or dying, 
 and science or the public opinion of the period 
 pronounces it but a natural and pardonable infirmity, 
 the evolution of those nations approaches the crisis 
 of revolution. No empire has ever flourished long, 
 when the custodians of its honour have ceased to be 
 very jealous of their awful charge. Irresponsibility 
 prepares the way for, and rings the knell, of retri- 
 bution. The forces of dissolution have already begun 
 to sap the moral and religious foundations, and the 
 forces of recuperation have failed to act with whole- 
 some and sufficient energy. Decay and destruction 
 set in as soon as the spiritual principles and the 
 working principles of society are greatly at variance, 
 and the lower have usurped the place and prerogative 
 of the higher. Communities rest ultimately on a 
 moral basis, and not on brute force or the best-drilled 
 battalions, and all the bayonets in the world will 
 not save a kingdom when the final sanctions for its 
 existence and the justification for its pride and 
 place have departed. The divorce between ethics 
 and practical policy or the common life of daily 
 procedure, indicates a deadly rift in the national 
 system. It proves that it is out of harmony with 
 its environment, and refuses to accept the challenge 
 
206 HE THAT S1TTETH IN 
 
 of the eternal antagonism that divides right from 
 wrong. Civilization has grown flabby, and lost its 
 grip of the great realities and moral safeguards. And 
 when religion, instead of coming to the rescue, and 
 attempting to educate opinion and raise the level 
 and tone of society, descends from its holy heights 
 and accepts the miserable standards in fashion, and 
 takes the colours and reflects the views that happen 
 to prevail for the hour, then it has renounced its 
 birthright and plays the ignominious part of a 
 follower or servant and not the loftier and legitimate 
 one of guide and instructor. Timid preaching, or 
 the trumpet that gives an uncertain sound, will 
 always inflict more injury than all the combined 
 cant and rant of the day. Better far the posture 
 of " Praise-God Barebones," than the imposture and 
 organised hypocrisy of "Mr. Facing-both-ways." 
 Keligion now is too much a social satellite, it fawns 
 on fine ladies and grand gentlemen, it speaks in 
 euphemisms and suggests ingenious apologies for 
 every sin new and old. It wears white kid gloves, 
 and seems afraid of handling disagreeable subjects, 
 and is more careful about appearances than about 
 ethics. Decorum in public covers a multitude of 
 sins, and a big subscription veils the blackest vice 
 in private. If he only may dip largely into his 
 neighbour's purse from time to time, the modern 
 clergyman will gladly disclaim the odious and onerous 
 office of being his brother's keeper, and will find 
 abundance of specious arguments for satisfying 
 himself that, after all, the devil is not half so bad 
 and not half so devilish as he is painted. He makes 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 207 
 
 liberal allowances. Of course we meet with excuses 
 and excuses, we find transgressors and transgressors, 
 and one of the most famous French religious writers 
 wrote his most beautiful book in the arms of his 
 neighbour's wife. But some excuses seem no better 
 than compounded felonies, and some transgressors, 
 like the above-mentioned saint, are worse than any 
 sinner. It is true that the conception of God, and 
 therefore of religion, varies, and must vary, with 
 every age, but this does not mean levelling down 
 when we should always be levelling up. Spinoza and 
 Montesquieu asserted that, if a triangle could " con- 
 struct a creed and form some notion of the Deity, it 
 would be triangular " and so God would be, and 
 should be, to the triangle. This merely confirms the 
 fact 1 of the Divine Eelativity as a working Ideal. God 
 ought to express Himself in the form and colour of 
 the time, while fundamentally and essentially " the 
 same yesterday and to-day and for ever," or He would 
 be of no possible service to the time. There lies no 
 degradation here. This is not the same as the 
 imputation of unworthy acts or thoughts to Him by 
 grovelling minds. And, as Hegel said, the hero is 
 no hero to his valet not because the hero is not a 
 hero, but because the valet is a valet. Clerics and 
 stipendiary stupidity in high places, with the minds 
 of valets, will here and there always make a trade or 
 policy out of their religion , and hawk it about to the 
 biggest bidder. But the man who affects piety of a 
 sort, because it pays or pleases, cannot be considered 
 really pious at all. Churches should be the clubs and 
 palaces of the poor, but are they or will they ever be 
 
