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CIVILISATION 
 AT THE CKOSS EOADS 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS: being 
 the Hulsean Lectures, delivered before the 
 University of Cambridge, 1908-9, with 
 additions. Sixth Impression. Grown 8vo, 
 is. 6d. net. 
 
 PopuLAB Edition. Crown 8vo, paper 
 covers, 6d. net. 
 
 RELIGION AND ENGLISH SOCIETY. Two 
 Addresses, delivered at a conference in 
 London, 1910. Fourth Impression. 8vo, 
 paper covers, 1«. ; cloth, 2«. 
 
 ANTICHRIST AND OTHER SERMONS. 
 Crown 8vo, 5s. net. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 LOKDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 
 
CIVILISATION 
 AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 FOUR LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
 
 IN THE YEAR 1911 
 
 ON THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE FOUNDATION 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS, Litt.D. 
 
 A 
 
 or TBE COMUUNITT Or THB RE8DRBECTI0N 
 BONOBABT TBLLOW Or ST. CATHABINs'b COU<BaC, CAMBBIDQa 
 
 TffIRD IMPPiSSiOir '' > 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 
 
 1913 
 
 AD rights reserved 
 

 
 COPYRIGHT, 1912, BT 
 LONGUANB, GBBEN* AND CO. 
 
 
FRATRl MEO CARISSIMO 
 a. B. ». 
 
 273422 
 
THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES 
 
 This Lectureship was constituted a perpetual foundation 
 in Harvard University in 1898, as a memorial to the late 
 William Belden Noble of Washington, D. C. (Harvard^ 
 1885). The terms as revised by the founder and accepted 
 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, Novem- 
 ber 26, 1906, provide that the lectures shall be delivered 
 annually, and, if convenient, in the Phillips Brooks House 
 during the season of Advent. It is left with the Corpora- 
 tion to determine the number of lectures. Each lecturer 
 shall have ample notice of his appointment, and the publica- 
 tion of each course of lectures is required. The purpose of 
 the Lectureship will be further seen in the following citation 
 from the deed of gift by which it was established : — 
 
 "The object of the founder of the Lectures is to continue 
 the mission of William Belden Noble, whose supreme desire 
 it was to extend the influence of Jesus as the way, the truth, 
 and the life; to make known the meaning of the words of 
 Jesus, ' I am come that they might have life, and that they 
 might have it more abundantly.' Li accordance with the 
 large interpretation of the Influence of Jesus by the late 
 Phillips Brooks, with whose religious teaching he in whose 
 memory the Lectures are established and also the founder 
 of the Lectures were in deep sympathy, it is intended that 
 the scope of the Lectures shall be as wide as the highest inter- 
 ests of himianity. With this end in view, — the perfection 
 of the spiritual man and the consecration by the spirit of 
 Jesus of every department of human character, thought, and 
 activity, — the Lectures may include philosophy, literature, 
 art, poetry, the natural sciences, political economy, sociol- 
 ogy, ethics, history, both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as 
 theology and the more direct interests of the religious life. 
 Beyond a sympathy with the purpose of the Lectures, as 
 thus defined, no restriction is placed upon the lecturer." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Armageddon or the Intellectual Chaob . 8 
 
 n. Babylon or the Moral Crisis .... 65 
 
 in. Calvary or the Challenge of the Cross 121 
 
 IV. SioN OR the Christian Fact 179 
 
 Appendix. King Richard the Third and the 
 
 Reverend James Thompson jj85 
 
 Notes 273 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Mystical titles are not much in fashion. Yet 
 I have kept the alternative names of each 
 Lecture, because they suggest even more than 
 they express of the nature of the book. Their 
 apocalyptic associations may also serve to 
 guard against misconception. The title of the 
 whole course and certain criticisms in the first 
 Lecture might seem to imply that I desire to 
 controvert the main thesis of the late Father 
 Tyrrell's famous work.* This, however, is not 
 the case. Too greatly am I in debt to all the 
 writings of that arresting author and especially 
 to his posthumous work to have any such 
 thought. But I do desire to point out that 
 the problem can be studied from more stand- 
 points than one. Something is crumbling all 
 around us. That is clearer every moment. I 
 write this on the day of the introduction of the 
 Bill for a Minimum Wage. Is it Christianity 
 that is decaying, or civilisation in its existing 
 shape? That conventional Christianity is going 
 or gone, no one will question. So much 
 
 * Christianity at the Cross Roads. Longmans. 
 iz 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 the better. But on the whole it seems to me, 
 that what is vanishing is not that pecuHar 
 kind of social life we call the Christian Church, 
 except certain accidental elements inextricably 
 bound up with the existing regime. Rather, 
 we are in the midst of a process not unlike that 
 of Western Europe in the Fifth Century, when 
 the world-organisation was on its deathbed, 
 and the Church alone remained unshaken. The 
 more I contemplate the face of things the more 
 does there come before me the vision of a whole 
 order changing. In a few years, we shall, 
 perhaps, be saying something like what Luther 
 said three centuries and a half ago about the 
 Holy Roman Empire: — 
 
 "Die Welt ist am Ende kommen, das romisch 
 Reich ist fast dahin und zerrissen." This 
 change is universal; but the Christian Church 
 will survive it, on the very ground that it pos- 
 sesses many elements incompatible with our 
 present system, and that its spirit is the scorn 
 of all that is fashionably enlightened. That 
 scorn will doubtless be the fortune of the present 
 volume. Indeed this must be the case with 
 any attempt to commend the traditional faith 
 in an age which finds interest in any and every 
 fantasy, but dismisses a priori the Catholic 
 creed. I am not however greatly disturbed by 
 this thought. The mental habit of our day, 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 like other of its qualities does not appear to me 
 so profound or lasting; and will undergo "a 
 sea-change into something rich and strange" 
 along with the other elements in our life. Thus 
 if it should seem that these lectures are so many 
 "Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen," I should not 
 grieve. They may not fit with the prevailing 
 fashion among the "intellectuels." It is at 
 least not inconceivable that the ground of this 
 is that there is something imperfect in that 
 fashion. A thing is out of date, because it 
 looks to the future, no less than when it harks 
 back to the past. 
 
 After this course was delivered, there was pub- 
 lished in England a volume directly traversing 
 that view of the nature of the Christian experi- 
 ence which is set out in the fourth lecture. 
 Since the book appeared of some importance, 
 owing to the controversy which it evoked, I 
 have thought it well to devote an appendix to 
 the general historical question which it involves. 
 I suppose that no one who has watched the rise 
 and fall of the uncounted historical theories, all 
 plausible, which have appeared in regions far 
 removed from the fever spot of Christian origins, 
 is likely to be disturbed by Mr. Thompson's 
 hypothesis. Since, however, these topics are 
 oftentimes debated by persons whose acquaint- 
 ance with general historical investigation is 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 other than obvious, I have thought it well to 
 indicate some points a little more at large. In 
 that appendix I should like to have quoted 
 pages from the Chapter on "CausaHty and 
 Natural Law," in Professor Wendland's ad- 
 mirable book Miracles and the Christian 
 Church. But I read it too recently to make 
 that possible. I would also refer to some re- 
 marks of Professor James Ward in the earlier 
 part of his new series of Gifford Lectures — 
 Pluralism and Theism, which bear on the 
 relation of historical knowledge and real indi- 
 viduality to all theories of inevitable, unbroken 
 cosmic development, mechanically interpreted. 
 Here I would only repeat with emphasis my 
 persuasion that it is only after a judgment of 
 the total character of the Christian experience, 
 that we ever can (or ever do) profitably ap- 
 proach the investigation of its details. This 
 is true on both sides, and is shewn in the present 
 controversy. It is precisely this total super- 
 natural character, which I believe to be as 
 firmly established historically as anything of 
 that nature can ever be — and to be disbe- 
 lieved only on account of presuppositions in- 
 compatible with its truth. In this respect and 
 certain others these lectures may serve as a 
 sort of sequel to the earlier course delivered at 
 Cambridge on the foundation of Dr. Hulse; 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 and may correct certain misconceptions, es- 
 pecially in regard to the third. 
 
 With slight alterations these lectures are 
 printed substantially as they were delivered. 
 Never a member of that company which re- 
 gards a book as likely to promote the glory of 
 God in proportion as it is ill written, I have 
 taken pains to make it readable. But I cannot 
 pretend to be satisfied with the result. Further 
 delay, however, must not be thought of and 
 such as it is, the book must go forth. 
 
 The Rev. Alexander Wicksteed is deeply my 
 creditor. Owing to his kindness in reading the 
 proofs and verifying references, I trust that the 
 proportion of errors is less than has sometimes 
 been the case with writings of the author; or 
 than always would be without such aid. 
 
 Finally, I must tender my grateful thanks to 
 the authorities of Harvard University, who by 
 appointing me to this office of Noble Lecturer 
 are "the only begetters" of the ensuing pages: 
 I would hereby assure them that I would the 
 book were more worthy of its "domicile of 
 origin" and that I shall not soon forget the 
 days that I spent in the enjoyment of their 
 proverbial hospitality. 
 
 J. Neville Figgis. 
 
 HonsB OF THE Resurbection, 
 March 21. 1912. 
 
CIVILISATION 
 AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
CIVILISATION AT 
 THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 ARMAGEDDON OR THE INTELLECTUAL 
 CHAOS 
 
 Not long since a writer, who seemed to 
 wield flame rather than words, directed 
 all our thoughts to the topic of Christianity 
 at the Cross Roads, And indeed the tragedy 
 of Tyrrell's own life symbolised that crisis 
 in thought of which the book was the 
 expression. More than any of his works 
 was his hfe an illustration of the momen- 
 tous problems urgent at this moment on 
 all reflecting men. How far can the new 
 wine of modern knowledge and changed 
 ways of thought be poured into the old 
 bottles of traditional religion? Is the Chris- 
 tian Church (with whatever modifications) 
 still to remain the depositary of the spiritual 
 experience of the race, the dispenser of 
 the gifts of grace, the home of the soul, 
 and the instrument of all redemption; or 
 
 8 
 
4 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 shall that supernatural claim be rejected 
 as a phantom or transcended as a phase 
 of history now drawing to its close? Allied 
 to this topic there is another no less mo- 
 mentous, — that is, the condition, not of 
 the Church, but of civihsation. Tyrrell 
 appears to have thought that the knowl- 
 edge of our day and its theories were so 
 secure as to enable us from that standpoint 
 to sit in judgment on the strange events 
 which gave rise to the Christian Church, 
 and also that the gifts of twentieth century 
 civilisation were so strongly entrenched 
 behind the walls of physical science that 
 they could not be lost. Transferred they 
 might be, say, to the yellow races, Europe 
 reverting to another dark age; but lost, 
 like the culture of the ancient world before 
 the barbarian, that is not to be thought of. 
 Neither of these statements appears to 
 me to be justiJBed. In the jBrst place there 
 are so many aspects of life which our 
 present day civihsation either ignores or 
 depreciates that I fail to see how we can 
 take its principles for anything more than 
 a partial and abstract account of certain 
 elements of the world. These elements 
 
ARMAGEDDON 5 
 
 indeed it enables us to control. And we 
 have achieved therein a success without 
 parallel in the past and with yet greater 
 promise for the future. But I do not 
 conceive the scientific or mathematical 
 temperament as in any way final. Large 
 elements of life, the artistic, the social, the 
 personal, it cannot handle, and when it tries 
 to do so it is apt to come to grief, and this 
 quite apart from religion. One side of sci- 
 ence indeed, its reverence for fact, is lead- 
 ing it to recognise an element best described 
 as supernatural in human Ufe, and also to 
 confess its own impotence to offer any 
 interpretation of the world as a whole. 
 Yet the scientific temperament, in ordinary 
 speech, means more than this. It implies 
 an assumption that knowledge can be 
 arranged on a schematic basis, and that 
 all events can be viewed as the unalterable 
 issue of the past, because everything is 
 bound together by the nexus of cause and 
 effect mechanically interpreted, and there 
 are in Ufe no new beginnings. This assump- 
 tion is opposed to any such scheme as the 
 Christian, which teaches not merely a 
 spiritual universe behind the natural, but 
 
6 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 also the existence of a multitude of spirits 
 with a real, though limited, freedom and 
 shews us a world whose issues are unpre- 
 dictable, with as many loose ends as there 
 are individuals, instead of the rounded 
 system of the universe totus teres atque 
 rotundus, which, though far from being 
 demonstrated or demonstrable, is the un- 
 alterable dogma of many modern enquirers. 
 Dr. Bussell shews how fatal this notion is 
 to all belief in real individuahty.^ "Such 
 " theoretical doubt can never seriously im- 
 "pair the vital impulse, the enjoyment of 
 " the struggle and doubtful issue. Perhaps 
 1'a more urgent, serious danger lies in the 
 ** strange hybrid of philosophic and reli- 
 "gious thought, the metaphysical mysticism 
 ** which disconcertingly alternates emotion 
 " and logic. To this reference has been and 
 "will be so frequent that it is needless to 
 "enlarge upon the obvious defect it shares 
 "with all previous and kindred systems. 
 **It neither explains nor justifies the per- 
 "sonal, which, whether by accident or 
 ** providence or by some inscrutable yet 
 *' purposive law, seems to have been the 
 *' goal of development on the earth. After 
 
ARMAGEDDON 7 
 
 the painful discovery of the self as the 
 true seed of philosophy, practical ethics, 
 reUgion, and political agitation, it is use- 
 less to point out that the discovery is, after 
 **all, worthless. We are still left with an 
 t acute sense of its truth. But we can more 
 T easily shake off a scientific fatalism which 
 ? momentary experience contradicts (at least 
 1' so far as our f eehngs go) than the benumb- 
 ^*ing influence of Pantheism." 
 
 These assumptions of the scientific imagi- 
 nation are not incompatible with religion 
 of a sort. The prevalence of Pantheism is 
 easy to reconcile with the presuppositions 
 of the mechanical temperament, which are 
 dominant far beyond the Hmits of physical 
 enquiry, and indeed are chiefly dangerous 
 in that of morals and religion. ^ It is not 
 to science, but to "scientific fatahsm," as 
 it has been well termed, that our difficulties 
 are due. Only when science captures the 
 imagination and seeks to subdue history, 
 philosophy, and the individual life does 
 she conflict with our religion. It is on 
 these assumptions that popular objections 
 to the Christian faith are based. The 
 dislike of miracles, more particularly of the 
 
8 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 Birth and Resurrection narratives, the 
 hostility to the supernatural claims of 
 Christ, to the doctrines of redemption and 
 the sacramental gifts, in a word to the whole 
 theology of grace, all this, so far as most 
 men are concerned, has httle basis beyond 
 the suspicion that science can find no place 
 for them and the assumption that science 
 covers the ground. True, indeed, the world 
 of fact, historical, artistic, personal, gives 
 it the lie, and the moment you stop reason- 
 ing and start to live, the difficulties dis- 
 appear. But it is just these facts that 
 men obsessed by the dominant categories 
 refuse to look at. There are on the one 
 hand the practical achievements of science, 
 denied by no one; results on the other side 
 are less apparent, and even if admitted are 
 supposed to be susceptible of explanation. 
 The greatest achievements of all, the 
 peace of God ruHng in the heart of the 
 redeemed and the conversion of sinners, 
 cannot, owing to their very magnitude and 
 psychical nature, be represented to those 
 without. And so minds enchained to the 
 categories of continuity, of inevitable evo- 
 lution, the laws of cause and effect mechani- 
 
ARMAGEDDON 9 
 
 cally understood, all different names of the 
 same notion, fall an easy prey to the deter- 
 minist theory of personal action and the 
 rationalistic projection of history. They 
 treat as anthropomorphic and antiquated 
 the world-old notions of sin and dehver- 
 ance and crave for a vision cosmic and 
 universal. So far as the mass of men 
 goes, this tendency is only beginning, but 
 if it be developed to the full it will 
 sweep away with it all that is of value 
 in our world. For Western civilisation, 
 inherited from the Christendom of the 
 Middle Ages, has been built on the faith in 
 personal values and the reahty of freedom.* 
 This faith is now menaced, and in many 
 places gone. It is largely lacking in the 
 more characteristic products of the present 
 day — all that seems most modern and 
 freest from the past. Thus it is true to 
 say that civilisation is at the cross roads. 
 There is a ceaseless conflict between ideals 
 which rest on the personal spiritual claims 
 of the Christian Hfe and that rigid mechan- 
 ism to which many would reduce it; while, 
 even among those who retain or revive 
 their faith in freedom, some deny in toto the 
 
10 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 Christian aim. So far as the Western mind 
 has been moving away from personal factors 
 (including of course those social unions in 
 which alone personality can thrive) it is 
 becoming more and more enslaved to 
 categories which make Christianity appear 
 not so much false as meaningless.* I may 
 quote two instances. An agnostic friend 
 once wrote to me, "I have never been able 
 to make any meaning out of Revealed 
 Religion." Another friend, not agnostic, 
 once said, "I am interested in the cosmic 
 and philosophical; you in the personal and 
 redemptive. All that I have to learn. I 
 hardly know what the words mean." That 
 is the condition which the Christian has 
 now to face — people who do not know what 
 the words mean. 
 
 Moreover, the civilisation which the 
 Western world inherits was erected on 
 the belief that human nature through 
 some act had fallen so low that it could 
 only be raised by some power from with- 
 out, and that redemption was brought by 
 Jesus Christ and mediated by the Church. 
 Such a doctrine of the fall, however quali- 
 fied, seems out of relation to ideas now 
 
ARMAGEDDON 11 
 
 fashionable, and the notion of redemption 
 supernaturally achieved is quietly dropped. 
 Further, there is a deeper tendency at work. 
 This, while not denying God's existence, 
 would confine Him to this life, and resents 
 all claims that are fundamentally super- 
 natural. Rehgion is in this view an idyll 
 of human hfe, the uprising of the soul of 
 man, but God never entered the world, 
 never could enter it save as immanent in 
 the whole of its growth; there are no 
 violent breaks, no catastrophes, no unique 
 personahties, no really new events. All 
 goes on developing by a continuous process; 
 religion, like the world, will ultimately 
 destroy itself. 
 
 It is the aim of these lectures to traverse 
 this view, to give grounds for holding that 
 the world, as it now is, bears on the face 
 of it the marks which call for redemption; 
 that Christianity comes to us alone pro- 
 fessing to have this power from beyond, 
 and alone able to meet the universal need 
 of deliverance. If the civilised world, saved 
 by a remnant of faithful, accepts this 
 evangel, it may rise to heights undreamed 
 of. If, as many indications suggest, the 
 
U CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 world at large rejects it, then civilisation 
 may proceed on its course of God-denial 
 for some generations or even centuries, 
 but it is doomed like the ancient world; 
 for no culture can go on existing with- 
 out faith, and the forces of materialism 
 abeady looming as a cloud will gather 
 volume, until the land of the spirit is over- 
 shadowed. 
 
 For all changes notwithstanding, and 
 with admitted modifications in details, the 
 Christian Church faces men today, not as 
 a theory but as a Hfe, giving to many 
 amongst us a sense of supernatural vision 
 and redemptive peace to be gained nowhere 
 else — hardly even offered. There, as a 
 fact, is the spiritual home of many. Are 
 there good grounds for deserting this refuge .^^ 
 Is the mental house of our Hfe so compact 
 and guarded that we can trust to it apart 
 from this other .^^ Does life, as we watch 
 or feel it, allow or repudiate the sense that 
 man needs deliverance .^^ Is there among 
 all opposing theories any one so certain or 
 so comprehensive that it compels us to 
 reject these venerable claims — claims not 
 merely of the past, but effective now? To 
 
ARMAGEDDON 13 
 
 these questions I shall seek to make some 
 reply in the following four lectures. 
 
 In the first, surveying the world of men's 
 reflections, I shall try to shew that the one 
 outstanding feature is an anarchy without 
 parallel, and that, in regard alike to funda- 
 mental beUefs or practical claims, however 
 loud or insistent be the voices which bid 
 us reject the Christian claim, they are in 
 no way so united or so well grounded as to 
 settle the matter a priori; they may not 
 assist, they do not inhibit the faith of the 
 Gospel. In the second lecture we shall 
 glance at some of the outward features of 
 the world, which indicate that human nature 
 needs to be redeemed and lacks the force 
 to effect deHverance for itself. Then, hav- 
 ing dealt with the present situation, I shall 
 in the third lecture endeavour to display 
 the gigantic nature of the Christian claim, 
 how the beUef in the Hfe beyond, in the 
 love of God, in the gifts of grace, must 
 change all our standards, so that Christians, 
 whether or no they are better, are amazingly 
 different from other folks ; while the attempt 
 to represent Christianity either as a sort of 
 
V 
 
 14 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 decorated idealism or as a mere emotional 
 altruism must be foredoomed to failure. 
 Finally, in the fourth lecture, I shall dis- 
 cuss the alleged facts that lie at the bottom. 
 We shall see there that the facts of the 
 life of Jesus are one with the history of 
 the Church and the experience of the indi- 
 vidual Christian, that the problem is con- 
 cerned with the nature of that experience. 
 Of that experience there are two interpre- 
 tations, the natural and the supernatural. 
 We shall see that the latter is that which 
 best correlates all the evidence, provided 
 we are not inhibited from holding it through 
 prepossessions derived from other sources. 
 We shall conclude that if we beheve the 
 spiritual aspirations of mankind to be 
 rooted in reality, the Christian as a member 
 of the great Catholic, i.e., universal, society 
 is the person most closely in touch with 
 that reahty; for he and he alone is at the 
 centre of the spiritual experience of the 
 race, and there in the Catholic Church he 
 drinks "within beneath a spring," which is 
 the fount and source of all redemption. 
 
 I said "in the Catholic Church." Here 
 and elsewhere in these lectures I shall use 
 
ARMAGEDDON 15 
 
 phrases or make statements with which 
 some here will not agree. I cannot help it. 
 Indeed it had been my hope to exclude 
 such things; the more especially as I hold 
 most firmly that all those who have a 
 hold on the supernatural are being pressed 
 together (not always with their own good- 
 will) under the force of the attack. Of 
 course I am using the term Church in the 
 true sense, as the society of all the baptized, 
 leaving out all the questions of organisation, 
 of discipline, which divide men still further. 
 Still there is no use saying that all nominal 
 Christians are the same, when they are 
 obviously different, or that there is no dis- 
 tinction between a Christian and a moralist. 
 Moreover, a man's view of things is no mere 
 theory; it is a part of him and must colour 
 what he says. It is safer to avow it frankly 
 beforehand than to make a profession of 
 impartiality, which is always a delusion 
 and in nine cases out of ten an imposture. 
 If the Catholic principle be a matter of life 
 even more than theory, that Hfe is bound 
 to shew itself in one who possesses or, to 
 be accurate, is possessed by it. Nor indeed 
 would I have dared to insult this great 
 
16 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 University, which has given to me an office 
 so honourable, by coming from Europe in 
 order to say not what I do mean, but what 
 I do not; or to omit integral elements in 
 what is the very Hfe of my spirit. You do 
 not want in this place colourless nothings 
 or the enunciation of sentiments which 
 seem obvious because they are vital to no 
 man's faith. You want a man with a man's 
 hopes and doubts, his visions and his 
 failures — all that he most vitally is — not 
 a set of abstract theses, dialectically argued. 
 If, therefore, anything said here may 
 seem to wound or set at naught the con- 
 victions of some who value the Christian 
 name, or of some who do not, I can but 
 crave your pardon and beg you to beheve 
 that I have set down nothing in mahce, 
 that I speak to you, as a priest in the Church 
 of God, for that faith which Hves in me. 
 May He grant that the words be not all 
 in vain. 
 
 In an arresting novel one of the most 
 remarkable men of the last century wrote 
 as follows; "Progress to what and from 
 
ARMAGEDDON 17 
 
 whence? Amid empires shrivelled into 
 deserts, amid the wrecks of great cities, a 
 single column or obelisk of which nations 
 I Pi import for the prime ornament of their 
 mud-built capitals; amid arts forgotten, 
 commerce annihilated, fragmentary htera- 
 tures, and populations destroyed, the Euro- 
 pean talks of progress, because by an 
 ingenious apphcation of some scientific 
 acquirements he has estabhshed a society 
 which has mistaken comfort for civilisation." 
 Perhaps not many now read Tancred^ 
 Yet that book is far more than mere 
 romance. It is evidence of the dissatis- 
 faction with modern civilisation, and its 
 "parvenu vanity felt even at that time by 
 an acute observer. You know the theme; 
 how the young Enghsh lord, weary of the 
 intellectual and moral chaos of the West, 
 sought in the East for that spiritual force 
 which alone would raise Europe from her 
 degradation. As he puts it, "Excepting 
 those who still cling to your Arabian creeds, 
 Europe is without consolation"; or again, 
 "Amid the wreck of creeds, the crash of 
 Empires, French revolutions and English 
 
 reforms, Catholicism in agony, Protes- 
 s 
 
18 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 tantism in convulsions, Europe demands 
 the keynote which none can sound. If 
 Asia be in decay, Europe is in confusion. 
 Your repose may be death, but our hfe is 
 anarchy." 
 
 These passages, and still more the general 
 argument of the book, bring out the fact 
 that in the mind of an observer whose 
 allegiance to orthodox Christianity was 
 not otherwise conspicuous, the spectacle 
 of the Western world — for we must take 
 the whole West together — presented itself 
 in somewhat different colours from the rose 
 tints it took on in the imaginations of that 
 Manchester school which was then at the 
 height of its power; that civiHsation in the 
 West, so far as we can separate its life and 
 culture from the Christian forces, on which 
 it still largely lives, is not in a state of which 
 we are to be hilariously proud ; that it needs 
 redemption, that redemption must come 
 from without and must take on a super- 
 natural, transcendent character, and cannot 
 come from a development of the principles 
 of the Exchanges. It will involve in some 
 degree those principles of asceticism and 
 other-worldliness popularly regarded as 
 
ARMAGEDDON 19 
 
 specifically Oriental, and inextricably in- 
 volved in the Catholic religion as a spiritual 
 society. 
 
 We are not, be it observed, drawing a 
 Rousseauesque indictment against civilisa- 
 tion and exalting the noble savage quand 
 meme. For civilisation works hand in hand 
 with religion, in so far as it treats men as 
 ends not means, and by its ordered variety 
 of life gives freer place to development. It 
 is just these things, however, that are in 
 question today; there we are at the Cross 
 Roads. They are right who speak of the 
 "Gifts of CiviHsation" as they see the 
 Church and culture marching hand in hand 
 in the warfare with barbarism and un- 
 ordered passion. Only, while civilisation 
 begins by ministering to man as a spiritual 
 being, by making freedom and all personal 
 values a reality and preserving space for 
 that leisure of spirit in which the peace of 
 God may reign, it by no means ends at 
 that point. Apart from a God ward out- 
 look it may tend to destroy these personal 
 values by permitting men to rest in the 
 "much goods laid up in store" and allow 
 the fortunate in a purely materialist ambi- 
 
20 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 tion, while from its true benefits the masses 
 of mankind may become more and more 
 shut out. This has been its great vice in 
 past history. It looks a little as though it 
 were being repeated in the present. Do we 
 not see before us a world intoxicated with 
 material prosperity, reckless of the life of 
 the spirit, and callous to the misery of vast 
 masses of its fellow-men.'^ 
 
 We may look back to the age when these 
 spiritual ends of civilised hfe were partially 
 attained and all its treasures enjoyed as the 
 gift of God, but can the modern world 
 claim as its own the glories of the ages 
 which, so far from being dark, are still the 
 refuge of souls wearied with the squahd 
 fever of our time? It cannot. We must 
 admit the profound difference between 
 the thoughts and feelings of our own day 
 and those of the age which produced the 
 Sainte-Chapelle, the frescoes of Giotto, and 
 the Divina Commedia, Nor would any 
 statistics about railroads and steamships 
 ever persuade me that a world of which 
 these things are the characteristic symbols 
 is inferior to that which flowers in the 
 factory town or the mammoth hotel. 
 
ARMAGEDDON 21 
 
 Medieval civilisation was no flawless 
 crystal. Then as now many men gave 
 free play "to the lust of the flesh, the lust 
 of the eyes, and the pride of hfe," but they 
 did not worship these things. In all ages 
 men have been bad. But the achievements 
 of the thirteenth century were owing pre- 
 cisely to the opposite of these elements 
 men most admire today. As a hostile 
 writer puts it, "they had one idee fixe, 
 rehgion." They may not have always 
 served God very well, but they knew that 
 He was "the chief end of man." That 
 world presents neither the oleographic pic- 
 ture dear to sentimentahsts, nor yet the 
 mere battle of kites and crows conceived 
 by Puritan and Renaissance pride. Yet its 
 most notable quahties — the things that 
 made it what it was — the cathedral, the 
 minster, the university (and each of us 
 here owes more to the University of the 
 Middle Ages than he is apt to imagine), the 
 orders of chivalry, the hierarchy of society, 
 the communal life and all its pageantry, 
 that unity which outlasted so much con- 
 flict, all these things were what they were 
 because of men's faith in God and man 
 
22 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 and the love which makes him free. None 
 of them could have been at all in the form 
 they took, had that faith not been present; 
 and hence Walter Pater, summing up the 
 quahties of the differing cultures of the 
 world, speaks in the famous passage on 
 Mona Lisa of "the reverie of the middle 
 age with its spiritual ambitions and im- 
 aginative souls" as contrasted with "the 
 animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the 
 return of the Pagan world, the sins of the 
 Borgias." Always rather by its ideals 
 than its achievements do we judge a nation 
 or epoch. These ideals can be seen re- 
 flected as in a mirror all through the life 
 of the Middle Ages, in the peace as of a 
 strange land which pervades the Historia 
 Ecclesiastica of the great Northumbrian 
 monk, the Venerable Bede, in the love and 
 universal reverence felt for S. Francis even 
 in his lifetime, in the mystery plays like 
 Everyman, in the almost autocratic influ- 
 ence of a mystic like S. Bernard, even indeed 
 in the strength of the Papacy (for it rested 
 not on material force, but on the faith of 
 men), above all in the most characteristic 
 of all its fruits — books such as The Imi- 
 
ARMAGEDDON 23 
 
 tation of Christ, similar works like the 
 writings of Walter Hilton, or Richard RoUe, 
 or Dame JuHan, the anchoress of Norwich. 
 All these are the natural fruit of the time; 
 they express its spirit. So far as we have 
 anything hke them, it is rather as protests, 
 reactions, the work of those who repudiate 
 the prevalent ideals, unzeitgemdsse Betracht- 
 ungeuy as Nietzsche would call them. No 
 one can deny the beauty of a work hke 
 the Pathway of the Eternal Wisdmn or 
 Tyrrell's Oil and Wine, but their distinction 
 consists in thus expressing a side of hfe far 
 from popular. The dominant feeling of 
 the age shrieks itself hoarse in the news- 
 papers and expresses itself artistically in 
 the New Machiavelli or L'lle des Pinguins, 
 and I cannot feel convinced that we have 
 gained by the exchange. 
 
 The world in the Middle Ages was far 
 enough from the practice of hohness, but 
 at least it did not question the ideal. What 
 are men's ideals today? It would be hard 
 to tell. But so far as their main energies 
 are concerned and we can form any judg- 
 ment as to what animates the man in the 
 street, I cannot doubt that it is truer to say 
 
24 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 that Christianity runs counter to our civil- 
 isation than that it fulfils it. In places 
 indeed it remains intact, but they are as a 
 rule those least touched by modern develop- 
 ments. The village church is the home of 
 an immemorial piety aHke in Bavaria or 
 in Italy, in England or Ireland — I suppose 
 also here; though this statement must be 
 made with very large reserves, for there are 
 districts abroad of which the very opposite 
 is true, and I fancy that in some colonial 
 places there would be an equal lack. But 
 can that or anything like it be said either 
 of the most educated or the most modern 
 elements of society .f^ Is it not rather the 
 case, as one wrote to me of the business 
 world, "Christianity counts for nothing, 
 men simply leave it alone". ^ Or as another, 
 an educated woman, said of a sermon on 
 penitence, "It seemed to me all so unreal; 
 I wondered how many of the people in 
 that church had any inkhng of what was 
 meant ".^ That is the point; the ordinary 
 Christian doctrines of grace, and sin, and 
 pardon have become almost meaningless 
 to many, and require translation before 
 people will even Hsten to them. The phrases 
 
ARMAGEDDON 25 
 
 of the New Testament seem to savour of 
 the Sunday School novelette and have lost 
 their vital force. Canon Carnegie, indeed, 
 seems to desire to take this condition as 
 a standard and to make the ordinary man's 
 dishke of such terms as hoHness or sin a 
 reason for leaving the things out of our 
 message. In his preface to Churchmanship 
 and Character^ he writes that "Christians 
 to a large extent use a language which is 
 not understood by ordinary folk. The ordi- 
 nary normal healthy man understands what 
 is meant by goodness; he becomes restive 
 if we talk to him of righteousness. He 
 understands what is meant by duty; he 
 hardly listens if we talk to him of vocation. 
 He understands us when we speak of moral 
 depravity and regeneration and progress; 
 he pays small heed to statements about sin 
 and conversion and sanctification." The 
 author's imphed view is not merely that 
 our language might be modernised, which 
 may possibly be a good thing, but that the 
 rehgion of healthy mindedness is practically 
 to be taken as identical with the faith of 
 redemption, and that the ideals which 
 dominate the Birmingham business man 
 
26 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 only need a little furbishing to be seen 
 to be fundamentally Christian. Nothing 
 would seem to me more opposed to S. 
 Paul's doctrine; nor would his language 
 have seemed rational to Horace or Sue- 
 tonius. Christianity conquered by its dif- 
 ference from every other system. That is 
 not to deny our duty of commending the 
 faith by avoiding merely conventional or 
 cant phrases, but of all heresies that of the 
 religion of healthy mindedness seems to me 
 to go the deepest. I quote the words as 
 evidence of the existing condition, and also 
 giving a succinct expression to the view 
 against which these lectures are directed. If 
 the world is to be brought back to Christ, it 
 will not be by accepting its shibboleths and 
 seeing God's revelation through eyes pur- 
 blind with avarice or satisfied with the 
 things of this world, but rather by dwelHng 
 ^N. on the strange new Hfe He promises and 
 re-awakening that sense of sin which has 
 become unfashionable. A weightier wit- 
 ness is that of the great philosopher Rudolph 
 Eucken. In the Problem of Human Life 
 he speaks of "the severity of the conflict 
 with modern civiHsation into which Chris- 
 
ARMAGEDDON Vt 
 
 tianity has fallen. In its rich unfolding of 
 hfe the modern world has brought an untold 
 wealth of things new and great, whose 
 influence no one can escape and whose 
 fruits we all enjoy. But with this incon- 
 testable gain there is closely interwoven a 
 characteristic tendency which is deeply in- 
 volved in doubt and conflict. Since the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century the 
 modern world has wrought out a new type 
 of Hfe, which departs widely from the 
 Christian. A powerful hfe-impulse forces 
 the thinking and the activity of man more 
 and more into the world which Christianity 
 regarded as a lower one; in this world 
 reason reigns, or wherever it is not yet 
 present the labour of men seeks to create 
 it; forces spring up ad infinitum, and the 
 increase of power becomes the highest and 
 all-sufficient goal of life. The greater the 
 strength and self-consciousness which this 
 new type acquires, the more evident it 
 becomes that it is incompatible with, 
 Christianity; in fact that the fundamental 
 tendencies of the two run directly counter 
 to each other. Their peaceable and friendly 
 co-operation, such as existed in earUer times, 
 
28 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 becomes impossible; a clear understand- 
 ing is increasingly necessary; continually 
 harsher is the rejection of Christianity by 
 those who follow the specifically modern 
 tendency.''"^ 
 
 Equally strong is the stater^ent in another 
 work, Christianity and the New Idealism. 
 "The main tendency of our own age, with 
 its steadily growing spirit of independence, 
 has come into even sharper conflict with 
 Christianity. That it had a stronger 
 vitaUty, and made existence more depend- 
 ent on man's own activity, would not 
 necessarily have conduced to this result. 
 The irreparable breach was due to the fact 
 that for modern thought the activity and 
 the positive trend of life was conceived as 
 man's own immediate work, as the out- 
 come of his own natural strength; whereas 
 Christianity regarded them as emanating 
 from man's relation to God, through an 
 inward renewal of his being; its aflSirmation 
 of Hfe is not direct, but is only reached 
 through negation and inward change. We 
 must beware of weakening in any way the 
 opposition between the Christian and the 
 modern points of view — an opposition so 
 
ARMAGEDDON «9 
 
 strong as absolutely to preclude any pros- 
 pect of easy reconciliation." ^ 
 
 I quote these statements from a writer, 
 who is very far from being a defender of 
 ecclesiastical Christianity, as evidence that 
 the conflict is not one on the surface or 
 even about doctrine, but that it is a veri- 
 table Armageddon between the spirit of 
 Christ and that of antichrist. And indeed 
 those writers grossly err who argue as 
 though all wise men were agreed on the 
 fundamentals, that it was only in the 
 formularies fabricated by priests that diffi- 
 culty existed. The attitude of such a 
 writer as Wilham Scott Palmer, in the 
 Diary of a Modernist, that the Christian 
 ideal may be taken for granted and Nietz- 
 sche be ignored, may be true of certain 
 coteries of culture, but it is profoundly false 
 to the facts of Hfe and ignores that deep 
 and growing chasm which separates the 
 aims of men. Speaking on the whole and 
 dismissing the natural bias for counting 
 on one's own side a majority, I should say 
 that there are no longer grounds for beUev- 
 ing that the Western world is Christian 
 now in a sense in which it was not in the 
 
30 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 period immediately preceding the peace of 
 the Church under Constantine the Great. 
 Of course Christian ideals still affect many 
 who repudiate the Christian name, such as 
 the Positivists. But does there seem much 
 more ground for saying that we Hve in a 
 Christian world, beyond what might have 
 been said in the time of TertulHan? In 
 many ways there is less ground. In a 
 charming story of this country, Lady Balti- 
 more,^ the writer makes his society people 
 talk of having given up rehgion, as though 
 it were a recognised fact that even nominal 
 adhesion to it had ceased. Nor do the 
 statistics of church-going in England favour 
 a different view, while in Lutheran Ger- 
 many or what was until recently Catholic 
 France an even worse dry rot has set in. 
 So far as we can judge, Spain, Italy, and 
 Portugal are in like case, while in the last 
 the government has embarked on a definite 
 poHcy of persecution, and in many districts 
 of France it is said that the municipality 
 is refusing to repair the churches or even 
 to permit Catholics to do so at their own 
 charges. The atmosphere in literature and 
 art, in novels and dramas, in newspapers 
 
ARMAGEDDON 81 
 
 and reviews is not only no longer Christian, 
 but is largely anti-Christian, even on the 
 ethical side. If you think of some of the 
 names most honoured of late, Thomas 
 Hardy, George Meredith, Mr. Arnold Ben- 
 nett, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H. G. Wells, 
 or Mr. Henry James, however different 
 they may be in outlook, none of them can 
 be called Christian, while for some it seems 
 impossible to name the subject without a 
 sneer; and neither M. Anatole France nor 
 Ibsen can control their disUke of a reUgion 
 which is to them mere convention. If 
 further you enquired of the most highly 
 educated society in the West, whether it 
 is specifically Christian, I think the answer 
 is not doubtful. Would there be a very 
 large proportion of such at any meeting of 
 scholars or scientific men? Is there, in 
 any real sense, at the Universities? Doubt- 
 less the proportion would be better if you 
 substituted the Almanack de Gotha for 
 Minerva in your researches; for of those 
 whose names are in the former, a majority 
 would at least, for hereditary or social rea- 
 sons, profess allegiance to the faith of their 
 fathers. But frankly, even among the 
 
32 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 general public, whether you take as your 
 standard the fortunate classes or the dis- 
 inherited, it is only by very narrowly 
 limiting your area that you can get even 
 an appearance of any general adhesion to 
 the ancient faith. I am not lamenting 
 this condition. It is partly the natural 
 fruit of liberty. With toleration ruling 
 alike in practice and theory it is clear that 
 many whose allegiance has been merely 
 nominal will drop away, and in some cases 
 hereditary influence is now on the other 
 side; while in those who remain there is a 
 growing intensity, which more than makes 
 up for the lack of extension. 
 
 Whether, however, we lament the fact or 
 welcome it we must face it. So far as num- 
 bers go, the Christian Church is no more 
 than a section of the modern world, one 
 among its many several developments. 
 People dislike calling it a sect or a denomi- 
 nation, but it can be nothing else, so long 
 as there are large numbers who repudiate 
 all part or lot in it and in many cases 
 detest its ideals. Civilisation in its states- 
 manship, its economic development, and 
 more and more in its social and intellectual 
 
ARMAGEDDON 88 
 
 life, goes on its way, not indeed unaffected 
 by so great a tradition, yet largely inde- 
 pendent of it. In fine, that secularisation of 
 life which began with the Renaissance and 
 was developed by the Reformation has now 
 gone much farther. Religion has become 
 almost entirely departmental, and it is more 
 feasible than it once was to treat of the life 
 and manners of the age apart from Chris- 
 tianity, and to leave it out of account in 
 estimating the hues of future development. 
 One observer definitely states that rehgion 
 may not be regarded as so much a private 
 affair, but that we need not reckon on its 
 influence in any general view of modern 
 society. Mr. Masterman, in the Condition 
 of England,^^ declares that "despite raUies, 
 the process continues. It continues without 
 violence, continuously, steadily as a kind of 
 impersonal motion of secular change. It is 
 the passing of a whole civiHsation away from 
 the faith in which it was founded and out 
 of which it has been fashioned." Lord 
 Haldane declares that "the dominant ideals 
 of the average man of the middle class in 
 Scotland appear to him to be a sort of mild 
 agnosticism," ^^ and from what I am told of 
 4 
 
34 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 this country and Canada the only difference 
 is that the schism between the Church and 
 civiHsation is greater than in the old world. 
 
