LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVLHSITY Of 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO 

 
 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE
 
 RELIGION & EXPERIENCE 
 
 BY 
 * 
 
 J. BRIERLEY, B.A. 
 
 ("J. B.") 
 
 Author of" The Common Life," " The Eternal Eligion," " Studies oj the Soul," 
 " Ourselves and the Universe," ic., Ac. 
 
 Cincinnati JENNINGS & GRAHAM 
 New York EATON & MAINS 
 
 1906
 
 Author's Note 
 
 THE present volume is a study of religion from 
 the standpoint of experience. In the Introduction 
 the endeavour is made to sketch a philosophy of 
 experience and to show its relation to the Christian 
 faith of to-day. In the succeeding chapters the 
 principles of the Introduction are applied to the 
 solution of some of the various religious problems 
 of our modern world. 
 
 LONDON, 
 
 July, 1906.
 
 Contents 
 
 I I CHAFIBB PA0K 
 
 I. Our New Senses .34 
 
 II. The Psychology of Prayer .... 42 
 
 uft^/7MknL--The Religion of Calamity . . . .51 
 
 -IV. What Was Pentecost ? . . . .60 
 
 i f -A 7 . The Law of Change 68 
 
 VI. Religion and Crime 75 
 
 VII. Pleasure 84 
 
 VIII. Religion and Ghosts 92 
 
 IX. Religion and the Concrete .... 100 
 
 X. Doctrine and Life ..... 107 
 
 XI. Life's Accumulations . . . . .121 
 
 vXlII. Past and Present 128 
 
 ')*) * Mklll. When it is Heaven 136 
 
 XIV. Fatigue . . . . . . .144 
 
 XV. Of Moral Stimulants 151 
 
 -XVI. A Question of Age . . . . . 160 
 
 XVII." Under Direction '-' .... . 168 
 
 -XVIII. The Ethics of Victory. .... 176 
 
 -r-XIX. The Soul's Distillations .... 184- 
 
 XX. Our Unordained Ministry . . . .192 
 
 XXI. The Solitaries . . . . .. . ' . 200 
 
 XXII. The Broadening of Life . . . .208 
 
 XXIII. Politics and Religion 216 
 
 XXIV. A Study of Backgrounds . . . .224 
 
 . XXV. Concerning Births 232 
 
 XXVI. Public Meeting Religion .... 240 
 vii
 
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAG* 
 
 XXVII. Our Topmost Note 248 
 
 XXVIII. The Unpurchasables . . . . .256 
 XXIX. The Mind's Hospitality . . . .264 
 
 XXX. Of Religious Union 271 
 
 XXXI. Of Inner Discipline . ... 278 
 XXXII. On Being Worldly , . . . .286 
 
 . . -XXXIII. Of Self-Creation 294 
 
 XXXIV. The Farther Side 302
 
 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 IT is a saying of Sainte Beuve that " absolute 
 doctrines in all matters have reached their limits, 
 and the best minds are learning instead from 
 experience." Nowhere is the truth of this dictum 
 more strikingly exhibited than in the sphere of 
 religion. It is curious to note from what opposite 
 quarters the appeal to experience is made. The 
 Salvationist preacher who harangues his fellows from 
 the street-corner finds here the ground of his 
 exhortation. And the scientist who endeavours 
 by exact analysis to deteBSme"'the place of religion 
 as a factor in human evolution seeks his facts in 
 the same quarter. Philosophy from her side also isj 
 busy examining the contents of experience in the 
 endeavour to ascertain how far we may trust its 
 verdicts. This region has become, too, in our day, 
 the favourite hunting-ground of the psychologist. 
 With him the theme is studied, not so much for the 
 ultimate questions with which religion deals, as 
 for the light it throws upon the powers and faculties,
 
 2 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 the strength and the limitations of the human mind. 
 Professor James's fascinating volume on " The 
 Varieties of Religious Experience " has appealed 
 to every class of readers. Heterodoxy is as much 
 interested in it as orthodoxy. It offers material 
 which the scientist and the mystic, the Christian 
 and the Atheist, may alike build into their own 
 special thought structure. The exploitation of 
 this region by workers of such opposite tendencies 
 is reacting in a remarkable way upon current 
 systematic theology. The co-operation in the field 
 of religious experience of science and faith, of 
 metaphysics and anthropology, is compelling theo- 
 logians to revise their whole method of inquiry and 
 to restate their results. It is obvious that our 
 age, on its way to a resettlement of the grounds 
 of its belief, requires first of all to see its way clearly 
 on this primary question. We propose, then, to 
 explore a little on our own account a portion of 
 this region, and to pronounce, as well as we can, 
 on some of the things it contains. 
 