208 HE THAT S1TTETH IX 
 
 without a radical revolution in our practical ethics ? 
 " Let not the seeker cease from seeking till he 
 find, and when he finds he shall be astonished, and 
 astonished he shall reach the Kingdom, and reaching 
 the Kingdom he shall rest." But we have nothing 
 of the kind now. No seeking and no finding confront 
 us everywhere in popular preaching and teaching, by 
 which unpleasant questions are quickly shelved. 
 And yet, for a society to live and be healthy, the old 
 eternal problems must be reverently re-opened by 
 our spiritual guides and re-stated in the terms of the 
 particular period. " Sunt lacrymce rerum. Jesus 
 wept, and who shall dare to deny that God weeps yet 
 over us, and Eepentance lies at the very root of all 
 things and a sane sense and horror of sin? Christ 
 stands before us not only as our Pattern, but our 
 Power, with the promise of every blessing. Those 
 who rashly minimize sin and the need of Kepentance 
 perhaps forget that this cuts two ways and under- 
 mines the bases of Holiness. Surely we have 
 travelled beyond the crude idea of Cabanis that 
 thought is a secretion of the brain, and the philo- 
 sophy (whether pantheism or not) which ignores evil 
 as a mere negation or defect to be outgrown in time ? 
 We possess some certainties, and to these we should 
 cling with all our faith as we cling to life. For 
 every truth we appropriate and assimilate, becomes 
 a perpetual eucharist. Is not the moral and religious 
 world at least as real and important as the physical? 
 The laugh, the triumph, the vindication at last, 
 invariably belong to the ethical process. History 
 justifies God, and is religion (as well as philosophy) 
 
THE HEAVENS SHALL LAUGH 209 
 
 teaching by example. " He that sitteth in the 
 heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in 
 derision." 
 
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INDEX 
 
 TO THE 
 
 NEW TESTAMENT VOLUMES 
 
 OF THE 
 
 BIBLICAL ILLUSTRATOR 
 
 Now Ready. Demy 8vo. Price IDS. 6d. net. 
 Uniform with the other Volumes. 
 
 Short Description of the Index Volume. 
 
 A good index is a perfect guide in what might otherwise often be an unknown 
 country. 
 
 A good index sets before you, in review, all the forces at your disposal. 
 
 This Index is a good one. It contains 507 pages of double columns of references, 1,014 
 columns of references to the New Testament volumes. 
 
 It has over 8O.OOO distinct references. 
 
 Compare this with the fact that the New Testament has but 7,959 verses in all and you 
 will see that there is an average of between eleven and twelve references to each 
 verse. Then each of these references frequently covers many pages of exposition and 
 illustration. 
 
 It forms, with the volumes of the work, a complete ENCYCLOPEDIA of all religious, 
 homiletical, and Biblical Information. 
 
 It is in itself a complete Sl'IUM"! -INI >KX to the whole New Testament. It enables. 
 you to find any passage, outline, exposition, illustration or help on any one passage 
 or subject. 
 
 There is not a passage, thought, illustration, outline, authority, suggestion or point of 
 any kind in any volume but will be found in the Index. By its aid you can trace- 
 that forgotten passage, illustration, or find information on any desired subject. 
 
 In a word it places all the material in this monumental library in your hands at one 
 time in one convenient volume. 
 
 In actual practice one preacher, designing to take on the next Sunday the subject of 
 ('ntd Revealed Through Nature," found not only a complete exposition, together 
 with a wealth of illustration, etc., under the head of the text chosen, but on consult- 
 ing the index, found immediately over two hundred other valuable leferrnc 
 
 l.new better than to attempt to read them all, but the index made it easy 
 to sel'-ct those most pertinent and to <|uickly glean their riches. Instead of turning 
 bewildered to book after book in his library, the Index Volume placed all th<* 
 libraries of the world right before him on lu> d. ,k and enabled him to do in hours 
 what lie might have s|*nt day in a vain attempt to accomplish. 
 
 Exfotitory Tinut : " The ' Biblical Illustrator ' is a work of s- lentiii.- value. An Index 
 was indispensable. Hereit is for th- NVw Testament volumes (Cinlhth> . 10^. <<d. net), a 
 miracle of fuln<- 
 
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THE MEN OF THE BIBLE. 
 