 And not only is the Church no longer the 
 religion of civiHsation, but she is met by 
 many competing systems, and that even 
 on her own hypothesis that mankind needs 
 redemption. That is the point. They are 
 so many. We live in an age of unparalleled 
 anarchy both moral and intellectual. The 
 confusion of tongues is worse than in any 
 Babel of old. You have not exhausted the 
 prospect by describing the Christian Church 
 as only one among many competing agen- 
 cies. Nor can you get rid of her claims by 
 saying that she is the Church only of the 
 uneducated. 
 
 For what are the alternatives .^^ In place 
 of this body which has stood the test of 
 experience, what is there offered to us? 
 What system is accepted by those reflecting 
 men of our day who deny the claims of the 
 Church of Christ? Surely by this time 
 we ought to have a clear answer if mere 
 reasoning could avail; for the problem of 
 life has been discussed by many acute 
 minds. There ought to be some body of 
 
ARMAGEDDON S5 
 
 philosophic doctrine, the possession of all 
 educated men. Where is such a doctrine 
 to be found? If we are to give up our life 
 in a society, which has enshrined the 
 essence of all that is highest in the religious 
 experience of men, we ought at least to 
 learn what we are giving it up for. Besides, 
 if the exercise of our logical faculties were 
 all-sufficient, since they are common to all 
 men, we ought to know where we are by 
 this time. But we don't. That is the 
 long and the short of it. Outside the 
 Church, men don't know where they are. 
 On the one hand is the Church, still in 
 possession, still taking from her treasure 
 house things new and old, still consoling 
 and converting men; she has history on 
 her side and all the weight of tradition; 
 there breathes in her temples the aroma 
 of all the souls she has nourished and 
 still nourishes, and on the other hand 
 there is — what? Is there any other faith 
 or fancy which holds among educated men 
 anything Hke the predominant influence 
 of rationalism in the eighteenth century? 
 I grant you that the intellectual atmosphere 
 we breathe is no longer Christian; that if 
 
36 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 I take up a volume of verse it is more than 
 likely that it is the work of an infidel; that 
 if I embark on a new philosopher (there 
 are plenty of them) ten to one he despises 
 the Christian faith so deeply that he has 
 never been at the pains even to think what 
 it means; that if I broach a scientific 
 historian his attitude to the founder of 
 Christianity will not improbably be one of 
 a supercihous patronage. I admit that the 
 pictures I see, the books I read, the music 
 I hear, the plays I witness are largely 
 the work of men outside the Church. All 
 this on the negative side I grant. But 
 what is there positive to set in its place? 
 This question remains without reply. Scien- 
 tific materialism is not held as a creed 
 except by few, is commonly declared not 
 to be one, although its presuppositions rule 
 men's minds to a larger extent than they 
 know. Beyond that all is chaos. Positivists, 
 agnostics, idealists, pessimists, optimists, 
 sceptics, theists, atheists jostle one another 
 and nobody knows what his next-door 
 neighbour thinks. And that even among re- 
 flecting and cultivated men, who are above 
 the mere vulgarities of money-making. 
 
ARMAGEDDON 87 
 
 Twenty years ago one could not have 
 said this. In those days the reply would 
 have run as follows: "As to the vulgar, 
 whether learned or ignorant, we neither 
 know nor care. The only person entitled 
 to a judgment is the trained philosopher, 
 and from such the answer is not doubtful. 
 All who do not write themselves down as 
 incompetent are agreed upon some form of 
 ideahsm. Their attitude to religion varies. 
 Some are Christian and employ their philo- 
 sophic doctrines as a prop to orthodoxy. 
 Others are Christians with a difference and 
 use their faith to purge tradition of its 
 accretions. Others are theists and find in 
 their system the one irrefragable refutation 
 of materiaUsm; others interpret the doc- 
 trine in an atheist sense or in one purely 
 sceptical. All, however, are agreed that 
 some form of the philosophy which was de- 
 veloped by Hegel out of Kant is the only 
 possible resting-place of thinking men. 
 They differ from the master in many ways, 
 or sometimes deny that they have one. 
 But they claim that the doctrine they hold 
 explicitly is implied in the faith of all; that 
 it combines the certitude of science with 
 
38 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 the comfort of religion; that with the 
 progress of education it will become a 
 postulate of all culture. Whatever of the 
 Christian creed may be harmonised with 
 this system will endure; for these are the 
 fundamental ideas of religion; the rest will 
 vanish." That or something hke was the 
 view present to humble enquirers not many 
 years ago. 
 
 In the words of one of its authorities,^^ 
 "For many years adherents of this way of 
 thought have deeply interested the British 
 public by their writings. Almost more 
 important than their writings is the fact 
 that they have occupied philosophical chairs 
 in almost every University in the kingdom. 
 Even the professional critics of idealism 
 are for the most part idealists — after a 
 fashion. ... It follows from their position 
 of academic authority, were it from nothing 
 else, that idealism exercises an influence, not 
 easily measured, upon the youth of the 
 nation — upon those, that is, who from the 
 educational opportunities they enjoy may 
 naturally be expected to become the leaders 
 of the nation's thought and practice." Or 
 as a hostile critic says, "For thirty years 
 
ARMAGEDDON 89 
 
 or more English thought has been subject, 
 not for the first time in its modern history, 
 to powerful influences from abroad. The 
 Rhine has flowed into the Thames, known 
 locally as the Isis, and from the Isis the 
 stream of German ideahsm has been dif- 
 fused over the academical world of Great 
 Britain." 
 
 It can hardly be questioned that this is 
 a correct account of the philosophic ortho- 
 doxy of the last generation, and perhaps 
 it may still be called orthodoxy. But is • 
 it anything more.'^ Is it dominant among 
 students of philosophy in the same sense 
 as it was? You know that it is not. Speak- 
 ing in this place, which the memory of 
 William James would alone suffice to render 
 illustrious, if all its other voices were silent, 
 I need not recall to you the philosophic 
 movement of which he was a leader. 
 Whether its trend is right or wrong, it is 
 not relevant here to enquire. Enough 
 for us that it exists, that it has won wide 
 acceptance, and that it is in sharp an- 
 tagonism with the whole anschauung 
 which a little while ago seemed so well 
 estabhshed. 
 
40 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 M. Bergson, too, has won a fame at 
 least not inferior. Whatever his ultimate 
 place in the history of thought, there is 
 no doubt that he counts and will count 
 more and more as time goes on. As one 
 put it, "in future we may be pro-Bergso- 
 nians or anti-Bergsonians, but we shall all 
 be post-Bergsonians."^^ Things cannot be 
 as though he had not written. Yet the 
 whole argument of L'Evolution Creatrice 
 and his other works is the direct antithesis 
 of the maxim of Hegel, that the hidden 
 secret of the universe must be penetrable 
 to thought. Like the man or woman in 
 the street, the lover, the soldier, the school- 
 boy, Bergson would place instinct or intui- 
 tion on a higher level in regard to our 
 insight into reality than pure intelligence. 
 He even goes so far as to pronounce the 
 intellect incapable of comprehending life 
 since it has been formed in the interests 
 of practical activity and never penetrates 
 beyond the outward aspect of things, and 
 even that it exaggerates. 
 
 If you go further and take up any philo- 
 sophical journal you will find hints of other 
 movements, all directed against orthodox 
 
ARMAGEDDON 41 
 
 idealism. We have new realists like Mr, 
 Bertrand Russell and Mr. G. E. Moore, and 
 they are not alone, at least on the critical 
 side. Writers like Mr. Prichard in his 
 criticism of Kant^^ and Mr. Joseph are 
 at variance with what has been the main 
 tendency since Kant.^^ They are opposed 
 to the view that the esse of things is 
 percijd; while Mr. Galloway, writing from 
 a somewhat different angle, declares that 
 philosophy is moving towards some form 
 of ideal-reahsm, or, in other words, is 
 moving right away from the direction it 
 took with the *Copernican Revolution.' ^^ 
 All these tendencies are significant, and 
 the hst is not exhaustive; Nietzsche is 
 exercising a great influence, and no one, I 
 suppose, would call him a successor of the 
 apostles of modern philosophy. I note 
 all these movements not in order to discuss 
 them, but rather to point out that there is 
 no such thing as philosophic authority at 
 present, nor any hkelihood of our reaching 
 it; in other words, no body of principles 
 to which all students adhere, as they do in 
 the special sciences. There is no agree- 
 ment among those who reflect on these 
 
42 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 topics, and so far then as experience goes, 
 we have no ground for trusting that the un- 
 illumined reflections of the human reason, 
 revolving on itself, are bringing us to a 
 knowledge of reality. I remember some 
 years ago asking a trained philosopher 
 whether he foresaw the prospect of any 
 main general conclusions on the part of 
 philosophers. He said No. At that time, 
 more or less obsessed with the fashionable 
 cult, I could hardly credit his words, but 
 now I see what he meant. 
 
 Thus, then, however you would account 
 for it, it would seem a simple fact of obser- 
 vation, that there is some "kink" in the 
 human logic which prevents man arriving 
 at the true knowledge of things by any 
 exercise of his rational faculties alone, and 
 that, though the power of drawing inferences 
 is universal. So far as we can observe 
 the history of these attempts, through its 
 whole progress there is but one conclusion, 
 and that is confirmed by the existing con- 
 dition of thought. It may be summed up 
 in the well known hues of Omar Khayyam: 
 
ARMAGEDDON 43 
 
 "Up from earth's centre, through the seventh gate 
 I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate; 
 
 And many a knot unravelled by the road; 
 But not the master-knot of human fate. 
 
 "There was the Door to which I found no key; 
 There was the veil through which I might not see: 
 
 Some little talk awhile of me and thee 
 There was — and then no more of Thee and Me. 
 
 "Earth could not answer; nor the seas that mourn 
 In flowing purple, of their lord forlorn; 
 
 Nor rolling Heaven; with all His signs revealed 
 And hidden by the sleeve of night and morn." 
 
 However, it may be said that there is 
 general agreement to adopt a purely agnos- 
 tic standpoint. If we include the general 
 level of educated and half -educated people, 
 this would be nearer the truth. As a 
 purely philosophic doctrine agnosticism is, 
 of course, by no means incompatible with 
 theistic or even Christian belief, and may 
 make a very good basis for it. Instances 
 of this are numerous; one of the most 
 valuable is that of George Romanes, the 
 great man of science. His work, Thoughts 
 on Religion, illustrates the progress of the 
 anima naturaliter Christiana from infidehty 
 to the faith, through making his agnosti- 
 
44 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 cism "pure"; that is, purging it of pre- 
 possessions on either side. For agnosticism 
 need be no more than an assertion that 
 the intellect of itself is incapable of em- 
 bracing reality, with the corollary that all 
 our knowledge of God is figurative and 
 provisional. It may imply the belief that 
 the ideahst account of things is open to 
 grave objection, and that all efforts of the 
 mind un-illuminated by revelation lead to 
 failure. This is very much the use put to 
 it by Mr. Arthur Balfour, who in his 
 Defence of Philosophic Doubt and the more 
 popular Foundations of Belief has given 
 us some admirable criticism both of the 
 naturahst and the idealist accounts, of the 
 world. It is obvious that with agnosticism 
 so "pure" as this, there is no ground against 
 — there may be very much reason for ac- 
 cepting the Christian claim that our knowl- 
 edge of God is mediated through His Son's 
 manifestation in human life and can be 
 reached in no other way. In this sense of 
 the term, not only great moderns, such as 
 ''Newman" and "Pascal," but even the 
 greater schoolmen, all alike maintain that 
 the intellectual reason is not of itseK ade- 
 
ARMAGEDDON 45 
 
 quate, and that all our words and creeds 
 are but metaphor; that our knowledge is, 
 in a word, analogical. 
 
 Agnosticism, however, as commonly used 
 today, means more than this. It is a par- 
 ticular kind of gnosticism. Its practical 
 meaning is similar to naturalism; while 
 theoretically it is a counsel of despair, 
 which cannot be maintained by beings 
 born to act. For they will not rest in the 
 behef that reahty is unknowable, ahke to 
 the reason and every other faculty of the 
 soul, and that the world is all a maya of 
 illusion. That is the one real hope in the 
 West; men cannot in the last resort but 
 beheve in some reahty; I might add that, 
 even taking our life at its worst, it shews 
 such desire for free personaUty, even if 
 only for the few, that there is less danger 
 than appears of its being satisfied with the 
 opiates of Pantheism, At least we find 
 as a fact that, apart from those immersed 
 in immediate activity, reflecting men hold 
 less and less to a truly agnostic position. 
 It always tends to pass into its opposite 
 and to become a gnosticism, whether theistic 
 or the reverse. Herbert Spencer's own 
 
46 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 system has been called semi-theism, and 
 he told us in his autobiography that as he 
 grew older he became less hostile to insti- 
 tutional religion. Sidg wick's agnosticism 
 verged on theistic faith, just as in others 
 it is tantamount to atheism. A better 
 instance is that of Mr. Lowes Dickinson. 
 Contemptuous as he is of all Christian 
 ideals, yet in his books on "ReHgion" he 
 develops a doctrine which may call itself 
 agnosticism, but is in reality a sort of 
 theism; and this is even more the case with 
 the dialogue on the Meaning of Good, 
 
 Of agnosticism, in the popular sense, 
 the strength has been and is not philosophic 
 thinking, but the prejudice from natural 
 science, the refusal of men like Huxley to 
 discern any ground for a spirit world beyond. 
 Even this attitude is changing. Science 
 tends more and more to recognise its pro- 
 visional and purely descriptive character; 
 further it is being driven to credit as 
 phenomena facts which make for a view 
 of the world as spiritual and personal, and 
 destroy the hope that, with a little more 
 knowledge, the universe could be summed 
 up in a series of differential equations; be- 
 
ARMAGEDDON 47 
 
 cause all history has been fixed from the 
 outset, and at any moment the state of 
 the world might be mathematically deduced 
 from that just preceding. This fatahsm is 
 the one and only postulate irreconcilable 
 with the Christian faith. 
 
 " With earth's first clay thou didst the last man knead, 
 And then of the last harvest sow'd the seed: 
 
 Yea the first morning of Creation wrote 
 What the last dawn of reckoning shall read." 
 
 Were this indeed the case, and it is the 
 assumption of all who disbeheve the mirac- 
 ulous, we need not discuss the Christian 
 faith, or indeed any other, which appeals 
 to spiritual freedom and treats the future 
 as not determined. Such a faith in that 
 case could have no meaning, neither would 
 human hfe, as we see and Uve it from day 
 to day. This prejudice, however, is break- 
 ing against the rock of fact. Natural 
 science is becoming in the true sense agnos- 
 tic, and recognises that it can speak but 
 of phenomena and their relations; of what 
 is behind it has no word to say, one way or 
 the other. In so far as observation in- 
 creases our sense of the cruelty of nature, 
 it may increase the difficulty of believing 
 
48 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 in the Fatherhood of God. Probably the 
 supreme difficulty of theistic religion to 
 most minds does lie in this doctrine rather 
 more than in any of the other points. But 
 I do not know that this has been substan- 
 tially increased since the days when Tenny- 
 son made it classical in his indictment of 
 Nature "red in tooth and claw with ravin," 
 and Mill i^eveloped the same thesis in prose. 
 More and more, too, is science tending 
 to lay stress on the unique, the individual; 
 and more and more does that tend to remove 
 the antecedent objection to the Christian 
 revelation. And it cannot be too often 
 repeated that it is the antecedent objection 
 which weighs with most minds and is at 
 the bottom of three quarters of the destruc- 
 tive criticism. Dr. Karl Pearson's criti- 
 cism of the Law of Causation in the recent 
 edition of his Grammar of Science ought to 
 leave no doubt that those who are deterred 
 from admitting the force of the evidence 
 of the uniqueness of the events connected 
 with the hfe of Jesus, because they seem 
 at variance with some imaginary law, are 
 merely frightened by a bogie. "As far 
 as our own experience goes, nothing in the 
 
ARMAGEDDON 49 
 
 universe ever will exactly repeat itself; 
 
 the law of causation is a useful 
 
 conception, but in no sense a reality lying 
 as a bed rock below phenomena." ^^ 
 
 But this is not all. The uprising of 
 psychology is teaching us many things. 
 Admitted facts Hke those of thought trans- 
 ference and the whole doctrine of the sub- 
 liminal self serve to shew that our personal 
 life reaches deeper than we suppose, and 
 give us hints of a universe whose elements 
 connect themselves in a way that is incom- 
 patible with a materiahstic hypothesis. 
 Mr. Gerald Balfour has recently shewn this 
 to be the case in regard to the admitted 
 cases of telepathy, quite apart from the 
 more doubtful alleged cases of "cross- 
 correspondence." Dr. Jevons has further 
 developed the point that the facts of mind- 
 cure are not explained by giving them a 
 name, and that they remain unintelUgible 
 except on a spiritual theory. 
 
 The new developments in regard to a 
 theory of matter, while they certainly do 
 not make rehgious behef more diflScult, serve 
 on the one hand to favour the view that we 
 know very Httle about the constitution of 
 
 5 
 
50 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 the material world, while all recent research 
 tends to shew us the depth of mystery that 
 surrounds the subject and the highly specu- 
 lative character of most theories in regard 
 to its nature. 
 
 From all these sides, the descriptive nature 
 of science, the electronic theory of matter, 
 the admitted emphasis on the unique and 
 individual, the strange occurrences now 
 known to the psychologist, men are slowly 
 moving away from that view which makes 
 the facts of Gospel appear incredible because 
 they seem to conflict with certain so-called 
 laws, which are never more than observed 
 uniformities and might always be subject 
 to exceptions. 
 
 As M. Bergson says, we cannot lay down 
 a priori the impossibility of any fact. 
 Indeed, in regard to the Gospel facts, it is 
 not scientific men, but "liberal" theologians 
 who take their science at second hand, who 
 tell us that the stories of the Virgin Birth 
 and the Resurrection body are certainly 
 false. Huxley, for instance, professed him- 
 self quite ready to believe it, if he had 
 thought the evidence sufficient. It is 
 literary critics and philosophers, rather 
 
ARMAGEDDON 61 
 
 than men of science, who say before- 
 hand that the one or the other is plainly 
 impossible. 
 
 Thus the prevailing uncertainty in regard 
 to fundamental principles weakens the 
 force of any and all the systems which 
 compete with the Christian Church, while 
 the recent advances in scientific thought 
 have lessened the current objections. For 
 all that, the great obstacle to behef among 
 ordinary minds is the success of physical 
 science; the achievements in the practical 
 world that have issued from a method of 
 enquiry which postulates a uniformity 
 against which the Christian story and our 
 sense of freedom are alike in conflict. We 
 are learning that even in the simplest 
 facts there is ever a mystery at the last, 
 a point at which you can only say, "Things 
 are so," "Blue is blue, and there's an end 
 of it." As men see this and as they see 
 also the mysteries involved in the scientific 
 projection of the world, and concentrate 
 attention on the actual facts of freedom 
 and the realm of values, and as they fur- 
 ther see the connection between the postu- 
 lates of human freedom and those of the 
 
52 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 miraculous or the Divine freedom; so will 
 the mirage of natural uniformity vanish, 
 like the dream it is, and they will be able 
 to place themselves before the light, that 
 shone once over Bethlehem, and yield to 
 the great weight of evidence that points to 
 the invasion of this world by powers from 
 one beyond. 
 
 Apart from the Christian hope, we are 
 in a state of chaos, only the more appalling 
 that it seems to be hardly realised. The 
 chaos is all the greater that it applies not 
 only to fundamental doctrines, but to 
 practical ideals. For the anarchy of specu- 
 lative thought is almost a harmony com- 
 pared with the chaos of the moral ideals. 
 
 In the last century the world could still 
 retain Christian ideals, while giving up 
 that life in the Church which alone makes 
 them possible. That belief has been shat- 
 tered by facts, and writers of the older 
 school of rationaUsts, like Gold win Smith, 
 noted and lamented this. Here and there 
 you find a belated Positivist or an austere 
 agnostic holding to an ideal indistinguish- 
 able from the Christian, but for the most 
 part the non-Christian no longer even 
 
ARMAGEDDON 53 
 
 aflPects to take Jesus as Master, but opposes, 
 with more or less of contempt for the 
 founder, the whole system of Christian 
 morals. I will not dwell on the great 
 movement of which Friedrich Nietzsche 
 was the mouthpiece, although I beheve it 
 to be significant. Its glorification of pride, 
 its philosophy of cruelty and race antago- 
 nism are a shining expression of the spirit 
 of antichrist and of the practical ideals of 
 many men who would be shocked at the 
 language of Nietzsche. It is fair to say 
 that part of Nietzsche's individuaUsm had 
 its origin in a wholesome reaction against 
 the pessimistic ethical sociahsm, derived 
 from Schopenhauer or the East, which 
 preaches altruism not because of the worth 
 of, but because of the (alleged) unreahty 
 of the individual. Also from Nietzsche's 
 polemic against arid intellectuaHsm there 
 is much to be learnt, and from his general 
 romantic attitude. At the same time his 
 whole contempt, not merely of the Christian 
 creed, but of Christian ethics, is undoubted 
 and cannot be lost sight of. Moreover it is, 
 in this respect, as incarnating a new philos- 
 ophy of pride and reviving ideas essentially 
 
54 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 Pagan that he has his greatest vogue — 
 and it is in this respect that his disciples 
 would claim to be "immorahsts," as 
 opposed to the whole notion of ethics which 
 has prevailed for two thousand years. 
 This is discerned to be the true inwardness 
 of the conflict between the ethics of Chris- 
 tianity and Nietzsche by a writer in a recent 
 number of the Hibbert Journal^ Professor 
 Otto JuUus Bierbaum,!^ in an interesting 
 article on Dostoieffsky and Nietzsche, from 
 which I make some extracts. It is indeed 
 the strongest presumption in favour of the 
 Divine and other-worldly character of the 
 Gospel that it should be seen to be dia- 
 metrically opposed in outlook, in motive, 
 and practical maxims to a scheme of things 
 avowedly Pagan, self-regarding, and this- 
 worldly. "I speak from the standpoint of 
 "one to whom Nietzsche's doctrine of the 
 " trans valuation of all values is something 
 " more than an empty phrase, and I assume 
 **that it indicates the direction in which the 
 ** most potent forces of Western culture are 
 *' moving today. . . . 
 
 "Even if it be conceded that the spirit 
 " informing him is, for Russia, fit and salu- 
 
ARMAGEDDON 55 
 
 * tary, it does not follow that it is the same 
 
 * for us. We to whom Dostoieffsky remains 
 
 * at bottom a stranger are not bom to absorb it; 
 
 * to attempt this would be to deny Goethe and 
 'to regard Nietzsche as a disease. It is a 
 'divergent path that we are called to tread, 
 'Our wanderings in the Catacombs are over, 
 
 "Those by whom this doctrine is rejected 
 ' (as it may be by men of great intellectual 
 
 * power) should welcome Dostoieffsky at 
 *once as a kindred spirit; for in him Christ 
 
 * speaks, and we must go back very far in 
 *the history of the Christian faith to find 
 
 * one in whom he speaks so forcibly as here. 
 *I for one should need to go back to S. 
 
 * Francis of Assisi. . . . 
 
 "On the one hand we have Nietzsche 
 'breaking in his Zarathustra the tables of 
 'the Mosaic Law; on the other Dostoieffsky 
 
 * raising up out of the depths of his Russian 
 'heart the primitive Christ." 
 
 If you take other non-Christian teachers, 
 like Mr. Lowes Dickinson, it is easy to see 
 how entirely they repudiate the Christian 
 ethic. An Oxford tutor, in his Religion of all 
 Good Men, while personally doing homage 
 to the teaching of Jesus, declares the whole 
 
66 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 system to be obsolete, and would sub- 
 stitute the "Gothic" ideal, as he calls 
 chivalry — the ethical simpUfication of 
 "gentlemanly conduct." 20 Mr. H. G. 
 Wells, in his impressive study. First and 
 Last Things, has told us that the per- 
 sonality of Jesus does not appeal to him; 
 while of the book which has united Chris- 
 tians of every obedience, another teacher 
 from Oxford, Mr. Henry Sturt,^! writes 
 in the following elegant terms: "Of all the 
 terrible intellectual disasters of Europe 
 the Bible has been by far the greatest, 
 mitigated only partially by the wild ro- 
 mantic savagery of the Old Testament, 
 by the sweet natural beauty of the preach- 
 ing of Jesus, and, for us, by the old-time 
 nobihty of our Jacobean translation. What 
 an irreparable injury to the intellectual 
 growth of England that week by week, 
 for centuries, the people have had pre- 
 sented to them 'lessons' from the records 
 of an Arabian tribe unapproachably distant 
 in culture, in national sentiment, and in 
 spiritual aspirations. Who can estimate 
 the degree to which our poetry has been 
 stunted and starved, our national genius 
 
ARMAGEDDON 57 
 
 crushed, our history cheapened and thrust 
 out of sight by this ahen oppression? 
 Scholars have sentimentalised over the 
 desolation of Hellas by the coarse, ignorant 
 tyranny of the Turks. Have they ever 
 thought of the ruin these ill-starred Jewish 
 scriptures have wrought to the mind of the 
 Teutonic nations?" It is not as though 
 there was any compensating agreement 
 about the fundamentals of morals. Chris- 
 tian chastity is condemned; Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw would make divorce "as cheap, as 
 easy, and as secret as possible"; a great 
 novehst was for treating marriage as on 
 the system of a leasehold contract, termi- 
 nable at intervals, while reputable names 
 can be found defending vices which even 
 the Pagans condemned, and a recent his- 
 torical writer has set up Heliogabalus with 
 all his nameless vices as a mark of modern 
 admiration. 22 Of course many would hold 
 to an austere view of morals quite apart 
 from rehgion; others would recommend 
 no more than "manly" hberahty. But 
 whatever they may approve, they are at 
 variance with the Christian notion of 
 marriage, and our novels and plays and 
 
58 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 popular agitations bear witness to a chaos 
 in moral ideals. This hopeless floundering 
 in all men's notions of right and wrong may 
 be partly due to the strange complexities 
 of our day, but it is more often the result 
 of the breaking down of all barriers to the 
 individual caprice and of the preaching of 
 a doctrine of "living one's own Hfe," which 
 leaves a man or woman — for the evil is 
 largely there — with no stars in heaven to 
 steer by. For "God hath made man up- 
 right, but he hath found out many inven- 
 tions." A society which leaves God out 
 of the reckoning in all matters of family 
 and sexual intercourse is bound direct for 
 the rocks. At this moment indeed it is 
 the ethic of Christianity which is more 
 unpopular than the creed. It hinders the 
 free development of the individual in regard 
 to society, or it is disliked as ascetic 
 and unnatural in regard to the private life; 
 and in business relations it is rejected on 
 principle as mere sentimentahsm. 
 
 This is all very natural. The firmest 
 believer in Christ finds his ideal so far be- 
 yond his practice that it is very unlikely 
 that an unbeliever should retain a thing 
 
ARMAGEDDON 59 
 
 SO difficult; while the balance between 
 egoism and altruism is so hard to strike 
 in theory that the Christian Church is the 
 only society in which a fair mean can be 
 had, and apart from hfe therein we should 
 anticipate what we actually have, an oscil- 
 lation between capricious individuahsm, or 
 an altruism no less irrational. 
 
 So far as we Christians are concerned, 
 it is the ethical antagonism which is the 
 more important. Nietzsche with his in- 
 sight saw that here was the crux. So long 
 as men go on admiring Jesus and making 
 Him their ideal, no good will come from 
 disproving the Gospel history. Somehow 
 or other men will hold to a system funda- 
 mentally Christian and will adopt practi- 
 cally, if not theoretically, an attitude of 
 worship. They will act in a way which 
 logically imphes the system which in theory 
 they have rejected. If they are finally to 
 be cut loose from the Christian Church, 
 they must be taught to trample on the 
 Christian ideal. And so Nietzsche set 
 himself to develop the taunt of the rejecting 
 Jews at our Lord, "He hath a devil." 
 Since many men, as a fact, hve an anti- 
 
60 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 Christian life, he only drew out what was 
 implied therein. That is one reason of his 
 influence. He made an idol of the deeds 
 of "bloodthirsty and cruel men." 
 
 Perhaps I may seem to exaggerate the 
 chaos of existing beliefs. Rather I believe 
 that I underrate it. So far as concerns 
 that world called educated or specifically 
 modern, the anarchy is greater, not less, 
 than I portray. The fact is disguised from 
 us by the presence amongst us of classes 
 who cling by instinct to the old faith. 
 What I am thinking of is the seething 
 cauldron of this modern world, not those 
 who, whether by fortune or choice, live in 
 a backwater. Barchesters still exist, but 
 we do not live there. In the world where 
 we do live, every kind of current and cross- 
 current is flowing at this moment, or as 
 one man put it, "the pavement is up in all 
 directions"; "for in those days there was 
 no king in Israel and every man did that 
 which was right in his own eyes." 
 
 I have been trying to shew that, while 
 as a fact the intellectual atmosphere of our 
 day is unfavourable to the Christian Church, 
 
ARMAGEDDON 61 
 
 yet this is merely a fact, the result of one- 
 sided development. It is no more decisive 
 than was the prejudice of the philosophic 
 schools of Rome or Alexandria in the first 
 century. The modern prejudice has been 
 created by the predominance of a single 
 method, triumphant in its own sphere, and 
 the attempt to carry it into regions where 
 it is powerless. This method has unduly 
 influenced certain critics and historians, 
 who have taken their science for granted; 
 unaware of the reserves made by the 
 greater physicists, they have treated as 
 rigid laws what are mere facts of normal 
 happening and have started to reconstruct 
 the New Testament or the history of the 
 Christian Church, with certain classes of 
 events ruled out a priori as incredible. 
 The same prejudices have operated to the 
 detriment of history, by creating a bias 
 in favour of arranging it all on a schematic 
 basis as the result of inevitable laws, 
 omitting all but a meagre reference to the 
 vast changes wrought by persons; that is, 
 by spiritual beings. 
 
 From many sides, however, these views 
 have been attacked. The limits of intel- 
 
62 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 lectual reasoning have been analysed by 
 writers like Bergson, certainly not from 
 any bias towards the Christian Faith. 
 There is no longer a united front or anything 
 like it on the part of the non-Christian 
 world. It is as variegated as the religions 
 of Asia. We are in the midst of Armaged- 
 don; we may keep the faith, but we must 
 fight for it. Sir Oliver Lodge is but one 
 of many scientific men who bid us remember 
 the limitations of all purely mechanical 
 interpretations 23; while another scientific 
 observer, Dr. McDougall, has just pub- 
 lished a volume, Mind and Soul, designed 
 to resuscitate once more the old-fashioned 
 belief in the individual soul which some had 
 told us had vanished forever from the world 
 of "enlightenment." 
 
 Neither in fundamental matters of 
 thought, nor in ideals of practice, is there 
 any body of principles accepted in the 
 main by reflecting men or any probabiHty 
 of such arising. On the contrary we live 
 amid a greater intellectual and moral chaos 
 than has ever been known in history. This 
 cannot continue. ^^ A civiHsation to endure 
 will have to mean something, and "projected 
 
ARMAGEDDON 68 
 
 efficiency" will not satisfy any race which 
 considers its latter end. Against the disso- 
 lution which is otherwise in store for us, 
 there is nothing to stand but the life of the 
 Christian Church. The existing anarchy 
 renders it not less but more probable that 
 there alone can the needs of human nature 
 be satisfied. HostiHty indeed is open and 
 contemptuous, yet there is nothing to 
 inhibit our faith. The ApoUyons of modern 
 knowledge are only bogies. Neither from 
 the side of natural science, nor from phi- 
 losophy, nor from ethics is there any voice 
 so clear or authoritative as to bear any 
 weight beyond an individual appeal; while 
 there is nothing proved, no principle even 
 probable, which stands in the way of 
 Christian Faith. There is no a 'priori 
 obstacle to the faith, provided that it seem 
 on other grounds to he reasonable. Such 
 grounds are to be found in the New Testa- 
 ment experience, as solid with the hfe of 
 the Church and the inward witness of the 
 behever. For there she is, the Christian 
 Church seared with the sins of all the cen- 
 turies, bearing the memory not only of the 
 saints, a Saint Francis, a Father Damien, a 
 
64 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 Fenelon, a Bishop Brent, but also of the 
 Renaissance Popes, the eighteenth century 
 prelates, the persecutors, the time-servers; 
 still she goes on. Here in our midst is the 
 society, which claims to have the gathered 
 experience of the race, still to keep the 
 flame burning, no philosopher's dream or 
 far-off hope, but a life with the scars no 
 less than the strength of reahty; still she 
 comes before us and asks. Can you do with- 
 out me? Is this glad new life for which 
 all seek to be had within me, or must men 
 seek it elsewhere? "Art thou He that 
 should come or do we look for another?" 25 
 
LECTURE II 
 BABYLON OR THE MORAL CRISIS 
 
 The Post-Impressionists have lately been 
 the theme of much talk. We are not here 
 to canvass the artistic merit of this strange 
 new school of painting. But the move- 
 ment means a good deal. By authorities 
 Hke Mr. Roger Fry and Mr. C. J. Holmes 
 we have learnt something of its aims. We 
 are shewn how it witnesses partly to that 
 Oriental influence which has been pouring 
 in upon Western art ever since Japan was 
 discovered, and partly to that cult of the 
 primitive which has been growing every 
 year. Here is a deliberate effort to step 
 back into the child's view of the natural 
 world and to thrust away the lie of the 
 photographic artist, which, rendering every 
 detail, obscures the whole truth and sacri- 
 fices colour and line to what is at bottom 
 mere mechanism. It represents a desire 
 
 6 65 
 
66 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 to get away from our sophisticated world 
 to one simpler. No longer shall the artist 
 be controlled by the desire of accurate 
 presentation of detail; rather by sugges- 
 tion and subtle arrangement shall he call 
 up those impressions fitting avowedly the 
 scene, and wed his own imagination to that 
 of the spectator. Mr. Roger Fry, in an 
 illuminating article, describes the signifi- 
 cance of the movement as follows: 
 
 "Again and again have attempts been 
 made by artists to regain this freedom of 
 imaginative appeal, but the attempts have 
 been hitherto tainted by archaism. Now 
 at last artists can use with perfect sincerity 
 means of expression which have been denied 
 them ever since the Renaissance. And this 
 is no isolated phenomenon confined to the 
 little world of professional painters; it is 
 one of many expressions of a great change 
 in our attitude to life. We have passed 
 in our generation through what looks like 
 the crest of a long progression in human 
 thought, one in which the scientific or 
 mechanical view of the universe was ex- 
 ploited for all its possibilities. How vast 
 and on the whole how desirable those possi- 
 
BABYLON 67 
 
 bilities are is undeniable, but this effort 
 has tended to blind our eyes to other 
 reaUties — the reaUties of our spiritual 
 nature and the justice of our demand for 
 its gratification. Art has suffered in this 
 process, since art, like rehgion, appeals to 
 the non-mechanical parts of our nature, 
 to what in us is mystic and vital. It seems 
 to me, therefore, impossible to exaggerate 
 the importance of this movement in art, 
 which is destined to make the sculptors' and 
 painters' endeavour once more contermi- 
 nous with the whole range of human aspi- 
 ration and desire." 
 
 I am not asking how far these men are 
 right or wrong; the point is that they exist. 
 Here in one important sphere, with interests 
 quite other than rehgious, men are seen in 
 deliberate revolt against the mental habit 
 of the Western world, as it has developed 
 itseff since the Renaissance. Elsewhere 
 we can also trace a similar sense of its 
 limitation. It is deliberately controverted 
 by an architectural genius like Mr. R. A. 
 Cram,i whom I need not in this place do 
 more than mention. In the Irish literary 
 movement, in the verse and criticism of 
 
68 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 Mr. W. B. Yeats, in the plays of Lady 
 Gregory, above all in dramas like Synge's 
 Riders of the Sea and The Play Boy of the 
 Western World, the same spirit manifests 
 itself, and it finds conscious expression, in 
 regard to language in the latter's preface. 
 There he points out the evil that has been 
 done to the rich suggestiveness and sym- 
 bolism, in other words the "sacramental" 
 element in language, by the whole modern 
 mechanical method, which uses words like 
 the symbols of a typewriter. We can see 
 the tendency far back in "Tiger, tiger 
 burning bright" and the whole anschauung 
 of William Blake, and much that has been 
 written about the "Renascence of Wonder" 
 bears on it. All these movements start 
 from the assumption that the calculable, 
 mechanical aspects of life have been given 
 undue prominence in the West and that 
 poetic, if not ethical, salvation is to be 
 found by leaving it; in a word we are to 
 "repent and become as Httle children" 
 in the service of beauty, no less than in 
 that of God. For of course those move- 
 ments have nothing directly to do with the 
 Christian Faith. Their protagonists are 
 
BABYLON 69 
 
 often its bitterest opponents. Yet all are 
 fighting the same battle with the vulgarities 
 and mechanical categories of commercialised 
 Europe; all are on the side of spirit and 
 freedom against Phihstinism and mammon 
 worship. All in a sense are other-worldly 
 and despise the tokens of the day; all, if 
 triumphant, will lead to a "transvaluation 
 of all values." People may be spiritually 
 akin, without knowing it or Uking to 
 acknowledge the fact when they are told. 
 As was said by one of them: 
 
 "For thou art gone away from earth, 
 And place with those dost claim, 
 The children of the Second Birth, 
 Whom the world could not tame; 
 
 "And with that small transfigured band 
 Whom many a different way 
 Conducted to this common land. 
 Thou learn'st to think, as they. 
 
 " Christian or Pagan, King and slave, 
 Soldier and Anchorite, 
 Distinctions we esteem so grave. 
 Are nothing in their sight. 
 
 "They do not ask, who pined unseen, 
 Who was on action hurled 
 Whose one bond is, that all have been 
 Unspotted by the world."* 
 
(70 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 All these things, Uke the romantic move- 
 ment in the early nineteenth century, are 
 evidences of a change of spirit which in- 
 cludes a rehgious aspect, but is in reaHty 
 wider. Our Lord's bidding to His friends 
 to take no thought of the morrow, to be 
 like children, and to consider the lihes 
 and to copy the birds, is curiously akin 
 to this latest utterance of a technique that 
 has swung full circle; only it reaches 
 further. Christianity is not less, but ten 
 thousand times more revolutionary than 
 people think. That jaded middle-aged so- 
 ciety of the Pagan Empire did well to see 
 in the Church its foe, and to persecute a 
 living spirit with the gift of Eternal youth. 
 Some tell us now that Jesus proclaimed a 
 social gospel. So He did. But it was 
 not that of Karl Marx or Henry George 
 or any legislator. He came to upset the 
 whole scale of values, and by changing men's 
 desires to inaugurate a new epoch. At this 
 moment there would be few wrongs in the 
 distribution of wealth if people ceased to 
 want more than is good for them. Jesus came 
 to alter men's wants. The real economic 
 reformer is not the man who alters the laws. 
 
BABYLON 71 
 
 but he who changes the wants of a suffi- 
 ciently large number of people to affect the 
 markets. Consider how great a reformer 
 was Peter the Hermit. He made more 
 difference than many legislators. So does 
 any effective preacher of standards above 
 the common. There would be fewer harlots 
 if the great majority of men even tried to 
 Uve pure hves; while the appalHng inequaU- 
 ties of our day would vanish as by magic if 
 a sufficient number of men were to leave off 
 "making haste to be rich" and a sufficient 
 number of women were to "set their affec- 
 tions on things above." The world improves 
 slowly, because nearly everyone overvalues 
 material goods. That is the main cause^ 
 of unjust laws, of economic wrong, and 
 nearly all tyranny — not the only cause, X 
 but in our day the chief one, except sheer 
 stupidity. Any change of men's ideals in 
 this respect would at once lead to improve- 
 ment. 
 
 As I said in the first lecture, the world 
 of the Middle Ages was anything but an 
 ideal place, and those best off were with- 
 out our comforts. It was a rough and 
 cruel world of tumbhng, quarrelsome. 
 
\ 
 
 72 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 naughty, joyous, and rather dirty children. 
 Its tears and its laughter, its hopes and 
 its solemnities, still live, not only in our 
 chroniclers or poets, but more universally 
 in those majestic piles, which not even the 
 throned scoundrel who destroyed the Abbeys 
 could quite avail to shatter. These places 
 witness to two things — men's faith alike 
 in God and in man. The two go together. 
 Either the whole world, seen no less than 
 unseen, is conceived as personal, spiritual, 
 aUve, ever fresh so that 
 
 "New every morning is the Love 
 Our wakening and uprising prove"; 
 
 or else it is seen as mechanical, impersonal, 
 dead, with human history unrolling itself, 
 like a cinematograph. The one is the 
 world of Cathohc Christianity, the other 
 that of Pagan philosophy or scientific 
 fatalism and its more spiritual or at least 
 decorative variety — Pantheism. 
 
 It is not doubtful that, if we were asked 
 to name a material symbol of the Middle 
 Ages, we should point to Rouen Cathedral 
 or Durham or to some great monastery 
 church, like Westminster or Selby or Peter- 
 
BABYLON 73 
 
 borough. To many who know nothing else 
 about those days, these form the only 
 conscious Hnk, the one legacy of the past. 
 As John Ruskin said in words which those 
 who have once read them find it hard to 
 forget: 
 
 "They are the only witnesses perhaps 
 that remain to us of the faith and fear of 
 nations. All else for which the builders 
 sacrificed has passed away — all their Uving 
 interests and aims and achievements. We 
 know not for what they laboured, and we 
 see no evidence of their reward. Victory, 
 wealth, authority, happiness — all have 
 departed, though bought by many a bitter 
 sacrifice. But of them and their life and 
 their toil upon the earth, one reward, one 
 evidence is left us in these grey heaps of 
 deep-wrought stone. They have taken with 
 them to the grave their powers, their hon- 
 ours, and their errors; but they have left 
 us their adoration." » 
 
 There were, of course, many other sides 
 to medieval hfe. Then, as now, greed and 
 cruelty and lust claimed their victims. But 
 its distinctive note is the effort to treat all 
 human actions from the standpoint of the 
 
74 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 other world. That was its standard of 
 value. Its unity is the unity of a band of 
 pilgrims struggling hardly home; its tender- 
 ness and intimacy are the smiling tears of 
 a soul that is glad by a great forgiveness; 
 its humour is the wholesome universal play 
 of those who are untroubled by all the 
 storms and undismayed by bereavement, 
 because they know that a man may feel 
 that: 
 
 "Love is and was my king and lord 
 And shall be though as yet I keep 
 Within his courts on earth and sleep 
 Encompassed by his faithful guard, 
 
 "And hear at times the sentinel, 
 
 That moves about from place to place 
 And whispers through the worlds ©f space 
 In the deep night that all is well." 
 