 II 
 
 And first of all, what do we mean by experience ? 
 By experience, taking it first in its most general 
 sense, we may be said to mean the total impression 
 made upon us by the world we live in. . This 
 impression, whether of a given moment or of a 
 lengthened period, contains, as we perceive, two 
 main factors. There is the outside, objective fact ? 
 and there is the inner mind which perceives the fact. 
 And the thing which immediately strikes us here is
 
 INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 the enormous, the overwhelming importance, for 
 the proper appraising of any reported experience, 
 of this last element. The supremely difficult 
 thing here is accurately to estimate the extent to 
 which the outer fact takes shape and colour from 
 the quality of the perceiving mind. Before 
 philosophy comes in, our notions, for instance, of 
 the relations between ourselves and the outside 
 world are of the crudest. ^"One of the things about 
 which the untrained man is so entirely clear is the 
 solid earth which his senses report to him. He is' 1 
 so sure about his globe, green with its meadows 
 in England, yellow with its sands in Africa, white 
 with its snows at the Pole. When, however, he 
 begins to reflect a little, above all when he has ; 
 read his Locke and his Kant, he finds things not 
 quite so easy. Awkward questions arise. Could 
 there be any white snow or yellow sand apart from 
 a mind which perceives white or yellow ? What 
 is white or yellow outside my mind ? Before he 
 has gone far he discovers that every perception 
 of his outside fact is a manufactured article, worked 
 into shape by a most elaborate machinery inside 
 him. He discovers that upon each outside impres- 
 sion there has been put the impress of a number 
 of thought-forms supplied by his own mind. He 
 has stamped on the raw material offered by the 
 senses, ideas of time and space, of cause and effect, 
 of necessity and contingency ; ideas which work 
 from within, and shape this material their own 
 way. He finds, in fact, to his astonishment, that 
 he is, to a large extent, the maker of his own world. 
 From this, his first excursion in quest of reality,
 
 4 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 he comes back with(j;he conviction that the one 
 thing he does know something about is his own 
 mind and its operations. What is outside has to 
 be taken largely on faitli,) 
 
 The next truth he learns is also one about mind. 
 His own mind, he finds, is not alone. It is one of a 
 multitude with which he is continually in contact. 
 And a vitally important feature in connection with 
 these related minds is the unity that obtains among 
 them. The impressions made upon him by the 
 outside world are, he perceives, practically those 
 made by it on his neighbour. The same laws are 
 at work in these two interiors. Their perceptions 
 of form, of colour, of extension, of causality, are 
 seemingly identical. It is, indeed, through the 
 sameness of these impressions, and of the inner laws 
 which construct them into ideas, that language, 
 science and philosophy have become possible. 
 There seems, then, to be the same world outside us 
 all, reflecting itself on us in the same way. 
 
 Our daily experience in this, its most immediate 
 and constant form, has, when looked at in this way, 
 given us two important results. It has, in the first 
 place, taught us that the world we know best, the 
 one of which we can be most entirely sure, is our 
 inner world/, that what we discern of an outside 
 
 4Ww ^^ B0MV i^VMm^^ 
 
 universe is at best a reflection, an image cast on a 
 mirror. The realities with which we are most 
 in contact are invisible and spiritual. The second 
 of these results is that of the unity of this mental 
 realm, its community of impression and of procedure. 
 But this, properly considered, compels us to a 
 further step. How does this unity of minds arise?
 