 17 Volumes, Crown 8vo, bound in Cloth. Each as. 6d. net. 
 
 Jesus Christ the Divine 
 
 W. j' DEANE, M.A. 
 " This book has the great merit of throw- 
 ing on the life of Abraham all the light of re- 
 cent Oriental learning." " The Evangelist." 
 
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 L DEANE, B.D. 
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 "A charming addition to the series . . . . 
 
 A strong, interesting, and useful book." 
 
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 Ezra and Nehemiah. 
 
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 ing . . . The writer is clear and reverent 
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 " An idea, volume, which brings the 
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 from the short threads of Scripture state- 
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 he becomes the Macaulay of Moses. This i 
 grand change for half-a-crown. If the other 
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 other means." " Sword and Trowel." 
 
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 " Christian Work." 
 
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THE TEACHERS CLASSIFIED 
 
 LESSON MATERIAL 
 
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 THE REV. CHARLES NEIL, M.A. 
 
 (Vicar of St. Mary's, Stamford Brook, \V.) 
 
 The following Volumes and Parts are now Ready: 
 THE FOUR GOSPELS & THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. 
 
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 "The Teacher's Classified Lesson Material " contains Scripture Lessons strictly evolved 
 from tbe sacred narrative itself, and constitutes the handiest Biblical Expositor for busy 
 Preachers and feathers. The authors have gone through Reference Hooks, Commentaries, 
 Standard Works and have collected. selected, condensed ;md classified all the information which 
 a Preaclier requires upon tin- portion of Scripture to be explained. In this work the grouping 
 of the accumulated treasures has been made upon a sound and uniform system. The matter 
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 upon the exact point upon which he seeks help without the vexatious wading through 
 superfluous or entangled statements. 
 
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 and to lose no opportunity of drawing attention to the moral lemons which should ' 
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 Scripture knowledge .-md Christian duty, are well worth the money." 
 
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 narrative are well brought out ; the geography, topography, and history thoroughly ex- 
 plained; and the spiritual lessons are clearly detm-d." 
 
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 quickly perceived, and arranged according to the teachers' and scholars' i 
 
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 London: FRANCIS GRIFFITHS, 34, Maiden Lane, Strand, W.C. 
 
THE TEACHER'S 
 
 CATECHISING BIBLE 
 
 By the Rev. CHARLES NEIL, MA. 
 
 THE FOLLOWING ARE Now READY: 
 
 THE FOUR GOSPELS AND THE ACTS OF THE 
 APOSTLES. Demy 8vo. Cloth. Price 75. 6d. net. 
 
 THE BOOK OF GENESIS Price 25. net. 
 
 Every Teacher or Expositor has felt the need of a Biblical 
 Interpreter someone to tell him in the tersest and most suggestive 
 and thought-promoting way the point of each paragraph or portion of 
 Holy Writ, and so to display the text itself as to remove all gram- 
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 form expressly suitable for class teaching or for the purposes of ex- 
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 THE TEACHER'S CATECHISING BIBLE. A Prebendary of 
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 informed the Author that during Holy Week he took this help into the 
 pulpit and was able to preach with perfect ease upon the Events 
 of our Lord's last week on earth. By this aid an amateur teacher 
 might easily train himself to be equal to the professional teacher; 
 while the professional teacher would perform his duties with increased 
 readiness and intelligence. 
 
 The Guardian : " The difficulties of combining the narratives have been carefullv con- 
 sidered and treated in a satisfactory manner." 
 
 The Record: " The volumes of the Catechising Bible contain the narrative of the Four 
 Gospels combined in chronological order, and divided into sections to correspond with 
 the lessons set forth in the companion volumes of the 'Classified Lesson Material.' The 
 advantage of this to the teacher will be at once apparent ; he has before him, at a glance, a 
 full account of any period of our Lord's recorded life, harmonized from the Four Gospels." 
 
 The Ecclesiastical dazette : " The analysis of the Four Gospels in a combined narrative 
 is especially well worked out, and will be found useful, not only bv teachers, but also by 
 preachers and catechists." 
 