 Even the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire 
 was the grandest ideal that men have set 
 before them in statecraft, and though it 
 was broken up under the passion and the 
 pride of man, we need not suppose that the 
 vast unity of all human and divine affairs 
 as seen in the vision of Dante is a thing to 
 be despised by a different age. 
 
 For it is different. Let us not forget 
 
BABYLON 75 
 
 that. The statecraft, the economics, the 
 education, the hterature, the social and 
 family life of our day are organised on a 
 basis frankly secular. So far as these 
 things are concerned, we might almost say 
 that God does not count. Consequently 
 it is the symbols of material possession that 
 are alone striking in the world of today. 
 For that very reason there is less of monu- 
 mental expression, for men intent on money- 
 making erect buildings only for utiHtarian 
 ends. If, however, any one such thing 
 could represent our world of today to 
 Macaulay's New Zealander I suppose it 
 would be the Stock Exchange. That is the 
 true centre of the interests of the vast 
 majority today, excepting small groups 
 apart from the main current. To many 
 others it would be the factory or the 
 mill. 
 
 To that end its universities and all its 
 education is more and more being directed. 
 Attacks of daily increasing virulence are 
 made directly on those studies which do 
 not lead directly to money-getting. Not 
 long since some business men went to the 
 Vice-Chancellor of a certain University 
 
76 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 and asked him to guarantee that if they 
 sent their sons to take a certain course 
 on commercial topics they would become 
 wealthy men. Physical science is indeed 
 valued, but mainly because it is hoped to in- 
 crease the chances of money-making. Take 
 the Western world through, and what unity 
 can you find either in religion or thought 
 or practical ideals except the desire for 
 riches.'^ I think I am not exaggerating. 
 
 Some one said to me here the other day, 
 "You cannot imagine the degree to which 
 we are materialized; every servant girl 
 cherishes hopes of being one day a society 
 queen." Of course the love of money is 
 not new, but the absorption in it of seventy- 
 five per cent of human energy is, I think, 
 new. More and more people are ill-con- 
 tent with a competence and are snatching 
 at the means of ostentation. What has 
 been euphemistically called the democrati- 
 sation of society has meant in practice the 
 crushing out of all standards save that of 
 wealth, so that people openly boast that 
 "they judge a man by his balance at the 
 bank"; and many more do so while hardly 
 aware of it. I heard a woman of historic 
 
BABYLON 77 
 
 name, dwelling in a way that might seem 
 beyond the dreams of avarice, declare 
 that she had asked her agent, "Oh when 
 shall I be rich, Mr. Smith?" Every form 
 of luxury has increased, with the result that 
 those who have enough are always, hke 
 OHver Twist, "asking for more," while so 
 many people are living beyond their income 
 that the need of money is breaking down 
 still further the barriers of honour and 
 fair-deahng. It is the mad race for wealth 
 that is the real cause of men's dishke of 
 religion. For Christianity can in no way 
 be got to fit with such a scheme of hfe, and 
 hence it is left out. Driven by this whip, 
 men are abandoning all scruple, and meth- 
 ods grow daily in favour, which even half a 
 century ago would have seemed less than 
 honest. "The great god success" is de- 
 scribed in an American novel as the one 
 goal on which all are agreed, and some one 
 said to me the other day, when I demurred, 
 to his admiration of a set of people, that 
 they were scoundrels, "Ah, yes, but they 
 get there." This aim, whether you call it 
 avarice, or the love of power, or the pas- 
 sion for conquest, has always dominated 
 
78 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 many. But it has not always been wor- 
 shipped without reserve. Since the days 
 of that majestic embodiment of human 
 pride, the Roman Empire, when S. John 
 bewailed "the lust of the flesh, and the 
 lust of the eyes and the pride of life," 
 material standards have never ruled with 
 such general acquiescence, as they do now. 
 The Middle Ages had "their forestallers 
 and regraters," but they did not call them 
 "kings of finance." Even a Renaissance 
 despot, though he embodied a similar ideal, 
 had commonly either political genius or 
 artistic culture. If men did not copy, at 
 
 **least they canonized S. Francis. Nowa- 
 days the police would lock him up for 
 sleeping in the open. 
 
 *** However, it is hard to say anything on 
 this topic without becoming either com- 
 monplace or exaggerated. Let me leave 
 it with one illustration. 
 
 There died last year a sovereign who, 
 though not a great statesman, has left 
 behind him a memory that will not die. 
 Leopold, king of the Belgians, had many of 
 the gifts of the Emperor Nero, without 
 his artistic taste. To the powers of the 
 
BABYLON 79 
 
 efficient man of business he added habits 
 in moral matters which were overacted 
 rather than novel; while his notions of 
 family affection might have been learned 
 at the court of Herod the Great. He 
 developed the resources of his people (in- 
 cluding the casino of Ostend). At length 
 he persuaded the states of the West to 
 unite in a scheme which should carry to 
 a backward race the blessings of civilised 
 existence. What those blessings are can 
 be found in many official documents or 
 pictured for the casual reader by Stac- 
 poole's Pools of Silence, Recently I received 
 an invitation to invest money in some 
 Congo rubber company on the ground that 
 "the sensational fortune of King Leopold 
 had a meaning." It had. His decease, 
 so lamentable to that race to whom in his 
 own words he was teaching "the sanctity 
 of labour," was discussed at some length 
 by the press of that city, which has ever 
 regarded itself as the metropolis of modern 
 culture. They praised the dead monarch 
 and enlarged on his abilities, apparently 
 regarding as one ground of their admiration 
 his admitted lack of scruple. All this I 
 
80 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 quote, not because I wish to add one more 
 curse to one who hears already the cries 
 of a murdered people, but because it illus- 
 trates the spirit of modern civilisation with 
 little infusion from earlier influences. The 
 combination of greed, lust, and success, 
 this is what moves the reverence of the 
 Parisian journalists in the year of our Lord 
 1910; this is the ideal held up to the enter- 
 prising citizens — who are not princes. Is it 
 for this and such like examples that we are 
 invited to treat the Bible as pernicious, 
 or gird at the epileptic ecstacies of S. 
 Taul? For remember that King Leopold 
 did not differ, except in fortune, from many 
 unknown makers of miUions and many 
 more who would like to make them. It 
 was not that his morals were worse, but 
 that his success was greater, not that his 
 aims were low, but that his place was high, 
 that won for him a renown so fragrant. 
 Every man or woman who invests money 
 with the single aim of dividends, irrespec- 
 tive of means, is guilty potentially of the 
 same crimes. In a debate before the 
 introduction of Chinese labour, one mem- 
 ber of Parliament declared that there was 
 
BABYLON 81 
 
 one paramount need, that of getting gold 
 out of the Rand. The moment such a 
 spirit rules, the horrors of the Congo are 
 bound to arise, given the conditions. In- 
 deed, if accounts be trustworthy, the same 
 is true of places like the Valle Nacional of 
 Mexico and of many systems of so-called 
 peonage; just as it was true in the factory 
 system of England before child labour was 
 regulated, in spite of a chorus of shrieks on 
 the part of the rich manufacturers, led by 
 John Bright. None of these things could 
 go on were it not for the morbid lust of 
 men to secure the utmost material gain at 
 the lowest cost and to set aside every 
 consideration of the workers' interests. 
 For the evil does not he in the forced labour, 
 nor in the tutelage of the child races (both 
 probably necessary), but comes from thrust- 
 ing out all consideration for the labourer, 
 as a person, and treating him as a Uving 
 tool, in a worse condition than were slaves 
 in the Roman Empire. There is the root 
 of the matter. You may even have the 
 fullest poUtical freedom and prohibit per- 
 sonal violence to an absurd degree, and yet 
 get results not radically dissimilar, provided 
 
82 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 you make wealth your sole object and all 
 thought of means be set aside. 
 
 Dr. Bussell declares with truth this 
 point: "Emancipation on two continents 
 sacrificed the real welfare of the slave and 
 his intrinsic worth as a person, to the 
 impatient vanity of an immediate and 
 theatrical triumph."* 
 
 So it is with our modern freedom and the 
 rights of the individual. No master would 
 venture nowadays to discipline an appren- 
 tice of sixteen years, as the rich pay for 
 their sons to be disciplined; for we have 
 carried freedom of the person to the point 
 of insanity, and daily witness irate parents 
 bringing ridiculous charges against ele- 
 mentary schoolmasters for employing in the 
 mildest way discipline that everyone who 
 has been through it at an English public 
 school admits to be wholesome. This is 
 one reason why a certain type of boy in 
 the slums can never be made anything of, 
 unless he be got into the navy. But on 
 the other hand any employe may be dis- 
 missed to starve in the streets at almost a 
 moment's notice. You remember the story 
 of Mr. Wells' Kipps; how a youth is thrown 
 
BABYLON 83 
 
 upon the world, without a moment's hesi- 
 tation, for an offence which was certainly 
 not serious; and it is alleged that in some 
 of the larger stores the sHghtest complaint 
 leads to immediate dismissal. These in- 
 stances serve to illustrate the fact that it 
 is not for the sentimental pampering of 
 the negro or the labourer that I am plead- 
 ing. And they shew further what freedom 
 means to the economically helpless, the 
 Uberty to be exploited in the interests of 
 other people, body and soul, with the risk 
 of being thrown on the scrapheap for the 
 smallest offence and very often for the 
 mere accident of being worked out. Em- 
 ployers' habihty has to some degree miti- 
 gated this, but it is not universal and was 
 secured amid the frantic protests of the 
 plutocracy. Nor does this condition con- 
 cern the very poor alone. Everyone knows 
 how the middle classes, including even the 
 upper middle class, are suffering from the 
 same condition, and their precarious tenure 
 of their position is more and more recog- 
 nised. A sudden illness, a shght error of 
 judgment, a mere accident may destroy 
 the whole position of a small professional 
 
X 
 
 84 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 man, his death reduce to beggary his 
 whole family, and take away all their 
 chances of a good education. But you are 
 famihar with many such cases. ^ 
 
 Perhaps our civilisation is not worse than 
 others, but it is meaner and more insin- 
 cere; and in spite of all our knowledge, it 
 is fundamentally stupid in the enormous 
 waste of human capacity which it involves. 
 
 Nor can any of us escape the burden. 
 It is of no avail to cry. Am I my brother's 
 keeper? or for those who are placed as we 
 are, away from the stress of it all, to pride 
 ourselves on being considerate to depend- 
 ents, thinking that is all. We are all 
 part of the system. We cannot get away 
 from it even when we try, and we profit 
 by it when we least intend. 
 
 If you will pardon a few words, of neces- 
 sity autobiographical, I will relate an expe- 
 rience. Holding what was called a rich 
 living (as things go), I resigned it and 
 joined a community of men living in vol- 
 untary poverty; not the main, but one 
 motive, was the feeling that at least one 
 would be no more exploiting other classes, 
 and that one would be rid of responsibihty 
 
BABYLON 85 
 
 for an order, which such an act flouts. 
 But I have not found it so. Primarily 
 I am not interested in these topics and 
 prefer to be free of them to think of other 
 things. But the very means of such simpU- 
 fied Hving as is provided by this regime, and 
 every piece of bread I eat and every train 
 I travel by, and to some extent the possi- 
 biUty of such an "order" at all, so far as 
 it depends on anything but alms, all issue 
 out of the system which is so repellent. The 
 gains of the act are purely personal, and 
 one's relation to the economic system as a 
 whole alters but slightly, nor does the class- 
 support grow less for such a surrender, in 
 many ways it grows greater, save that 
 one is always a recipient, no longer a donor. 
 Certainly no man is justified in thinking 
 he is freed from all further responsibiUty 
 and may dismiss from his mind the economic 
 muddle of the world. He cannot be freed. 
 So long as he lives, it is in him; and writhe 
 as we may, we must bear the Nessus-shirt 
 of modern industriaUsm and still feel that, 
 as we have all our hves been sheltered 
 through the blood and tears of others and 
 ridden on the crest of the wave, so we do 
 
86 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 still; and ours will be the guilt if the chains 
 of injustice are made heavier. This was 
 always the case. But it is more trans- 
 parently so now than of yore. The de- 
 velopments of credit and transit have 
 united mankind more closely than at any 
 other time. We all share its evils and its 
 benefits. Mr. Bernard Shaw has earned 
 
 . the thanks of all for burning into us this 
 truth. In Widowers^ Houses and Mrs. 
 WarrerCs Profession he throws a lurid light, 
 not on the evils of our day, but rather on 
 all its "pleasant pictures." He shews us 
 how the walled gardens of grace and virtue 
 which make the life of the few pleasant, 
 and it may be noble, are only possible 
 through a surrounding quagmire. The cul- 
 ture and virtue of the few are won through 
 a meanness and avarice which the dwellers 
 in the garden would fain forget. The whole . 
 world of the sheltered classes, with their 
 high aims and cultivated tastes, and even 
 their very spiritual vision, is seen to be en- 
 joying its opportunities, unaware how they 
 
 -^are the fruit of a putrescent cruelty. 
 
 It is not inequality I am lamenting,- 
 Inequality may be right or wrong, but it 
 
BABYLON 87 
 
 has in it nothing revolting. There is more 
 apparent inequahty between the incomes 
 of some of us in this room than between 
 our average income and that of the dis- 
 inherited classes. What is revolting is 
 the conditions which take from a large 
 mass of men the means of a worthy per- 
 sonal hfe, which breed child-criminals, pay 
 women "the wages of prostitution," and 
 even among those better off produce an 
 appalling insecurity. For thousands of peo- 
 ple live always on the edge of a precipice, 
 and many more are breaking down from 
 the overstrain of an age which lives in a 
 fever. For is it not true that at present 
 services are performed by "private individ- 
 uals under competitive conditions, strug- 
 ghng for life and death on the incHned plane 
 that leads to ruin, fighting always for more, 
 lest they should be obliged to take less, too 
 many of them everywhere competing for 
 one job, and the conditions of success not 
 only or even mainly merit and capacity, 
 still less honesty and rectitude, which may 
 be positive disqualifications, but that 
 pecuHar and intrinsically contemptible art 
 we call *push?'"« 
 
88 CIVILISATrON AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 All this I notice not in order to suggest 
 a new scheme of social amelioration, but 
 to point the need of deliverance. I could 
 not omit it. The problem is haunting and 
 forbids one to think in quiet of the religious 
 and philosophical problems of hfe. The 
 doctrine of original sin forces itself in when 
 we would fain be quit of it and discuss high 
 themes at leisure. Each man is forced 
 to ask himself, Why is civilisation to me 
 so gracious a mistress and to others so hard 
 a stepmother .^^ Even if we allow much to 
 the solidarity of the family, and say the 
 individual must share in the life of his 
 fathers, we hardly get a full solution. To 
 me and to you she gives the power to live, 
 not merely to drudge; to form plans and 
 win high delights. At our feet she pours 
 the treasured memories of the ages; she 
 opens the long corridor of history and the 
 palaces of all the courts. To us she permits 
 to rest by pleasant streams and grants the 
 glory of letters and the fellowship of men 
 gone by. Why should we have all this 
 almost without our will and others be 
 born to squalor and foul living? Poverty 
 is not the evil in the strict sense. The 
 
BABYLON 89 
 
 peasants' life, if well cared for, has noth- 
 ing in it ignoble. It is the daily grinding 
 care, the exposure to foul temptation, 
 the blighting of soul, the inferno of the 
 slum, and of things we cannot bear to 
 picture, that are the fortune of too many 
 thousands to leave one a comfortable mind. 
 Somewhere there must be wrong, some 
 canker of soul among us, in a world which 
 keeps its chances for so few and for large 
 numbers reserves a slavery worse in many 
 ways than that of Pagan Rome. 
 
 "You and I, you must remember, belong 
 to the small section of society that has both 
 kinds of freedom; and I think it possible 
 that we really have on the balance more 
 liberty than we could easily secure under 
 other conditions, though to my mind the 
 value of the Hberty is almost destroyed by 
 the knowledge of the price which others 
 have to pay for it. For these others, the 
 mass of men, what freedom really have 
 they.^ Can they effectively choose their 
 career, more than under the most bureau- 
 cratic sociahsm? Can they fix their hours 
 of work.^ Can they determine their wage? 
 Can they travel.'^ Can they educate them- 
 
90 CIVILISATION >T THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 selves? Can they select their society? 
 Can they assure their solitude?" ^ 
 
 We may try to turn away from this 
 spectacle. We do not like it. It is dull. 
 It is so much pleasanter to dwell upon art 
 and letters, so much nicer to think of our 
 "Christian privileges," or (if you will), our 
 privileges as non-Christians. But there 
 they are. They will not let us be. That 
 haunting face of the beggar in the street, 
 the harlot at the gate, the unemployed, 
 the inheritors of disease. Nothing but 
 fortune prevents our being like that. "There 
 but for the grace of God goes John Brad- 
 ford," was said once at the sight of a con- 
 victed murderer going to his doom; and the 
 words cannot but echo in our ears at any 
 sight of a member of the disinherited class. 
 
 Idle it is, and waste of breath, to prate 
 of the triumphs of civilisation, or to quote 
 ^ the figures of the national income, when at 
 its heart there is this festering sore, when 
 the proportion of those who really use the 
 fruits of our knowledge to those ground 
 beneath its car must be smaller than in 
 Pagan Rome, far smaller than in medieval 
 Europe. Something is wrong, and that 
 
BABYLON 91 
 
 wrong has been growing with the growth 
 of our knowledge and its resulting wealth. 
 So much seems bare fact. "There is 
 death in the pot" of modern civiKsation, 
 and it is not like to heal itself. 
 
 Let us turn to the other side and regard 
 the Kfe of the triumphant classes, "the 
 conquerors" of Mr. Masterman's analysis. 
 
 Does that offer a cheerful spectacle? 
 The vulgarity and vices of the rich form a 
 theme for satire in all ages and I shall not 
 attempt to emulate it. We may talk of 
 the ennui and boredom of wealth, and there 
 is truth in this. But dull people are not 
 always dull to themselves. Jane Austen's 
 characters appear to us to have led a some- 
 what flat existence. Probably, however, 
 to them it was about as amusing as her 
 description of it is to us. Dr. Johnson 
 defined a fishing-rod as "a rod with a worm 
 at one end and a fool at the other." That 
 shews that the doctor was no fisherman, but 
 it proves nothing against angling. Freak 
 dinners and other tasteless caprices of 
 
92 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 which we hear are probably the highest 
 amusements of which those who give them 
 are capable — may, indeed, be to them a 
 spiritual ascent. 
 
 Other sources of evidence there are, less 
 disputable. Despite the advance of hygi- 
 enics, is health among the richer classes so 
 much better than it used to be? Doubt- 
 less more weakly people are kept alive, 
 and the average length of life is longer. But 
 is there less worrying ill-health than of 
 old.f^ Judging by its interest as a topic of 
 conversation, and the universal fads about 
 diet, the proportion of people driven to 
 think about their health is much larger, 
 and even fads would not flourish if the 
 normal regimen were all that could be 
 desired. Doctors appear to think that 
 neurasthenia and all forms of brain exhaus- 
 tion are on the increase. Not long ago 
 we heard of an epidemic of suicide in Ger- 
 man schools due to over-pressure, and it 
 is said that lunacy is on the increase. In 
 setting against this the reduction of suffer- 
 ing through the use of anaesthetics we must 
 bear in mind that the subjective side of 
 ill-health is the most important and the 
 
BABYLON 9S 
 
 most disabling disease is probably a cause 
 of less real distress to the patient than 
 some form of nerve or brain depression 
 which leaves his organs sound. And it is 
 in all these regions, where it is felt most, 
 that the standard seems getting lower under 
 the pressure of modern life and its con- 
 tinual fever; and this is the case through 
 the whole range of society. An observer 
 by no means hostile says that it is true 
 even of children; we must not expect them 
 to be so healthy as those of a past genera- 
 tion. And he gives the ground in excite- 
 ment of modern life with all its rush. This 
 is the judgment of Mr. Cooper in his 
 Twentieth Century Child: » 
 
 "The normal healthy child of eight or 
 ten will do nothing quietly; and when you 
 put it to do modern lessons among people 
 who hve on motor cars, conduct two thirds 
 of their correspondence by telegram, and 
 want to prosecute half the express trains 
 in the kingdom for loitering, in ten years' 
 time you will probably have to send it 
 to bed for a nerve-cure. Put a boy to 
 work full hours at a Board school, and 
 later on half-time at a factory, with plenty 
 
94 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 of home work and worry besides, and 
 unwholesome food to complicate matters, 
 and the state of his physique will be below 
 modern army requirements. It would he 
 hard to say in which class of life the child 
 pays the higher price for his knowledge. 
 But unless we are prepared to face this 
 physical deterioration and to induce the 
 children to abandon their sixteen years of 
 undivided cricket and football for the 
 pursuit of knowledge, it is difficult to see 
 how any philosopher, statesman, or prophet 
 can save the supremacy of England." 
 
 If this is the case with the young, a little 
 enquiry at Homburg or Carlsbad would 
 reveal a worse state of things among their 
 elders; while even in regard to the triumphs 
 of surgery, I have heard a brilhant doctor 
 maintain that anaesthetics had caused more 
 suffering than they had cured. At least 
 there is sufficient evidence that those on the 
 crest of the wave are in this respect in no 
 very enviable state, and are probably worse 
 rather than better off than their fathers 
 were. But this is not all. Nor is it the 
 main point. The test of a civilisation is 
 in its characteristic culture and in the 
 
BABYLON 95 
 
 type of men and women who thrive best 
 in it. 
 
 As I said last time, amid the Babel of the 
 world's religions and moralities, it is not 
 possible to state what are the governing 
 ideals of the triumphant classes at the 
 moment, and it is ten to one that if you 
 met two dozen at dinner, you would hear a 
 dozen different faiths asserted, with all that 
 voluble enthusiasm that befits "the light 
 haK-believers of our casual creeds." On 
 this point I said enough in my first lecture 
 and we need not go further. But if we judge 
 by their conduct, we may well ask with 
 Archbishop Benson, when he arrived in 
 London, "What do these people believe?" 
 We have, however, some better evidence 
 of the type of characters which thrive in 
 our age and may be regarded as its most 
 prominent fruit. It is rather the women 
 than the men of an epoch who accentuate 
 and express its dominant principles, because 
 they do so for the most part unconsciously. 
 It is not what people actually profess, but 
 what they habitually practice, that gives 
 the true note of an age. In the novels of 
 your distinguished compatriot, Mr. Henry 
 
96 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 James, we have an accurate and subtle 
 portraiture of the manners and aims of 
 the fortunate classes; the more valuable 
 because it is drawn without reference at 
 all to a moral. There we find women in 
 plenty, whose speech and thought, more 
 subtly delineating itself than in any other 
 writer, live for us, as does the whole milieu 
 of their life. And what strikes one next 
 to the consummate, if a little over-con- 
 scious, skill of the artist is the almost com- 
 plete lack of any approach to noble aims 
 or even interesting characters. They are 
 interesting only through the wonderful 
 art of the novelist. I mean that they are 
 none of them people whom one would 
 care to meet twice, and even their immorali- 
 ties are only disgusting. What sort of an 
 age can it be which speaks in Kate Croy's 
 Sense of Honour or in the chivalrous friend- 
 ship of Charlotte in The Golden Bowl? If 
 you go further and take the crowd of 
 people who figure in the Awkward Age or 
 in What Maisie Knew or in the Sacred 
 Fount, no one can deny that you have the 
 picture of a society exclusive, outwardly 
 refined, and sheltered from all the wider 
 
BABYLON 97 
 
 interests of men. Their life is essentially 
 a private one, and their amusements seem 
 never to reach beyond a flirtation that 
 suggests something more. Without (so far 
 as we can tell) intending or desiring to 
 do so, Mr. Henry James has allowed the 
 emptiness, the meanness, and the drab 
 morals of our day a hardly less perfect 
 monument than was given to the Renais- 
 sance women under the great Elizabeth. 
 Compare them with the heroines of George 
 Meredith; compare their whole life with 
 the sinners of Thackeray. Why, Becky 
 Sharp is worth the lot of them! She may 
 have been bad, but she was great; they share 
 her badness, but are httle, eternally little; 
 and indeed the whole scene of morals sug- 
 gests that hero of Kipling's poem who had 
 no deeds that were not second-hand, and 
 only committed adultery because he read of 
 it in a French book. Screaming ever more 
 discordantly in the effort to reach beyond 
 the top-note, the men and women of our 
 latter day have achieved only a prevailing 
 flatness of spirit; all this mirrors itself 
 to perfection in the great writer I have 
 been discussing, and it does so the better 
 
98 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 owing to the inwardness of his method, 
 which displays the soul from within and also 
 because the men and women he takes are 
 as a rule of no outstanding quality, but 
 such as may be met with in any drawing- 
 room. 
 
 What then are the outward products of 
 our existing system? What good things will 
 it leave to posterity to set by the monu- 
 ments of the past days? Si monumentum 
 quaeris circumspice. Walk down the streets 
 of any typically modern town, or take, if 
 you can, a bird's-eye view of a region, like 
 the Black country. These are the things 
 we have really made. We have no right 
 to claim as ours the great cathedrals, or 
 the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, any 
 more than the Hotel de Ville of Brussels or 
 the Rathhaus of Rothenburg an der Tauber. 
 It is the factories, the banks, the hotels, 
 and the streets and the structure of our 
 towns which display what the age cares 
 for. I do not say that all is bad, or even 
 that so far as street architecture goes there 
 has not been within the last twenty years 
 a great improvement. Here and there a 
 bank or a great shop, or a station Uke 
 
BABYLON 99 
 
 the Pennsylvania Railway Station is a 
 decent bit of architecture. But taking 
 the multitude of our buildings alone, our 
 municipal buildings, our museums and 
 modern universities, our capitals, our in- 
 dustrial cities, our watering-places and 
 towns of pleasure, our suburbs, rich and 
 poor, what sort of impression will they 
 leave on a future age? One observer of 
 English life, after enlarging on the growth 
 of private ostentation, compares our age 
 with one or two others in terms hardly 
 extravagant. 
 
 "Dr. Dill ^ has shewn in the Roman 
 Peace, during the age of the Antonines 
 and after, the people of the Empire turning 
 with enthusiasm to great communal build- 
 ing, and every city setting itself to such 
 achievements as remain today the wonder 
 of the world. . . . What kind of building 
 will represent for the astonishment of 
 future ages the harvest of the super-wealth 
 of the British Peace? The signs are not 
 propitious. A Byzantine cathedral at West- 
 minster, a Gothic cathedral at Liverpool, 
 a few town-halls and libraries of sober 
 solidity, the white buildings which today 
 
100 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 line Whitehall and fill the passing stranger 
 with bewilderment at a race 'that thus 
 could build ' will be the chief legacies of this 
 present generation. The thirteenth century- 
 gave us the cathedrals; the sixteenth gave 
 us the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge 
 and the noblest of English country houses. 
 This tiny England with populations in the 
 aggregate less than that of London today 
 and wealth incomparably smaller has 
 left us possessions which we can admire 
 but not equal. *The work which we col- 
 lective children of God do/ complained 
 Matthew Arnold, *our grand centre of life, 
 our city for us to dwell in, is London — Lon- 
 don with its unutterable external hideous- 
 ness, with its internal canker of publice 
 egestas privatim opulanter unequalled by 
 the world.' It was this contrast which 
 gave point to a question which otherwise 
 the plain man would put by as absurd. 
 *If England were swallowed up by the 
 sea tomorrow, which of the two, a hundred 
 years hence, would most excite the interest 
 and admiration of mankind, the England 
 of the last twenty years or the England of 
 Elizabeth?'" 
 
BABYLON lOl 
 
 And truly the outward aspect of the world 
 in which we live is not such as to arouse 
 extravagant gratification, even though we 
 have tasteful drawing-rooms and pleasant 
 private gardens. If we leave out of it 
 all these legacies of a past age, like our 
 churches, or the immemorial beauty of 
 the EngUsh country side, and think of the 
 world so far as it is the work of the nine- 
 teenth century, can any man, however 
 much an optimist, be enthusiastic? Do 
 we not feel refreshed when we do the 
 bidding of WilHam Morris ^^ and 
 
 "Forget six counties overhung with smoke; 
 Forget the snorting steam and piston-stroke; 
 Forget the spreading of the hideous town; 
 Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, 
 And dream of London small, and white, and clean, 
 The clear Thames bordered by the gardens green; 
 Think that below bridge the keen sapping waves 
 Smite some few keels that bear Levantine staves. 
 And cloth of Bruges and hogsheads of Guienne, 
 While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer's 
 
 pen 
 Moves over bills of lading"? 
 
 WiUiam Cobbett was no dreamy senti- 
 mentalist, and he used to talk of London 
 "as a great wen,*' and I suppose that 
 
102 CIViLiSATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 while the centre may be improved, that if 
 the whole area be included, the prospect 
 would be more squaUd now than when he 
 wrote. To set against medieval Florence 
 or Durham or Tewkesbury, all character- 
 istic and typical, what are our types? 
 The factory-town, acres of mean streets, the 
 slums of our cities — places of which one 
 very unromantic observer said, "The best 
 thing that could happen to them would 
 be to be burnt down." It is not that there 
 were no ugly or dirty or repulsive sights in 
 the past, but that their typical monu- 
 ments are beautiful, and ours are — what 
 we know. Nor can it be said that they 
 are greatly altered for the better by our 
 jubilee clock-towers, the piers of our water- 
 ing-places, or the frock-coated effigies of 
 municipal notabiHties. In other matters 
 comparison is easier. One reason of the 
 dehght in the old masters is that the world 
 which they depicted in costume and colour 
 was so much more beautiful. Compare 
 the colours and lines of a Fra Angelico or 
 Pinturicchio's Griselda with any to be 
 found in a modern street. It is the life 
 out of which these things grew that is so 
 
BABYLON 103 
 
 much worthier than ours, or than, say, the 
 grand Steele with its pompous affectations. 
 For no one would deny the exceptional 
 beauties of our civiHsation any more than 
 the rare glory of an artistic genius, hke that 
 of Whistler who painted it; but its char- 
 acteristic drabness and prevaiHng squalor 
 make one long to cry out 
 
 "Oh Love! could'st thou and I with Fate conspire 
 To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, 
 
 Would we not shatter it to bits? And then 
 Remould it nearer to the heart's desire? '* 
 
 For this ugliness is self-chosen. It is the 
 lie in the soul. We flatter ourselves by 
 supposing it incidental to an age of me- 
 chanical invention and much use of iron. 
 But iron girders may be beautiful and 
 marble palaces vulgar. As Mr. Wells 
 shewed in a New Utopia, a society with 
 peace at its heart could make use of all 
 and more than all our mechanical acquire- 
 ments and yet have its bridges, its rail- 
 roads, and its factories noble and serene, 
 ministers to the Ufe of the spirit instead 
 of torments. No one, I suppose, would 
 deny the dignity of your Pennsylvania 
 Railway Station, and I could name at least 
 
\ 
 
 104 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 one famous Italian cathedral which is 
 in many ways repulsive. Nor is it for want 
 of money spent that our world is ugly. 
 One authority declares that there is more 
 spent on art in our schools in a single year 
 than there was in the whole fourteenth 
 century. 11 
 
 The lust of personal wealth and the pre- 
 vailing fever leave men with no eyes for 
 what is worthy or base in this civilisation. 
 Provided they can make their homes pleas- 
 ant and decorate them with a certain 
 measure of taste, they will contemplate 
 in comfort cities which have no single 
 ic building worthy of the name and 
 populations squalid and ill-clothed. It is 
 not iron or engines, it is the unchecked 
 operation of greed that makes life so hid- 
 eous; and until the soul of man is weary 
 of his millions, we need hardly look for 
 much improvement.12 
 
 This is the point. It is a new soul that 
 the world needs, not a scheme of reforms. 
 The only source of such new life is faith 
 of one kind or another. From many ob- 
 servers comes the cry for life, for dehver- 
 ance, for some uphfting power. The cry, 
 
 ^publ 
 
BABYLON 105 
 
 though little regarded as yet in the seats of 
 the mighty, will ere long be triumphant, 
 unless the world is to go the way of other 
 decadent civihsations and pass through 
 self-indulgence to ruin. The remedies sug- 
 gested often differ, but the sense of need 
 is wide-spread. Let us state some instances. 
 Rudolf Eucken of Jena, one of the weight- 
 iest of Uving philosophers, preaches strongly 
 this very need of redemption. He is no 
 upholder of evangelical tradition. Indeed 
 he has added one chapter to his work on 
 Christianity and the New Idealism to redeem 
 him from the stigma of orthodoxy. Yet it 
 is the fundamental idea of the evangehcal 
 faith which animates him. He argues that 
 the Western civilisation is unable either 
 to effect man's salvation or to satisfy his 
 deepest needs. Alike from the intellectual 
 and the practical standpoint Eucken argues 
 the needs of those ideas of redemptive 
 grace and supernatural hfe which find their 
 expression in the Christian Church. Per- 
 haps I may be permitted to quote.^^ 
 
 "What do we see.^ WhirHng complexity, 
 restless hurry and pursuit, a passionate 
 exaltation of self and an overweening 
 
106 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 pushing of its claims against those of others; 
 Hfe occupied with aUen interests rather 
 than its own; no inward problems or in- 
 ward motives; little pure enthusiasm or 
 genuine love; the fostering and furthering 
 of self ever the dominant note, despite all 
 boastful profession and even some really- 
 honest work; man, with his likes and dis- 
 likes, the supreme arbiter of good and evil, 
 true and false, so that the main goal of 
 endeavour is to win social favour and 
 respect appearances. All this, however 
 much it may make profession of following 
 after ideal goals and being guided by ideal 
 sentiments, yet reveals in every part of it 
 an inner insincerity, a repellant unreality, a 
 spiritual tameness and hollo wness." 
 
 "To every thinking man the great alter- 
 native presents itself, the Either — Or. 
 Either there is something older and higher 
 than this purely humanistic culture or life 
 ceases to have any meaning or value." ^* 
 
 And once more: 
 
 "We may dismiss all hope of giving life 
 meaning and value by a mere further 
 development of this purely humanistic 
 culture. Such a culture, even if its goal 
 
BABYLON 107 
 
 were obtainable, would not satisfy us. 
 It has blossomed out freely during our 
 modern period, and it has been successful 
 in diverting the stream of Ufe into its own 
 channels. But the more independent and 
 exclusive it becomes, the more it repels 
 the intrusion of any influence and friendly 
 supplement from the long centuries of past 
 labour, the more clearly are its Hmitations 
 seen, the more certainly does it live out its 
 influence and bring about its own downfall. 
 "We are feeling that, at the present 
 moment, and with growing acuteness, a 
 weariness of the world and a deep dislike 
 to its hmitations are becoming more and 
 more general. We feel that life must for- 
 feit all meaning and value if man may not 
 strive towards some lofty goal in depend- 
 ence on a Power that is higher than man 
 and as he reaches forward reaUze himself 
 more fully than he could ever do under 
 the conditions of sense and experience. 
 Cut off from the larger hfe of the universe 
 and shut up in a sphere of his own, he is 
 condemned to an unbearably narrow and 
 paltry existence, and the deeps of his own 
 nature are locked away from him. Thus 
 
4 
 
 108 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 today we hear a great deal of the super- 
 human and the superman, but for all the 
 genuine longing such a movement may 
 embody it cannot but degenerate into mere 
 idle words if this superhuman be sought 
 within the world of sense-experience, within 
 the sphere of our immediate existence. 
 For man is far too closely bound by the 
 fetters of his nature and his destiny to be 
 renewed in life and being by the mere 
 magic of a word. Thus he must either break 
 with the realistic culture or renounce all 
 hope of inwardly raising humanity and 
 realizing the meaning of life. Only a shal- 
 low and trivial philosophy can deem any 
 third course possible." ^^ 
 
 In other words, man is once more asking 
 the question, "What must I do to be 
 saved .f^" And those who, like Nietzsche, 
 preach salvation by the superman are in 
 reahty pointing to a world beyond, although 
 they eschew with scorn all notion of a 
 gospel from jenseits, Eucken, indeed, has 
 no doubt that our fundamental need is the 
 need of a redemptive religion and that it 
 can be met in no other fashion. 
 
 "Discontent with the world as it is, till 
 
BABYLON 109 
 
 at last such a world becomes unendurable, 
 is what drives the soul to religion. 
 
 "From religion we hope to gain that 
 which we cannot gain from the world, but 
 at the same time cannot do without. 
 
 "Thus the question that presses itself 
 on us is the question where, and how it is, 
 that we are conscious of a defect, a disturb- 
 ance, a warping of existence, which will 
 not allow us to rest. 
 
 "In a word, it is the problem of evil that 
 is the winnowing fan for rehgions as well 
 as for persons, and it is their solution of 
 this problem which is the real test of their 
 pretensions. 
 
 "Here, more than anywhere else, life 
 is concentrated into one question and one 
 answer." ^^ 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge again, the distinguished 
 physicist, has declared his dissatisfaction 
 with some elements of traditional religion. 
 Yet he emphasizes the truth of a world of 
 supernatural agencies in contact with man, 
 and more than anyone else has he brought 
 into relief the difference between the view 
 of the world thus opened and the closed 
 system of rationalism." 
 
110 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 "This is the kernel of what I have to 
 say — that orthodox modern science shows 
 us a self-contained and self-suflBcient uni- 
 verse, not in touch with anything beyond 
 or above itself; the general trend and 
 outline of it known; nothing supernat- 
 ural or miraculous, no intervention of 
 beings other than ourselves being conceived 
 possible. 
 
 "While religion, on the other hand, 
 requires us constantly and consciously to 
 be in touch — even aiSPectionately in touch 
 — with a power, a mind, a being or beings, 
 entirely out of our sphere, entirely beyond 
 our scientific ken. The universe contem- 
 plated by religion is by no means self- 
 contained or self-sufficient, it is dependent 
 for its origin and maintenance, as we are 
 for daily bread and future hopes, upon the 
 power and good-will of a being or beings of 
 which science has no knowledge. Science 
 does not indeed always or consistently deny 
 the existence of such transcendent beings 
 nor does it make any effectual attempt to 
 limit their potential powers, but it definitely 
 disbeheves in their exerting any actual 
 influence on the progress of events, or in 
 
BABYLON 111 
 
 their producing or modifying the simplest 
 physical phenomenon. 
 
 "For instance, it is now considered un- 
 scientific to pray for rain. ... It ought, 
 however, to be admitted by Natural Philos- 
 ophers that the unscientific character of 
 prayer for rain depends really not upon its 
 conflict with any known physical law, 
 since it need invohe no greater interference 
 with the order of nature than is implied in a 
 request to a gardener to water the garden — 
 it does not really depend upon the impossi- 
 bility of causing rain to fall, when other- 
 wise it might not — but upon the disbeHef 
 of science in any power who can and will 
 attend and act. 
 
 "The root question of outstanding con- 
 troversy between science and faith rests 
 upon two distinct conceptions of the uni- 
 verse: the one, that of a self-contained and 
 self-sufficient universe with no outlook into 
 or links with anything beyond, uninfluenced 
 by any fife or mind except such as is con- 
 nected with a visible and tangible material 
 body, and the other conception, that of a 
 universe lying open to all manner of spiritual 
 influences, permeated through and through 
 
m CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 with a Divine spirit, guided and watched 
 by Hving minds, acting through the medium 
 of law indeed, but with intelligence and 
 love behind the law, a universe by no means 
 self-sufficient or self-contained, but with 
 sensitive tendencies groping with another 
 super-sensuous order of existence, where 
 reign laws hitherto unimagined by science, 
 but laws as real and as mighty as those by 
 which the material universe is governed. 
 
 "'For nothing is that errs from law.' 
 According to the one conception, faith is 
 childish and prayer absurd; the only in- 
 dividual immortality Hes in the memory 
 of descendants; benevolence and cheerful 
 acquiescence in fate are the highest attri- 
 butes possible; and the future of the 
 human race is determined by the law of 
 gravitation and the circumstances of space. 
 
 "According to the other conception, 
 prayer may be mighty to the removal of 
 mountains, and by faith we may feel our- 
 selves citizens of an eternal and glorious 
 cosmogony of mutual help and coopera- 
 tion — advancing from lowly stages to ever 
 higher states of happy activity world with- 
 out end — and may catch in anticipation 
 
BABYLON 113 
 
 some glimpse of that *one far off divine 
 event to which the whole creation moves'. 
 
 "The whole controversy hinges, in one 
 sense, on a practical pivot, the efficacy of 
 prayer. Is prayer to hypothetical and 
 super-sensuous beings as senseless and use- 
 less as it is unscientific? Or does prayer 
 pierce through the husk and apparent 
 covering of the sensuous universe, and 
 reach something living, loving, and helpful 
 beyond? 
 
 "And in another sense the controversy 
 turns upon a question of fact. Do we live 
 in a universe permeated with Hfe and mind, 
 life and mind independent of matter and 
 unhmited in individual duration? Or is 
 this life Hmited in space to the surface of 
 planetary masses, and in time to the dura- 
 tion of the material envelope essential to 
 its manifestation? The answer is given in 
 one way by orthodox modern science; 
 and in another way by ReHgion of all 
 times." 
 
 Huxley in his famous Romanes Lecture, 
 though I suppose he remained in his chosen 
 agnosticism, yet argued for an ethical 
 system very different from anything sug- 
 
114 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 gested by rationalism; if the cosmic pro- 
 cess is to be thwarted by another, and if 
 as a fact human hfe has been ennobled by 
 such thwarting, it would seem that there 
 must be in the nature of man some deeps 
 which are not arrived at by any merely 
 mechanical evolution. 
 
 Nietzsche again, deliberately anti-Chris- 
 tian though he be, is equally emphatic in 
 condemnation of the present situation. 
 His system turns on the need for a new 
 N^ race incarnating a new ideal. His doctrine 
 of human nature, as sunk in darkness until 
 the superman comes to redeem it, is curi- 
 ously akin to Christianity. I think also 
 \^ that in his assertion of the worth of per- 
 sonality he is far less vitally opposed to 
 our faith than he is to that Eastern pessi- 
 mism, masquerading as altruism, for which 
 he partly mistook it. Though he does not 
 accept the Christian doctrine of the indi- 
 vidual, his attitude is nearer to it than the 
 rationalist scheme which he attacked; while 
 he has been called more than once funda- 
 mentally mystic. He is like Lucifer, son 
 of the morning, a spirit fallen from heaven; 
 and after all his eloquence, his superman is 
 
BABYLON 115 
 
 only a god from the machine, no redeemer 
 from above, but a new conquering aristoc- 
 racy, the "splendid blonde beast." Like 
 Hegel's, his philosophy comes to the Kaiser 
 at last. 
 
 If we take writers more popular, we wit- 
 ness the same phenomenon. Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw in Man and Superman preaches a 
 similar doctrine — that the world is very 
 evil, that it needs redemption, and that 
 somehow is to come out of eugenics. In 
 that large class of books of which Mr. 
 Wells' New Utopia is a type, and the novels 
 of Mr. John Galsworthy are an element, 
 we find very much the same features. The 
 dominant ideals of commerciaHsm are held 
 up to scorn and some kind of evangel is 
 proclaimed which is to free us from its 
 accumulated horrors. 
 
 The lyrical raptures of the Cobdenite 
 school are almost forgotten, except when 
 some stranded millionaire like Mr. Carnegie 
 declares that all is the best in the best of 
 possible worlds, and that in a very brief 
 space we shall reach perfection if things go 
 on as they are. Our world is fonder of 
 riches, perhaps, than ever it was, but I 
 
116 CXVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 think that it is ceasing to believe in its 
 idol. The danger is that it should cease to 
 have any belief at all. Wearied of its hope 
 of finding in material prosperity a satisfac- 
 tion for its insatiable desires, and robbed 
 through that hope of all spiritual ideals, it 
 may sink into a fatigued scepticism and 
 fall a prey to pessimism. This appears to 
 be discernible of many even now. It is 
 this process which needs to be arrested. 
 No order can endure of which the naturally 
 energetic elements are sceptical. Some 
 faith it must have or else it is doomed. 
 If the faith in worldly goods should go 
 and nothing take its place, ours will be 
 doomed, unless a spirit gives Hght from 
 beyond and help be found in the saving 
 remnant which have not bowed the knee 
 to Baal. 
 
 The crying need of the time is for some- 
 thing to shake men out of their compla- 
 cency. In the Hteral sense we need seers 
 \ — men who can see things as they are and 
 burn into men the facts of life in this twen- 
 tieth century. This work is actually being 
 done by a host of writers, many of them 
 non-Christian. It will be said doubtless. 
 
BABYLON 117 
 
 by the practical man of wealth, that how- 
 ever they differ, they are all alike in 
 being dreamers. Thank God for that. 
 For a world sunk in material satisfaction, 
 a society throttled with comfort, it is only 
 when the old men see visions and the 
 young men dream dreams that there is 
 much hope of deliverance. For that is the 
 point. Deliverance is what they all cry V 
 for. There is something wrong; as a man 
 of science (not a Christian) put it to me, 
 ^'this world has got appendicitis" 
 
 Religion is far from being the only 
 scheme of deliverance — our social schemes 
 are also that. Nor is the Christian the ^ 
 only religion of redemption; that is also 
 the note of Buddhism. But it is something 
 to have it recognised that it is redemption 
 that is needful, and not mere continuance; 
 for progress in the sense of development 
 of existing principles will not suflfice to 
 secure well-being. It is a change that is 
 needed, a revolution of the spirit; and if "^ 
 this once be reahzed, the strength of the 
 claims of the Christian Church is in a 
 fair way to be felt. Of the social reformer 
 we may ask, " Where are you likely to get 
 
118 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 the driving force to bring about those 
 tremendous changes unless you have a 
 religious faith, or something very Hke it? 
 Change the economic system of society 
 without somehow changing the passion and 
 the pride of man and you will but change 
 the ways in which the strong will exploit 
 the weak. Without some change of heart, 
 some fresh orientation of the spirit, how are 
 your great social changes to be effected 
 or effectual?" If, on the other hand, we 
 admit so much and look to some system 
 like Buddhism for deliverance, I think the 
 chances in its favour are very small, and 
 that, even were it purged of all local asso- 
 ciations. I do not think that the West will 
 ever accept such a system, which, though 
 it indeed promises redemption, promises 
 it as a dehverance from life, (personahty) 
 whereas the Christian redemption is a 
 deliverance from evil, from that canker 
 which impedes the upward spring of Ufe. 
 In our age, with all its unregulated ideals, 
 with its fear of materialism and pathetic 
 unrest, there is one craving in which there 
 is hope — the cry for Ufe, hfe, more life. 
 This is in various ways the secure and 
 
BABYLON 119 
 
 unassailable support of all those schemes 
 of reform which are rife among us. It 
 may mean the claim that even the humblest 
 shall share in the opportunities of living a 
 full and varied life; it may mean the cry 
 (not in itseK illegitimate) for full develop- 
 ment of individuahty; it may mean a cry 
 for something deeper, some ground on which 
 to rest, some home of the soul wherein 
 the spirit may spread its wings and slake 
 its thirst: so far as it does, (and at bottom 
 there is always something of this element 
 hidden) it can only drive men on to that 
 source of all Hfe. He came not only that 
 our joy might be full, but that men " might 
 have Hfe, and might have it more abun- 
 dantly." The need is for some scheme of 
 deUverance, some new hope. The choice 
 Ues between schemes Kmited to this world, 
 or schemes which give redemption at the 
 cost of personal existence, and the Chris- 
 tian scheme, which "preaches peace to 
 them that are far oflf and to them that are 
 nigh," because it worships One who is 
 not only the Light, but is also the Life 
 of men, and not only their Life, but also 
 their Saviour. 
 
no CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 It is the faith which accepts and trans- 
 forms pain, which admits and consecrates 
 freedom, which faces and conquers sin, 
 holding the truths of Hf e not in dialectic con- 
 sistency, but in practical harmony, which 
 alone, amid the wrecks of systems and the 
 profound disillusion of men, has any hope 
 or prospect of winning them to peace. 
 That faith of the Cross it is that alone can 
 satisfy, and it is, while akin to the other 
 faiths, more unlike them than like, and while 
 in moral exhortation not unlike the nobler 
 philosophies, at bottom something differ- 
 ent from any, something more splendid, 
 more difficult, more unfathomable, because 
 its essence and its ground are other-worldly, 
 its God One who is also man, and its 
 supreme act the execution of a criminal. 
 Something of this uniqueness I shall hope 
 to discuss in our next lecture. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 CALVARY OR THE CHALLENGE OF 
 THE CROSS 
 
 Kn van Eyck in the Adoration of the Lamb 
 has given to the world what is often said 
 to be its greatest painting. All of you 
 know either by sight or reproduction that 
 glory of colour and composition. No one, 
 however far removed from that faith which 
 alone made such a picture possible, but 
 is at once awed by its presentment of the 
 Victim slain from before the foundation 
 of the world, and its exaltation of that 
 sacramental chaHce in which the Blood is 
 made available for all ages and every con- 
 dition. For it is not the crowd of wor- 
 shippers in all their bravery of blue and 
 scarlet on which the eye rests, nor even the 
 far green distances with their castles, which 
 make the wonder of the picture, but the 
 figures in the centre, the altar with its 
 
 121 
 
122 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 image of a Lamb and the chalice flowing 
 blood. There summed up in an image at 
 once bold and compelling, is the whole 
 notion of Evangelical CathoHc Christianity, 
 stretching right through history, binding 
 together the ages in a unity of adoring love. 
 Saints and monks, emperors, kings, popes 
 and bishops and cardinals, and all the pro- 
 cession of knights and virgins uniting in one 
 supreme act of worship gaze upon the Lamb; 
 so that as one looks, one almost hears the 
 words: "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain 
 to receive power and riches and wisdom and 
 strength and honour and glory and bless- 
 ing. And every creature which is in heaven, 
 and on the earth and under the earth, and 
 such as are in the sea, and all that are in 
 them, heard I saying. Blessing and honour 
 and glory and power be unto Him that 
 sitteth upon the throne and unto the 
 Lamb for ever and ever." 
 
 That painting represents, with enduring 
 beauty, acts which are repeated in every 
 church and chapel of Christendom. For 
 whether a man hold high or low views of 
 the Sacrament of the Altar, all who hold 
 to historic Christianity would be at one 
 
CALVARY 123 
 
 in admitting that in the act of communion 
 they had hold of God. I take the Eucharist 
 as a starting-point, since this act, even by 
 the admission of our adversaries, is treated 
 as the centre of the Christian cult, and be- 
 cause it takes to its highest point the idea 
 of worship; and in such a way that it can- 
 not be compared with some purely inward 
 process like meditation, which may be said 
 to have some efficacy, even though there 
 were no outside forces to pray to, no voice 
 nor any that answered. For what does the 
 Eucharist involve? Even the simplest per- 
 son who receives it with faith implies cer- 
 tain behefs by his act. His presence asserts 
 this at least: that God, the ultimate reality, 
 however much more than personal, is yet 
 so far personal that He can enter into inti- 
 macy with men; that man with his limited 
 freedom has used it wrongly and is through 
 that false independence in a state of misery, 
 from which he can not deliver himself; 
 that such deliverance has, however, taken 
 place by the very act of God, who has 
 made the most marvellous exercise of His 
 omnipotence by "emptying Himself and 
 taking the form of a servant" and dying 
 
124 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 as a common criminal; that death, how- 
 ever, was not the end, but the beginning, 
 for it was succeeded by a rising again and 
 a continued life in the bosom of the Father, 
 that is in union with the sacred heart of all 
 reahty; and that hfe communicates itself to 
 us through prayer and the sacramental gift. 
 It is fair to add that among those who 
 hold to Evangelical historic Christianity 
 the pure Zwinglians attach no value to the 
 sacramental gift, but even they would ad- 
 mit it to be the culmination of prayer and 
 the most distinctively Christian service. 
 
 What I want here to emphasize is the 
 astonishing audacity of these assumptions. 
 They are irreconcilable not only with 
 materialism, but with every non-miraculous 
 theory of religion. They involve a view 
 alike of this world and the other quite 
 alien from the closed circle contemplated 
 by the materialist philosopher, or even 
 the vague harmony of the Pantheistic 
 monist. They assert the supernatural 
 character of the events which led to the 
 founding of the Church, and the immor- 
 tality of the individual spirit. They are 
 not to be reconciled with any form of 
 
CALVARY 125 
 
 Pantheism, though they of course admit 
 and to some extent involve a doctrine of 
 Divine Immanence. All Christians believe 
 in Pantheism — "for in Him we live and 
 move and have our being." They are 
 opposed, Hke the facts of our personal life, 
 to the notion that the course of things is 
 one of purely inevitable sequences; and 
 as against the modern tendency to deify 
 the undoubted fact of the continuity of life 
 and ignore the equally undoubted fact of 
 the uniqueness of single moments and the 
 creative activity of the self, they assert 
 the catastrophic, absolute newness of events 
 and individuals and the value of each man's 
 soul not as a means but as an end — some- 
 thing for itself. They do not, indeed, 
 assert man's entire independence. The 
 whole notion of the fall and redemption 
 means that our freedom, though real, is 
 partial and a goal toward which we strive. 
 
 "Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." 
 
 But they assert such independence as 
 is involved in the self-direction of our 
 acts and the power to ignore God if we 
 will. Neither pure socialism nor abso- 
 
N 
 
 126 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 lute individualism finds warrant in the 
 Gospel. * 
 
 That appeals, indeed, to each man as such 
 and assures him of his eternal worth. He 
 is worth the life and death of Jesus Christ. 
 But again it does not appeal to man as a 
 mere unrelated unit, but as a member of 
 society. In this it is true not only to the 
 earliest, but also to the very latest social 
 and political reflection, as it is also to the 
 daily hfe of man in family, in school or 
 college, in club or union, in state or nation; 
 only it offers him his life in that one so- 
 ciety, whose raison d'etre hes in the other 
 world. 
 
 That is the point — the other-worldly 
 nature of the Christian claim. To return 
 to our symbol, the Eucharist involves that 
 claim in a form at once social and indi- 
 vidual and so startling and direct, as to 
 leave no doubt of the fact. Consequently 
 it is a stumbling block to many, who other- 
 wise accept that view of the Faith I am 
 putting forward. Indeed the sacramental 
 idea has been so closely bound up with 
 the life of the Church that it seems un- 
 reasonable to suppose that you can cut 
 
CALVARY 127 
 
 this out while preserving all the other super- 
 natural elements. As a fact, we see more 
 and more that along with this vanish all the 
 others, in course of time. In this, however, 
 the arresting challenge of the Sacraments 
 and the claim that therein God gives Him- 
 self to man, there is but an extension of 
 what is involved in every prayer to God 
 through the name of Jesus. For it is on 
 the uniqueness of Jesus that all depends. 
 Church and Sacraments exist only as the 
 expression of that hfe here, the extensions 
 of the Incarnation as they have been called. 
 It is this, the Cross of Christ, which is so 
 startling, "madness to the Greeks, to the 
 Jews offensive," and always will be. This 
 faith it is which defies those attempts, which 
 were they not pathetic would be ridiculous, 
 to assimilate the Christian "way" to any 
 of these humanist codes of morals or social 
 ethics or mere theism, which bear to it a 
 superficial resemblance. Let us avoid the- 
 ological language; but I think we can say 
 that so far as creed goes, a man is a Chris- 
 tian or a non-Christian so far as he can 
 enter into the spirit of the hymn "When I 
 survey the wondrous Cross." What a gulf 
 
128 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 that makes, not of piety, but of outlook, 
 between the two. 
 
 The non-Christian may be the more 
 self-devoted, kinder, stronger, even the 
 more religious of the two; very likely he 
 has fewer skeletons in his cupboards, fewer 
 sins that are shames to cover up than I 
 have. Yet he is different, with a different 
 ideal of humihty. He would probably 
 despise me for mine. I believe, as the 
 non-Christian does not, that my life is a 
 dialogue, lived in intimacy with One who 
 lived as man and died to restore the 
 peace broken by my act and deed. I 
 believe, and he does not, that in Jesus I 
 have a new Hfe, and that the centre of that 
 life is not here. Those words "Ye are dead 
 and your hfe is hid with Christ in God" 
 are words of tremendous import and must 
 at least imply that the Christian as a son 
 of the Resurrection contemplates life from 
 a standpoint beyond, and finds his motive 
 force there. He is one, as it were, who has 
 come back, but only for a little while; the 
 Christian's life is a sharing of the great 
 forty days. Moreover, that life I believe 
 to be nourished by a gift as real, though 
 
CALVARY 129 
 
 spiritual, as the physical bread which sup- 
 ports my animal life, and this gift implies 
 the frequent irruptions of the Divine into 
 this world. Also, and perhaps this point 
 is the most shining, this Ufe, though not 
 to be shunned or despised, is but an epi- 
 sode in a career which knows no end to its 
 adventures 
 
 "With ever a new surprise 
 And clouds eternally new." 
 
 Now such beUefs create an almost unbridge- 
 able chasm between the Christian and other 
 men. As S. Paul said, "If Christ be not 
 risen, we are of all men most miserable." 
 If Jesus be no Saviour, and the other world 
 no home, then we labour under the most 
 lamentable of all delusions. So far as we 
 ^re really trying to live this Christian hfe, 
 we are directing all our actions on the 
 ghastliest of shams. We have staked all 
 for nothing — not even an off-chance. How 
 it is that our faith appears aught but sheer 
 lunacy to those who hold it not, I cannot 
 for the life of me imagine. I suppose it 
 is due to our positive faith being weak 
 and our actual worldliness so strong. There 
 is indeed no reason why Christians and 
 
 10 
 
130 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS BOADS 
 
 others should not unite for many things 
 which have to be done. In this world we 
 have to eat and drink and dress, whatever 
 comes after. But that men should treat 
 the distinction as unimportant or indif- 
 ferent, or still worse, that the Christian 
 should do so, and should suppose he can 
 reduce within narrow limits the difference 
 between himself and, say, a high-minded 
 idealist, is only to be explained by our 
 practical refusal to live as we pray. All 
 this is less true of those who believe in a 
 world of individual immortality. But as 
 a matter of fact, that belief is held so 
 little outside the Christian Church and 
 unguaranteed by the Resurrection, that we 
 need not seriously consider it. Despite 
 the prevalence of certain habits, we are no 
 longer living in the eighteenth century. 
 
 Let us consider two tempers of mind 
 both found alike among Christians and 
 non-Christians; the one I will call the 
 world-accepting and the other the world- 
 renouncing temper. We shall see that 
 they differ toto coelo according as they are 
 held by a Christian or by an unbeliever; 
 while their resemblance is superficial. Upon 
 
CALVARY 131 
 
 every act and every art of human life, upon 
 its amusements, its purposes and all its 
 interests, the other-worldly reference sets 
 its stamp. If ''Light be the only subject 
 of a picture," then the light that shines 
 from Calvary makes a new picture, and 
 though every outward object and every 
 isolated act of two men would be the same, 
 yet the total picture would differ, as much 
 as a landscape of lake and mountain seen 
 in the rose of a July dawn or the grey chill 
 of a November fog. Like S. Bernard, who, 
 passing the Lake of Geneva, did not notice 
 the water or the sky, so deeply was he 
 absorbed, the other-worldly person may 
 regard the glory of seas and skies, the 
 harmonies of home, and all its interests 
 as so many hindrances — things which get 
 in his way, keeping back the day when he 
 shall pierce behind the veil. To such an 
 one life seems but a waiting time till he 
 sees God face to face and is "satisfied." 
 As S. Paul put it, "having a desire to 
 depart and be with Christ, which is far 
 better." Life here in such a view is a yis 
 alter y a duty to be done, and delight comes 
 only by-and-bye. The mystics speak like 
 
132 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 this, or many of them. It is clear that 
 what is said represents a real experience, 
 that they feel that the supreme cross of all 
 is life on earth, the sense of separation. 
 This hfe they fill with toil and sacrifice, 
 and the tortures of the martyrs are not to 
 be compared with the fire of the longing 
 that consumes them, the sense that "here 
 they have no continuing city." As they 
 wander in life's ways, to them it is all one 
 whether the path is smooth or rough; they 
 hardly feel the cutting stones, driven by 
 that irresistible desire within, the nostalgia 
 of the infinite. I am not saying that this 
 temper is a right one or that there is not a 
 higher stage, that set down by Dante in 
 the words 
 
 "In la sua volontade e nostra pace" 
 
 where the soul is so deeply possessed by 
 God that life or death is indifferent, and 
 there where it is at any moment is the 
 place nearest Him; just as in the perfect 
 Jesuit "La sancta obbedienza fa d'ogni 
 luogo Paradiso." 
 
 As a fact, however, the world-renouncing 
 temper exists. It may lead to a morbid 
 
CALVARY 133 
 
 contempt of life or a cloistral detachment 
 from human activity. But that it forms 
 one element in the experience of many 
 Christians would appear evident from the 
 number and popularity of the hymns, dat- 
 ing from all ages, which express it. We 
 may decry these other-worldly aims, yet 
 there must be some instinct, deep seated in 
 human nature, which could unite men of 
 such varying ecclesiastical affinity as the 
 author of " O Quanta Quaha" of the 
 twelfth century, or the "Urbs Beata " of the 
 thirteenth, ** Jerusalem my happy home" 
 of the sixteenth, or "I'm but a stranger 
 here" of the nineteenth. Doubtless many 
 people enjoy singing them who are very far 
 from feeling "hke poor exiles on Babylon's 
 strand" and would be no fonder of their 
 heavenly than they are of their earthly 
 home, except for singing purposes; but 
 there must be many to whom they appeal 
 or they would not continue to be sung. 
 
 Now let us consider the opposite stand- 
 point, the world-embracing temper, as seen 
 by a Christian. Just because of its other- 
 worldly reference, this life is seen as having 
 not less but more value. Our life now 
 
134 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 and here is to us the revelation of the 
 Eternal. Here in a world of wonder and 
 ceaseless change we are set, and we are to 
 make the most of it all, like boys of school- 
 days. Just as the onward reference of 
 youth, so far from hindering rather en- 
 hances the zest and meaning of life during 
 training (unless by a calculating meanness 
 we ruin the present), so with the Christian 
 hope, for it shews us every act as having 
 an enduring as well as a transient worth. 
 The hues of the hills and the seas, every 
 scene or tone of beauty, is no butterfly 
 delight, but is a sacrament of the Love 
 behind. Art and all embodiments of im- 
 agery are not less but more valuable because 
 they are not in themselves perfect, but hints 
 and glimpses of the " altogether lovely." 
 This is the true difference between romantic 
 and classical art, illustrated by "Siat be- 
 tween Gothic and Renaissance buildings, 
 of which the former has been called ** ap- 
 parent pictures of unapparent realities" 
 and the latter "simple representation." 
 The former is never quite so perfect and 
 rounded, because it is shot through with 
 hues of the eternal. It is never absolutely 
 
CALVARY 135 
 
 itself, because its meaning is to be a symbol. 
 It is great more by what it suggests than by 
 what it states, and its profoundest beauty 
 leaves the spirit still athirst. It embodies, 
 whether in buildings or in verse or in 
 painting, the mystery of all creation; and 
 however irreligious the artist, the work 
 reminds us that the true home of the spirit 
 is "the land that is very far off," and yet 
 for that very reason can sound in echoes 
 on earth, in the dying fall of a melody, in 
 the haunting inscrutable beauty of a lyric, 
 or in some dream in stone, which makes 
 the spirit at once satisfied and overflowing, 
 so that the heart all but bursts from a joy 
 that is yet only the other side of pain. "I 
 saw thee and I sought for thee; I saw thee 
 and I wanted thee," says the mystic; and 
 that might be taken as the motto of all 
 the noblest art in every age, greatest always 
 in imperfection, conquering by failure; 
 and hke the symbol of it all, the Cross 
 shining splendid out of the very stuff of 
 misery. But this world-embracing temper 
 does not stop here. It goes through all 
 things. The Christian may find in every 
 wholesome human relation not only more 
 
136 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 delight but deeper meaning than anyone 
 else. Earthly fatherhood is a nobler thing, 
 because it is a shadow of the Divine, and 
 human love glows more brightly when seen 
 as a symbol of the joy that burns at the 
 heart of things. It is not to the mere 
 butterfly, but to the immortal spirit that 
 the treasure house, even of this world, is 
 open. He is a child in the stage of life, 
 playing about and learning till he reach 
 maturity. To him belongs the universe, 
 past and present and to come, in a way 
 that it cannot do to "the poor pensioner 
 on the bounty of an hour." If we are 
 not immortal, we may be possessed by 
 the world, we cannot possess it; we are 
 strangers, it is our enemy; we take a little 
 and then are gone. If we are to go on, we 
 can appropriate it, make it our own, so that 
 its beauty and its sorrow, all its mystery 
 and its splendid acts, become part of us 
 and shine for ever in a spirit that lives with 
 God. Even worldliness demands other- 
 worldliness to justify it. Only the im- 
 mortals have a right to feel at home in this 
 world. We are like a boy at school or 
 college who shares all his life, past, present. 
 
CALVARY 1S7 
 
 and to come, and carries it on in the whole 
 
 course of his career; we are to carry out 
 
 the treasures of the spirit, for they are 
 
 part of us; and so of us, and us alone, is it 
 
 true, as S. Paul said, "All things are yours, 
 
 whether Paul or ApoUos, or life or death, 
 
 or things present or things to come — 
 
 all are yours and ye are Christ's and 
 
 Christ is God's." 
 
 1 
 
 We have thus considered the contrasted 
 tempers, the Puritan and the Sacramental, 
 as exhibited among Christians; let us 
 compare them with the similar condition, 
 as seen in others. Compare the world- 
 renouncing attitude of some Christians 
 w ith that of the Buddhists, or the Western 
 pessimist who preaches a doctrine sub- 
 stantially the same and treats individuality 
 as evil. Such a Christian as the "exile 
 on Babylon's strand" is, it is true, the 
 stranger who laments "that earth is a 
 desert drear" and looks to "heaven as his 
 home." But he does all this not because 
 he wants less, but because he wants more 
 life, including his own. It is the imper- 
 fection of the world taken even at its best 
 
138 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 that drives him to seek a "better country." 
 He is Hke a child, who cannot play the 
 games which commonly delight him, be- 
 cause he is consumed with excitement over 
 the feast to which he is going. The good 
 has almost ceased to be a good because 
 he knows there is something better in a 
 short time; just as a thirsty man may 
 refuse lemonade, if he has been told that 
 champagne is on the way. 
 
 The pessimist on the other hand declares 
 life to be an evil quand meme and there 
 can be no deliverance till it be extinguished. 
 Hartmann and his followers can treat con- 
 sciousness as an evil and look to the day 
 when the universe, weary of its initial 
 error, will swallow its tail — and all be 
 done. The Christian says that life is a 
 good thing, but has been marred by sin; 
 and suffers also from the growing pains of 
 youth. The one is like the new boy dream- 
 ing of the day when he will bowl for the 
 eleven, and sustaining himself by the dream 
 when things are very unlike it. The other 
 is the type which at the first onset of diffi- 
 culty writes home and begs to be removed. 
 Both these look forward to death; the one 
 
CALVARY 139 
 
 because he thinks it "closes all," the other 
 because he knows it does not. The fault 
 of the one is impatience, petulance, the 
 refusal of the sensitive artist to produce 
 because he can never achieve his ideal; 
 he is the man who loses all interest in his 
 work as soon as he has planned his holiday. 
 The other believes that things in them- 
 selves are hopeless and the one goal anni- 
 hilation. If either went to the practical 
 extreme, the Christian would commit sui- 
 cide from an unbalanced hope, from a 
 desire to see the other side at once; the 
 non-Christian would do so from an un- 
 reheved despair, in order to be rid of an 
 existence found intolerable. Christian pessi- 
 mism is a pessimism secundum quid and 
 treats this world as a purgatory. True 
 pessimism is pessimism simpliciter and 
 treats personal existence as hell. 
 
 The same is true of the practical maxims 
 that attach to the two types, the Christian 
 and the non-Christian. No greater error 
 has been made than that which confounds 
 the Christian and the non-Christian doc- 
 trine of self-sacrifice. Modern altruism 
 teaches what is really a denial of individu- 
 
140 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 ality and tries to destroy "the will to live" 
 by substituting "the will to love." The 
 ^ Gospel declares that a man must die to 
 live, but it neither states nor implies the 
 destruction of the self. All false asceticism 
 finds its root in the non-Christian view of 
 self-sacrifice; all true asceticism in the 
 Christian. For it is the ground truth of 
 all education; it is the earHest lesson of 
 the schoolboy that pain must not only be 
 faced, but transmuted through courage 
 into joy and strength. It is the result of 
 the truth that self can only find itself in 
 love, and this involves surrender, giving, 
 cost. This, however, does not mean that 
 personality is annihilated, or that the 
 individual is to be lost in a higher unity. 
 On the contrary love, even in its most 
 \ sacrificial forms, exalts and develops indi- 
 viduality and strengthens the will. One 
 argument for immortality is the difficulty 
 of believing that certain characters aflame 
 with love can be as though they never were. 
 But it is not hard to hold such a creed about 
 a very selfish man. 
 
 I think that some of the animus displayed 
 by Nietzsche against Christian ethics was 
 
CALVARY 141 
 
 due to an error of this sort. He mistook 
 Schopenhauer's doctrine of self-annihilation 
 for Christian sacrifice; in a word he con- 
 fused pessimistic with educational asceti- 
 cism, and most of his attack is vitiated by 
 this confusion. On the other hand it must 
 be allowed that Christians of all schools 
 have used and do use language about self- 
 sacrifice which leads to misconception. 
 Some apparently believe in a notion of 
 sacrifice which teaches not the develop- 
 ment of personality through self-giving, 
 but its annihilation; and this really treats 
 individuahty as an evil. That at least 
 is the logical import of their words, and it 
 has led to disastrous consequences, harmful 
 not only to health, but to morals. I think 
 it is the fundamental error of the Jesuit 
 system, for it is obvious that if complete 
 sacrifice is demanded, the conscience must 
 go too.i 
 
 Let us take now the counter tendency, 
 the world-accepting, for that also exists 
 on a non-Christian no less than on a Chris- 
 tian foundation. Yet how different! By 
 the Christian the life is accepted as God's 
 
142 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 will for him, a state of probation. This 
 world is in all its details a sacrament, the 
 outward and visible sign of an inward and 
 spiritual grace. The beauty of nature and 
 art, the acts of human work and play, 
 friendship and heroism and forgiveness, 
 all are noble, because they point beyond 
 and are caught up in the life of a spirit that 
 passes from earthly society to heavenly. 
 As I said just now, they are worthy, but 
 relatively and provisionally worthy, rather 
 because of what they hint than of what 
 they say. They are suggestions of eternity 
 in statements of time. To the non-Chris- 
 tian, however, they are all in all. He, to 
 whom no further life is promised, may 
 resolve to make the most of what there is, 
 just because he has nothing more. He 
 may accept the world as a place wherein 
 to be as happy as he may and echo the 
 Carpe diem philosophy of Horace and many 
 another. 
 
 "Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, 
 Before ye too into the dust descend; 
 
 Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie 
 Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and — sans end!" 
 
CALVARY 143 
 
 The pessimism which underhes the voluptu- 
 aries' philosophy patent in Omar is yet 
 more shining in the well known epilogue 
 of Walter Pater to the Renaissance, 
 "Every moment some form grows perfect 
 in hand or face; some tone on the hills 
 or the sea is choicer than the rest; some 
 mood of passion or insight or intellectual 
 excitement is irresistibly real and attrac- 
 tive for us, — for that moment only. Not 
 the fruit of experience, but experience 
 itseK, is the end. A counted number of 
 pulses only is given to us of a variegated 
 dramatic Hfe. How may we see in them 
 all that is to be seen in them by the finest 
 senses? How shall we pass most quickly 
 from point to point, and be present always 
 at the focus where the greatest number of 
 vital forces unite in their purest energy? . .. 
 "While all melts under our feet, we may 
 well catch at any exquisite passion, or any 
 contribution to knowledge that seems by 
 a hfted horizon to set the spirit free for 
 a moment, or any stirring of the senses, 
 strange dyes, strange colours, and curious 
 odours, or work of the artist's hands, or 
 the face of one's friend. Not to discrimin- 
 
144 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 ate every moment some passionate attitude 
 in those about us and in the brilliancy of 
 their gifts some tragic dividing of forces 
 on their ways is, on this short day of 
 frost and sun to sleep before evening. . . . 
 
 "We are all condamnes as Victor Hugo 
 says, we are all under sentence of death, 
 but with a sort of indefinite reprieve — 
 les hommes sont tout condamnes a mort mais 
 avec des sursis indefinis — we have an 
 interval and then our place knows us no 
 more. Some spend this interval in listless- 
 ness, some in high passions, the wisest, at 
 least among the children of this world, 
 in art and song. For our one chance lies 
 in expanding that interval, in getting as 
 many pulsations as possible into the given 
 time." 
 
 True, the world-accepting temper is not 
 tied to this Epicurean form. It may take 
 on the austere tone of the Stoics or their 
 modern imitators, the attitude familiar 
 to most of us in Matthew Arnold's poems. 
 Or again its votary may adopt the Positivist 
 humanitarian attitude, a position curiously 
 like one side of Christian ethics in the 
 enthusiasm for humanity and sense of 
 
CALVARY 145 
 
 social ties, and also in some practical views, 
 such as those on marriage. At bottom, 
 however, it is quite different, and though 
 ennobled by high and earnest endeavour, 
 is without that vein of hope and gaiety 
 which clings to the Christian. With the 
 burdens of the human race it has sympathy 
 and enters into its toils and its sorrows, 
 but this burden is to it a burden and nothing 
 more. It has no Heavenly Father to trust 
 to, and when disinterested must spend 
 itself in a fever of activity in order to effect 
 its purposes. It can never rest, for it has 
 only itself to trust to. 
 
 The truth is this. The doctrine of a 
 world beyond, in which we ourselves shall 
 have part, may be looked at in various ways 
 and colours itself, according to our tempera- 
 ment; yet in any case it changes all our 
 values. Only the most superficial resem- 
 blance is left between those who are Chris- 
 tians and those who are not. Now at 
 last are men coming to see this. They 
 reaUze that whether the supernatural theory 
 of the origin and nature of Church life be 
 true or false, it is terrific, and that in this 
 11 
 
146 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 respect there can be little doubt as to the 
 belief of the earliest of Christians or the 
 consciousness of their Master. We may 
 indeed have to allow a good deal more for 
 the way in which the doctrine was developed 
 out of its seed, but of the supernatural, 
 other-worldly claims of Jesus of Nazareth 
 there can be no question. Indeed there 
 never need have been, but for a small 
 circle of pedants, who were anxious to 
 retain the name and prestige of Christian, 
 while rejecting every element that gave the 
 Faith its power. All they held was a mere 
 morality, but they wanted to dignify it 
 with the name of religion. They desired 
 the historic and traditional charm of the 
 Christian Church, while repudiating every 
 element which made that charm possible. 
 Now, however, this school is breaking up 
 under the pressure of mutual criticism, and 
 the issue is daily clearer between those who 
 accept Jesus Christ with His supernatural 
 claim and those who, since they are unable 
 to credit the claim, repudiate His leader- 
 ship. The half-way house of German liber- 
 alism is built on sands; the storm of the 
 apocalyptic problem is shaking it in pieces. 
 
CALVARY 147 
 
 To many, of course, this recognition makes 
 belief harder; for they cannot delude 
 themselves any longer into imagining they 
 are Christians, when they are nothing of 
 the sort. 
 
 Dr. Schweitzer, in a memorable phrase, 
 has declared that if Jesus Christ came into 
 our modern world. He would come as a 
 stranger; that our characteristic categories 
 hold no place for Him; that the funda- 
 mentally other-worldly claim, the apoca- 
 lyptic vision of Jesus is opposed to the 
 presuppositions of the ordinary educated 
 man, formed as they are under the influence 
 of naturaUsm. I beheve that Dr. Schweitzer 
 is right; that if Jesus came once more as an 
 individual He would come not to bring 
 peace but a sword, and that many who 
 for sentimental reasons cling to His name 
 would turn and cry "Crucify Him." I 
 believe also that He is doing this here and 
 now, through His body the Church, except 
 where she is false to her mission; and that 
 there is an irreconcilable conflict, not indeed 
 between science and religion, but between 
 scientific fatahsm and the postulates of the 
 Christian Faith. This conflict it is idle 
 
148 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 to ignore. It meets us at every stage and 
 in every form. Idler yet is the attempt by 
 the promoters of "reduced Christianity" 
 to transform the "great mystery of godH- 
 ness" into a decorated natural philosophy 
 or a sentimental altruism. For the essence 
 of the Faith is to be spiritual, personal, 
 supernatural, and it may not be reconciled 
 with any rationalistically designed scheme 
 of the universe. Yet it is congruous with 
 Hfe as it is lived daily in this world; with 
 the dreams and "obstinate questions" of 
 the child; with the "long long thoughts" 
 of the youth; with the passion and adven- 
 ture of the man, and with all the incurably 
 social instincts of the race. 
 
 So far as I have understood him. 
 Dr. Schweitzer himself is convinced of the 
 adequacy of our modern categories and 
 thinks them a fit criterion whereby to 
 judge the Saviour of the world. Having 
 shewn that the Jesus of the Gospels is not 
 the Christ of modern Protestantism, and 
 descanted on His supernatural apocalyptic 
 claim, he turns away, treating Him as 
 mere man with a turn for vision. That, 
 at any rate, is one alternative (whether or 
 
CALVARY 149 
 
 no it is that adopted by Dr. Schweitzer). 
 You may believe that the apocalyptic Jesus 
 is nearer to the truth of history than any 
 other, and on that very ground you may 
 be unable to credit His claims, and are 
 therefore driven to decline all connection 
 with historical Christianity. George Tyrrell 
 has shewn how the apocalyptic theory 
 leads straight on to a transcendent view 
 of Jesus, and the situation has been well 
 summed up by a Cambridge scholar. 
 
 "Once more we are driven to ask, Who 
 is this mysterious Person of the irrecon- 
 cilable contrasts, who had not where to 
 lay His Head, and who claimed all power 
 in Heaven and earth? Who, we are told, 
 belonged so completely to His own age 
 that he is a stranger and enigma to our 
 time, and yet men think of Him, talk of 
 Him, worship Him, and find their truest 
 Ufe in following Him? Who Hved on earth, 
 they tell us, the hfe of a deluded visionary, 
 finding out His mistakes on a felon's cross, 
 and yet, the same writer tells us, * a mighty 
 spiritual force streams forth from Him 
 and flows through our time also'? Who, 
 as the same author goes on to declare, 
 
150 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 *in the light of historical inquiry passes 
 our time and returns to His own'? And 
 yet the champion of this new attempt to 
 explain the mystery of His personality 
 has given up his life of teaching and study 
 at Strasburg to be trained as a medical 
 missionary for work on the Congo, and has 
 now been accepted by the French Mis- 
 sionary Society for that purpose, and is, 
 I believe, soon to go out, to fight, as he 
 puts it, *for the lordship and rule of Jesus 
 over this world.' Whatever judgment we 
 may pass on Dr. Schweitzer's book and 
 theories, let us make up our minds in the 
 hght of these facts. Once more he has 
 forced upon us, by what he has written 
 and by what he wants to do, the question 
 of the Jerusalem crowd. Who is this.^^ We 
 may learn part of the answer to the question 
 from the closing words of his book. 'Jesus 
 comes to us as One unknown, without a 
 name, as of old by the lakeside He came 
 to those who knew Him not; He speaks 
 to us the same words, "Follow Me," and 
 sets us the tasks which He has to fulfil for 
 our time. He commands. And to those 
 who obey Him, whether they be wise or 
 
CALVARY 151 
 
 simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, 
 the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall 
 pass through in His fellowship, and as an 
 ineffable mystery they shall learn in their 
 own experience who He is.' " 
 
 A movement somewhat similar is repre- 
 sented by men such as Professor Drews, 
 and in a less degree Professor Jensen, 
 abroad, and less important folk in England, 
 like Mr. J. M. Robertson and Mr. Roberts, 
 and in this country by Professor W. B. 
 Smith. These men ^ have all convinced 
 themselves a priori of the impossibihty 
 of any supernatural events. At the same 
 time they reject the "Liberal" view that 
 the miraculous and transcendental elements 
 in the story are of a later creation, and 
 that the figure of Jesus as a pure and dis- 
 interested social reformer can be disengaged 
 from this supernatural trapping and made 
 a mark, if not for faith, at least for admira- 
 tion. Such men see plainly that this is 
 impossible; the Gospel narratives, the 
 Epistles of S. Paul, which reflect the 
 earliest personal experience, the whole at- 
 mosphere of the early Church as displayed 
 
152 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 in the New Testament and in our earliest 
 independent knowledge, are saturated with 
 the miraculous. The supernatural is so 
 much an integral part of the picture that 
 it is vain to cut out all these elements as 
 unhistorical and treat what is left, after 
 this gigantic subtraction, as the fact. The 
 whole of the narratives must go by the 
 board if we may not believe in the irruption 
 of the Divine into this world at a definite 
 time. Consequently the whole evidence 
 does go by the board. They are devoting 
 their energies with much ingenuity to shew 
 that the whole story of Jesus, however 
 attenuated, has no warrant in fact; that 
 the person is simply the eponymous hero 
 of a cult which has gathered round the 
 Eucharistic meal. A mild expression of 
 this tendency can be seen in the words of 
 the Rev. Dr. Cheyne. 
 
 "That the God-man, whose cult in cer- 
 tain Jewish circles was probably pre-Chris- 
 tian was called by a name which underlies 
 Joshua, has become to me, on grounds of 
 my own, very possible, and it is to me 
 much more than merely possible that Jesus 
 of Nazareth was not betrayed or surren- 
 
CALVARY 15S 
 
 dered to the Jewish authorities, whether 
 by Judas or by anyone else. The 'Twelve 
 Apostles' too are to me (and I should 
 think to many critics) as unhistorical as 
 the seventy disciples." ^ 
 
 Such speculations may seem sufficiently 
 absurd. But these words of ex-Canon 
 Cheyne shew that they are not to be 
 ignored by the most eminent critics, and 
 that the advanced school of learned criti- 
 cism has much affinity with such views. 
 It is very natural. Once grant the postu- 
 lates on which they rest — and most of 
 the German "Liberals" do grant these 
 postulates — and the conclusions of Drews 
 are far less absurd than the attempt of the 
 normal Teutonic savant to reduce the hfe 
 of Jesus and the experience of the Church 
 to the level of the ordinary events of their 
 own machine-governed lives. All these peo- 
 ple seem destitute of one sense; they are 
 like the senior wrangler who asked what 
 * Paradise Lost' was written to prove. 
 