 The Christian : "By showing the structure of the Scripture, they help materially to a 
 sound interpretation of the text." 
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 The Christian Visitor's Handbook 
 
 Passages of Scripture with Descriptive Titles and Suggestive Remarks; 
 also Topics for Prayer suitable for cases usually met with in District 
 
 Visiting. 
 
 F'cap 8vo. Limp Cloth. Price is. 6d. net. 
 
 London: FRANCIS GRIFFITHS, 34, Maiden Lane, Strand, W.C. 
 
THE TEACHER'S 
 
 SYNOPTICAL SYLLABUS 
 
 OF SCRIPTURE LESSONS 
 
 With Reference Tables, Maps, P/ans and Diagrams. 
 
 By the Rev. CHARLES NEIL, M.A. 
 
 With an Introduction by the Ven. ARCHDEACON SINCLAIR, D.D. 
 
 Complete in one Demy 8vo. Volume. 518 pp. los. 6d. net. 
 
 The first help which every Scripture student needs is a Biblical Educator, some one 
 experienced person or book to survey the field of Biblical knowledge as a whole and note its 
 related parts. In regard to the Books of the Bible usually taught in schools, and frequently 
 furnishing the topics for sermons this task has been preformed. A scientifically drawn up and 
 logically arranged " Tcacher' Synoptical Syllabtitt" lias been prepared, with 
 seventy -eight Reference Tables and sixty-nine Maps and Diagrams. These Tables, Maps and 
 Diagrams have been specially prepared for teaching purposes, and letterpress, when necessary, 
 faces them in such a way that it can be read without shifting the position of the book. The 
 help thus offered is what writers have hitherto failed to give. It is exactly what every student 
 consciously or unconsciously longs for. The historical, geographical and other facts com- 
 pressed into this book will be found indispensable to the student when he is about to prepare 
 a lesson or preach a sermon. 
 
 THE AITHORITAT1YK APPROVAL OF EXPERTS. 
 
 Bishops. Deans, Canons. An hdcacons, the Clergy, Headmasters of our Cireat Public 
 Schools, Principals of Theological Colleges and Training Colleges, Masters and Mistresses of 
 High Schools, and School Insj>ectors have written in exceptionally approving terms. 
 Testimony in favour of this hook comes not only from members of the Church of England, 
 but from Presbyterian and Nonconformists. 
 
 The present Archlhhop aj Canterbury, though alwavs cautious in his recommendations, 
 writes, when Bishop of Ro< hestcr : " I shall certainly recommend the Book both to Ordination 
 candidates and to other friends." 
 
 /)>-. C. /. Ellicolt, the Bishop of Gloucester, the Chairman of the Revision Committee of 
 the NYw Testament Company perhaps the greatest living English commentator, utttts: 
 "It is obviously compiled with much care, contains in it a great deal of helpful and in- 
 tructire matter, and cannot fail to be of much use to every careful reader of C.od's Holy 
 
 \V 1 " 
 
 Dr. P. J. Ckavaw, Bishop of Liverpool, formerly Principal of Wycliffe Lodge, Oxford, 
 pronounces the book to be " A perfect treasury of information, and will prove a valuable 
 help to T'-adiers. Clerical and Lay." 
 
 The late Hiihop Perownt, the Editor of the "Cambridge Bible for Schools and 
 Colleges," and acknowledged eminent Theologian of his day, remarks: "I have seen 
 nowhere else v, dear and helpful an analyst.- of the whole Bible history, and 1 shall gladly 
 do all in inv i "te Us i m illation." 
 
 The late Canon 1-vun Ihinitl, once I 'rmcipal at St. John's College, Battersra, the Author 
 
 of the Standard Work on the Book of Common Prayer for Kdu< ational Pm poses, < oinmits 
 
 I to tins unqualified praise : "It is the IXM harmony of the Bible . . . whii h I am 
 
 The late Dr. //.//. Heyti>il>l\ Prm. ipal .( Cheslmnt College, himself a most industrious 
 and vholarlv writer, hoie the f<illowmg strong testimony : "The care and research involved 
 , n t |, ( . O j su-li a work are ,j,,ite phenomenal I bekHify congratulate you on the 
 
 completion of such an HerdiU-an task. 1 
 
 Lonflon: KHAN-CIS ('.mi-TITHS. 34, Maiden Lane, Strand, W.C. 
 