 The problem offered by the apocalyptic 
 school, led by Dr. Schweitzer, and by the 
 mythological school as led by men like 
 Professor Drews, has not been faced by 
 
154 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 the advocates of the commonplace and 
 Phihstine projection of the Gospel figure 
 fashionable in circles of soi-disant enlight- 
 enment and set forth in unadorned sterility 
 by the Dean of Divinity at Magdalen 
 College, Oxford. The point is not whether 
 such views are true — they are obviously 
 nonsense — but whether they are not the 
 logical outcome of these same preposses- 
 sions, which cause the excision of all 
 the wonderful features from the figure 
 of Christ and the history of the Church. 
 *' Reduced Christianity," as it is called, 
 is but a half-way house. You cannot rest 
 in it, but must move either backward or 
 forward. Either you must surrender any- 
 thing beyond the merest humanitarian 
 notion of our Lord; in which case you will 
 not improbably be driven further and 
 eventually, like the protagonist in the 
 "Jesus as Christ" controversy, give up all 
 belief even in His historicity; or at any 
 rate you will find it more and more impos- 
 sible to maintain any real belief in His 
 uniqueness. 
 
 Dr. Harnack, for instance, is for cutting 
 away most of the transcendent elements, 
 
CALVARY 155 
 
 while still maintaining His unique relation 
 to the Father — a doctrine which really 
 surrenders the notion of history as a mere 
 continuing and makes miracles possible. 
 It admits a "creative evolution." It is 
 doubtful whether this view can be sustained. 
 The whole movement of the Christian 
 Church may be a delusion, and then we 
 are all in the dark, except that the dark- 
 ness has been made visible by the pathetic 
 splendour of Christianity. For, as men 
 are coming to see, the Liberal Protestant 
 view of our Lord really is a justification 
 of the Jewish people, who crucified Him 
 for His claims; and it is to that Judaistic 
 theism that those must return who are 
 so deeply wedded to the modern super- 
 stitions of law and continuity that the 
 exceptional, the unique, the really new 
 event or person is to them inconceivable. 
 If on the other hand you accept the lordship 
 of Jesus as a mysterious being, with some- 
 thing in Him more than human, you will 
 be carried, however reluctantly, to the 
 Christ of the Creeds and the New Testa- 
 ment and the whole supernatural faith in 
 a Church dispensing gifts of God's grace 
 
156 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 and guided by a power not of this world. 
 This also you will do, unless you are so 
 deeply convinced of what can not happen 
 that you remain unmoved by the accumu- 
 lated weight of evidence, historic, social, 
 personal, which points to a transcendental 
 interpretation of these strange facts in the 
 world's experience. 
 
 What I want to emphasize is, that 
 here is the dividing Une, and we must 
 make our choice. Christianity may be true 
 or false, but it makes claims subversive of 
 all the rationalist projections of life. It 
 rests on presuppositions which cannot by 
 any ingenuity be reconciled with any view 
 which denies the miraculous, the unique, 
 the individual. Its whole meaning comes 
 from a faith in a life of spirits behind the 
 veil. It cannot without hopeless error be 
 confused with those systems which deny 
 such a life or treat it as impersonal. You 
 cannot treat existence as a closed circle, 
 with every part predetermined, and at the 
 same time assert the reality of freedom and 
 the guilt of sin. You cannot place the same 
 value, as others do, upon human life on 
 earth, if you hold that life to be but an 
 
CALVARY 157 
 
 episode in a career which passes far beyond 
 earth. This world is a different place 
 according as it be viewed from the Christian 
 or the non-Christian standpoint, and no 
 ethical or personal sympathy can bridge 
 the gulf. 
 
 A very cursory perusal of the New Testa- 
 ment ought soon to convince even the most 
 pronounced Liberal that, even allowing 
 for differences of date and expression, the 
 experience therein recorded is something 
 other than that contemplated by their 
 system. It is above all things of a "new 
 life," a vast change, that the writers speak, 
 and it always has reference to the world 
 beyond. Take the most characteristic 
 phrases of S. Paul, such as that of being 
 "buried with Christ in baptism"; that 
 "Christians are dead and their life hid 
 with Christ in God"; that he is "crucified 
 with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I 
 but Christ Uveth in me." These might 
 conceivably be paralleled in non-Christian 
 mystical writings, but that of itself points 
 to the other world and is far removed from 
 the drab Philistinism of the Liberal. Its 
 very meaning is the unity between the 
 
158 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 individual and the all; the flight of "the 
 alone to the alone." 
 
 Or take the phrases about the peace pur- 
 chased with the blood of Christ. They 
 are quite as startling, or even vulgar some 
 might say, as hymns like Cowper's "There 
 is a fountain filled with blood." The cry 
 of an untaught Methodist, the "blood and 
 fire " of the Salvation Army, the best Eng- 
 lish form of devotion to the Sacred Heart, 
 are one and all nearer to the mind of the 
 New Testament writers, to S. Paul, and S. 
 Peter, and S. John, and above all to the 
 Epistles to the Hebrews, than are the 
 ethical commonplaces of Unitarian or semi- 
 Unitarian Christianity. I suppose this ele- 
 ment of strangeness and unorthodoxy would 
 be admitted in the writings attributed to 
 S. John, but discounted. As a matter of 
 fact it is of little importance for our purpose 
 here who wrote them. They certainly 
 represent a state of mind that existed in the 
 Church quite early. Of that transcen- 
 dental, other-worldly conception of Jesus 
 as existing in the Church they are first- 
 hand evidence, no less than the Epistles 
 to the Ephesians or the Colossians. Turn 
 
CALVARY 159 
 
 the New Testament inside out, dissect it 
 as you may, and you cannot read it for 
 ten minutes without coming across flashes 
 of this sort side by side often with the most 
 matter-of-fact maxims for the conduct of 
 parents and children, wives and slaves and 
 citizens. One unique feature of the New 
 Testament is the interpenetration of the 
 plainest moral precepts with the most 
 exalted mystical ecstasy. 
 
 Finally is there not in the central figure 
 itself, despite all this simphcity, something 
 strange and elusive.'^ There is, it might 
 almost be said, a certain absent-minded- 
 ness in the utterances of Jesus; and while 
 He lives the hfe of a Jew, the words which 
 at one time caused many so much ponder- 
 ing would seem expressive of His habitual 
 way. It is not a character easy to be 
 described, and His life in the wider sense 
 could not be written. Impressionist por- 
 traiture was all that was possible, and 
 that is what we have. It is incomplete, 
 unchronological, unscientific, if you will; 
 but the impression is always the same, 
 the weird mingling of the homely and 
 the far-off, the strange romantic tender- 
 
160 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 ness for things human and little, the 
 passion of faith; and the unbroken calm all 
 intertwined with that power to do things, 
 to make wonders, leaves us, as it left his 
 earliest friends, in suspense. "What man- 
 ner of man is this?" Stranger, as Dr. 
 Schweitzer calls him, to our age, He was 
 strange to His own, so strange that men 
 were driven either to crucify Him or else 
 to take up the Cross themselves. 
 
 I trust that these instances do not weary 
 you. For further confirmation I would refer 
 to the New Testament. I am convinced 
 that it is only because people insist on dis- 
 cussing religion, who are ignorant of the 
 Bible, that it is ever thought feasible to 
 present Christianity as a merely human 
 religion, while still maintaining it to be 
 Christianity. People will read philosophy, 
 theology, criticism, anything rather than the 
 Bible, and then they wonder why the system 
 of the Church is so unintelligible. I confess 
 it myself. It is only these last few years 
 that I have, as it were, rediscovered the 
 New Testament; and the more I study it, 
 not critically but devotionally, the more 
 does the choice it leaves seem clear to me. 
 Either this thing is a delusion the most 
 
CALVARY 161 
 
 gigantic the world has known, or else it is 
 a revelation from beyond, a gift of grace, 
 something that we could not have done for 
 ourselves. Either it is what it claims, the 
 power of God able to save to the utter- 
 most and giving peace and freedom, or 
 it is a quack medicine; this conclusion is 
 vouched for ahke by its earliest records, 
 by the history of the Church, and by the 
 experience of the individual Christian to- 
 day, from Papist to Plymouth brother. All 
 believe themselves to have hold of a new 
 supernatural life, to be sustained by forces 
 not their own, to be in touch with One, 
 of Whom however little we know, we know 
 enough to enter into communion with Him ; 
 and that He can give us of Himself. This 
 He has done by the medium of His Son, 
 the very brightness of His glory, and that 
 Son not only shews us the Father, but 
 in some way beyond our ken has bought 
 for us deliverance from death by His 
 great act on the Cross; so that who- 
 soever beheveth in Him shall not perish, 
 but have Eternal Life. In other words, 
 Christianity is supernatural, or it is a 
 sham. 
 
162 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 But what do you mean by the super- 
 natural? And what right have you to 
 use the term? These are questions cer- 
 tain to be put. It has recently become 
 the fashion to deprecate the use of the 
 term supernatural; to declare that the 
 spiritual significance of nature is so real, 
 and the consecration of our ordinary life so 
 needful, that to use this term arouses 
 needless hostility and leads to a low view 
 of human duty. Carlyle used to declare, 
 "The natural is the supernatural." Do 
 not all Christian^ hold to the Omnipresence 
 of God? That means His Immanence in 
 all His works, and so far from honouring 
 God, we are profaning Him by shutting 
 Him off into one separate part called super- 
 natural. I think that this objection is 
 groundless, and that the disuse of the term 
 leads to grave dangers in the direction of 
 Pantheism, dangers which we have not 
 altogether escaped. It is partly, of course, 
 a matter of definition. If, as Huxley said 
 somewhere, nature is taken for simply the 
 universe of being, it is quite clear that the 
 natural is the supernatural; it is indeed a 
 truism. Nobody asserts that miracles are 
 
CALVARY 163 
 
 against the nature of things; if by nature 
 we mean all that happens, as Mill put it, 
 of course they are natural events. Only 
 as a fact people do not mean that when 
 they speak of nature. They mean this 
 physical visible world. The question is not 
 whether this world has a spiritual significance, 
 but whether it is all or only a part of the whole. 
 The least misleading way of asserting that 
 there is, in addition to this world, a larger 
 invisible world behind it, with other powers 
 than we possess, is, to my judgment, to 
 make use of this derided term supernatural. 
 But of course it must be remembered that, 
 taking the universe as a whole, events such 
 as the birth of Christ are natural, miracles 
 are normal, all is according to order; but 
 it is the nature, the law, and the order of 
 the whole, and of that whole we have here 
 but a tiny part. 
 
 On this point and on some others touched 
 on in this book, the reader will do well to 
 consult an admirable article by Miss Carta 
 Sturge in The Commonwealth for September, 
 1909. It is in the form of a review of Mr. 
 Dearmer's book on Body and Soul, but it 
 deals with topics of wider interest. I wish 
 
164 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 that it could be reprinted. Failing that, 
 I quote the following. 
 
 "Nevertheless, perhaps, in his recogni- 
 tion of the essential Unity of Matter and 
 Mind, it is possible that the author some- 
 what loses sight of the difference of planes 
 in which the Creator manifests Himself 
 when he comes to the question of miracles. 
 He speaks, and in a sense rightly, of the 
 'naturalness of miracles.' If 'naturalness' 
 is held to be equivalent to processes carried 
 on in obedience to law, laws whether 
 spiritual, psychic, or physical, then the 
 expression is true. But as a matter of 
 fact we generally understand by natural 
 the workings of the laws of the physical 
 plane, which we call the world of Nature, 
 and which works according to laws of its 
 own, laws which we are learning to know 
 with great exactitude and on which we can 
 calculate with increasing certainty so long 
 as (there is the point) they are not inter- 
 fered with or counteracted by the higher 
 laws of another plane. But surely it is 
 the bringing into play of another order of 
 laws so to speak, laws which usually have 
 little touch with this plane, which constitutes 
 
CALVARY 165 
 
 miracle. If miracles were natural in the 
 sense which we ordinarily understand by 
 the word, we should not have witnessed the 
 almost passionate effort on the part of 
 scientific men in the generation just passed 
 to get rid of them as things contrary to 
 nature and impossible. There must be 
 some very marked distinction between the 
 * works' and 'powers' spoken of as miracles 
 (amounting almost to a difference in kind) 
 and the ordinary facts of nature or they 
 would not have produced such intense 
 increduUty in scientific students of nature. 
 And in so far as they are not according to 
 the so-called laws of nature, even markedly 
 upsetting these, they can truly be spoken of 
 as supernatural, coming from a plane lying 
 deeper than our known world of natural 
 phenomena. And we shall have greatly 
 to alter the connotation of 'natural' if we 
 are to make it cover these laws of a more 
 mental or spiritual plane. It is true that 
 there is evidence that these higher laws are 
 Ukely in the future to play a far more 
 important part in our life on this plane, 
 and that by familiarity with them they may 
 cease to seem marvellous; yet there still 
 
166 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 will be the two distinct sets of laws, distinct 
 from each other, the physical and the 
 superphysical, although related of course 
 in a Unity as all emanating from the 
 Creator. ... It is best to avoid confusion 
 and to recognise that we are so constituted 
 as to have, if we will live up to our inheri- 
 tance, more or less, the command of the 
 laws of at least two planes and possibly 
 more."* 
 
 Again, under the influence of idealism, 
 the natural has been alleged to be the super- 
 natural, in as much as its whole meaning, 
 its bulk, is spiritual. Such a view no Chris- 
 tian is concerned to deny; God is the 
 ground of the material universe and its 
 laws are His will. Yet again it seems to 
 me in its practical import misleading and 
 dangerous. For it almost irresistibly tends 
 to identify God with the world and to lead 
 right on to Pantheism. At least it favours 
 the view that God is not above, but im- 
 plicated in the course of nature; that He 
 cannot break the routine of a natural evo- 
 lution, operating in fixed ways known to 
 science. 
 
 Nature from this standpoint always tends 
 
CALVARY 167 
 
 to mean "nature as she appears to man 
 from a certain point of view — i.e., from 
 the standpoint of mechanical causation"; 
 if this is not asserted it is always implied.^ 
 It leads further to the view that the whole 
 universe is one in such a way that, though 
 that oneness be spiritual, in it there can 
 be no true individuahty, no freedom, and 
 nothing like the Gospel drama of the soul. 
 These things have a certain relative value, 
 but they cannot be the saving Truth men 
 used to think them. I do not say that 
 all who object to the term supernatural 
 hold this. But I think that the logical 
 implication of their thought is in this direc- 
 tion, and that many find therein the main 
 stumbHng block to Faith. It is against 
 such views that supernatural is in its right 
 place, as the epithet distinctive of Chris- 
 tianity. No Christian need deny the 
 spiritual significance of matter or assert 
 that the physical world is to be explained 
 apart from God. Rather he asserts the 
 contrary. But he must assert that God is 
 very much more than the soul of the world; 
 it is His work, not merely His garment. 
 He is as much and more beyond it as I, 
 
168 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 in my personality, am beyond the body 
 which is the instrument of my life here. 
 It is sometimes said that this distinction 
 between nature and the supernatural is 
 harmful because it secularises the greater 
 part of hfe. But, as a fact, to give up the 
 distinction tends in the long run to secu- 
 larise the whole of it. By saying that no 
 day is specially sacred, you will not make 
 the ordinary man keep all days as the 
 Lord's; rather he will more and more shut 
 God out of his Ufe. Prayer is possible at 
 any time and at all occupations, but the 
 man who prays when he is cleaning his 
 boots is always likely to be the man who 
 has set apart times to keep up the habit. 
 It is so through all this range of distinctions, 
 those between sacred and secular, Sunday 
 and weekday, clergy and laity, the Church 
 and the world, venial and mortal sins. All 
 of them are relative, not absolute. To 
 press any to an extreme is dangerous. But 
 to leave them out is more dangerous still. 
 Human nature being what it is, you tend 
 to banish God altogether if you say that 
 because He is omnipresent there are to 
 be no sacred places or seasons. While if 
 
CALVARY 169 
 
 you assert that all sins are equal, though 
 in one sense it is true, you will make the 
 ordinary man treat all sin as venial and 
 none as serious. A great deal of the 
 current laxity in regard to sin has come from 
 the omission to make use of a distinction 
 between mortal and venial sin, which is 
 only approximately true. We have fallen 
 in consequence into the worse error of 
 treating sin as unimportant. 
 
 The supreme danger, however, of this 
 dislike of the idea of the supernatural is 
 that in so far as it is not hostile to religion 
 it ministers to a fashionable Pantheism, 
 which in the long run condones the most 
 revolting acts, because somehow or other 
 they are part of God's world. In the past 
 generation men have given in a little too 
 much to this habit of thought. We have 
 passed through an age best termed Alex- 
 andrian, when men have been concerned to 
 shew the assimilations between Christian 
 and other systems and have almost forgot- 
 ten the difference in the process. So much 
 alive have they been to the human environ- 
 ment that they have neglected to emphasize 
 the divine origin of the Gospel. Now, it 
 
170 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 seems, we need rather a Tertullianist or 
 Augustinian presentment of the faith insist- 
 ing more on its difference from, than its 
 approximation to, other systems; on the 
 vital change it brought, rather than on the 
 connection, however undoubted, with the 
 old; on the gift of a new life, that makes it 
 what it is. Both sides are true; what 
 might be roughly called the Greek, or the 
 Johannine view of things, and the Latin or 
 the Pauline; at this moment it is the latter 
 that we need to bring into relief. 
 
 As I have tried to shew, it is these unique, 
 incommunicable, other-worldly elements 
 that make the beauty of the Christian 
 Faith, even though it be false. These it is 
 which give it its own aroma. To cut out 
 of it all miracle because it is improbable, 
 the doctrine of the Incarnation because it 
 is mysterious, the glory of sins forgiven 
 because it is hard to rationalise, all this 
 would be to cut out what is of real charm 
 in the Christian, as distinct from other 
 systems; while it seems to me that those 
 who are for this drastic treatment are 
 attaching a certainty and infallibiHty to 
 some modern habits of thought which they 
 
CALVARY 171 
 
 do not possess even in regard to normal 
 human life, and are still less likely to pos- 
 sess in regard to any revelation from unseen 
 powers. The assumption at the basis of 
 George Tyrrell's Christianity at the Cross 
 Roads seems to be that wherever Christi- 
 anity conflicts with our modern mental 
 scheme, it must be trimmed to make the 
 two square. This view seems to be quite 
 without ground. Neither facts nor theory 
 justify our holding the dogma of the infalli- 
 bility of the modern Western mind. Its 
 most acute representatives do not claim 
 this infallibility, and the intellectual an- 
 archy of our day reveals its inadequacy. 
 Most of all, however, is its limitation 
 displayed in the amazing lack of certain 
 elements of noble hving, which are found 
 in civihsations whose spirit is different. 
 It lays stress on one set of qualities and 
 ignores others, and the result is mon- 
 strosity. It is precisely because the Chris- 
 tian Faith does involve these other elements, 
 because it demands a mental habit different 
 from that now popular, that it is at least 
 arresting. True or false, its sincere pro- 
 fession sets us free from the idols of our 
 
172 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 modern cave and permits us to look at 
 God's universe with the eyes of the peni- 
 tent, the lover, and the child. To take 
 from the Christian Faith the elements that 
 make this possible is to destroy its inahen- 
 able charm and remove from it its main 
 source of attraction, as compared with 
 other schemes austere, imposing, and phil- 
 osophical though they be. 
 
 I think then that we do right in empha- 
 sizing the uniqueness of the Christian claim 
 and insisting on the wisdom of the use of 
 the word supernatural. But it is also true 
 that there is a very important sense, in 
 which the natural is the supernatural, and 
 that our whole problem turns on this truth. 
 The real question between Christianity and 
 its adversaries is concerned not with the 
 N miracles of Jesus, but with the possibiUty 
 of human freedom. The antecedent diffi- 
 culty which keeps men from Christian 
 Faith is commonly understood to be this 
 problem of the miraculous. This is true, 
 but it is true only because miracles are a 
 part of the larger issue between freedom 
 and necessity. All along the Une there is 
 
CALVARY 173 
 
 one and only one fundamental difficulty, 
 that created by "scientific fatalism." It is 
 clear that without some doctrine of human 
 freedom the Christian scheme and the 
 whole theory of sin and redemption is 
 nonsense. What is less obvious is that 
 once it be established that the acts of men 
 are not all of them determined, the a priori 
 argument against miracles is gone. Suppos- 
 ing our wills be free, we are spirits who 
 choose and, acting frequently upon the 
 material of nature, alter and interfere with 
 its arrangements. We make that happen 
 which apart from our free act would not 
 happen. A miracle only asserts the same 
 about a being or beings also free and with 
 under knowledge than ours. When God 
 employs the forces of nature without any 
 apparent interference, we call His act a 
 special providence; when He brings forces 
 into play which we cannot manipulate, we 
 call the act a miracle. Both are equally 
 involved in the conception of God's free- 
 dom, that is His personality. Both are 
 equally opposed to the mechanical theory 
 of the world and are apt to be laughed out 
 of court. If there be a spirit world besides 
 
174 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 man at all, we can hardly suppose that the 
 beings within it are not possessed of wider 
 knowledge than ours, and they will produce 
 effects more startHng. The whole problem 
 turns on the reahty of freedom, for that 
 involves even in ourselves powers which 
 may well be called supernatural. It is 
 of course conceivable that there are no 
 higher beings in the universe than we are. 
 If that were so, of course miracles in the 
 ordinary sense could not happen. But 
 once grant that God is to be thought of as 
 the free Being who created and controlled 
 the world, then it is really less difficult to 
 credit His action than our own; for we 
 know very well that our life is dependent. 
 Once grant, however, that our acts are free, 
 or some of them, and the whole edifice of 
 a system of rigid mechanism falls to the 
 ground; and we must, at least, allow the pos- 
 sibility of such irruptions from the world 
 beyond sight as are best called miraculous. 
 On this matter of freedom it is needless 
 to dwell at length. The problem is as old 
 as thought. Moreover, one of the clearest 
 defences of human freedom has been made, 
 in this place, by WiUiam James. ^ 
 
CALVARY 175 
 
 This much, however, I would say. Free- 
 dom, not of all but of some actions, is to 
 me an immediate doctrine of consciousness, 
 a primary fact, the most real thing in life. 
 So much is it a part of my life that to deny 
 this fact reduces it to ruins. As Dr. 
 Pringle-Pattison says, "InexpKcable in a 
 sense as man's personal agency is — the 
 one perpetual miracle — it is neverthe- 
 less our overt datum and our only clue to 
 the mystery of existence." ^ I find further 
 that in practice this belief is the foundation 
 of social life, is assumed in every personal 
 judgment; and however they may explain 
 it in theory, all men make it in practice 
 the presupposition of their mutual inter- 
 course. So far then as I am concerned, 
 if I had to choose, I would prefer the belief 
 that there is something radically inadequate 
 in human reasoning if, as apparently it 
 does, it leads to determinism; I should prefer 
 this alternative to the acceptance of deter- 
 minism. For there may be this error. 
 It is a pure act of faith that you can get a 
 rationalistically arranged scheme of things. 
 The facts of life are there, whether we can 
 harmonise them by reason or any other 
 
176 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 faculty. We do direct and restrain our 
 actions. That we know, if we know any- 
 thing. And to substitute any intellec- 
 tualist scheme, however apparently secure, 
 for what is to me the prius of all thinking, 
 the knowledge of freedom, seems to me to 
 put the cart before the horse and to be 
 denying facts in deference to a constructive 
 theory which may be false. Probably, 
 indeed, as Bergson says, this notion of 
 freedom is absolute and cannot be analyzed. 
 The moment you begin to argue about it, 
 you have really conceded the point to your 
 adversary. Freedom must be accepted as 
 a given fact, mysterious like the primary 
 facts of life. In all there is something 
 unfathomable, an "irreducible surd." Yet 
 so far as observation goes, it is true to say 
 that we hve in a world of free beings 
 standing "free and doubtful as at the cross 
 roads in a forest." So far from the future 
 being predictable, the daily and hourly 
 experience of every man, woman, and child 
 alive is expressed in the maxim of William 
 the Waiter, "You never can tell. Sir, you 
 never can tell." Part of life may obviously 
 be made subject to calculation, and of 
 
CALVARY 177 
 
 another part you can say what will probably 
 occur, and in much more you can state 
 that one of two things is more than probable. 
 More than that you cannot do. And every 
 attempt to do more breaks down in face of 
 the amazing uncertainty of life. 
 
 Once let the fact of freedom be granted, 
 and it may be said that we live, here and 
 now, a life which is truly described as 
 supernatural. For in that case we our- 
 selves are something more than parts of 
 nature. Moreover, if as a fact there are 
 a number of different centres of indeter- 
 mination, the whole intellectualist scheme 
 of the universe has broken down, because 
 it is only the projection into mental terms 
 of notions of mechanical necessity. Reality 
 is now seen to be of such a nature that you 
 cannot do more than predict what will 
 happen in the physical world, provided 
 certain disturbing causes, such as the free 
 will of spiritual beings, do not operate; 
 while the element of possible changes is 
 much greater if you postulate a God who 
 is free; i.e., personal and all-knowing. 
 The real battle then in regard to miracles 
 is that which ranges round the personaHty 
 
 13 
 
\ 
 
 178 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 of man and of God. Both hang together. 
 \^ Personalism — the doctrine of the universe 
 as a world of spirits — is the point at issue 
 in all the discussions. Pantheism is a 
 creed the very opposite of this; it begins 
 by denying human personaUty, it ends by 
 denying Divine. More and more is it be- 
 come clear that the battle of the future is 
 one between some form or other of cosmic 
 emotion which sacrifices all real distinctions 
 in the desire to attain an all-embracing 
 unity and Christianity with its insistence 
 on the reahty of the individual life of men 
 and the personal being of God. Behef in 
 Christ is increasingly recognised by our 
 opponents as the great obstacle to the 
 prevalence of Pantheistic monism. The 
 reason is that the life of Jesus is the supreme 
 revelation of the personal love of God, while 
 His death and rising again are the assurance 
 to all men of their value in God's sight 
 and their participation not as means only, 
 but as ends in the hfe of the world. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 SIGN OR THE CHRISTIAN FACT 
 
 Last summer, if you met a casual acquaint- 
 ance come home from his holidays, what 
 was the scene he was most likely to have 
 visited? One of those macadamized cities, 
 the flower of our civilisation? I think not. 
 Perhaps he sought communion with nature 
 in quiet places and refreshed his mind by 
 rustic pursuits; or perhaps he climbed 
 peaks or emulated the toils of Ulysses. 
 One tribute, however, was paid by most of 
 those who had the means. Away from 
 the roar of wheels and heedless of our 
 pleasures, there Ues an obscure village in a 
 backward country off the highway of the 
 tourist. To Ober-Ammergau came men 
 and women of every faith, there to watch 
 in awe the drama of the Cross or weep at 
 the parting of Mary and her Son. Unlured 
 by luxuries they went on this quest, and 
 
 179 
 
180 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 no star singer or artist attracted them. It 
 was just a few villagers trained from youth 
 up to this great act, but not otherwise 
 differing from Bavarian peasants. 
 
 What is the ground of this interest.'^ It 
 does not indeed prove so much as a pil- 
 grimage to Our Lady of Walsingham in 
 the Middle Ages, or that made memorable 
 by Chaucer to the shrine of the poor man's 
 Archbishop who dared to withstand a 
 monarch more powerful than the Kaiser. 
 For modern science has made the rough 
 places plain to the traveller, while the act 
 which formerly was one of devotion is now 
 largely due to curiosity. For all that, this 
 interest is worthy of remark in an age when, 
 according to Thomas Hardy, a settled 
 melancholy is coming over the educated 
 classes with the decline of the belief in a 
 beneficent power, and when by universal 
 agreement ideals essentially Pagan have 
 hold of numbers of educated people. How 
 is it that the story of the Passion holds 
 still so conquering a charm.'' You would 
 not have secured a tithe of that company 
 for the pictured presentment of the death 
 of any other religious teacher — not even 
 
SION 181 
 
 Mrs. Baker Eddy. It is strange what an 
 attraction the Christian Church still pos- 
 sesses even for men who scorn her claims. 
 Privately people may reject and attack these 
 claims and in public laugh to scorn all 
 Christian ideals, yet the moment they 
 move one step in the pursuit of romance, 
 they are forced to acknowledge and even 
 to learn from her. It is curious to see in the 
 houses of people to whom the Catholic 
 Church is anathema copies of altar pieces 
 and madonnas. Even more amazing it is 
 to watch the struggles of non-Christian 
 artists and poets to get away from this 
 atmosphere. But the moment they drop 
 into romance, it comes back to them. 
 Agnostics will fill their holidays with visits 
 to S. Ambrogio or S. Mark's and wax learned 
 over the date or constitution of some 
 monastic house, while they would cut off 
 their right hand rather than give credence 
 to those things which alone made such 
 places possible. Human culture, so far as 
 it looks before and after and seeks to bring 
 men into the society of "the best that is 
 known and thought in the world," is inex- 
 tricably entangled with the Christian 
 
182 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 tradition. In consequence you now find 
 intransigeants like John Davidson, the 
 poet, opposed to all culture, as the only 
 means of finally cutting off the entail of 
 religion. Others make what is perhaps a 
 worse error and confuse an aesthetic interest 
 in stained glass or Church embroidery with 
 a living faith. 
 
 Now what makes possible such a spectacle 
 as that at Ober-Ammergau.^ Not money. 
 MiUionaires all the world over might club 
 together, but they could not produce a 
 Passion-Play. It is no case of the demand 
 creating the supply. This thing so touch- 
 ing and wonderful could never have been 
 at all, and would long since have died but 
 for the faith of those who produce it. To 
 these poor peasants, so inferior to our en- 
 hghtenment, this wonder is real. It belongs 
 to their life as Christians. Their act is 
 solid with that on Calvary. 
 
 There is the fact of which we seek the 
 interpretation — that tremendous event and 
 its continuing influence in the life of society 
 and the individual. We cannot separate 
 these things. If we are to arrive at any 
 satisfying estimate, we have to take all 
 
SIGN 188 
 
 three as part of one great fact: the Hfe, 
 death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, 
 the society in which His spirit acts, and the 
 present reahty of His gifts in individual 
 experience. We must start from the actual 
 phenomenon of today, the individual Chris- 
 tian, who is what he is as sharer in the com- 
 mon Ufe of the Church; and this common 
 life is continuous with the events of Calvary 
 and the first Easter and may not be compre- 
 hended apart from them; and vice versa. 
 Of any event the evidence is to be sought 
 in the effects which it produces (and this 
 is the case even with the testimony of eye- 
 witnesses). The Resurrection is no excep- 
 tion to this law. Part of its evidence is to 
 be sought in that collection of documents 
 we call the New Testament. But this is 
 only part. Other parts are the history 
 of the Church and its living power in the 
 experience of men and women today. 
 
 Of these facts all symbohsed in the 
 Passion-Play there are, roughly speaking, 
 two interpretations and two only. Accord- 
 ing to the former, rehgion is a phenomenon 
 well-nigh universal. It breaks out in Pro- 
 
184 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 tean forms, but all are purely human. To 
 such a view the emergence of the Christian 
 Faith, its victory, and its present efficacy 
 form merely the cardinal instance of this 
 universal phenomenon. It has no special 
 or unique value, owes much to local and 
 partial influences, and though possibly the 
 highest form which the religious instinct 
 has yet assumed, is not final and is hkely to 
 be superseded — is, indeed, already vanish- 
 ing. Whatever substratum of fact under- 
 lies the Evangelical narrative, and it is 
 not large, there must have been enough to 
 arrest and stimulate the imagination of 
 mankind. 
 
 Moreover, as Gibbon long since pointed 
 out in his famous sixteenth chapter, there 
 were other circumstances pecuharly favour- 
 able to the growth of a society claiming 
 supernatural credentials and assuring to 
 any man a life beyond. Slowly and after 
 many conflicts that society gathered co- 
 hesion, and conquering all rivals such as 
 the cult of Mithra or Neoplatonism, came 
 at last to dominate the civilised world. 
 That predominance, more than half tem- 
 poral, was shattered by the Renaissance 
 
SIGN 185 
 
 and the Reformation. True, the Christian 
 Church still lives on. But it is only a 
 living power in small groups. Some of 
 its apparent strength is due to its inherited 
 wealth and to the general lack of higher 
 education. All this, however, is but for 
 the moment. We are at the beginning of 
 the end. Either the Christian Church will 
 lighten the ship of its Jonah burden of the 
 supernatural and live on as a frankly human 
 institution, or it will be superseded by some 
 fresh religious synthesis. Such a synthesis 
 would not repudiate the Divine, but would 
 rigidly exclude all notions of God, as dis- 
 tinct from the developing life of nature, 
 including men. Its horizons would be lim- 
 ited by this world. It would make a more 
 universal appeal than the Christian Faith, 
 because its claims would be less startling; 
 and no man who looks for the improvement 
 of the race would find himself excluded 
 from it. 
 
 The naturalistic theory of Christianity 
 takes on different colours with the tempera- 
 ment of the speaker. From the hysterical 
 contempt of Nietzsche, the hostihty of 
 writers like Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Sturt, 
 
186 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 we may pass through almost every stage 
 of increasing admiration, with one great 
 proviso, that Jesus is not to be worshipped 
 as God. Even among those who adhere 
 to the Christian name there are some who 
 treat Him as Httle more than the first of 
 human teachers, while the more extreme 
 modernists openly avow that it is only the 
 ideas of Christianity that matter, and that 
 it is of no importance whether any of the 
 alleged facts, supernatural or not, happened 
 at all. We are to rest in an "imaginary 
 portrait" and rejoice in an inherited cult, 
 heedless of aught but their existence today. 
 Others of them will stop short of this, yet 
 strip the central figure of every actual 
 quahty that points beyond, and proclaim 
 a doctrine of the Divine Immanence little 
 removed from Pantheism. A recent expres- 
 sion to this view in its unreheved crudity 
 has been given by Mr. Thompson, the Dean 
 of Divinity of Magdalen College, Oxford. 
 His work is not valuable except as evidence. 
 It shews the inwardness of much that in 
 other forms allures many minds. For in 
 that work the immanent logic of a great 
 deal of the critical movement is seen to 
 
SION 187 
 
 develop itself into an assured repudiation 
 of all influence from a world beyond. 
 
 What I want to emphasize is that within 
 this naturalistic interpretation every va- 
 riety of sentiment and moral ideal is 
 possible, from Pagan to Catholic ethics. 
 All, however, unite to repudiate the idea 
 of a unique revelation and of supernat- 
 ural grace or facts; all are founded on 
 rejection of '*supernaturaUsm" in the usual 
 sense. 
 
 Now let us consider the opposing view. 
 That asserts that there is about this episode 
 something more than human, and that its 
 differences from all other religions and 
 philosophies are more important than its 
 resemblances. It is to man the supreme 
 guarantee of a something more than the 
 visible world and its development, even if 
 that visible world be thought of as spiritual. 
 It marks the entrance into this hfe of 
 forces from a spirit world beyond, and in 
 this sense is nothing if not other-worldly. 
 Of course its human aspects are not to be 
 denied, and the chief perplexities arise 
 from the refusal of Christians to treat the 
 
188 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 life of Jesus as a mere "theophany." As 
 Canon Simpson says^: 
 
 "The history of Christian doctrine 
 made it abundantly clear that men have 
 found it harder to represent to them- 
 selves the real manhood of the Son of 
 God than the perfect Godhead of the Son 
 of Man." 
 
 Nor need we suppose that there is any- 
 thing final in the efforts hitherto made to 
 express this double-faced fact. The recent 
 work of Dr. Sanday on Ghristologies Ancient 
 and Modern is alone evidence of this; for 
 here is a writer avowedly Nicene seeking the 
 explanation in the doctrine of the subUminal 
 self. How far the Church will go in this 
 direction one cannot at this stage predict, 
 but even the suggestion of it is a proof that 
 finality is not reached — nor indeed is it 
 likely to be.^ Of a fact so essentially mys- 
 terious as the entrance into human life, 
 under human conditions, of that Life, which 
 always burns and is never extinguished, all 
 our statements must be so much below the 
 truth that now one side and now the other 
 will be emphasized. The belief is in the 
 supernatural character of this, that great 
 
SIGN 189 
 
 mystery of godliness, of which S. Paul 
 spoke, "God manifest in the flesh." 
 
 The form of this belief may vary in differ- 
 ent ages, and as Dr. Sanday illustrates, take 
 on a different colour, even while the sym- 
 bolic expression remains unchanged; other- 
 wise the creeds would be something other 
 than symbols. All, however, who hold it 
 would agree in this — that in the story 
 told in the Gospels there is evidence of a 
 peculiar outbreak from the spirit world. 
 It is not merely an uprush of religious emo- 
 tion. This ** irruption" of the Divine into 
 the world of phenomena guarantees the 
 nature of God as being Love; it destroys 
 the presuppositions of naturalism, in that 
 it assures to each of us a life hereafter and 
 delivers us from that strange disease of the 
 wiD we call "sin," restoring the broken 
 unity between the soul and God ; of Whom 
 it reveals so much as can be shewn in human 
 life. 
 
 In the former of these two views, even, 
 if we take it as it is nearest to the Nicene 
 faith, the Christian fact has much teaching 
 for man. But that teaching is of the highest 
 to which human love can aspire. It is a 
 
190 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 doctrine of man. On the latter view the 
 teaching is of the depths to which God's 
 Love can descend. It is a doctrine of God. 
 He stooped to conquer. The unique note 
 of the Christian rehgion is the humility 
 of God. Further, the one interpretation 
 need never get beyond the Divine Imma- 
 nence. The other reveals the Divine Tran- 
 scendence. It preserves the distinctness of 
 man and God ahke, while it asserts that 
 God is able so to limit HimseK as to be- 
 come Incarnate. It is needless to develop 
 at length what this view involves. For it 
 has embodied itself in the Christian Church. 
 The whole Catholic Evangelical theology 
 of grace, of the Sacraments, of the Atone- 
 ment and the Incarnation, is but its expres- 
 sion; inadequate, it is true, and figurative, 
 but generated in the need of defending the 
 one supreme fact of the Divine and super- 
 natural character of the whole order against 
 interpretations which in the long run would 
 have destroyed it. 
 
 But we must not exaggerate. This view, 
 like its contrary, may be held with the 
 widest differences of detail. It is, as a fact, 
 
SIGN 191 
 
 maintained by many whom a rigid ortho- 
 doxy would repudiate. It would include 
 such men as a historian who once said to me, 
 "I believe firmly in the Divinity of Christ 
 and the Atonement, but I don't beheve 
 in anything else, not the Church or the 
 Sacraments or the Holy Ghost." It would 
 include the semi-Arian, who worships Christ 
 as Lord and holds firmly to the Logos- 
 dodrine, but has difficulties about even the 
 simplest of the Creeds. It would include 
 those who adhered to the formula suggested 
 by Dr. Denny, "I believe in God through 
 Jesus Christ," provided that formula were 
 interpreted according to the previous argu- 
 ment of the writer. It would include some 
 who deny certain facts such as the Birth 
 Story or the Empty Tomb, which seem to 
 most of us integral to the supernatural 
 nature of the whole. That may be true. 
 For all that, it is not to be gainsaid that 
 Professor Burkitt,^ in his pamphlet on The 
 Failure of Liberal Christianity, while he re- 
 jects those facts, argues most convincingly 
 that the evidence of the documents as a 
 whole compels the supernatural theory of 
 the origin of the Church and justifies the 
 
192 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 Athanasian Creed, It is hardly too much to 
 describe this pamphlet as epoch-making, for 
 it marks the way in which a devout mind, 
 arguing from the critical basis, but unde- 
 terred by prepossessions against the super- 
 natural, is driven to a position which is 
 fundamentally that of the Church. A 
 somewhat similar view is that of Dr. 
 Forsyth in his work on The Person and 
 Place of Jesus Christ, I need hardly add 
 that this view of the fundamentally mys- 
 terious nature of the New Testament 
 experience is held by men owning every 
 kind of ecclesiastical allegiance. On the 
 other hand from this standpoint, there 
 would be excluded many of the ultra- 
 modernists, strong though they may be 
 in the sense of the value both of the Church 
 and Sacraments, and many "liberal" theo- 
 logians, who would rule out the "supra- 
 normal." Professor Denny, Professor Bur- 
 kitt, Dr. Forsyth, Dr. Garvie, Dr. Orr, Dr. 
 Seeberg, Dr. Knowling, Mr. Wilfrid Ward, 
 Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, the Bishops of 
 Birmingham and Durham, Evangelical Dis- 
 senters and Ultramontanes may seem a 
 rather heterogeneous company. Doubtless 
 
SION 19S 
 
 many of them would condemn as woefully 
 inadequate the theology that contents the 
 other. Yet all have this in common. They 
 have crossed the Rubicon. All are on the 
 other side of the Une which divides the 
 natural from the supernatural theory of the 
 origin of Christianity. All are unable to 
 beheve that the reduced Christianity dear 
 to the Teutonic savant comes at all close to 
 the facts; all are at one in their refusal 
 to surrender the supernatural in deference 
 to the naturahstic bias. 
 