Works by the 
 
 Rev. CHARLES H. H. WRIGHT, D.D., Ph.D. 
 
 Hampton Lecturer (1878) ; Public Examiner in Semitic Languages (1894-95) ; 
 ami Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint (1893-7) ; in the University of Oxford. 
 
 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH 
 
 AND OTHER HISTORICAL STUDIES. 
 Crown 8vo. Cloth. Price 6s. net. 
 
 CONTENTS : I. The Book of Isaiah. II. The Site of Paradise (with a Map). III. -Human 
 Sacrifices in the Old Testament. IV. The Malicious Charge of Human Sacrifices among 
 the Jews. V'. Great Jewish Kabbis of the First Century. VI.- Martin Luther, the Hero 
 of the Reformation. VII. Religious Life in the German Army in the War of 1870-1871. 
 VIII. The Persecution of the Lutherans in the Baltic Provinces of Russia. 
 
 The Suffering Servant of Jehovah 
 
 Depicted in Isaiah lit. and liii. Considered in Relation to Criticism 
 Past and Present. 
 
 Crown 8vo. Paper Cover. Price 6d. net. 
 
 The Intermediate State 
 
 AND PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 
 
 Examined in the light of Scripture, and of Ancient Jewish and Christian 
 Literature. 
 
 Cloth Crown 8vo. Price 55. net. 
 
 " Dr. Wright is our highest authority in respect of Hebrew Biblical Literature, and 
 nothing could be more felicitous in its seizure of a golden opportunity than the publication at 
 the present moment of this exhaustive 'examination.' '' The Rock. 
 
 Sunbeams on My Path 
 
 OR 
 
 Reminiscences of Christian Life in Various Lands 
 
 By EBBA J. D. WRIGHT, nee ALMROTH, 
 
 Edited by Rev. C. H. H. WRIGHT, D.D. 
 
 Price 2s. net. With Ten Illustrations. 
 
 " Gives glimpses of the life and character of persons of all nationalities The work is 
 well illustrated, and being written in a most unpretentious style, by a simple-minded, 
 devout, sympathetic, and courageous woman, will be much appreciated by readers of the class 
 she specially appeals to."- -Spectator. 
 
 London: FRANCIS GKIFHTHS, 34, Maiden Lane, Strand, W.C. 
 
Price jf- Net. 
 
 Ecclesia 
 
 OCCASIONAL SERMONS AND ADDRESSES 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR WOLLASTON MUTTON, M.A. 
 
 Rector of St. Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside. 
 Crown 8vo. Cloth. Gilt top. Price 35. net 
 
 rl ' I "to ifffiVt^i TQfHt^ T i r ii ^ri 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 SERMONS. 
 
 T,,E I'KKSFVC,-: OF THE KIMGI 
 THE RESTORATION ft] FAITH. 
 OUR FATHI-:K'> KI.V, 
 VOCATION TO TICK MINISTRY. 
 
 Tin Hi. A 
 
 TIM, OLD TKSTAMKXT AXI, ITS CRITICS (Four Lectures). 
 
 ACTMOIMI V AND Tllli \\ll\l.K. 
 
 Tll! : " : ANGLICAN 
 
 Tlil - P"J C V LIA ; ' AXU ITS ILLATION TO MYSTICISM. 
 
 '1 OGICAL 
 
 - 
 
 CARDINAL I .. ;I : SS AXD HIS s 
 
 OH ASSENT. 
 
 LONDON: ftlANCIS ( -K'll ! ITIIS, 34, MAIDEN LANE STRAND, W.C. 
 
ECCLESIA DISCENS. By A. W. Huttoru 
 
 PRESS OPINIONS. 
 
 Athenaeum : " The idea of a learning Church deserves emphasis, 
 and the name might properly be taken by every Church which, while 
 fulfilling the function of an ecclesia docens, disclaims infallibility. In 
 adopting the title of his book Mr. Hutton takes a phrase which, as he 
 points out, means in theological treatises the laity as contrasted with 
 the clergy, or the laity and the inferior clergy contrasted witii the Pope 
 and bishops. He does well, however, to elevate the phrase to the high 
 station of a title for a whole Church, and he applies it to the Church of 
 England. It is a nice question how far an established Church, on 
 account of its State connexion, has the liberty to restate its doctrine ir. 
 harmony with acquired knowledge ; and it may be asked whether 
 formularies, fixed by Acts of Parliament, which determine the limits of 
 an ecclesia docens, do not thereby prevent such a Church from being an 
 ecclesia discens. The judgment of the House of Lords in the case of the 
 Free Church of Scotland raises questions regarding the relation of creeds, 
 articles, and confessions to progressive thought, even though that 
 judgment may not, and probably does not, directly affect the Estab- 
 lished Churches of England and Scotland. Apart from the answers to 
 the difficult questions arising out of the connection of Church and State, 
 the duty of learning, it may be said, should go with the right of teach- 
 ing ; and it is a sound and healthy conception of a Church that it must 
 learn as well as teach. In the sermons and addresses contained in this 
 book, Mr. Hutton deals with subjects of outstanding interest, and he 
 speaks from personal knowledge in the address ' Cardinal Newman, his 
 Weakness and his Strength,' since for some years he was, within the pale 
 of the Romaa Church, closely connected with Newman. The book 
 should have many lessons for those to whom the idea of the Church of 
 England as an ecclesia discens may be a novelty." 
 
 Pali Mall Gazette: "Mr. Button's book is a careful guide t<> 
 what the broad wing of English Churchmen, represented by the 
 Churchmen's Union, are now doing. Mr. Hutton's spiritual career 
 has been such as to enable him to see the problems of religion in a 
 very varied way, and his attachment to orthodox Liberalism cannot 
 lie considered apart from his former acceptance of the claims of Rome. 
 His sojourn in Rome has, we think, made him rather intolerant of 
 the English Catholic position, and at times he seems anxious to 
 exaggerate the official change in doctrine that occurred at the 
 Reformation. On the whole, the most valuable things in the book 
 are the paper on the Ritschlian theology, and that on Cardinal 
 Newman." 
 
 South Place Magazine : " Such men as Mr. Hutton however 
 much they may seem to us addicted to compromise, must give their 
 orthodox hearers to think, and so hasten the time when the Church 
 will place weightier emphasis upon the fruits of religious conviction, 
 rather than on its forms and doemas." 
 
 I.ONDOX : FRANCIS GRIFFITHS, 34, MAIDEN LANE, STRAND, W.C, 
 
SEEKING A COUNTRY: 
 
 (ENGLISH PREACHERS' SERIES). 
 
 By THOS. F. LOCKYER, B.A. 
 
 Crown 8vo. Cloth, Gilt Top. Price 35. net. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Seeking a Country The Homeward Way A Citizen of No Mean 
 City My Redeemer Liveth The Last Passover Idylls of Home 
 Life They came to Marah Love's Faithful Waiting Evening and 
 Morning The Gift of the Morning Star Shall He Live again ? 
 The Challenge of Eastertide None of you Asketh, Whither? The 
 Abiding Christ. 
 
 PRESS OPINIONS. 
 
 " Two volumes have been issued Ecclcsia Discens, by the REV. A. 
 W. HrrroN, M.A., and Seeking a Country, by the REV. T. E. LOCKYER, 
 B.A. The names represent two very different types of preaching. 
 Mr. Hutton is absorbed in the intellectual movements of our time and 
 concerned for the authority of the Church. Mr. Lockyer is interested 
 in men and women, their home-life, their daily burdens, their abiding 
 Christ, and their future hope. We need both kinds of sermon. 
 Every congregation should have a Hutton and a Lockyer in the pulpit 
 in turns. If that is not possible at present, every member of every 
 congregation should be encouraged to read both these books." 
 The Expository Times. 
 
 "Mr. Lockyer has a quiet strength of thought and an assured 
 felicity of style which make his sermons very pleasant reading. He 
 is an expositor of real insight and careful scholarship." London 
 Ouarterly Review. 
 
 " These addresses are just such as we should expect from Mr. 
 Lockyer scholarly, eloquent, graceful in diction, full of vigorous and 
 stimulating thought, and throughout instinct with spiritual power-- 
 real power and plenty of it. Earnest, persuasive, and soul-stirring, 
 they bring before us a preacher who knows how to play upon the 
 hearts of men, and deal with the mysteries of human experience."- 
 Alicnlccn Daily Journal. 
 