 It is right to put the question in this 
 broad manner, as one which is concerned 
 with our view of the nature of the expe- 
 rience as a whole. We are putting the 
 cart before the horse, when we argue, 
 as though the question were first and fore- 
 most concerned with dogma. Dogma only 
 brings out the impHcations of the super- 
 natural view, and it cannot be arrived at 
 independently or argued about as consisting 
 of so many isolated propositions. The 
 Creeds are the intellectual expressions of 
 this faith, developed in the life of the 
 Church, and they guard its essential nature, 
 
 14 
 
194 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 which is to be supernatural. It is this 
 supernatural character which is its differ- 
 entia. On this we have to make up our 
 mind before, not after, we consider the 
 Creeds. The enquirer must decide whether 
 or no these supernatural claims were made, 
 and then whether he can accept them. 
 Either you fit Jesus Christ into the normal 
 categories or He eludes them. The Chris- 
 tian Church is either one episode in the 
 natural development of mankind or it is 
 something superadded. That is the real 
 difficulty involved in the Incarnation and 
 in the higher view about Church and Sac- 
 raments. Whatever class you put them in, 
 you find it inadequate. Treat Jesus Christ 
 as purely human and you fail to explain 
 most of His characteristic deeds and words, 
 even if you give up the theory of fraud. 
 Treat Him as God, and His essential human 
 quality. His local temperament and hori- 
 zons, are hard to comprehend; though 
 indeed we never could say beforehand what 
 limitations of power and knowledge an 
 Incarnation does not involve. The Atha- 
 nasian Creed and all Catholic theology puts 
 the two sides together, but does not remove 
 
SION 195 
 
 the diflSculty. They are never altogether 
 harmonised; they never will be, till we 
 reach the beatific vision. But any simpler 
 creed is even harder. For it compels us 
 to give up the facts. 
 
 Moreover, it leaves you without any 
 adequate explanation of the origin and 
 expansion of the Church. As Gibbon long 
 since discerned, the crucial diflSculty of 
 the enquirer is that of explaining the 
 existence of the Church. And indeed that 
 diflSculty is greater than he knew. The 
 Church needs explanation not merely as 
 a past, but as a present fact, stretching 
 back to the dawn of history and achieving 
 since Gibbon the most marvellous of all 
 its revivals. All this you must describe 
 as either part of the natural course of 
 human development or as something cat- 
 astrophic breaking the chain, invading 
 the sphere of the natural, a gift from 
 beyond. 
 
 As in the words of a writer I have quoted 
 more than once — Eucken^- 
 
 "In the case of Christianity it is man's 
 moral life which harbours this contradic- 
 tion. Christianity holds that, down to 
 
196 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 the very roots of his moral nature, man is 
 especially estranged from what is right, 
 and therefore requires that he shall become 
 a new creature and Hve a new life. The 
 form which this conviction has taken in 
 concept and in doctrine is no doubt open 
 to attack on many sides, but so long as 
 the fundamental fact survived as an in- 
 spiration in human experience, it triumphed 
 over all the objections brought against 
 it. But the modern world, dazzled by 
 the splendour of its own achievements, 
 armed with its consciousness of power, 
 stimulated by its craving for a fuller and 
 a richer life, has thrust such experience into 
 the background and for a time forgotten 
 it. And now the problems and perplexities 
 of the nineteenth century and our own 
 have thrust it forward once more, and, 
 with growing insistence, are challenging 
 the old complacent belief in the work of 
 civiHsation and the light-hearted enthusi- 
 asm for progress. 
 
 "It becomes increasingly difficult not 
 to recognise the sharp contradiction which 
 runs through the whole life of man and 
 comes to a head in his moral behaviour." 
 
SIGN 197 
 
 And again, in Chnstianity and the New 
 Idealism, he says: 
 
 "Its presence attests the invasion of 
 our life by a new order of reahty, involving 
 a breach in the causal order of nature, 
 tearing through the existing system of 
 connexions, rendering for ever impossible 
 a rational synthesis of reality within the 
 limits of sense-experience, and precluding 
 any monism of the world as we find it." 
 
 Decide this point one way or the other 
 and you have decided everything, and no 
 mere jettison of this or that detail will 
 bring you in line with the opponent theory. 
 In the same way that a very small dose 
 of free will means a complete breach with 
 the rationalist, so here accept the super- 
 natural in however small a degree and the 
 logic of it carries you right on to the Church 
 with the Creeds. Nothing but some acci- 
 dent of temper or training will hinder you 
 from being one with that great continuous 
 body, which enshrines this supernatural 
 life in all its fulness. Deny this supra- 
 human character, and however much you 
 may gild your unbelief with phrases of 
 reverence, and even emphasize devotion 
 
198 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 to the Church of your fathers, and desire 
 to be part of the main stream of Christian 
 life, you are yet on the incHned plane 
 which leads far away from it. To scientific 
 fatalism in some form or other, if not the 
 individual (for he does not always develop 
 the logic of his position), at least the society, 
 which adopts such denial, will come at the 
 last. 
 
 The problem, then, is one as to the 
 transcendental or the normal character 
 of this experience or group of experiences; 
 the central facts as recorded in the New 
 Testament, the impression made by them 
 at the time, and the continuance of that 
 impression in the Church and its individual 
 members. Christian theology issues from 
 the attempt to guard this truth of the 
 supernatural character of this experience 
 against interpretations which explicitly or 
 implicitly involve its denial. Whether the 
 theology be coherent or well-expressed is 
 one thing. That its essence is this faith 
 in a mystery is unquestioned alike by 
 friend and foe. 
 
 I state the problem in this way because 
 it seems to me an error to treat the topic 
 
SION 199 
 
 analytically; isolating this or that detail 
 and then either from the traditional stand- 
 point or its opposite building up a series 
 of conclusions. As a fact, we are dealing 
 not with a number of isolated events appar- 
 ently marvellous, each to be discussed in 
 vacuo, but with a great experience of human 
 life extending from the converted sinner of 
 today right back to "that strange man 
 upon the Cross" and all that He implies. 
 The question is, What does that experience 
 mean? Even in regard to the New Testa- 
 ment it is a mistake to adopt this purely 
 analytic method. It is not the Virgin 
 Birth, or the Empty Tomb, or the Trans- 
 figuration, or the feeding of the five thou- 
 sand, or the walking on the water, or the 
 tremendous claims of Christ, or the stories 
 of the Apostles, or the experience of S. 
 Paul, or the theory of S. John; it is all these 
 things together. Or, to be accurate, it 
 is the atmosphere, the mental world, in 
 which all these things take place, that is 
 in question. Men would never have made 
 this error were it not for our habit of making 
 words and single events a screen which veils 
 life instead of reveahng it, and discussing 
 
200 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 not real experience, but the articulate ex- 
 pression of it, which never is complete and 
 can at best be no more than symbolic. 
 
 The first thing to decide is our view of 
 the total character of the narrative, taken 
 in unison with its living issues (as the title 
 of the Kaiser is part of the evidence for 
 the power of Julius Caesar). When we have 
 made up our minds as to what that character 
 is, and further, being what it is, whether we 
 can accept or reject it, then and then only 
 shall we be ready to discuss it in detail. 
 
 As a matter of fact, this is precisely 
 what is done. Half of the anti-Christian 
 criticism of the records, while it professes 
 to be an open enquiry, is in reality only an 
 examination of this or that detail with the 
 humanist interpretations of the narrative as 
 a whole taken for granted, though carefully 
 concealed. Too many writers on the ortho- 
 dox side have been content to examine 
 these theories, without considering the pre- 
 suppositions; thus tacitly offering a victory 
 to their adversaries. 
 
 But this is not all. If the problem be 
 primarily one about the total impression. 
 
SION 201 
 
 it does not need a specialist to determine 
 its results. On the general character of 
 the alleged occurrences of the Gospel, or 
 the experience of the early Church, as 
 mirrored in S. Paul, in S. Peter, in S. John, 
 it needs no specialist nor any great knowl- 
 edge to come to a valid conclusion. In this 
 matter the appeal to the plain man and that 
 to the historic consciousness of Christen- 
 dom comes to the same thing. Such mat- 
 ters as the piecing together of the narratives, 
 the priority of S. Mark, or the nature of Q, 
 or the genuineness of S. Peter's and S. Jude's 
 Epistles, can only be argued by specialists. 
 But no expert is needed to pronounce on 
 the general character of the impression 
 created by the accounts of Jesus or the 
 experiences of S. Paul. Nothing is needed 
 but attentive reading, and the critics who 
 would cut all the extraordinary elements 
 and leave a caput mortuum of morahty 
 touched with emotion (yet still to be called 
 Christianity) would never have won half 
 their vogue had not the reading of the New 
 Testament gone out of fashion. Their 
 strength comes from their appeahng to a 
 world which has ceased to use the Bible 
 
202 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 devotionally. It was a maxim of the 
 Reformers that the Scriptures bore their 
 meaning on their face, and that every 
 man could be his own interpreter. Apphed 
 to single texts this notion is contrary to 
 fact; for we need to go behind the New 
 Testament to the society which produced 
 it, just as we need to go behind Dante or 
 Homer to the civilisation which environed 
 them. The maxim resulted in a greater 
 variety of views among Christians than had 
 before seemed possible; each view basing 
 itself on the Bible. If, however, we take 
 the New Testament as a whole, the Re- 
 formers were not so far wrong. Whether 
 or no he believes it, the plain man who 
 reads the New Testament has little doubt 
 of the transcendent claim made by Jesus 
 Christ; nor does he deny that there was 
 an experience of redemption which believed 
 itself to be connected with the Cross, and 
 of a new life in unison with the Risen Lord. 
 How these things are to be harmonised 
 may be matters for the Church, and what 
 their theological implications exclude or 
 allow. How to get them into relation with 
 ordinary life is a problem still unsolved. 
 
SIGN 203 
 
 But that this is their general character is 
 only to be denied by that class of mind that 
 asserts that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, or, 
 like Samuel Butler, that the Odyssey was a 
 suffragist manifesto. The authority of the 
 Church, indeed, here as in other matters, 
 only operates to protect the ordinary man 
 against the excesses of one-sided talent, and 
 is indeed essentially democratic. 
 
 Still the point remains. What are we to 
 think of it all.^ To me it appears plain 
 that we have evidence of some invasion 
 from that world beyond, whose possibility 
 it would be rash to deny. So far as the 
 evidence goes, we have to do with a unique 
 experience, paralleled in mystical Utera- 
 ture, but quite other than normal. All 
 seems to point to the gradual opening of 
 men's eyes to an element strange and 
 superhuman in the life of Jesus. Reluc- 
 tantly, with the slow-moving inteUigence of 
 peasants, the Apostles began to ask. What 
 manner of man is this.'^ After long feehng 
 the attraction of His person, and treating 
 His healing miracles as a thing of course, 
 they began at last to see in Him something 
 more — the Christ, the Son of the Living 
 
204 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 God. Then for a time all their hopes were 
 dashed by the tragedy of Calvary, to us so 
 splendid, to them so chill and drab. Again 
 on reluctant eyes there bursts the light of 
 Easter, and in its blinding glare the Church 
 has lived ever since. What wonder if the 
 accounts be confused, or if there are diffi- 
 culties in the theology which guards it. 
 The whole thing is difficult, like all ultimate 
 facts; for mystery is in the nature of things 
 and nothing real but shares it. There, 
 however, it is dazzling still, this poor un- 
 educated Galilean criminal, worshipped to- 
 day as God and starting a movement with 
 no real parallel in history. For neither 
 the Buddhists nor Mohammed can really 
 be compared. It is this, the total massive 
 impression of something unearthly, that 
 beats in upon the reader. In the long run 
 this impression carries evidence of its own 
 reality — to all who are not obsessed by 
 theories, which bar the door to it. Much 
 may be attributed to the mythopoeic faculty. 
 But here the simplicity of the writing, the 
 amazing beauty of the ideal, the patent 
 fact that the Epistles of S. Paul utter an 
 actual personal experience, seem to point 
 
SION 205 
 
 against the view that all that is distinctive 
 in the events was created by vivid imagina- 
 tion. This is further strengthened by the 
 terrific after-results, including the Ufe and 
 inward experience of today. It is really 
 on account of the impression of the whole 
 that we believe in the parts; and not vice 
 versa. This is, I take it, the significance 
 of the use of the term the Faith as a single 
 thing, as it is at the bottom of the appeal 
 to authority. There are these three strange 
 facts: myself with my failures and aspira- 
 tions, — many more like me: the amazing 
 vision of Jesus: and the new Ufe that 
 came through Him and goes on still. 
 Apart from prepossessions, what is there 
 left me but to say, "Neither is there any 
 other name given under Heaven, whereby 
 men may be saved"? Or as a friend once 
 wrote to me, "Perhaps after all there is a 
 fact at the bottom of Christianity." 
 
 I do not say that all this can be proved, 
 but I do say that there is a cumulative 
 argument. On the personal, the social, and 
 the historic side considerations arise which 
 mutually support each other. On the actual 
 matter of historical enquiry about the cen- 
 
206 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 tral figure, there is once more a cumulative 
 argument. No single detail is conclusive 
 by itself, but all together make a positive 
 unity which is not so readily found in the 
 alternative explanation. These other ex- 
 planations are not impossible, but they do 
 great violence to documents and the con- 
 sciousness of the Church and have all the 
 marks of a non-natural reconstruction, 
 adopted in obedience to a preconceived 
 theory. All that the traditional view needs 
 for its acceptance in its main features is the 
 removal of the presupposition that miracles 
 do not happen. There is, I think, in this 
 view a definite ground of assurance to those 
 whose craving is well described by Mr. 
 Hardy in The Gospel of Pain.^ 
 
 "Men and women need something more 
 central than the emotions, more sane than 
 the wistful mood of aspiration. They do 
 not require * demonstration' or 'logical 
 proof; they have reacted from 'schemes' 
 and 'systems'; but conviction they do 
 want. They want assurance on common- 
 sense grounds. Such grounds they have 
 in practical life, where no one pays a thought 
 to logic or waits a moment for demonstra- 
 
SIGN - 207 
 
 tion. Are they to be blamed for requiring 
 such in religion? Granted one conviction, 
 brought out of the facts of Hfe, one clear 
 hint of order and purpose, and the spiritual 
 assurance of the ages of faith * might again 
 inspire the world.' " ^ 
 
 We are asked whether it is wise to accept 
 this Faith. We reply: it is the part of 
 wisdom to accept that account of things 
 which includes the relevant facts. Whether 
 or no we can coordinate the facts into a 
 coherent system, we know not. That is a 
 matter of faith. There will always be those 
 who value and those who dislike a clearly 
 articulated "diagrammatic" view. In any 
 case we have to get the facts in, however we 
 are to explain them. Now this Faith in- 
 cludes as nothing else does the facts of life 
 as it is lived. Avowedly it appeals to the 
 nature of man, as a being who chooses, 
 who loves, and who sins. The other sys- 
 tems all tend to ignore these facts in whole 
 or in part. 
 
 So far as the facts of human life are con- 
 cerned, no system has been developed for 
 deahng with them at all comparable to that 
 
X 
 
 \ 
 
 N 
 
 208 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 of the Christian Church. No view which re- 
 pudiates freedom but in the long run breaks 
 upon the rock of personahty. Again no 
 system which is not social, no purely indi- 
 viduahst religion, but is false to the nature 
 of man; and sociaUty involves authority. 
 \ It is only owing to the high organisation 
 
 of modern life, and the support given to 
 each individual, that sheer individualism 
 is even conceivable.^ 
 
 Rehgion without a Church is not really 
 possible, for not only is man a social animal, 
 but religion is essentially social. And more 
 and more is the comparative study of 
 religion making it clear that men are funda- 
 mentally religious. This is indeed one of 
 the main diiOSculties that face the apologist. 
 For while religion in general is seen to be a 
 necessary element in the make-up of human 
 life, the same observation by no means tells 
 in favour of any religion in particular; rather 
 it tends to an impartial patronage of all. 
 Taking it, however, as at last settled that 
 religion is a human property, we may well 
 proceed to ask ourselves whether the Catho- 
 lic Church does not enshrine the central 
 experience of the race, and whether any 
 
SIGN 209 
 
 of the competing systems is seriously to be 
 compared with it. That does not mean 
 that they have nothing to teach us. Even 
 in our worship we have become too deeply 
 occidentalised, and we need once more to 
 drink at the Eastern springs. We are 
 indeed doing so; the growth of interest in 
 mysticism is evidence. 
 
 Speaking on the whole, can anyone seri- 
 ously maintain that any other religion is 
 likely to take the place of the Christian, or 
 that any other society can approach the 
 Christian Church in the production of the 
 highest characters.? All societies, even re- 
 ligious, are ultimately judged by the type 
 of character they tend to produce. For, 
 having settled the problem of freedom, it 
 remains to be seen what you will do 
 with it. Some of the most passionate 
 exponents of freedom at this moment are 
 in the anti-Christian camp; they despise 
 the Christian character. I do not mean the 
 character of Christians. It is not because 
 we fall short of our ideal (we all do more 
 or less) ; it is our ideal itself that wins this 
 scorn. So long as men are content to 
 admire Christ and the Christian character, 
 
 15 
 
210 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 SO long will they find grounds good or bad 
 for adhering to the Church. Nietzsche, 
 indeed, as we saw last time, was aware 
 of this and directed his polemic on this very 
 point. If you dislike the Christian charac- 
 ter and consider that its virtues are vices, 
 there is no use arguing about the evidence 
 of the Faith. You will surely find grounds 
 for discarding it. If you admire the Chris- 
 tian and find in holiness "the beauty of 
 God," then you will in the long run sur- 
 render yourself to that society in which it 
 thrives, or at least you will desire to do so, 
 though you may be deterred either by the 
 intellectual diflSculty or by the rarity with 
 which the ideal is realized. At least your 
 sympathies will be all on that side. The 
 question of every caUing, every school, 
 and every profession is not what it teaches, 
 but the kind of men it produces. A man's 
 own choice is determined in nine cases 
 out of ten by whether he hkes the law or the 
 army or literature, and finds in it the kind 
 of men he cares to Mve with. So with the 
 Christian Church. The supreme practical 
 question is what kind of people does she 
 make; all individuals are largely a product 
 
SIGN 211 
 
 of their society. In so far as you are able 
 to compare Christians with non-Christians, 
 which type would you wish to be like? 
 Only, be it remembered, it is unfair to 
 compare the mere average Christian with 
 some "saint of rationahsm" hke John 
 Stuart Mill, or even to take the least 
 inspired moments of the saint and bid men 
 judge his inferiority. The Church must 
 be judged by its truly characteristic pro- 
 ducts no less than a school or college 
 or nation. I do not believe that in our 
 apologetic we have made enough use of the 
 saints. We should argue on a sounder 
 basis, if we talked a httle more of the 
 martyrs. It would not in all things make 
 matters easier. For the modern world 
 tolerates sanctity rather than admires it, 
 and outside the Bible regards it as almost 
 wicked to believe in saints. Further, it has a 
 notion of what the saints are that is almost 
 entirely false to the facts, and before they 
 can be made an apologetic argument their 
 character, their variety, their enormous 
 practical influence, and their abihties need 
 to be better known. When, however, the 
 lay figure of a most unnatural being has 
 
21^ CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 been replaced by the living reality, it will 
 be found that they were and are the most 
 persuasive of all arguments. 
 
 For it is this sharing in a great society, this 
 communion of saints, which is one great 
 charm of the Christian life. By it we enter 
 into the life of the striving sinners (the 
 best description of the saint) of all ages and 
 make their achievements ours. We are 
 united not only with the living, but with 
 the dead. There is truth in the anachro- 
 nisms of the Old Masters, who paint a S. 
 Augustine, a S. Francis, a S. Chrysostom 
 kneeling simultaneously at the foot of the 
 Cross. So with other things. There are 
 elements in the doctrine, in the devotion, 
 in the ritual, even in vestment and gesture, 
 which sway us with the accumulated force 
 of all the generations who have used them 
 and help us to share in "the long result of 
 time." All authority is social in its nature; 
 it is the life of the community, larger than 
 all its members, in which these things grow 
 to maturity and wherein all are welded to 
 harmony. In a thousand subtle and im- 
 perceptible ways this authority is all about 
 us, uniting in intimacy the present and the 
 
SIGN 213 
 
 past, the near and the far. A man who 
 takes part in a high celebration of the 
 Eucharist is a witness and a sharer in the 
 unity of history. In this worship he is 
 carried far back through many ages, breath- 
 ing cHmates older than the Christian, and 
 he, a modern, is at one with primitive man 
 and also has the promise of the future.'^ 
 It is then, as gathering in itself the religious 
 experience of mankind, that the Christian 
 Church makes its appeal, and, as sharing 
 in the central stream of the Life, that the 
 Catholic would justify himself. For reasons, 
 not relevant to discuss here, I do not believe 
 the theory of Papal omnipotence to be 
 central. But facts appear to shew that 
 the further we go from what is Catholic, 
 the greater danger we are in of becoming, 
 in Tyrrell's phrase, "pert and provincial"; 
 even though our devotion to Jesus be real, 
 there is in such cases a narrowness and lack 
 of freedom, because so many of the treasures 
 of the past have been deliberately foregone. 
 In England in the past we have been too 
 "provincial," and we do well to lend all 
 honour to those who are striving to restore 
 in all their touching and immemorial beauty 
 
214 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 certain age-long notes of CathoKc faith, 
 notably those which have to do with the 
 Communion of Saints. All this may be 
 held with the widest allowance for dif- 
 ference in local custom and national feel- 
 ing, no less than for the individual 
 temperaments, which are not intended all 
 to emphasize the same aspects of faith 
 and worship. 
 
 All this, of course, may be denied. It 
 may be said that man needs no religion, 
 that it is but a passing phase nearly over, 
 and that we have at length entered on the 
 positive epoch, as described by Comte. 
 Comte, however, it must never be forgotten, 
 was driven to crystallize into a religious 
 system that enthusiasm for humanity which 
 he desiderated, making, as has been said, 
 a sort of parody of the Roman Church. 
 So far as can be judged by observation, 
 however, it seems improbable that either 
 the agnostic or the purely rationalist scheme 
 will satisfy the mass of men, but only a few 
 who live under conditions highly artificial 
 and many who do not reflect at all. Nor 
 do I deny the extreme difficulty of the 
 
SIGN 215 
 
 fundamental faith of the Christian in Love, 
 as Lord of all things. The doctrine of the 
 Fatherhood of God, to which some would 
 fain reduce Christianity, in the hope of 
 making it easy and universal, is to me the 
 profoundest of all stumbHng blocks. Look- 
 ing at the world of today, with its masses 
 of blighted Hves and amazing wastefulness, 
 not only of happiness, but of character, it 
 is hard indeed to credit the saying that 
 there is a heavenly Father "without whom 
 no sparrow falls to the ground." Plausible 
 grounds may be adduced for treating all 
 known existence, the history of the world 
 as we have it, as a mere effort of "the 
 will to power," blind and conscientious. 
 Nietzsche's doctrine is much more than the 
 ravings of a lunatic, and at times threatens 
 to overwhelm the strongest. At other 
 times the view of things propounded by 
 another philosopher, Mr. Bertrand Russell, 
 that it is mere purposeless vanity, seems 
 to come to me with a force well-nigh irre- 
 sistible. Certainly no one can prove it 
 false. Let me read the eloquent words in 
 which he proclaims it. It is from The 
 Religion of the Free Man, 
 
216 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 ^*Such in outline, but even more purpose- 
 less, more void of meaning, is the world 
 which Science presents for our belief. Amid 
 such a world, if anywhere, our ideals hence- 
 forward must find a home. That Man is 
 the product of causes which had no previ- 
 sion of the end they were achieving; that 
 his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, 
 his loves and his beliefs are but the out- 
 come of accidental collocations of atoms; 
 that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of 
 thought and feeling can preserve an in- 
 dividual life beyond the grave; that all the 
 labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the 
 inspiration, all the noonday brightness of 
 human genius are destined to extinction 
 in the vast death of the solar system, and 
 that the whole temple of Man's achieve- 
 ment must inevitably be buried beneath 
 the debris of a universe in ruins — all these 
 things, if not quite beyond dispute, are 
 yet so nearly certain that no philosophy 
 which rejects them can hope to stand. 
 Only within the scaffolding of these truths, 
 only on the firm foundation of unyielding 
 despair, can the 'soul' habitation hence- 
 forth be safely built." 
 
SIGN 217 
 
 "How, in such an alien and inhuman 
 world, can so powerless a creature as Man 
 preserve his aspirations untarnished? A 
 strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipo- 
 tent but bhnd, in the revolutions of her 
 secular hurrying through the abysses of 
 space, has brought forth at last a child, 
 subject still to her power, but gifted with 
 sight, with knowledge of good and evil, 
 with the capacity of judging all the works 
 of his unthinking Mother. In spite of 
 Death the mark and seal of parental con- 
 trol, Man is yet free, during his brief 
 years, to examine, criticise, to know, and 
 in imagination to create. To him alone, 
 in the world with which he is acquainted, 
 this freedom belongs; and in this lies his 
 superiority to the resistless forces that 
 control his outward life." 
 
 "Brief and powerless is Man's life; on 
 him and all his race that slow, sure doom 
 falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and 
 evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent 
 matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, 
 condemned today to lose his dearest, to- 
 morrow himself to pass through the gate of 
 darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere 
 
218 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that 
 ennoble his little day; disdaining the 
 coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to 
 worship at the shrine that his own hands 
 have built; undismayed by the empire of 
 Chance, to preserve a mind free from the 
 wanton tyranny that rules his outward 
 life; proudly defiant of the irresistible 
 forces that tolerate, for a moment, his 
 knowledge and his condemnation, to sus- 
 tain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, 
 the world that his own ideals have fashioned 
 despite the trampling march of unconscious 
 power." 
 
 Now what destroys such doctrines is not 
 demonstration. They cannot be demon- 
 strated to be false, or else why should Mr. 
 Russell believe them.'^ Their true antago- 
 nist is always faith, the faith that, however 
 bad things may appear, reality cannot be 
 so hopeless as that would make it. Life 
 cannot be such a senseless tragedy as all 
 that. Just as the supreme argument for 
 immortality is the spectacle of some strong 
 and noble character, dying in early life — 
 for we feel that all cannot be over with it 
 — so against the sight of nature and all 
 
SION 219 
 
 her cruelties, what is there to be said except 
 that human hearts will not acquiesce in a 
 world whose sole meaning is that it has 
 none? This is the final ground of all 
 rehgious beUef, whether Christian or not. 
 As Mr. Bradley puts it in regard to his 
 philosophy: 
 
 "Is it after all a paradox that our con- 
 ceptions tend all more or less to be one- 
 sided, and that life as a whole is something 
 higher and something truer than those 
 fragmentary ideas, by which we seek to 
 express and formulate it? Is it after all 
 the man who is most consistent who on 
 the whole attains to greatest truth? To 
 most, if not to all of us, I should have 
 thought that there came moments when it 
 seemed clear that the Universe is too much 
 everywhere for our understanding. Any 
 truth of ours, no matter what, fails to 
 contain the entirety of that which it tries 
 to embrace, and hence is falsified by the 
 reality. ... 7/ 7 were not convinced of 
 [this] on the ground of metaphysics, I should 
 still believe it upon instinct. And, though I 
 am willing to concede that my metaphysics 
 may be wrong, there is, I think, nothing 
 
220 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 which could persuade Trie that my instinct is 
 not right, ''^ 
 
 "The immanence of the Absolute in finite 
 centres, and of finite centres in the Absolute, 
 I have always set down as inexpHcable. 
 Those to whom philosophy has to explain 
 everything need therefore not trouble them- 
 selves with it." « 
 
 This refusal is an act of faith. It cannot 
 be consciously justified to those who will 
 not make it. Yet, I think, it may be said 
 to be involved as a presupposition of all 
 purposeful activity.^ And it also will carry 
 us on to some view of ultimate reality, 
 which makes it at least analogically per- 
 sonal. We cannot rest in the belief that 
 the world as a whole is lacking in those 
 personal relations which are the reality of 
 life here, and without which the eternal 
 home is no home. We demand imperiously 
 the hope of intimacy with the secret 
 of all things; and intimacy means to 
 us communion, the mutual love of spirits, 
 and this intimacy between the derived 
 and the original Spirit is only another 
 way of expressing the Fatherhood of 
 God. 
 
SIGN m 
 
 I spoke of faith as the supreme argument 
 against the difficulty raised by the apparent 
 waste and cruelty of the world. There is 
 another — the authority of Jesus. His un- 
 broken trust in His Father gives us warrant 
 even stronger than that sense of which I 
 have been speaking. This authority is to 
 many of us a support when our own per- 
 suasion seems breaking. It is said that 
 this doctrine is the sum total of the Chris- 
 tian Faith; that as the teaching of Jesus, 
 it is sufficient; that all the supernatural 
 elements may be omitted or relegated to a 
 secondary place. This it was His mission 
 to proclaim. This involves no difficulties 
 and no assertion of the miraculous. Yet 
 in that case, what is the use of it? If the 
 doctrine of Jesus was a mere surmise, it is 
 no better than yours or mine, and can be 
 to us no support at times, when "all melts 
 under our feet." Jesus' doctrine of the 
 Heavenly Father might be only one more 
 beautiful dream, were it not for that in 
 Jesus which enabled Him to speak securely. 
 If He were not raised above that conjectural 
 quagmire in which we "follow wandering 
 fires," why should we trust in what He 
 
n^ CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 tells us? The difficulties of belief are at 
 times so tremendous that you cannot hold 
 the truth even of the Fatherhood of God 
 without a view of Jesus, as beyond man, 
 which leads right on to the Creeds. And 
 so the question at the last comes back to 
 the same point: Whom say ye that Jesus 
 is? What is the total impression of Jesus 
 on mankind? And how are we to set forth 
 our relation to it? Can we jBnd any method 
 more adequate than the Faith adumbrated 
 in the Creeds and lived by the Church, 
 of which they are an element? 
 
 As we saw at the outset, it is altogether 
 a fallacious method to treat the question 
 as though it were all concerned with docu- 
 ments. There is no reason for studying 
 documents of this or any other matter 
 in vacuo. It is always something in our 
 life here and now that drives us to that 
 study. We shall never get right even 
 educationally till we begin history at the 
 right end, which is today; not 1066, or 
 476, or 753, or any other arbitrary date. 
 The ground for enquiry into the past must 
 be the present or the future. That is what 
 starts us off. Above all in regard to this 
 
SION 223 
 
 question of questions, I ask myseK, How 
 am I to interpret certain living facts, the 
 Christian Church here, myself now speak- 
 ing, and the general philosophic chaos, 
 which is only one aspect of the more uni- 
 versal human muddle? I am not as a 
 Christian professing a belief in Christ as 
 one who once hved. It is no far-off memory 
 of one who told of God, but the sharing in 
 a new Hfe, which is nourished by union 
 with one alive. Nor, on the other hand, 
 do I adhere solely to a present society, 
 energising in His name. That society has 
 its credentials, which are submitted to 
 scrutiny. Nor again is it only in the figure 
 of Christ, nor in the Church as a community 
 for winning holiness, nor in its history as 
 authentic, nor in its miracles as facts, but 
 because all these are a source of peace and 
 strength to me — me a loving, sinning, 
 choosing being. Nor again is it because 
 there are no historical perplexities and no 
 difficulties for thought that I accept what 
 I do, but I find that every other alter- 
 native is even worse; that it either ignores 
 material facts and pretends to escape diffi- 
 culties, which in reality it enhances; or 
 
224 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 from having a lower ideal it preaches a 
 view of things too horrible to be endured, 
 save on a compulsion which it does not 
 prove; or that it frankly gives up the prob- 
 lem as hopeless. And none of these posi- 
 tions but seem to me on the whole less 
 tenable than the Christian. All these argu- 
 ments for faith, positive and negative alike, 
 come with an accumulated force, which 
 seems to me so tremendous that I incline 
 very strongly to accept them. Moreover, 
 the total character of the Christian story 
 seems to me so strongly to point to an 
 irruption into this world of powers from that 
 beyond, that short of compulsion I hesitate 
 to reject it. 
 
 And so the question must be put. Do 
 we know enough of reality to pronounce 
 a priori as incredible such a narrative as 
 that of the Gospels, supported as it is by 
 the statements of the Epistles, actualised 
 in the Church and the individual of today .f* 
 On this point enough has already been said 
 and I need not labour it further. 
 
 No bigotry is more intense and less 
 amenable to evidence than that dogmatism 
 which, while proclaiming man's ignorance of 
 
SIGN 225 
 
 the secret of things, asserts also that he 
 knows enough of that secret to declare that 
 it could not communicate itself through 
 Jesus Christ. I grant the difficulties in- 
 volved in the extreme views of God's power 
 to limit Himself, which the Incarnation im- 
 plies, but to deny that it was possible is 
 pure assumption and springs from a Pagan 
 view of God, as essentially proud. I grant 
 the difficulties of Christian theology, but 
 it does guard its supreme treasure, the 
 supernatural, and God's entry into human 
 life in Christ Jesus. Once satisfied of the 
 generally supra-normal character of the 
 Gospel narrative, I find it the part of wis- 
 dom to put myself into living union with 
 the society which makes that belief active. 
 By such admission we are in face of 
 stupendous mysteries. Nor can human 
 language ever be adequate to set them out. 
 The teaching of S. Paul on the Atonement 
 and the person of Christ, and of S. John 
 on the mystical union and the Sacraments, 
 and the whole atmosphere of the early 
 Church is crowded with mystery. So am 
 I. These things are congruous with our 
 sense of wonder in the world and in our 
 
 16 
 
CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 own life. That a world so strange as this 
 should have as its core a secret so marvel- 
 lous as that revealed in the Cross and 
 Passion and Rising again of Jesus, is to 
 me but natural. What does seem to me 
 false to that reality in which I live is the 
 clear daylight of naturalism, or the articu- 
 lated scheme of rationalist thought. All 
 views of the world end in mystery — and 
 an act of faith. In agnosticism there is 
 no light at all. Pantheism, with its pathetic 
 confidence in an ever incomprehensible 
 Absolute, its denial of true personality, 
 and its failure to explain the delusion of 
 it, seems to me, despite obvious attractions, 
 less credible and less true to the facts of 
 life, while even fuller of mystery. The 
 Christian Faith, with its teaching of God 
 as Love, and therefore as Father and 
 Saviour, and of human hfe as redeemable 
 and as seen through the Resurrection glory, 
 if it does not solve all mysteries, leaves us 
 more hopeful than any other. Theology, 
 so far as it errs, does so by over-rationalising 
 rather than by profaning its mysteries. 
 But it does its work so long as it preserves 
 the sense of the stupendous nature of those 
 
SIGN 227 
 
 doings in Palestine and their refusal to be 
 classed in the ordinary categories. 
 
 Again we have admitted, and it was the 
 purpose of the last lecture to emphasize, 
 the fact of the vast differences between 
 the mental climate of the Christian Church 
 and that of our own day. Any acceptance 
 of the Faith as supernatural, even allowing 
 for much that is local and transitory in 
 form of expression, involves us in great 
 difficulties, for it invites us to breathe a 
 different atmosphere. It is this sense of 
 the difference of climate that forms to many 
 the insurmountable obstacle. But it is 
 not in reality such, except on the assump- 
 tion that ours is altogether superior and 
 that the other contains no valuable ingredi- 
 ents which we lack. On grounds stated in 
 the first part of our discussion I am driven 
 to reject these assumptions. Despite our 
 vaunted enhghtenment, the mental habits 
 of our own day appear to me curiously 
 superficial. Whole tracts of the life of 
 the spirit are to them a terra incognita. 
 If certain dominant tendencies continue 
 unchecked, we should soon be even in 
 worse case, for these tendencies will stamp 
 
228 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 out certain inherited counter-tendencies, 
 which linger on and have still some influence. 
 The point is, that the world needs and is 
 crying out for some way of escape from that 
 intellectual prison house which it has built 
 for itself. Such a way of escape is offered 
 by the Gospel of Christ, and that which 
 seems to outsiders its foolishness is in 
 reality the very wisdom for which they 
 are seeking. It holds the open sesame into 
 a larger world, the talisman of a Hfe freer 
 and less sophisticated than that of the 
 atmosphere of present day intellectualism. 
 It lifts us from the dry bones of theory to 
 the abounding life of the Spirit, It is 
 indeed a magic which relieves our minds, 
 tired with the riddle of things, and intro- 
 duces us to a world where we are free. 
 
 For it is indeed mainly our own theories 
 of things that we have to reconcile with the 
 presuppositions of Christianity. The spec- 
 tacle of man as a free and sinful spirit, 
 and his inner knowledge of the tragedy of 
 himself, the picture of God as Father and 
 Saviour, the philosophy of suffering as 
 revealed in the Cross, the Sacramental 
 gift at once natural and supernatural — 
 
SION 229 
 
 all this, if hard to reconcile with speculative 
 theories, is congruous with life as it is daily 
 lived. It is only when we set up our modern 
 categories, useful for certain aspects of life, 
 and put them between us and real experi- 
 ence, that we find the difficulties insuperable. 
 A child's laughter or a woman's tears make 
 short work of all such phantasms of the 
 spirit. The Gospel is the freshest and most 
 original thing in the world, while the tone of 
 modern intellectualism, with all its culture, 
 is at bottom commonplace and middle aged. 
 Of course these things are mere pre- 
 sumptions. They may lessen the diffi- 
 culties to faith in one who desires it. They 
 are not conclusive. Nothing is. No man 
 who is honest but echoes at times the reply 
 of Dr. Johnson to Boswell, who declared 
 there was quite enough evidence — " Sir, I 
 could wish for more." God leaves us free 
 to take what view of life we please. Against 
 our will we shall not be driven even "to 
 the truth as it is in Jesus." The argument 
 most nearly conclusive is the atmosphere 
 of the New Testament and its congruity 
 with our own experience. It is the constant 
 pouring in of that atmosphere upon the 
 
230 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS 
 
 mind of a man, persuaded alike of his own 
 failure and the world's need of redemption, 
 that is most likely to bring him to the foot 
 of the Cross. For that is where we all 
 have at last to come. Christ does not 
 reveal Himself to those who are satisfied. 
 Why should He? They do not want Him. 
 It is only as a man is ready to cry, "What 
 must I do to be saved?" that the answer 
 will come, "BeUeve on the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and thou shalt be saved." 
 
 For that is what it all means. I have 
 spoken of the Church and her history, nor 
 could I set forth strongly enough my hope 
 that men would enter into that great 
 fellowship. I have spoken of her actual 
 power today in the social perplexities of to- 
 day, and I feel more and more the need of a 
 \ society that has an other-worldly reference, 
 whose very existence is a protest against 
 materialist ideals. I have spoken of the 
 appeal to the individual, his power to find 
 himself in the Church. This individual 
 reference must never be left out, the mys- 
 tic is the deepest of all apologists; and no 
 social authority can do away with the sense 
 
SIGN 231 
 
 of the individual member. But all these 
 things have for the Christian no meaning 
 apart from Him from whom they took their 
 origin. Neither the history, nor the pres- 
 ent life of the Church, nor her Sacraments, 
 nor the individual's consciousness of grace 
 could stand for one moment, but for their 
 reference to Him. It is in Him, as He hangs 
 upon the Cross, "the dear dying Lamb" 
 in whom we see the human face of God. 
 He calls all men unto Him, lifted on that 
 tree of agony, which is His enduring throne. 
 The quest of any man is the quest of 
 reahty. It may be more vigorous and 
 conscious at such times as this at college, 
 but it never ceases. Man is so made that 
 he cannot be satisfied with less than the 
 highest, and that he must be beaten down 
 before he can be raised up. The pursuit 
 of seK cannot be carried on alone; it is self, 
 as at home in God, that we seek. We find 
 ourselves only in finding Him. There in 
 Him who bade men die to five is the crown 
 of all our striving; there is the Love that 
 redeems our tragic failure, the peace that 
 passeth all understanding — Jesus Christ, the 
 same yesterday, today, and for ever. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 King Richard the Third and the Reverend 
 James Thompson 
 
 Some fifteen years ago Sir Clements Markham 
 set himself to rehabilitate Richard Crookback. 
 His effort was not the first, for Horace Walpole a 
 century before had tried his hand at the same task. 
 The work was done so skilfully that any member 
 of the general public who had suflScient interest to 
 read the articles would easily have succumbed to 
 the advocate. Briefly, the case was as follows. 
 The writers who have made history were all of them 
 directly or indirectly subservient to Henry VII, 
 who needed for his stability to inculcate detesta- 
 tion of the man whom he had supplanted. This 
 bias animated historical writers consciously and 
 popular opinion unconsciously. For reasons of 
 this sort Fabyan is worthless. Polydore Vergil, 
 historiographer to Henry VII, was an Italian and 
 was not likely to tell any truth unpalatable to his 
 master even if he had known. The life of Richard 
 by Sir Thomas More has not really the weight of 
 his character behind, but was written or inspired 
 
 235 
 
2S6 APPENDIX 
 
 by Cardinal Morton, the engineer of the Tudor 
 triumph, and implacably hostile to Richard. 
 
 After thus clearing the ground by destroying 
 the credit of the witnesses, the critic examined 
 the individual crimes attributed to Richard. He 
 laboured the inadequacy of the evidence for the 
 Duke's share in the murder of the young Prince of 
 Wales after Tewkesbury. For his supposed mur- 
 der of King Henry VI in the Tower, the course 
 advised by Mr. Weller was adopted and an alibi 
 set up. The story of the killing of "false, fleeting, 
 perjured Clarence'* was dismissed as unworthy of 
 credence. 
 
 After this preliminary exculpation the accused 
 is led into court with clean hands and there tried 
 for his final and worst offences, the usurpation of 
 the Crown and the subsequent murder in the Tower 
 of the two princes. So far from being an educated 
 Renaissance villain, Richard is shewn as a rather 
 nice man, capable like others of crimes, but averse 
 from them. The whole moral atmosphere of that 
 time 
 
 " Which hovered between war and wantonness 
 And crownings and dethronements." 
 
 is conveniently ignored throughout the discussion. 
 The plea set up for the assumption of the Crown 
 is reviewed. It is alleged that Richard was no 
 usurper, but the true heir. He was shocked to find 
 from Bishop Stillington the evidence of an earlier 
 maiTiage of his brother, which reduced the little 
 princes into bastards. Thus Richard was not the 
 
APPENDIX 237 
 
 wicked uncle, but the lawful inheritor; i.e., if 
 Warwick was held to be barred by his father 
 Clarence's attainder. 
 