 " The present \ohnncworthilysustainshisreputation. The sermons 
 are evangelical and practical, though not avowedly doctrinal, or 
 presented in the old conventional form. The style is chaste, clear, 
 and marked by a certain self-restraint which seldom, if ever, forgets 
 itself."-- Primitive Mttkoditl Qnarteri 
 
 London . FRANCIS r.UII-HTHS. 34, Maidm Lane, Strand, W.C. 
 
Seeking a Country : By Thos. F. Lockyer. 
 
 PRESS OPINIONS. 
 
 "Mr. Lockyer is a preacher of singular charm. He writes with the 
 skill of the well-trained man of letters as well as with the calm fervour 
 of the evangelical preacher. His careful study and extensive reading 
 are constantly in evidence, but the book is thoroughly his own." 
 Preacher s Magazine. 
 
 " These sermons are thoughtful expositions of vital truths. Many 
 of our readers will be glad to have their attention called to a volume 
 which worthily represents the ministry of one who has skill in open- 
 ing the Scriptures and in applying their teaching to the spiritual 
 needs of men." Methodist Recorder. 
 
 "For expository genius and illustrative aptitude, with spiritual 
 insight and power of tender and persuasive appeals, Mr. Lockyer has 
 erw equals." Peterborough Advertiser. 
 
 " In thought, in temper, and in language this is a choice book." 
 Hastings and St. Leonards Weekly Mail and Times. 
 
 " Mr. Lockyer has set himself to work out a clear and consecutive 
 purpose. And on that main purpose Mr. Lockyer has worked a beauti- 
 ful embroidery of clear thought and uplifting ideals/' Methodist Times. 
 
 " He deals with the variety of topics over which the fourteen 
 sermons of this book range with a boldness of touch, a picturesque- 
 ness of style, and a practicalness of tone that must invest any pulpit 
 with an unusual charm." Krith Times. 
 
 " The title is taken from the subject of the first sermon, which is the 
 recurring motive of the whole book. Those who are familiar with 
 Mr. Lockyer's other publications will not be surprised to find this 
 continuity of interest in the contemplation of the eternal life. It is a 
 living interest, and not mere dreaminess ; still less is it any unhealthy 
 weariness of the world's work. The present life is simply penetrated, 
 in these sermons, with the consciousness of the greater life hereafter : 
 the preacher does not look away from facts, but through them to the 
 light beyond." The Myrtle. 
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 THE QUEST OF FAITH : 
 
 A SERIES OF DEVOTIONAL STUDIES. 
 F'cap 8vo. Cloth. Price 25. net. 
 
 London : FRANCIS GRIFFITHS, 34, Maiden Lane, Strand, W.C. 
 
THE TRUE STORY OF 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 In relation to "ADAM BEDE," giving the real life 
 history of the more prominent characters 
 
 By WILLIAM MOTTRAM 
 
 (Grand nephew of Adam and Seth Bede and cousin to the 
 Author) 
 
 WITH EIGHTY-SIX ILLUSTRATION'S, MAINLY FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY 
 ALLAN' P. MOTTRAM, B.SC., AND VERNON H. MOTTRAM, B.A. 
 
 Large Crown 8vo. Cloth, Gilt Top. Price 75. 6d. net. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. The Evolution of George Eliot. 
 
 CHAPTER II. The Home of the Bedes a Hundred Years Ago. 
 
 CHAPTER III. Adam Bede, a Fiction Founded on Fact. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. The Real Life-Story of Adam Bede. 
 
 CHAPTER V. All about Mrs. Poyser. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. Haytime at the Hall Farm and the Harvest Supper. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. Seth Bede's Account of Himself. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. Dinah Morris Preaching on the Green at Hayslope. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. The Autobiography of Dinah Morris. 
 
 CHAPTER X. Dinah Morris from Babyhood to Womanhood. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. Dinah Morris Lif<> ;m<l Work in Nottingham. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. Dinah Morris Wooed by Seth Bede. 
 
 Oi.u-iKR XIII. Holy Work of a Wedded Pair, 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. Life's Labour Sabbatic Rest. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. The Marriage with George II . Lewes. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. The Religion of George Klit. 
 
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