 But this is not all. Not only did Richard not 
 usurp the throne. He did not even make away with 
 his nephews. He left them aHve. They were mur- 
 dered by Henry VII, or at least at his orders. For 
 it was his interest to marry the daughter of Eliza- 
 beth Woodville, and as this left the legitimacy of 
 the princes once more clear, it was needful to get 
 rid of them. Now the character of that rather 
 unattractive Machiavellian statesman is not such 
 as to make the story hard of belief. We should 
 have no diflSculty about it if there were any tradition 
 or writing in its favour. Moreover, it is noteworthy 
 that the Act of Attainder passed against Richard 
 does not mention this assassination, and this is not 
 very easily accounted for, except by the hypothesis 
 that the Httle princes were still alive at the moment 
 the act was passed. Against all this there is, on 
 the one hand, the evidence of popular tradition and 
 all our writers, and on the other the testimony of 
 one witness who must have been disinterested. 
 The French Chancellor, at the States-General in 
 1484, with Richard still reigning, openly denounced 
 him as the murderer of his nephews and assumed 
 the widespread knowledge of the fact. This diflS- 
 culty was removed by Mr. Markham in the follow- 
 ing way. He pointed out that Morton was peculiarly 
 active in France and suggested that he had inspired 
 the Chancellor, not only with the behef that Richard 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 had murdered the children, but also with the belief 
 that there was in England a common rumour to 
 that effect, whereas, as a matter of fact, there was 
 nothing of the sort. 
 
 Despite the ingenuity of this argument — and 
 it is far more plausible than much of the critical 
 constructions of a non-miraculous Gospel — it has 
 failed to win acceptance. Dr. Gairdner, whose 
 knowledge of the sources was unrivalled, not only 
 refused to be persuaded, but declared that such 
 methods as those employed were "an end of all 
 history." So far as I am aware, no single historical 
 student has declared in favour of the new theory. 
 
 The controversy is, however, of great interest, 
 for it raises the whole question of normal historical 
 beliefs. Further, it serves to illustrate how woe- 
 fully we may go astray if we isolate each document 
 or fact and consider them apart from the total 
 picture and from popular tradition. For indeed 
 it is a strange chance, if Richard had been the 
 "plaister-saint" he becomes on the new theory, 
 how all evidence of such a character should have 
 vanished. It is also to be noted that this whole 
 series of crimes was attributed, not to different 
 people, but to the same individual, placed amid 
 alluring temptations and living in an age when 
 bloodshed was a daily occurrence and the influence 
 of the later Renaissance was operating to under- 
 mine the moral basis of society. In the time of 
 such flowers of the moral life as Tiptoft or Rodrigo 
 Borgia, such deeds are far from incredible for a 
 
APPENDIX 239 
 
 prince in a position which has proved too strong 
 for many a more virtuous character. Nor can we 
 account for all these crimes as the creation of prej- 
 udice or ill-feeling, even though it may be that one 
 or two of the narratives have undergone appro- 
 priate development; nor is it really an argument 
 against the traditional story that it formed the 
 basis of a play of Shakespeare. The real diflBculty 
 lies in the total impression and the universal tradi- 
 tion. Of course all this might be the fruit of Tudor 
 calumny; at least the contrary must be proved. 
 But to a mind not resolved a priori to discard the 
 common tradition such an explanation seems too 
 far fetched to be probable. Thus it can be seen 
 how, even in a case like this, any sound historical 
 judgment must take into account not only the 
 documents, but also the common tradition, while 
 it must treat not merely of the facts in isolation, 
 but the total picture, of which they are elements. 
 
 The same is the case with other characters, such 
 as the Emperor Tiberius or Pope Alexander VI. 
 Efforts have been made to destroy the belief in the 
 trustworthiness of the traditional view, but with- 
 out any real success, and with slight changes in 
 detail the portrait remains as it was. 
 
 Further, it is not to be doubted that even in 
 regard to the most thoroughly "documented" of 
 historical facts tradition plays a large part in our 
 belief. Creighton said somewhere that apart from 
 tradition there was not suflBcient evidence to prove 
 that Julius Csesar ever lived, and the same fact is 
 
mo APPENDIX 
 
 proved indirectly by the famous theory of Huet 
 in the seventeenth century. In the interests of 
 the Papacy, Huet argued that there never had taken 
 place any Councils before that of Trent; i.e., that 
 the whole of Church history was a fiction. In our 
 own day the same was contended from an opposite 
 standpoint by the late Mr. Johnson. He held 
 that the whole of history from 500 to 1500 was 
 imaginary, the deliberate creation of the monastic 
 orders, and to get over certain obvious difficulties 
 he presumed that, where there was other than 
 Christian authority, that was due to a similar 
 fiction on the part of Mohammedan monks. I quote 
 these cases, not for any value in the theories, but 
 as proof of the difficulties that face any enquirer 
 who is resolved to jettison tradition from all his- 
 torical beliefs. 
 
 II 
 
 This is the first impression made upon the reader 
 by Mr. Thompson's book on Miracles in the New 
 Testament} The age-long faith of Christendom 
 goes for nothing. In his view the consciousness 
 of the Church creates not even a presumption in 
 favour of any single interpretation — indeed the 
 presumption is rather the other way. Now it 
 might not be accurate to say that, critically speak- 
 ing, the Church tradition affords more than a pre- 
 sumption. But that it affords less is not so much a 
 surrender of any conception of Divine guidance in 
 the religious society, but it is false to the first 
 
APPENDIX 241 
 
 principles of forming the most ordinary historical 
 judgments. In starting to write a life of Bossuet, 
 for instance, I cannot divest myself of those impres- 
 sions about the grand siecle that have Kved them- 
 selves into the mind of cultivated Europe and ha\'e 
 been slowly infusing their meaning into me since 
 the days when I read Voltaire's history before I 
 went to a pubUc school. I approach the topic 
 through a whole worid of presuppositions, senti- 
 ments, and imaginings, which have built themselves 
 into a picture with very httle of conscious con- 
 struction on my part. True, when the evidence 
 is mastered, in some respects the current tradition 
 will be modified and my appreciation of its mean- 
 ing will be deeper. But tradition is rarely at fault 
 in regard to the main Hneaments of any character 
 who held the stage, and it ought always to be taken 
 into account even by a writer who desires to set 
 up a diflFerent view. As a matter of fact the 
 vast development of historical investigation in 
 the nineteenth century has not greatly altered our 
 judgments, though it has deepened our knowledge 
 and modified it in detail, in regard to any of the 
 great public men. Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, 
 Charies I and his sons, Mariborough, Joseph II, 
 RicheHeu, Frederic the Great, Maria Teresa do not 
 loom so very differently to us from what they did 
 to our grandfathers, however greatly we have 
 deepened our acquaintance with the social and 
 political conditions of their life. 
 However that may be, no historian ought to 
 17 
 
242 APPENDIX 
 
 approacli the study of any well known historical 
 personage without taking into account the tradi- 
 tional portrait and treating it as at least having a 
 very strong presumption in its favour. Or else how 
 did it arise? For this is where he begins. He 
 starts from that notion of the character which has 
 become universal, which is impressed upon the 
 mind rather by suggestion and feeling than by direct 
 statement and is a presupposition of the very motive 
 which drives him to criticise. 
 
 Now in regard to the miracles, and still more in 
 regard to those of them enshrined in the Creeds, 
 the tradition of the Christian Church affords at 
 least as valuable a help as does the popular judg- 
 ment of a king or a soldier. Yet from Mr. Thomp- 
 son's book one would scarcely know that it existed, 
 and might almost suppose that these narratives 
 were some newly constructed hypotheses which a 
 revolutionary school of theologians were trying to 
 bolster up by a non-natural use of the documents. 
 I do not say that the consciousness of the Church 
 in a matter of this kind is infallible; certainly it 
 cannot be assumed to be so beforehand. But I 
 do say, as Professor Denney said, that the very 
 institution of Sunday is a standing evidence, too 
 frequently ignored, of the fact that the Church 
 is built upon the faith that on the first day of 
 the week the Lord rose again leaving an empty 
 grave. 
 
 The question of our Lord's miracles cannot be 
 decided by discussing them in isolation. First of 
 
APPENDIX 243 
 
 all we must have some view of the narrative as a 
 whole. Now Mr. Thompson does not profess to 
 do this, although, as I shall indicate, he really does 
 write with his mind made up as to what cannot 
 have happened. At any rate he never discusses 
 the problem about the total character of the im- 
 pression made upon us by the documents — 
 whether it does not present us with features that 
 are supernatural. As I have urged in the text, 
 the total massive impression of the New Testament 
 narratives seems to me so strong and so wonderful 
 that, unless I were hindered by irresistible prejudice, 
 I should say that we have here to do with events 
 in a high degree mysterious, with what has all the 
 marks of an irruption of influences from the spirit- 
 world into that of sense, producing, as might well 
 be anticipated, amazing disturbances. For if there 
 be a spirit-world behind this and it has relations 
 with ours — if even what Mr. Thompson somewhat 
 inconsistently admits be true, then that these 
 results of such a unique fact should be strange, 
 abnormal, miraculous is only natural. 
 
 I beUeve that this conclusion can be sustained 
 even if we take the Synoptics alone, or S. John, or 
 the Epistles of S. Paul; though on the grounds 
 stated I do not believe that this separation is legiti- 
 mate, or even that we have any real right to separate 
 the evidence of the New Testament from the con- 
 tinuing hfe of the Church and its power today in 
 the individual experience. For we must bear in 
 mind that one well-attested conversion or one 
 
244 APPENDIX 
 
 specifically Christianised life outweighs as positive 
 evidence the existence of a thousand unbelievers or 
 Pagans, precisely as one well-authenticated ghost 
 story is positive evidence about a spirit-world, 
 which would not be destroyed by proving a hundred 
 other stories to be figments. Speaking as one who 
 has been concerned in historical studies for more 
 than twenty years, I say that it would take a great 
 deal more argument than any I have yet come 
 across to convince me of the untruth of the general 
 character of the New Testament. The impression, 
 which deepens on every reading, is quite plain — 
 like a flash of light — that I hold here the record 
 of a spiritual experience which speaks from the 
 world beyond and has produced profound and 
 unusual disturbance in the physical universe. 
 This seems to my apprehension the plain fact; a 
 fact made more patent by its after-results and to be 
 accepted, like other facts, whatever general scheme 
 of notions a man adheres to. It matters not for 
 this purpose whether a man be idealist, realist, 
 sceptic, intellectualist, pragmatist, here he has to 
 do with a genuine outbreak from the world beyond, 
 and he must harmonise the fact of that outbreak 
 with his system or change it as best he may. 
 
 Personally it seems to me that the Creeds and 
 the Church are but the expression of that fact, are 
 indeed part of it, and on grounds stated above, it 
 is the whole fact that is the real living thing; the 
 details are but abstractions, and it is to that whole 
 fact, as the expression of "God in Christ reconcil- 
 
APPENDIX 245 
 
 ing the world unto Himself," that my adhesion is 
 given and by which I obtain "the fellowship of 
 the mystery.'* 
 
 Ill 
 
 Let us, however, pass from this topic and con- 
 sider the treatment which Mr. Thompson gives to 
 the documents, how the first and most notable 
 feature of his treatment is that he nowhere gives 
 any serious reflection to the total impression created 
 by the documents as a whole. We shall never get 
 a true view either of a character, an epoch, or a 
 book if we seek first for the details and, adding up 
 our impressions, produce the result as a sort of 
 addition sum. Fancy judging a Keats' sonnet 
 by the first four hues or Esmond by three 
 chapters taken at random. It is the whole which 
 makes a work of hfe or of art. On that we must 
 have some provisional view before we proceed to 
 analysis of details. It is now recognised by psy- 
 chologists that this is the way in which the mind 
 works; it starts from a vaguely defined continuum 
 and proceeds to split it up into objects. So we have 
 to do with our historical judgments as with our 
 literary. First of all we must frame for ourselves 
 some general impression as to the man, the epoch, 
 or the book with which we are dealing, and then 
 proceed to deepen, to correct, and to define this 
 impression more precisely by a closer study of 
 detail. The whole comes before the parts in this 
 as in any living thing. 
 
246 APPENDIX 
 
 Here it is the total fact that has the character 
 of miracle. It is there that we obtain that irresist- 
 ible impression of witnessing an invasion of this 
 world by powers from that beyond — a view which 
 is only inadmissible provided the world as we see 
 it be self-explanatory and complete. If this be not 
 so, we cannot rule out beforehand the supernatural 
 character of the Christian fact, and it is as parts 
 of this alleged supernatural fact that the miracles 
 are to be considered. They are not single and un- 
 related marvels, and yet that is the way in which 
 criticism of this sort habitually treats them. 
 
 Let us take two instances of this unbiassed 
 criticism. The narratives of the first two chapters 
 of S. Luke are well known, and their internal soli- 
 darity is the most obvious feature. Mr. Thompson, 
 however, will have none of this, and following Prof. 
 Kirsopp Lake, endeavours, by splitting them into 
 pieces, to shew that the story of the miraculous 
 birth forms no integral part. It is a later addition. 
 There is no ground in the MSS. for this assertion, 
 and hence its sole support is the prepossession of 
 the writer against any abnormal occurrence. I quote 
 his words: 
 
 "But probably the best solution of the diffi- 
 culties of the passage is to suppose that the four 
 words cTTct avSpa ov ytyvtoo-Kw, without which there 
 would be no obscurity and no suggestion of 
 the Virgin Birth in the Gospel, are either a modi- 
 fication of S. Luke's source, introduced by the 
 Evangelist himself, as editor, or a later addition 
 
APPENDIX 247 
 
 to the text of Luke by some person or congrega- 
 tion who wished to make the miracle quite clear. 
 There is no textual authority for doubting the 
 words. But we know that editorial modifications 
 are a common feature of the Gospel. And we 
 have no reason, unfortimately, to suppose that 
 even the best texts which we possess are free from 
 interpolations." ^ 
 
 It is not easy to treat this objection seriously — 
 it can obviously have no weight at all save to a 
 mind resolved beforehand to find some way out of 
 the clear testimony of the Gospel. 
 
 One more instance will witness to the sanity 
 and balance of this criticism. The narrative of 
 the feeding of the five thousand occurs in all four 
 Gospels. If the writer's view be sound that the 
 miracle of the four thousand is only a variant, this 
 only proves how widespread was the story. Clearly, 
 it formed part of the very earliest tradition. Nor 
 can it be dismissed by a manipulation of the MSS. 
 The author, however, finds no diflSculty. Following 
 M. Loisy he pronounces it to be a Eucharistic 
 myth. It had better be given in his own words. 
 
 "But probably the most valuable clue to the 
 meaning of the narrative is supplied by the institu- 
 tion of the Eucharist in the Early Church. Sup- 
 pose an original incident, the exact nature of which 
 we cannot now determine, but which must have 
 been remarkable enough to impress itself upon the 
 memory of the apostles, to be compared with the 
 stories of the Old Testament prophets (I Kings 
 
248 APPENDIX 
 
 xvii. 8-16; 2 Kings iv. 42-44), and to be regarded 
 at a comparatively early date as a miracle. This 
 incident may have been transformed, by the pious 
 imagination of a later generation, into the original 
 institution of the Agape and Eucharist. Then the 
 account of it would be assimilated to the actual 
 experience of Christian worship. At the Eucharist, 
 which might sometimes be held out of doors, and 
 at which the congregation would naturally be 
 arranged in groups, Jesus Himself was still 
 present among His friends; still, as Head of the 
 Family of the faithful, blessed and brake the 
 bread; still miraculously satisfied the utmost needs 
 of all who came. Further, it was natural to think 
 that, if He had performed this symbolic act once 
 in Jewish territory. He must have done it again 
 among the Gentiles; and thus the alternative 
 tradition of the Feeding of the Four Thousand 
 found ready admission to the Gospel.^ 
 
 "It is difficult to see why, unless there was some 
 such ecclesiastical motive for its preservation, the 
 story of this miracle should have appeared six times 
 in the Gospels, and always with such an amount 
 of detail. The fact that it is so often described is 
 not a sign that the Evangelists were particularly 
 sure that it happened, but rather that it was par- 
 ticularly appropriate to the needs of those for 
 whom they wrote.'* 
 
 Further argument is hardly needed with expla- 
 nations like this ready to hand. It would be 
 equally feasible to interpret the whole Gospel 
 
APPENDIX 249 
 
 narrative, in the method once fashionable, as a 
 sun-myth. For no conceivable phenomenon, how- 
 ever unusual, but might be trinmied into normal 
 categories by methods so drastic and subjective. 
 Of course this exegesis can have no weight except 
 for those who are resolved beforehand to reject all 
 that is abnormal. 
 
 That is indeed the spirit of the book. True it 
 is that the writer refrains from denying the abstract 
 possibiHty of miracles, but this exception is purely 
 verbal. On page 5 we find him saying "To admit 
 a miracle is to commit intellectual suicide." When 
 an academic ■WTiter begins an unbiassed enquiry 
 with a dictum of that kind, we can predict pretty 
 readily what conclusions he will come to. More 
 significant even than this statement is the remark 
 in the course of his reply in The Guardian that "the 
 amount of evidence which exists for miracles is 
 itself the proof that they never happened." To 
 argue with a writer who takes up a position like this 
 is obviously out of the question. It is a case of 
 heads I win, tails you lose. If the evidence is slight 
 or a httle confused we are to withhold our belief 
 because there is too little; if it be incontrovertible 
 we are still to withhold it because there is too 
 much. This truly amazing sentence is a redudio 
 ad absurdum of his whole argument.^ That argu- 
 ment, however, with the discussion which it has 
 aroused, will have served a good purpose if it 
 avails once more to bring out the well known 
 fact that the question of the abnormal in his- 
 
25d APPENDIX 
 
 tory is at bottom philosophical or theological and 
 can never be decided by the documents alone. 
 It all depends on the attitude of mind with which 
 you approach it. One would have thought that 
 all this had been suflSciently established by the 
 classical work on Miracles (ignored by Mr. Thomp- 
 son), Mozley's Bampton Lectures. That all depends 
 on our previous attitude is demonstrated over and 
 over again by the writer, in spite of himself, in 
 phrases like those quoted, and others, and in his 
 preference of a vast quantity of ingenious theories 
 to the clear meaning of the New Testament and 
 the whole tradition of the Church. And indeed it 
 is very commonly recognised — by friend and foe 
 alike. A friend of mine once said to me, ^'It is not 
 a question of evidence, it is a question of taste, and 
 the taste for miracle has gone out.** That is the 
 modern attitude. Only I deny the statement. 
 True of the last generation it is less and less true 
 of our own. Recent knowledge of faith-healing, 
 thought-transference, and the well established cases 
 of "ecstatics" and "levitation'* are bringing back 
 once more that habit of mind which can approach 
 strange occurrences without ruling them out before- 
 hand by some appeal to laws of nature, or to what 
 is, or is not, conceivable. Mr. Thompson's remarks 
 about the "walking on the water" and the nature 
 miracles savour rather of the "brave days" of Pro- 
 fessor Tyndall than of anything we have now. 
 Thus it appears to me to be an entire mistake when 
 Mr. Thompson speaks of criticism as though it 
 
APPENDIX 251 
 
 were a purely independent science and could estab- 
 lish certain conclusions universally acceptable. 
 For the moment you pass beyond the range of 
 the normal, everything depends on your previous 
 attitude towards the supernatural. According as 
 your general view is favourable or unfavourable to 
 it, so must you approach the evidence. If you believe 
 or consider it probable that we are surrounded by 
 living spirits who may influence this world and know 
 more about it than we do, you cannot fail to approach 
 the evidence in a very different spirit from one who 
 beheves such powers to be non-existent or so highly 
 improbable as to be practically negligible. This 
 distinction is seen daily in the different approach 
 made towards ghost-stories, and I suppose by some 
 even in regard to thought-transference or mind- 
 cure. Does anyone suppose that Prof. Ray Lan- 
 kester and Sir Ohver Lodge, both of them eminent 
 scientific enquirers, would be hkely to agree as to 
 the results of a dozen meetings of the Society of 
 Psychical Research? 
 
 So in regard to the New Testament. Not all, 
 but a great deal of our view will depend on whether 
 we hold a belief in regard to the other world akin 
 to that of S. John or S. Paul or whether we start 
 by ruling out of court with M. Seignobos all miracu- 
 lous narratives because we think it a principle of 
 historical criticism that "miracles do not happen"! 
 The truth is that any hope of a general agreement 
 in regard to narratives deahng with events which on 
 the face of them are supra-normal is a chimera. It 
 
252 APPENDIX 
 
 is as littl-e likely to be realized as a universal theistic 
 belief based on the alleged irrefragable proofs. If 
 they are intellectually coercive, how is it that so 
 many reflecting persons are unconvinced by them? 
 In history, as in philosophy or theology, there 
 is no likelihood of a compulsive certainty based 
 on the documents alone and apart from faith. 
 The evidence may be enough to confirm a 
 waverer or puzzle a doubter, but it never was 
 and never will be enough of itself to convince a 
 determined unbeliever in the other world, and by 
 its very nature it cannot be, because it is always 
 possible for the sceptic to say, with Hume, that 
 some form of self-delusion is more probable than 
 the truth of the narrative.^ 
 
 Now it is this general attitude towards the other 
 world that is the most startling feature of this book. 
 It comes out most clearly in the writer's attitude 
 towards the Fourth Gospel. It is well known that 
 even some Unitarian scholars hold to a belief in 
 Christ, as the Incarnate Logos, who are yet unable 
 to accept the miracles. But of this Mr. Thompson 
 will have none. He complains of the "intellectual 
 inadequacy" of the Gospel and lays bare his feeling 
 in his attitude towards the prologue. He describes 
 its aim correctly enough, but only to reject it. 
 
 "The fourth Gospel begins with a supernatural- 
 istic account of the Incarnation. This it propounds 
 in the prologue, stating (with a deliberate parallel- 
 ism of expression to the opening of the Jewish Bible) 
 that the story of Jesus is the story of the entrance 
 
APPENDIX 253 
 
 into the world under ordinary conditions of space 
 and time of the Eternal Word of God. Pre-existent 
 with God, He had been God's agent in the creation 
 of the world, which now He visited and revivified, 
 as the Source of all spiritual life and light." A 
 little further on he adds: "To sum up, the aim of 
 the fourth Gospel is to place the timeless, spaceless 
 person of the Word of God into the narrow condi- 
 tions of time and place in which Jesus of Nazareth 
 lived and died. This can be done in faith without 
 damage to either side of the antinomy. It cannot 
 be done in history without a weakening either of 
 the humanity or of the divinity of Christ." 
 
 Thus, in Mr. Thompson's view, the whole doc- 
 trine of the Logos and any belief in the pre-existence 
 of our Lord is a product of superstition. Thus he 
 throws over with one wave of the hand the view of 
 one who understood the Gospel if any man ever did 
 (Bishop Westcott) "The Unchangeable sum of 
 Christianity is the message" — "The Word was God 
 and the Word became flesh," while it would reduce 
 to ruins the greater part of the confession of the 
 other great critic. Dr. Hort, as expressed in his 
 famous Hulsean Lectures on The Way^ the Truthy 
 and the Life. It is not easy to see what remains 
 of the theology of the Incarnation if this view 
 be accepted, although it must be allowed that 
 at the close certain phrases not very consistent 
 with the writer's main position are introduced 
 implying that our Lord as the perfect result 
 of evolution is to be worshipped as God. This 
 
254 APPENDIX 
 
 point is of importance because in moat of the 
 discussion the significance of this part of the 
 work seems to have been overlooked. Certainly 
 it shews that the writer is far more at variance 
 with Christian theology than some of his defenders 
 have claimed. 
 
 Here in similar passages the true drift of the book 
 is revealed. It is the total mentality of the writer, 
 so far as it can be judged, that is far more repugnant 
 to me than any of his treatment of details. Except 
 in the form of a Pantheistic Nature-worship, I see 
 no real loophole for any belief in a supernatural 
 world. ^ 
 
 IV 
 
 As I have said in the text, the question of miracles 
 is really the question of the existence of a transcen- 
 dent world. Does there exist behind the veil a 
 Being or beings of spiritual nature with knowledge 
 and powers more than human and able to influence 
 our life in the world of sense? To deny this exist- 
 ence is to surrender the last vestige of the Christian 
 doctrine of the other world. Yet if such beings 
 have any relation at all with this life they must 
 somehow or other cause that to happen which 
 otherwise would not; and vice versa. When such 
 events are normal in character we caU them special 
 providences. When they are not we call them 
 miracles. In Balzac's story La Peau de Chagrin 
 both are illustrated. When the hero's wishes are 
 granted, so far as I recollect the form is never 
 
APPENDIX 255 
 
 miraculous. The result occurs by the providential 
 ordering of normal occurrences. On the other hand, 
 the shrinkage of the leather, which takes place 
 instantaneously with each new use of his power, 
 is definitely miraculous. It occurs as the direct 
 result of his words without any intermediary. Now 
 to suppose that there is beyond us a spiritual world, 
 and that it either has no relation to this, or that it 
 produces no effects other than normal, must be 
 either to deny its character as free and personal or 
 else to lay down that neither in knowledge nor 
 power can it exceed ourselves. But it may produce 
 effects of this kind; all recorded and, I think, all 
 conceivable miracles could be brought under this 
 category. I refuse to make the truly tremendous 
 assumption that they never happen and never have 
 happened — even apart from any of the stories 
 that they actually did happen. 
 
 The current dishke to the miraculous is due to 
 the marvellous triumphs of the mechanical method 
 and to the faith that it is the sole means of 
 knowledge. It is frequently due to a subtle form 
 of materialism which, by asserting the supernatural 
 significance of this world, conceives that it has 
 saved the spiritual sense, whereas it has merely 
 deified Nature. The whole point of our per- 
 plexities is not whether or no this life may have 
 a spiritual meaning, but whether it contains any 
 freedom or all is determined; and secondly 
 whether this face of things we see, commonly 
 called the natural world, is the whole of being, 
 
256 APPENDIX 
 
 or whether it be but a little bit and is sur- 
 rounded by a vaster invisible universe peopled 
 with personal spirits and functioning in ways 
 different to ours. 
 
 Christianity stands for the latter view and always 
 has stood for it, and when it be once admitted there 
 is no real difficulty in regard to miracle. Of course, 
 if we take Nature in the sense of Huxley or Mill, 
 as equivalent to all that happens, then miracles are 
 as natural as sparrows (both alike being mysterious). 
 No one supposes that a miracle is contrary to the 
 nature of things, and part of the ground for crediting 
 them is that they are congruous with a God who 
 created man and nature. The same is the case 
 with the rather wearisome controversy about law. 
 Miracles are not contrary to the law of the universe 
 — it is unthinkable; they may be regarded as 
 instances of a higher kind of life with its laws super- 
 vening upon a lower, just as man's free action by 
 the law — i.e., the order — of his being can stop 
 a cricket ball and "interfere"''' with the results of 
 gravitation. What we have experience of is the 
 different kinds of nature, the mechanical, then the 
 organic, the free activity of man, and finally there 
 are rarely recognised occurrences which indicate 
 beings of a higher order. 
 
 There is thus no objection to speak of miracles 
 as instances of a higher result. Personally I am 
 disposed to think the whole use of the term law is 
 misleading, but there is not the smallest ground 
 for any believer in miracles refusing to use the 
 
APPENDIX 257 
 
 term if he prefers it. Every fact that happens is 
 to some extent new and individual, and a miracle 
 is but an extreme instance of this. On the other 
 hand, every fact that happens takes its place in a 
 series — it is a bit of that great order of the world. 
 The question is whether that order is personal or 
 mechanical, for as M. Bergson so admirably shews, 
 the idea of mere non-order is unthinkable; the only 
 question is what kind of order we have to deal with. 
 If the ultimate basis of all order be a God who is 
 Love — i.e., who is personal and free — then such 
 events as the Resurrection are in the highest degree 
 natural, they are signs of that Eternal order; while 
 the more nearly anything approaches to the purely 
 mechanical, the more partial and abstract will it 
 be. As a fact, the moment you come to real life 
 you find mathematics gives but a very partial 
 account of it, and of the most apparently mechanical 
 facts, tells rather the tendency than the actual fact; 
 for in Nature, as some one put it, we never find that 
 1 is 1, and that is the assumption of logic and 
 mathematics. On this point I may refer to the 
 work quoted in the text. Dr. Karl Pearson's Gram- 
 mar of Science. 
 
 The contention of the Christian is that in the 
 last resort all the order of things is personal. More- 
 over, since on this view God has created a number 
 of free beings with a relative independence, there 
 is always uncertainty in the universe. The opposite 
 view is that, so far from this being the case, one 
 might (theoretically) and may by-and-bye practi- 
 
 18 
 
258 APPENDIX 
 
 cally be able to predict the whole future of the 
 universe both in gross and detail, because every- 
 thing in it is mutually determined. At bottom this 
 view denies the reality of change and freedom and 
 treats the world as dead, i.e., given once for all, 
 and working out a formula like a calculating machine. 
 Between these two views there can never be any- 
 thing but conflict, and the various attempts to soften 
 determinism can none of them be pronounced 
 successful. It is the cardinal question of freedom 
 wherein lies the whole problem. 
 
 All this is left untouched by Mr. Thompson, 
 who does not seem to have ever considered the bear- 
 ing of his views on this topic. Others, however, 
 do not leave it here. The doctrine of special provi- 
 dences is almost more repugnant to the popular 
 sentiment even than that of miracles. For in the 
 nature of things the former are more numerous 
 and less unmistakable. Still more is this the case 
 with freedom. Disbelievers in miracles almost 
 invariably go on, as they logically ought, to a sheer 
 determinism. This is indeed needful if they want 
 one to get a clearly articulated scheme with the 
 state of the world at any one moment as the 
 mathematically deducible consequence of that pre- 
 ceding. It is because it conflicts with this that 
 freedom is discredited, and with freedom, of course, 
 the miraculous. That the two are bound up to- 
 gether is shewn by the following passage from Dr. 
 McDougall's new book on Body and Mind. Argu- 
 ing from a scientific standpoint for the existence of 
 
APPENDIX 259 
 
 the individual soul, he puts the current objection 
 of what Sir Oliver Lodge would call "the orthodox 
 man of science." These are his words: 
 
 "Under these conditions the working hypotheses 
 of the natural sciences become confidently held 
 doctrines from which we feel ourselves able to 
 deduce the limits of the possible; and we seem able 
 to rule out from our scheme of the universe all that 
 confused crowd of obscure ideas wliich, under the 
 names of magic, occultism, and mysticism, have 
 been at war with science ever since it began to take 
 shape as a system of verifiable ideas inductively 
 established on an empirical basis. Once admit on 
 the one hand that psychical influences may interfere 
 with the course of physical nature and **you dont 
 know where you are"; you no longer can serenely 
 affirm that miracles do not happen. They may happen 
 at any moment and falsify the most confident predic- 
 tions of physical science.'' 
 
 This book deserves to be widely known. It 
 shews what are the living tendencies among students 
 of natural science. At least some of the acutest 
 minds are seen to be moving away (at this very 
 moment, when Mr. Thompson develops an attack 
 based on the notions of the last generation) from 
 that monism, whether materialist or spiritualist, 
 to which all events are mere changes in the one 
 Being and miracles or new happenings and free- 
 dom or the existence of individuals are equally out 
 of court. His work illustrates incidentally to the 
 careful reader how closely connected are all three 
 
260 APPENDIX 
 
 notions: belief in God as a real personal agent, i.e., 
 in a transcendent world; belief in miracle, i.e., in 
 the livingness of the universe (on the other view 
 it is merely a machine); belief in the true individ- 
 uality, i.e., the soul of men and women. The 
 publication of this book is a remarkable phenomenon. 
 The writer has (I should suppose) no bias towards 
 Christianity and he approaches the subject rather 
 as a scientific observer than as a philosopher and 
 shews the hopeless inadequacy of the popular 
 doctrines of epiphenomenalism or psycho-physical 
 parallelism to concatenate the actual facts of 
 psychic life. 
 
 This passage of Dr. McDougall suggests one 
 other element in that dislike of the miraculous which 
 is so prevalent, an element not indiscernible in 
 certain words of Mr. Thompson about the Sacra- 
 ments and involved in his views of S. John. Miracles 
 are corrupting to religion, for they imply a "magical" 
 view of the nature of God. Now so far as I can 
 see, this widespread objection has its roots in that 
 Gnostic and Manichsean view of the material 
 universe which regards it as something evil, and is 
 at the bottom of all false asceticism and much of 
 the Puritan view of hfe. It is the false spiritualism 
 which flies from all contact with the outward world, 
 which animates the Zwinglian attack on Sacramental 
 grace, and is at the root of nearly all doctrines 
 which deny the Incarnation. It is held to be some- 
 
APPENDIX 261 
 
 how degrading to God to hold that the regenera- 
 tion of man should proceed partly by any means 
 dependent on the outward world. Religion is in- 
 wardness and nothing else, and every material 
 means is a bar. This is the basis of Zwinglianism; 
 it is seen in all attempts to minimise the Incarna- 
 tion, and it is now reaching its complete expression 
 in the dislike and contempt for miracle. But if we 
 look this difficulty in the face, we can at once see 
 how imreal it is and largely dependent for its force 
 on the unpleasant associations which many people 
 call up in connection with the word "magic." If 
 we are a world of spirits surrounded by a cloud of 
 invisible witnesses, also spirits, and if these spirits 
 act on this world at all, then so far as their actions 
 produce results in the world of sense, they must 
 be magical. 
 
 Besides, to assert the contrary is to deny the 
 sacredness of outward things and to suppose that 
 redemption is concerned with a part, not with the 
 whole of life. I need not here labour the point 
 that Christ on any Christian view came to effect 
 redemption for the entire being of man — body 
 no less than soul and spirit — and that it is a false 
 abstraction to leave out one element. As Westcott 
 says: "The Resurrection teaches not the immor- 
 tality of the soul, but the immortality of the man." 
 Now the magical view of the Incarnation asserts no 
 more than that it is an Incarnation, the entrance into 
 the condition of human life of the Eternal spirit; 
 and how such an entrance is likely to be devoid of 
 
262 APPENDIX 
 
 disturbances in the material order, I know not. 
 The magical view of the Sacraments merely asserts 
 that God communicates Himself to us by the con- 
 secration of the simplest means of common life and 
 emphasizes the *'givenness" of grace in a way that 
 none of the subjective theories which claim a higher 
 spirituality can ever succeed in doing. The magical 
 view of the world involved in the miraculous is 
 simply the assertion that this life is not all; that it 
 is encompassed by a spirit world beyond, and that 
 that world can have influence over this, directly and 
 not merely indirectly. How any believer in the life 
 beyond can deny this, I cannot understand. 
 
 VI 
 
 Finally Mr. Thompson informs us, with that 
 confident dogmatism wliich is a note of all his writ- 
 ing, that the mental conditions in which miracles 
 were credible have vanished, and that they will never 
 return. On the contrary, so far as I can judge, 
 they very nearly did disappear in the last century, 
 but they are coming back now, as hard as they can 
 pelt. On all sides that hard crust of intellectualist 
 orthodoxy is breaking up. The mechanical account 
 of Nature is more and more seen to be abstract and 
 partial. We see on every hand the collapse of the 
 heroic efforts to force on to the Procrustean bed of 
 purely physical and mathematical method even those 
 branches of natural science which are concerned 
 with life; while the attempt to stretch human life. 
 
APPENDIX 263 
 
 still more art and religion on this bed, is daily ex- 
 hibiting its futility; it always gives a plausible 
 explanation, but it does so by omitting the one 
 important element which makes the difference. It 
 is not with science, but with the mechanical 
 theory of the world, that the belief in miracles 
 conflicts — with that view which, treating causa- 
 tion as the category of identity appHed to time, 
 finds nothing in the effects really new, and by 
 implication denies the life of things, the reality 
 of change. Prof. J. A. Thompson, whose scienti- 
 fic distinction is unquestioned, asks. Is there 
 one science of Nature? He argues that the 
 moment you come to the problem of hfe, you 
 pass beyond any possible mechanical explanation 
 and proceeds to quote very eminent authorities 
 on his side, such as Dr. J. S. Haldane, Driesch, and 
 Joly. 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge, whom I quote in the text, 
 affords a further instance. In history we look back 
 with a smile on Buckle's attempt to force the whole 
 of human Hfe into a formula of inevitable develop- 
 ment; and sometime back a protest justified by 
 the evidence was made on the danger of over- 
 emphasizing the element of continuity. But this 
 is not all. The moment you pass beyond the 
 normal you find a well established body of knowledge, 
 quite inexplicable by any mechanical means. Mr. 
 Thompson appears to think that those of our Lord's 
 miracles concerned with disease cease to be such 
 by calling them cases of mind-cure. But neither 
 
264 APPENDIX 
 
 mind-cure nor thought-transference are really ex- 
 pHcable on the mechanical theory. We now know 
 that mind-cures exist and have begun to classify 
 them, but they remain beyond interpretation, except 
 as the free exercise of psychic activity. The 
 method, in fact, by which Mr. Thompson gets rid 
 of many of his cases is quite illegitimate. The 
 now general belief in mind-cures, so far from render- 
 ing more diflficult our faith in the other narratives, 
 makes it far easier, because it lays bare something 
 of the richness of psychical power; while it also 
 enormously strengthens the general sense of the 
 trustworthiness of the narrative. It is amazing 
 that these discoveries should be made use of against 
 the miraculous. Not only this, but the increase 
 of interest in mysticism and certain forms of Oriental 
 religion, while it may not always be Christian in 
 tendency, is sometimes even the direct opposite, 
 yet is evidence that men are growing wearied of 
 the intellectual way of looking at things and are 
 seeking for modes of knowledge more intimate and 
 spiritual, and also for powers that are beyond the 
 normal. I am not commending this tendency in 
 all its aspects, but its existence is evidence of a vast 
 movement of the human spirit which will sweep 
 away our Western incredulity and leave such argu- 
 ments as those of this book stranded with an earlier 
 attack on "Supernatural Religion." The belief 
 in freedom, which w^as rapidly vanishing a genera- 
 tion ago, is coming back with a rush, and though 
 that rush will produce, is producing, many results 
 
APPENDIX 265 
 
 not favourable to the Christian Faith, it will at 
 least remove some of the antecedent objections to 
 considering its evidence. 
 
 More and more does it seem clear that we have 
 to do with a universe in which being exists on dif- 
 ferent levels. There is the mechanical level of the 
 physicists, or inorganic Nature; there is the sentient 
 life of the animal world; and the character-making, 
 active life of man; in the latter we discern alike in 
 ourselves and others many different levels — the 
 emotional, the intellectual, the spiritual. All are 
 interpenetrating and none (probably not even the 
 mechanism of Nature) exist in active isolation. 
 But it is, roughly speaking, convenient to divide 
 the world in this way. Now, just as there are cer- 
 tain powers dependent on the active use of the 
 intellect, so there are levels of knowledge and insight 
 that are beyond the reach of the intellect and only 
 very imperfectly to be expressed by its categories. 
 These levels alike of knowledge and of power are the 
 region in which events called miraculous properly 
 are to be expected — events, that is, not to be 
 brought about by the normal activities of the 
 physical world or by those of man's intellectual 
 scientific knowledge of it. 
 
 It is this fact in which we find the answer to that 
 very popular objection to miracles, that believers 
 in them only see God "in the gaps" of the natural 
 order, or, as Mr. Thompson puts it, the only way to 
 save the true supernatural is to deny the miraculous. 
 As has been said before, the only "supernatural" 
 
266 APPENDIX 
 
 which such a view can save is a Pantheism. Chris- 
 tians no more deny God's presence in the world, 
 because they assert His action above and beyond it, 
 than a behever in the Sacramental presence denies 
 His presence in every time and place. On this 
 point I said something in the third lecture. What 
 we do deny is that God is no more than the world, 
 which is His work and not Himself. We refuse to 
 imprison God in Nature or to assert this immanence 
 in such a way as to deny His transcendence. The 
 ordinary working of natural laws, if we so phrase 
 it, may be called the indirect and the miracle the 
 direct act of spiritual power. I may be serving 
 God equally when I clean my boots as when I say 
 my prayers, but I am not serving Him the same 
 way — and miracles are no more than analogous; 
 they are to ordinary events what worship is to work. 
 It may be true that 
 
 " God is seen God 
 In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod." 
 
 But He is seen to be God more fully in living beings 
 than in dead matter, in developing man than in 
 brute beasts, in the spiritual levels of life rather 
 than the animal or intellectual. So, though He 
 may be everywhere present in natural facts, there 
 may be some which set forth His presence and His 
 power over, not merely in. Nature by some startling 
 and unique effect, like the Resurrection; and thus 
 we are able to say with Westcott: "Christianity 
 rests on the conviction that in the Life and Death 
 
APPENDIX 267 
 
 and Resurrection of Christ something absolutely 
 new and unparalleled has been added to the experi- 
 ence of man, something new objectively and not 
 simply new as a combination or interpretation of 
 earlier or existing phenomena; that in Christ 
 heaven and earth have been historically united; 
 that in Him this union can be made real through 
 all time to each believer; that His Nature and 
 Person are such that in Him each man and all men 
 can find a complete and harmonious consumma- 
 tion in an external order. The Life of Christ is 
 something absolutely unique in the history of the 
 world — unique not in degree but in kind. It is 
 related to all else that is unfolded in time, as birth, 
 for example, is related to the development of the 
 individual." And thus, as he says elsewhere, 
 ** miracles are more properly the substance than the 
 proof of revelation," and they are rightly needed 
 in any revelation of redemption that embraces 
 the whole of being and stops short at no partial 
 manifestation. 
 
 True, such acts must be rare from the nature 
 of the case. Yet that they occur in connection 
 with times or persons of special spiritual endow- 
 ment was (until recently) the common opinion. 
 For it seems to me beyond question that in the so- 
 called ecclesiastical miracles there is a greater sub- 
 stratum of fact than it is now fashionable to allow. 
 For instance, in regard to the cases mentioned by 
 Mr. Thompson, I find his reasoning quite uncon- 
 
268 APPENDIX 
 
 vincing — whether in his minimising account of 
 the Franciscan story or of that related of Father 
 John of Cronstadt. It seems to me the purest 
 perversity to deny that the cure mentioned in the 
 latter was a direct answer to prayer. Indeed the 
 view which such an interpretation gives as to the 
 writer's notions of prayer is one more argument 
 against his whole position. I believe indeed that 
 stranger things have happened, and are now hap- 
 pening, than we can account for by any ordinary 
 means. But in our Western world we have become 
 so attuned to the mechanical method that we have 
 neither eyes nor ears for any other. This obsession, 
 which is a veritable superstition, is now passing. 
 There is an increasing recognition that at certain 
 levels of psychic experience powers may be tapped 
 which are abnormal. With this recognition there 
 will come once more the hope of approaching fairly 
 the remarkable galaxy of such events which we 
 contemplate in the New Testament. 
 
 vn 
 
 For one thing comes out more clearly than any- 
 thing else from Mr. Thompson's analysis, the volume 
 of the experiences. If the reader did not know the 
 fact before, he is hardly like to be unaware, after 
 reading Mr. Thompson's work, of the number and 
 variety of supra-normal occurrences which are 
 recorded — even if we grant, which I do not, that 
 
APPENDIX 269 
 
 he can erase all the cures and treat them as ordinary. 
 It appears clearer than ever that the New Testa- 
 ment is soaked through and through with miracle. 
 The task of removing it is Sisyphean. As fast as 
 one is rolled away another appears. To effect his 
 object a mountain of critical ingenuity has to be 
 constructed. And it is. Theory is piled upon 
 theory, interpretation added to interpretation, 
 every possible aid is taken from textual criticism 
 and speculative mythology, every form of non- 
 natural explanation exhausted before the records 
 can be ** purged of their offence." When they are, 
 the reader is left asking himself. Where will all this 
 end? If so much is taken, what is there that really 
 remains? If the narrative has to be so mutilated, 
 why not go the whole hog with the school of Drews 
 or Jensen? Even then he has this most diflScult 
 problem before him: Are the facts, as trimmed and 
 fitted into normal categories, adequate to account 
 for the martyrs and the saints, for the history of 
 the Church, for modem missions and Augustine's 
 conversion? I do not say that they can be proved 
 to be inadequate if you choose to postulate enough 
 of the creative religious instinct, but to me it seems 
 a far more probable and reasonable course to accept 
 the story substantially as it stands; to admit that 
 we are here in face of some unique operation of 
 that Amor che move il sole, e V altre stelle, and to 
 accept that summary of the experience in the 
 society which it created. 
 
^70 APPENDIX 
 
 True, this leaves us in presence of a mystery, 
 and no one can assert that there are no difficulties. 
 Yet what corner of life is without it? Is it not 
 most probable that some of our difficulties are due 
 to the very abnormality of the facts men tried to 
 recall? A reHgious account of the world without 
 mystery is not a religious account at all. As Dr. 
 Sanday said in his sermon on the book, printed in 
 The Guardian for May 12, 1911. 
 
 " Can we expect to make both ends absolutely 
 meet? Is there to be no margin that we are 
 obhged to leave open? Is there to be no element 
 of mystery in which we must needs acquiesce as 
 mystery, until we know even as we are known? If 
 that were so, the field of religious belief would be 
 different from all the rest of human life; it would 
 have in it less of mystery just at the point where 
 we should expect that it would have more. In 
 short, it would approximate more and more to 
 that type which the poet described as — 
 
 A reasoning self-sufficing thing. 
 An intellectual All-in- All! 
 
 " I do not think that that is exactly the type that 
 most Christians would wish to aspire to; and I do 
 not think that they are under any obligation to 
 aspire to it." 
 
 No one would deny the superficial plausibility 
 of this book any more than they would that of the 
 Jesus according to S. Mark. But both are in my 
 judgment fundamentally vicious historically, and 
 
APPENDIX 271 
 
 the supercilious treatment of the Founder, "Jesus 
 was no theologian," does not commend the author's 
 thesis to a reverent mind. On the whole a perusal 
 of the books strengthens rather than weakens one's 
 hold on the miraculous and shews how much it is 
 an integral part of the Gospel; how bare and drab 
 is the view of things disclosed by unbehef. The 
 real question is whether there is anything beyond the 
 world. If there be such things as real change, 
 fresh experiences, creative evolution, then there is 
 no antecedent diflSculty and the evidence for the 
 great Christian Fact seems to me to be irresistible. 
 If there is not, if we are tied to a mechanical theory 
 of nature, then of course we must find some way of 
 getting rid of the abnormal from these narratives. 
 But then also we must reject a God living and 
 active behind the phantasmagoria of sense; we 
 must give up our sense of a world of struggling and 
 choosing men, and then must set aside the hope of 
 a whole creation of redeemed spirits existing in a 
 risen Hfe. 
 
 The question is not about law or no law in the 
 universe, but whether the law we normally see in 
 operation, or think we do, be a part or the whole; 
 whether there is any real freedom in the universe; 
 whether life is really the working out of purely 
 mechanical relations, all of whose problems might 
 ultimately be solved by some super-Babbage with 
 an improved calculating machine; or whether it is 
 wiser to think of it as existing on different levels 
 — the mechanical, the sentient, the animal, and 
 
272 APPENDIX 
 
 intellectual, the spiritual — and admit that they 
 all interpenetrate to such an extent that the 
 irruptions of life at the last level produce great 
 and unpredictable disturbances in the world of 
 sense. 
 
NOTES 
 
NOTES 
 
 ARMAGEDDON OR THE INTELLECTUAL 
 CHAOS 
 
 (1) Busseirs (Dr. F. W.) BampUm Lectures, 1905 
 (Methuen & Co.), p. 225.i 
 
 (2) On this point see Bussell's Bampton Lectures. He 
 points out that it "is thought by some to be a philosophi- 
 cal achievement and an act of creditable daring to call 
 the sum of things God" and argues the futiHty of this 
 gilded atheism. 
 
 "It is no novelty to accuse modern Hegelianism and 
 ancient Stoicism of being indistinguishable from pure 
 Naturalism, of employing terms out of their current 
 usage, rather from habit and a desire for comprehension 
 than from any conscious wish to deceive. . . . 
 
 "The tendency to save the comfort of religious terms 
 without their meaning or object will always satisfy 
 many who cannot bear to lose at one blow the traditional 
 scheme of life. . . . 
 
 "It mitigates the horror of determinism, and if it bring 
 some vague solace to those who are able to entertain it, 
 it fulfils that standard of usefulness which is the sole ulti- 
 mate test of creeds as of institutions. Founded securely 
 
 ^ The passages from Bussell's Bampton Lectures here quoted 
 are printed by permission of Dr. Bussell and Messrs. Methuen 
 & Co.. Ltd. 
 
 276 
 
276 NOTES 
 
 on faith and sentiment (personal but incommunicable), 
 it can resolutely close the ears to outward remonstrance 
 on the part of pure Positivism or moralistic Religion." — 
 Bussell's (Dr. F. W.) Bampton Lectures, 1905, p. 113. 
 
 (3) "We shall grasp eagerly at any intimation that 
 God cares for us, has work for us to do; nay has need of 
 our help. It is on this secret or silent conviction that 
 Western life has been founded with its strange and anom- 
 alous features of self-repression and common action, wild 
 personal enterprise, and reverence for custom and tradi- 
 tion." — Bussell's Bampton Lectures, p. 133. 
 
 (4) Bergson gives an admirable account of the prevail- 
 ing tendency, which makes everything deducible from 
 the laws of matter and motion; a fact which, if it were 
 the case, would mean that we are all in a dead world, 
 working itself out like a machine. 
 
 **Les explications mecanistiques, disions nous, sont 
 valables pour les systemes que notre pensee detache 
 artificiellement du tout. Mais du tout lui-m^me et des 
 systemes, qui dans ce tout, se constituent naturellement 
 a son image, on ne pent admettre a priori, qu'ils soient ex- 
 plicables mecaniquement, car alors le temps serait inutile, 
 et meme irreel. L'essence des explications mecaniques est 
 en effet de considerer I'avenir et le passe comme calculables 
 en fonction du present, et de pretendre ainsi que tout est 
 donnS." — Bergson's L'Evolution CrSatrice, p. 40. 
 And then Du Reynaud. 
 
 "The time is passing when men can comfortably sup- 
 pose that Christian behaviour outlasts Christian dogma.'* 
 — Bussell's Bampton Lectures, p. 133. 
 
 (5) Tancred, by B. Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield 
 (Longmans, Green & Co.). 
 
 (6) Carnegie's (Canon W. H.) Churchm^nship and 
 Character (John Murray), p. xiv. 
 
NOTES 277 
 
 (7) Eucken's (Prof. R.) The Problem of Human Life 
 (T. Fisher Unwin), p. 297. 
 
 (8) Eucken's (Prof. R.) Christianity and the New Ideal- 
 ism (Harper & Brothers). 
 
 (9) Wister's (Owen) Lady Baltimore (Macmillan & 
 Co., Ltd.). 
 
 (10) Masterman's (C. F. G.) The Condition of England 
 (Methuen & Co., Ltd.). 
 
 (11) Haldane's (Lord) Universities and Public Life 
 (John Murray). 
 
 (12) James's (Prof. "William) A Pluralistic Universe 
 (Longmans, Green & Co.). 
 
 (13) "B. D." in Pa.r. 
 
 (14) Prichard's (H. A.) Kanfs Theory of Knowledge 
 (Clarendon Press, Oxford). 
 
 (15) Joseph in Mind, October, 1910. 
 
 (16) Galloway's (Dr. G.) Principles of Religious 
 Development (Macmillan & Co., Ltd.). 
 
 (17) Mill's (J. S.) Three Essays on Religion (Longmans, 
 Green & Co.), "On Nature," pp. 29, 30. 
 
 (18) Pearson's (Prof. Karl) The Orammar of Science, 
 3rd Edition (A. & C. Black), p. 153-4. 
 
 It is fair to say that the writer furnishes a mathemati- 
 cal proof, which in his view is conclusive, that "miracles 
 are incredible" (p. 142), and indeed he would appar- 
 ently be willing to persecute all believers in mystical or 
 ecstatic state as pernicious to social welfare (p. 138). 
 But it does not seem that this position is consistent with 
 that taken up in a later chapter on "Contingency and 
 Correlation." Mr. R. A. Bray, in an article in the 
 Daily News, called attention to the significance of Pro- 
 fessor Pearson's treatment of causation, and agreed that 
 his view leads right on to some such view of the world 
 as that outlined by M. Bergson. The point here to note 
 
278 NOTES 
 
 is the insistence on the individuality of things and the 
 contingency in all events and the discarding of the idea 
 of absolute fixity. Certainly if the Christian view be 
 true that this world is encompassed by an invisible world 
 of spirits, then that this activity should be responsible 
 for that kind of variation we term miracle is natural 
 enough. He points out that "all the universe provides 
 man is likeness in variations; he has thrust function into 
 it, because he desired to economise his limited intellectual 
 energy" (p. 167). No believer in the fact of miracles can 
 surely want more than this. "We have tried to get all 
 things under a perfectly inelastic category of cause and 
 efiFect. It has led to our disregarding the fundamental 
 truth that nothing in the universe repeats itself." The 
 writer of course disbelieves in will as a cause and refuses 
 to consider it as in any way different from other phenomena 
 of sequence. But he certainly shows how on the side of 
 science, if he accurately represents it, it is nonsense to talk 
 of the absurdity of such events as the Resurrection on 
 the hypothesis that this world is not all; an hypothesis 
 which is in no way ruled out by his own theory, which 
 is "purely" agnostic. 
 
 (19) Bierbaum*s (Prof. Otto J.), Dostoieffsky and 
 Nietzsche, Hibbert Journal, July, 1911, pp. 827-8, 837. 
 
 (20) Garrod's (H. W.) The Religion of all Good Men 
 (Constable & Co., Ltd.). 
 
 (21) Sturt's (H.) The Idea of a Free Church (Mac- 
 millan & Co., Ltd.). 
 
 (22) Hay's (J. S.) The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus 
 (Macmillan & Co., Ltd.). 
 
 (23) In the Hibbet-t Journal^ October, 1910. Cf. also 
 the following passage from Sir Oliver Lodge's The 
 Christian Idea of God (Hibbert Journal^ »^uly, 1911, 
 p. 704) :— 
 
NOTES 279 
 
 "The modern superstition about the universe is that, 
 being suffused with law and order, it contains nothing 
 personal, nothing indeterminate, nothing unforseen; that 
 there is no room for the free activity of intelligent beings, 
 that everything is mechanically determined, so that given 
 the velocity and acceleration and position of every atom 
 at any instant the whole future would be unravelled by 
 sufficient mathematical power. The doctrine of Chris- 
 tianity and Determinism is supposed to be based upon 
 experience. But experience includes experience of the 
 actions of human beings; and some of them certainly 
 appear to be of a capricious and undetermined character. 
 Or without considering human beings, watch the orbits 
 of a group of flies as they play; they are manifestly not 
 controlled completely by mechanical laws as are the mo- 
 tions of the planets. The simplest view of their activity 
 is that it is self-determined, that they are flying about 
 at their own will, and turning when and where they choose. 
 The conservation of energy has nothing to say against it. 
 Here we see free-will in its simplest form. To suppose 
 anything else in such a case; to suppose that every twist 
 could have been predicted through all eternity, is to intro- 
 duce preternatural complexity, and is quite unnecessary. 
 Why not assume what is manifestly the truth, that free- 
 will exists and has to be reckoned with, that the universe 
 is not a machine subject to outside forces, but a living 
 organism with initiations of its own; and that the laws 
 which govern it, though they include mechanical and 
 physical and chemical laws, are not limited to those, but 
 involve other and higher abstractions which may per- 
 haps some day be formulated for life and mind and 
 spirit? " 
 
 And further on he continues (710) in reference to the 
 influence of departed spirits: 
 
280 NOTES 
 
 "The region of the miraculous, it is called, and the bare 
 possibiHty of its existence has been hastily and illegiti- 
 mately denied. But so long as we do not imagine it to 
 be a region denuded of a Law and Order of its own, akin 
 to the law and order of the psychological realm, our denial 
 has no foundation. The existence of such a region may 
 be established by experience; its non-existence cannot be 
 established, for non-experience of it might merely mean 
 that, owing to deficiencies of our sense organs, it was 
 beyond our ken. In judging from what are called mira- 
 cles, we must be guided by historical evidence and liter- 
 ary criticism. We need not urge o priori objections 
 to them on scientific grounds. They need be no more 
 impossible, no more lawless than the interference of a 
 human being would seem to a colony of ants or bees." 
 
 (24) "It is time that attention was directed to the 
 forces, intellectual and social, which are slowly but surely 
 dissolving our Western civilisation." — Bussell's Bamp- 
 ton Lectures, p. 145. 
 
 (25) "There is a very large audience waiting, quite 
 free from a priori notions of the possibility of a reve- 
 lation, from any understanding of mere historic accu- 
 racy — waiting, I say, for an answer to this question, 
 which has recently gained in loudness and insistency : Can 
 we afiPord to do without Christ?" — Bussell, ibid., p. 55. 
 
 II 
 BABYLON OR THE MODERN CRISIS 
 
 (1) Cram's (R. A.) The Gothic Quest (Gay & Hancock, 
 Ltd.). 
 
 "Can we as architects answer enthusiastically to the 
 call of men who desire a Christian Church bringing to 
 
NOTES 281 
 
 their assistance, not the considerations of a tradesman, 
 but the fire of an artist? . . . Can we come to look upon 
 architecture as a part of the vast language of art, the 
 exalted privilege of which is the expression of tlie emo- 
 tions, of the loftiest achievements of the soul of man, as 
 they can be expressed by no other human power? 
 
 "I believe we can. At all events we must if we care 
 for our art at all except as a means of making, or trying 
 to make, a living. We shall have much to fight against. 
 We shall find opposing us a great civilisation that hates 
 religion, or scorns it; a civilisation made up very largely 
 of an un-Christian economic system, a sordid and un- 
 honoured society, venal and corrupt politics, rampant 
 commercialism, narrow ideals." — Cram, ibid.f pp. 200-1. 
 
 Cf. also the following passage from a very different 
 writer. Professor Babbitt, in The New Laokoon, writes: 
 
 "If the arts lack dignity, centrality, repose, it is because 
 the men of the present have no centre, no sense of anything 
 fixed and permanent either within or without themselves, 
 that they may oppose to the flux of phenomena and the 
 torrent of impressions. In a word, if confusion has crept 
 into the arts, it is merely a special aspect, of a more gen- 
 eral malady, of that excess of sentimental and scientific 
 naturalism from which, if my diagnosis be correct, the oc- 
 cidental world is now suffering. It remains therefore for 
 us to consider whether there is any means by which we 
 may react in just measure against this naturahsm — by 
 which we may recover humanistic standards without 
 ceasing to be vital and spontaneous or in any way revert- 
 ing to formahsm." — Babbitt's The New Laokoon, p. 185. 
 
 (2) Arnold's (Matthew) Stanzas in Memory of the 
 Author of Obermann (Macmillan & Co., Ltd.). 
 
 (3) Ruskin*s (John) Seven Lamps of Architecture (G. 
 Allen & Sons, Ltd.). 
 
282 NOTES 
 
 (4) Bussell's (Dr. F. W.) "Christian Theology and 
 Social Progress ' ' (Bampton Lectures) (Methuen & Co. , Ltd.) . 
 
 (5) Wells's (H. G.) New Worlds for Old (Constable & 
 Co., Ltd.) has an illuminating chapter on this topic. 
 
 (6) Dickinson's (G. Lowes) Justice and Liberty (Dent 
 & Sons, Ltd.), p. 71. 
 
 (7) Ibid., p. 129. 
 
 (8) Cooper's (E. H.) Twentieth Century Child (John 
 Lane). 
 
 (9) Masterman's (C. F. G.) The Condition of England. 
 
 (10) Morris's (William) The Earthly Paradise (Long- 
 mans, Green & Co.) 
 
 (11) Cram's (R. A.) The Gothic Quest (Gay and Han- 
 cock, Ltd.), pp. 81-2. 
 
 "It is no explanation of the hideousness of life and the 
 puerile mimicry of art which exist today to say that we 
 in this country [the United States] have no time for art 
 and the other amenities of life. On the contrary we all 
 know that art is not a scientific or economic product. 
 We know that it is a mental temper, a spiritual condition, 
 and we know that it is just as much an adjunct of whole- 
 some life as is bodily health. We have time enough for 
 art, much more than many peoples have possessed in the 
 past. Beauty takes no time. A good church can be built 
 as quickly as a bad church. It takes no longer to paint a 
 good than a poor picture — much less in fact. We spend 
 in a year more money on what we are pleased to call art 
 education than was spent in Italy during the whole four- 
 teenth century." 
 
 And again a little further on: 
 
 "If we are to possess a civilisation which is worth 
 expressing itself artistically, we must do something 
 besides establish art-lectureships; we must change the 
 conditions of life; the temper of the people" p. 93. 
 
NOTES 283 
 
 (12) Cf. Bussell's "Christian Theology and Social 
 Progress" (Bampton Lectures), p. 319. 
 
 "Other religions start from a sublime idea of perfec- 
 tion and come down to average human level with reluc- 
 tance or condescension. But Christianity starts with 
 proposing to the sinner the spectacle of a suflFering crim- 
 inal; and thus, by at once meeting the distressed and 
 the degraded on their own ground, raises on this basis a 
 theology which the wisest cannot exhaust. 
 
 "Other systems begin deductively, not with the vari- 
 ety and complexity of our life, but with the unity and 
 harmony of the whole; they are brought down, puzzled 
 and perplexed, to the 'principium individuationis' (if I 
 may in this connection use the phrase) and to the 'prob- 
 lem of Evil.' Christianity boldly confronts the diflBculty 
 which they explain away with devious or plausible argu- 
 ment or else altogether avoid ; it starts with the weakness 
 of God and the sin and sorrow of pain, and on this foun- 
 dation of fact, that may not be gainsaid, builds its edi- 
 fice of morals, of piety, and of hope. 
 
 "It is strange that this unvarying appeal to 'faith,' a 
 belief in a reality so difiFerent to its 'appearances,' does not 
 prevent the message from being ' understood ' even by the 
 humblest. Indeed, understanding that is to move men 
 to action and endeavour must always be of this charac- 
 ter; flawless knowledge, which mirrors unchanging veri- 
 ities, carries no such incentive or stimulus. 'To know 
 one's self as a perfect member [of a perfect whole' is a 
 definition of religion which for most men would have 
 no meaning." 
 
 (13) Eucken's (R.) The Meaning and Value of Life 
 (A. & C. Black), p. 139. 
 
 (14) Eucken (R.), ibid., p. 140. 
 
 (15) Eucken (R.), ibid., p. 57. 
 
284 NOTES 
 
 (16) Eucken (R.), ibid., p. 72. 
 
 (17) Lodge's (Sir Oliver) Men and the Universe 
 (Methuen), pp. 6, 8, 22 f. 
 
 in 
 
 CALVARY OR THE CHALLENGE OF THE 
 CROSS 
 
 (1) Russell's (Dr. F. W.) Bampton LedureSy 1905, 
 p. 121. 
 
 "The substance of my contention, as of every earnest 
 Christian and every genuine philosopher, is to assure the 
 one known reality of its sovereign importance and value, 
 not merely as a bye-product, an accidental epiphenome- 
 non, on the surface of an unending evolution, but as the 
 supreme centre of life, and being, and thought." 
 And again, ibid., p. 134: 
 
 "The Gospel transfers the interest from a secular or 
 cosmic process to the single life. If science can take 
 nothing into account butUhe fortunes of a solar system 
 or a sidereal universe, the gradual changes of a species, 
 the normal man, dismayed at these immensities, returns 
 to his own pressing needs. 
 
 "The individual claims (as we have seen) to be the 
 subject of a heavenly solicitude; and among religious be- 
 liefs must always prefer that system which assures to 
 him, spite of all seeming and present loss, a central place, 
 an ultimate victory. Now the Gospel appeals to him 
 because in its very essence it is a protest against Law; 
 it enlists its sympathy because Right is weak and not 
 powerful." 
 
 For the individualist basis of all true social feeling, 
 see the following: 
 
NOTES 285 
 
 "The conception of life is only 'social/ and devoted to 
 the common good, because it is primarily and profoundly 
 'individualistic'. Only the man assured of the lasting 
 worth and dignity of his own life, of the safety of his 
 happiness in the hands of God, can afford to sacrifice it 
 for the benefit of others, in whom he sees children of a 
 common father." — Ibid., p. 141. 
 
 (2) Professor Drews, in The Christ Myth, sets himself 
 to show that our Lord never had any historical existence 
 at all. The interesting point is that he does this avowedly 
 in the interests of religion of the Pantheistic type. He 
 declares that the belief in the historic personality of Jesus 
 is the great obstacle to the universal triumph of "Mon- 
 ism." Mr. J. M. Robertson has developed his views in 
 Pagan Christs, a work in which he endeavours to shew 
 that neither Jesus nor Buddha ever had an historical exist- 
 ence, and seems inclined to surrender other well known 
 historic persons like Montanus. Jensen claims that his 
 view is less radical; his point is not that Jesus had no 
 historical existence, but that the Jesus of the Gospel 
 never Uved. See the pamphlet, P. Jensen, Hat der 
 Jesus der Evangelien mrkiich gelebt? The whole is 
 developed in connection with a theory of the Gilgamesch 
 Epos, which is one of the wildest doctrines ever put for- 
 ward in good faith, and sweeps not only our Lord, but 
 Moses, S. Paul, and others all into one net, regarding them 
 as successive embodiments of the mythical hero-god. 
 The theory is wilder than the wildest exercises of super- 
 stition, and I cannot for the life of me imagine why the 
 medieval peasant, who believes some story which is prob- 
 ably no more than an exaggeration of a real experience, 
 and at least is spiritually edifying, is to be treated with 
 contempt, while a modern scholar, with all the resources 
 of civilisation at his back, who invents a doctrine so fan- 
 
286 NOTES 
 
 tastic as this is only regarded as a little extreme. For 
 what is abundantly clear is that the whole foundation of 
 Jensen's theory is the belief which he shares with the 
 ordinary "liberal," like his opponent Julicher, that the 
 strange stories must be false. He says this himself in 
 his reply to Julicher: "Nun aber der Charakter schon des 
 vom altesten Evangelium, dem des Markus, Bezeugten. 
 Darin treffen wir bekanntlich auf eine ununterbrochene 
 Reihe von Dingen, die so nicht geschehen sein konnen. 
 Ich brauche nur zu erinnern an das sichtbare Herabkom- 
 men des Geistes Gottes, an die Stillung des Sturms, an die 
 erste und die zweite wunderbare Speisung u.s.w. oder an 
 so manche Heilungen durch Jesus, hinter die jeder Medi- 
 ziner ein 'unmoglich' schreiben musste. Das heisst: 
 bereits in der altesten fUr uns konstruierbaren und der 
 altesten uns bekannten Gestalt der evangelischen Uber- 
 lieferung finden wir so zahllose mythologische Elemente, 
 dass sie allein schon eine hbchst kritische Betrachtung 
 der ganzen Geschichte notwendig machen. Ohne jede 
 Frage konnte ihr deshalb doch ein sogar recht umfang- 
 reicher geschichtlicher Kern zugrunde liegen" {Hat 
 der Jesus der Evangelien ivirklick geleht? pp. 17, 18). 
 And he then goes on to say that his theory of Moses, 
 Paul, and Jesus, each being embodiments of the Baby- 
 lonian, the God-Man Gilgamesch, supplies the necessary 
 historical foundation. If anyone wants any evidences of 
 the aberrations to which the refusal to allow the miracu- 
 lous can drive learned and intelligent men, he could not 
 do better than read the so-called arguments and parables 
 of the pamphlet Moses, Jesus, Paulus, Drei Varianten 
 des babylonisclien Gottmeuschen Gilgamesch. This is all, 
 moreover, in the name of an "ernsten, wissenschaft- 
 lichen voraussetzungslosen folgerichtigen Kritik" as 
 opposed to the "Fanatismus blossen Glaubens." 
 
NOTES 287 
 
 (3) Cheyne (Dr. G. K.), in Hibbert Journal, July, 
 1911. Cf. also the following passage from the same critic. 
 
 "The section which does appear to require immedi- 
 ately a fuller investigation is that of the Passion, i.e., 
 from the Last Supper to the Death on the Cross. Is there 
 any historical nucleus.'* As the critical enquiry stands at 
 present, one may reasonably hold that an extraordinary 
 teacher and healer called Jesus, who began his career in 
 Galilee, incurred the displeasure of the Roman author- 
 ities, and sufifered the extreme penalty as a rebellious and 
 unrecognised *king of the Jews.' But is it not possible 
 that the statements of the Messianic claims of Jesus, and 
 consequently also of the intervention of the procurator 
 may be imaginary? . . . For my own part, I think that 
 the Barabbas story may be most simply explained from 
 a Babylonian source. As Zimmern has shewn, there 
 are traces of a primitive custom of decking out some 
 person of inferior rank as king, and finally putting him 
 to death in place of the real king. On the occasion of 
 what ceremony this took place does not appear, and it 
 seems plain that the author of the Barabbas story only 
 knew of a far-off reflection of the primitive custom in 
 the shape of a popular story. As for the name of Barab- 
 bas it is surely a corruption of Karabas, . . . which 
 probably indicates the Arabian origin of this supposed 
 fierce bandit. ... As the evidence now stands, I think 
 that Paul most probably knew a little about a great 
 teacher called Jesus, and that he identified him with the 
 pre-existing Christ from an intuition that only so could 
 the precious doctrine of the Christ be made a practical 
 power among mankind." — Hibbert Journal, April, 1911. 
 
 (4) The Commonwealth, Sept., 1909, p. 284. 
 
 (5) Eucken's (Prof. R.) Meaning and Value of Idfe 
 (A. & C. Black), pp. 26-27. 
 
288 NOTES 
 
 "As the solutions of Religion and Immanental Ideal- 
 ism have gradually lost their force, nature has come to 
 mean more and more to man, eventually constituting his 
 whole world and his whole being. We do not mean 
 Nature as she is in herself — for to modern thought the 
 thing in itself remains a dark and inscrutable mystery — 
 but Nature as she appears to man from a certain point 
 of view — i.e., from the standpoint of mechanical causa- 
 tion. Though natural science is very far from actually 
 maintaining the identity of the world with nature — this 
 being no scientific theory, but merely the creed of a 
 naturalistic philosophy — still the creed has its roots in 
 the discoveries of science, and there is today a growing 
 tendency to interpret science in a naturalistic spirit. 
 Our modern era began, at the Enlightenment, with the 
 sharp separation of nature from soul. The more insistent 
 the demand for a soulless nature, the more urgent the 
 claim that the soul should exist in its own right. But from 
 the very outset there was something far more imposing in 
 nature's illimitable vastness than in a number of dispersed 
 individuaHties; and, as nature's realm continued to expand, 
 it was inevitable that the soul should tend to be drawn 
 within it. Not only has its empirical existence been shown 
 even more and more clearly to be dependent on natural 
 conditions, but there has been an attempt to appropri- 
 ate its very essence, and eventually to fit it wholly into 
 the framework of an enlarged naturalistic scheme. There 
 has been a continually growing tendency to identify 
 science with natural science, and reality with nature. 
 If any difference were still felt to persist, it seemed to 
 vanish — together wilh the doubts this solution naturally 
 engendered — before the steady advance of a mechanical 
 doctrine of development. This doctrine claimed to assim- 
 ilate man entirely to nature — a nature destitute of all 
 
NOTES 289 
 
 inner principle of cohesion, and possessing no spontaneity 
 of its own. Thus it was proper, and indeed inevitable, 
 that the attempt should be made to give a value to human 
 life when considered as a mere part of a natural process, 
 and to shew that it was really worth the living." 
 
 (6) In an Essay printed in James's (William) The 
 Will to Believe (Longmans, Green & Co.), p. 145. 
 
 The following passage from Eucken's Meaning and 
 Value of Life (A. & C. Black), pp. 94-95, is worthy of 
 note: 
 
 "Freedom is essential if life is to have a meaning. It 
 must be possible to give a personal stamp to our activity, 
 and press forward to a life that is autonomous. Other- 
 wise our life is not wholly our own, but rather something 
 assigned to us by nature or by destiny, something that 
 transpires within us, but is in no sense moulded by us. 
 A half-alien experience of this kind, a r6le imposed on us 
 from without, must ever leave us inwardly indifferent 
 to its claims, and our life would labour under a paralyzing 
 contradiction if that to which we were cold and indif- 
 ferent should succeed in winning our whole energy, and 
 becoming for us a matter of personal responsibility. 
 
 "But freedom, in the sense which concerns us here, 
 finds little favour with the modern mind. On all hands we 
 are told that the old problem is at last solved, that man 
 is nothing more than a piece of the cosmic mechanism, 
 and that only an inexact mind can discover in the machin- 
 ery any loophole whatsoever for freedom. Thus freedom 
 is roundly rejected, and the fact that life therewith loses 
 its self-suflSiciency and intelligibility is either overlooked or 
 treated with scant regard to the importance of its effects. 
 
 "Since, however, we are insisting on the intelligibil- 
 ity of life, we cannot so lightly dispense with freedom, 
 and we are therefore bound to ask whether our proposed 
 20 
 
290 NOTES 
 
 treatment of the Spiritual Life does not set the problem 
 of freedom in a more favourable light. Now, we hold 
 that it certainly does this, and does it in a twofold way — 
 partly through establishing truth on a new basis, and 
 partly through the distinctive content of reality which it 
 reveals. 
 
 "The main reason why freedom's defenders seem to be 
 leading a forlorn hope is that science has presented us 
 with a picture of the world, a scheme of reality, in which 
 freedom is quite out of place. In particular, the mechan- 
 ico-causal conception of nature has been carried over 
 into human life and the experiences of the soul. That 
 such a conception leaves no room for freedom and initia- 
 tive cannot for one moment be doubted, but whether it 
 can justly be applied to the things of the soul is open to 
 very grave doubt indeed. 
 
 "As a matter of fact, the true significance of the life- 
 process is not to be sought through any roundabout 
 reference to the external world. The decisive factors 
 are really the phenomena it exhibits and the demands it 
 makes in the course of its own development. If we 
 should find it displaying, at least on its highest levels, a 
 deep-rooted spontaneity and power of initiative, then we 
 should have to recognise this as a fundamental fact, and 
 relegate to a secondary position the further question how 
 to accommodate this fact with the chain of causes and 
 effects. Never should first things take the second place; 
 never should the experiences of the personal life be sacri- 
 ficed to the demands of some particular theory. We 
 need not trouble if our apprehension of reality is rendered 
 less smooth and simple. How can we be certain that the 
 world must be constituted in the exact way which happens 
 to be most convenient for our human thinking? But this 
 at least is obvious, that whoever reduces the world to a 
 
NOTES 291 
 
 mere chain of given phenomena, thereby depriving it 
 of its spontaneity, robs it forthwith of all self-possession 
 and all inwardness." 
 
 (7) Pringle-Pattison's (Dr. Andrew Seth) Theism, p. 46. 
 
 IV 
 SIGN OR THE CHRISTIAN FACT 
 
 (1) Simpson's (Dr. J. G.) Christtis Crucifixtis (Hodder 
 & Stoughton), p. 266. 
 
 (2) There is a suggestive criticism of Dr. Sanday in 
 the appendix to Bishop Chandler's Faith and Experience. 
 The Bishop points out how Bergson's theory of the rela- 
 tion between intuition and reasoning provides a better 
 rationale of the problem than does the rather dubious 
 doctrine of the subhminal self. 
 
 (3) See Burkitt's (F. C.) Tfie Failure of Liberal Christ- 
 ianity. The whole pamphlet is most valuable and should 
 be studied. I am not contending that the views of 
 either Professor Burkitt or some of the other scholars 
 mentioned are entirely satisfactory, only that they have 
 given up the materialistic theory of the meaning of the 
 Christian Church. In face of existing attempts to rush 
 us into the complete acceptance of that theory, I say that 
 this movement is remarkable, and should give even the 
 youngest academic person pause, before he surrenders 
 at discretion to a view which in the last resort drives us 
 to materialism, or at least Pantheism of a mechanical 
 type. 
 
 (4) Eucken's (Prof. R.) Christianity and the New 
 Idealism, pp. 26, 80. 
 
 "We must insist more strongly than ever that the 
 salvation which religion promises to man is a salvation 
 
292 NOTES 
 
 not of his natural, but of his spiritual self, that imposes 
 on him a momentous choice and demands of him heavy 
 sacrifices. He who minimises the opposition that is 
 involved, and obscures the tremendous seriousness of 
 the issue, may easily let his religion, despite all respect 
 for outward form, degenerate into a refined Epicurean- 
 ism" (p. 26). 
 
 "Its unconditional advocacy of the claims of Spiritual 
 Life implies the most vigorous repudiation of all natural- 
 ism, whether of the crasser or more refined kind, and the 
 championing of freedom in the teeth of all attempts to 
 turn life into a merely natural process. Its conviction 
 of the wide gulf — nay, diametrical opposition — between 
 the condition of the world and the imperative require- 
 ments of the Spiritual Life, is in itself a most decisive 
 repudiation of Pantheism with its glorification of the 
 world, and at the same time a repudiation of all those 
 movements, such as Intellectualism, ^stheticism, and so 
 on, which ignore the necessity for an inward change. 
 Finally, its proclamation of a world-wide revolution 
 through spiritual might and redeeming love involves 
 the utter casting out of all embittered pessimism and 
 despairing scepticism. With its focussing of all its con- 
 viction into a Yes or a No, Christianity gives certitude 
 to the whole life, setting the work of thought on a safe 
 path, and assigning it a clearly marked goal." — Ibid., 
 p. 86. 
 
 (5) Hardy's (Rev. T. J.) The Gospel of Pain (G. 
 Bell & Sons, Ltd.). 
 
 (6) On "Authority," see a very valuable new book 
 by Rev. J. H. Leckie, Authority in Religion (T. & T. 
 Clark). 
 
 (7) Cram's (R. A.) The Gothic Quest, p. 292. 
 
 "The established ceremonies of the High Mass take 
 
NOTES 293 
 
 their place among the few supreme triumphs of art in 
 all time; in a way the great artistic composition takes 
 precedence of all in point of sheer beauty and poignant 
 significance. There is no single building, no picture, no 
 statue, no poem, that stands on the same level, even 
 Parsifal is a weak imitation and substitute. In the 
 ceremonial of the Mass art comes full tide." 
 
 (8) Bradley's (F. H.), Mind, No. 74, p. 171 and also 
 p. 154. Cf. also the following dicta of Dr. Bussell, 
 Bampton Lectures. 
 
 "All ultimate verdicts, where they are not tempera- 
 mental petulances, are ventures of faith or acts of faith.** 
 — Bampton Lectures, p. 210. 
 
 "There is not the slightest warranty, in the history of 
 mankind or of thought, for supposing that we can ever 
 sum up the Universe as a whole except by an effort of 
 will or an effort of faith. . . . 
 
 "It is clear that to apply any summary title to a whole, 
 which can never be known in its totality or in its still 
 undetected possibihties, is either an impertinence or a 
 paradox, or — an act of faith, undertaken on account of 
 life's practical needs. Solvitur ambulando is still a suffi- 
 cient if unscientific solution." — Ibid., p. 256-7. 
 
 (9) Cf. the following words of M. Boutroux in his 
 valuable study Science et Religion. 
 
 "Chacun de mes actes, la moindre de mes paroles 
 ou de mes pensees signifie que j'attribue quelque realite, 
 quelque prix k son r6le dans le monde. De la valeur 
 objective de ce jugement je ne sais absolument rien, je 
 n*ai nul besoin qu'on me la demontre. Si par hasard 
 j'y reflechis, je trouve que cette opinion n'est sans doute 
 que Texpression de mon instinct, de mes habitudes, et 
 de mes pr6juges, personnels ou ataviques. Conforme- 
 ment k ces prejudices, je me suggere de m'attribuer une 
 202 
 
294 NOTES 
 
 tendance k pers^verer dans mon 6tre propre, de me croire 
 capable de quelque chose, de consid^rer mes idees comme 
 serieuses, originales, utiles, de travailler a les repandre et k 
 les faire adopter. Rien de tout cela ne tiendrait devant 
 le moindre examen tant salt peu scientifique. Mais sans 
 ces illusions je ne pourrais vivre, du moins vivre en homme." 
 — Boutroux's Science et Religion, p. 360. 
 
 I quote some further words of M. Boutroux: 
 
 *'L' amour fait de deux dtres un etre en laissant k 
 chacun d'eux sa personnalit^, bien plus, en accroissant, 
 en realisant, dans toute sa puissance la personnalite de 
 l*un et de I'autre. L'amour n'est pas une bien exterieur, 
 tel qu'une association d'inter^ts, ce n'est pas non plus 
 I'absorption d'une personnalite par une autre ; c'est la 
 participation de I'etre a T^tre, et avec la creation d'un 
 ^tre commun, I'achevement de I'etre des individus qui 
 forment cette communaute." — Boutroux, ibid., pp. 
 370-371. 
 
 "La religion offre a I'homme une vie plus riche et 
 plus profonde que la vie simplement spontan6e ou m^me 
 intellectuelle, elle est une sort de synthese ou plut6t 
 d'union intime, et spirituelle, de I'instinct et de Tintelli- 
 gence, dans laquelle chacun des deux fonde avec Tautre 
 et par la m^me, transfigure et exalte, possede une pleni- 
 tude et une puissance creatrice qui lui 6chappe, quand il 
 agit separement." — Boutroux, ibid., p. 371. 
 
 "Si la science positive est, a elle seule, la mesure du 
 vrai et du possible, I'homme est moins qu'il ne se croit. 
 Car I'individualite, la personnalite, la dignite, la valeur 
 morale, le r6le special, et la destinee superieure, qu'il 
 persiste k s'attrouper sont en contradiction, non seule- 
 ment avec les conclusions actuelles, mais, ce qui est plus 
 grave, avec les principes les m^thodes et I'esprit m^me 
 de la science positive." 
 
NOTES 295 
 
 "Nagu^re fascine par la clart6 et Futility de la science, 
 et domine par elle, I'esprit humain tend aujourd'hui k 
 se ressouvenir qu'il est essentiellement vie, action, effort 
 vers le mieux, et a r^integrer la science dans cette vie 
 int6rieure dont, en r^alite, elle procMe.*' — Boutroux, 
 Avant-propos, p. x, of Fr. trs. Eucken, Les Grands Cou- 
 rants de la Pensie Contemporainey X. 
 
 "[L'esprit philosophique] est raison, et en m^me temps, 
 il est foi et risque: ein Sucken und Versuchen, ein Wetten 
 und Wagen. II faut savoir, il faut penser, et il faut 
 parler. II faut travaiUer pour Vincertain. . . . Les plus 
 grandes creations sont celles, qui provoquent le plus de 
 creations nouvelles." — Boutroux, ibid., XIII. 
 
APPENDIX 297 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 KING RICHARD THE THIRD AND THE 
 
 REVEREND JAMES THOMPSON 
 
 (1) Thompson's (Rev. J. M.) Miracles in the New 
 Testament (Edward Arnold). 
 
 (2) Cf. Loisy, Les Evangiles SynoptiqueSy i. 286-94. 
 
 (3) For this view mde Loisy, ibid., i. 937. 
 
 (4) On this point I should like to refer the reader to 
 Dr. Field's remarks in his admirable pamphlet "An 
 Open Letter to the Reverend James Thompson." 
 
 (5) See Langlois (Ch. V) and Seignobos (Ch.), Intro- 
 duction to Historical Studies. Translated by G. G. 
 Berry (Duckworth & Co.) 
 
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