 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 Is it a chance, a fortuitous circumstance ? When we 
 examine the leaves on an oak tree, and perceive that 
 each in the mass of foliage is framed on the same 
 lines, woven of the same material, and obeys the 
 same laws as all its fellows, we do not regard this 
 as a chance occurrence. \We see the reason for 
 the leaves being alike in the fact that they are united 
 in one organic whole >, They are the same because 
 they are all part of the same tree. And the facts 
 of the mental world, as we perceive them, point 
 irresistibly to a similar conclusion. Our minds 
 receive the same impressions and record the same 
 verdicts because they, too, are part of an organism. - 
 Our separate minds are leaves of a tree. They are 
 fed from one source. 
 
 The backbone, then, of reality is mind. And 
 the individual mind subsists by virtue orits relation 
 to the Universal Mind. This does not mean that 
 our mentality is in any complete sense a copy or 
 expression of the Mind behind it. The leaf is not 
 the oak. You could not, by studying a leaf, picture 
 the oak unless you had previously seen it. Not 
 less is the one contained in the other, and not less 
 does the one imply the other. The essential unity 
 of mental life as we know it, unless all the analogies 
 and all the methods of scientific induction are false, 
 implies a Basic Consciousness in which all individual 
 minds find their .ground, their accord, and their 
 meaning. 
 
 The same result may be reached in another way. 
 The outside world becomes intelligible to us solely 
 by means of a mentality which underlies it, and 
 which crops out of it at every point. You hold any
 
 6 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 common thing in your hand a pebble, a lump of 
 chalk. Your examination of it, if it proceed scien- 
 tifically, will land you at every point in a mental 
 network. The relation of our pebble to space and 
 time, its oneness as related to number, its colour, 
 shape, density, all these things have meaning solely 
 as related to perception, to a mind ; they are 
 
 / impossible, inconceivable apart from mind. t)ur 
 stone, as soon as we begin to talk of it, reveals itself 
 
 I as in a logical universe^ 
 
 III 
 
 But this has brought us a long way. Our experi- 
 ence, in placing us in direct contact with a spiritual 
 . world, real, harmonious, and centring in a universal 
 consciousness, has laid for us the foundation of 
 religion. The next question is whether experience, 
 of the race or of individuals, has carried us any 
 further. Having secured us a foundation, does 
 *t offer material for a solid superstructure ? Do 
 the existing structures, or any one of them ) 
 contain such material ? To narrow our question 
 still further, is Qarj&tianity such a structure, and 
 if it is claimed as such, in what sense do we accept 
 it, and upon what grounds ? 
 
 We shall, perhaps, in dealing with these questions, 
 best proceed if we begin with here and now. Our 
 own first experience of religion is the coming into 
 what might be called a physical^ contact with it as 
 ^ it exists to-day in our own country. Here in 
 England and the same may be said of the Western 
 world generally the public is confronted with 
 religion as, if the term may be permitted, " a going
 
 INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 concern." Every one of us is related to it in this 
 first way. We see the cathedral*, the churches, 
 the conventicles, in which its worship is carried on 
 and its message delivered. We have read more or 
 less of the Bible, its sacred Book. We know some- 
 thing of the differing creeds and articles in which 
 its leading doctrines are summarised. We are 
 aware of the divisions between its followers and 
 know, perhaps, something of the causes of them. 
 
 So far we have, then, all of us a religious experience 
 about which there can be no question. It is one 
 common to the believer and the unbeliever alike. 
 It is an appeal to the senses, as plain and palpable * 
 as the sun and moon. But this of itself does not 
 amount to much. When we come to closer quarters* 
 when we listen seriously to the Church's message, in 
 creed or sermon, we have an experience of another 
 kind. We find ourselves now confronted by a 
 series of statements of a remarkable character. 
 Christianity is here delivered to us as an elaborate 
 doctrine concerning God, man, the world, life, 
 death, and what is after death. God is defined in 
 terms of a Trinity, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ; 
 there is a doctrine of salvation, of the Church, of 
 the Sacraments, of the ministry^of the Bible and 
 other themes of the first class. ^Vhat, we have now 
 to ask, is the relation of all this to experience ?J It 
 might seem at first sight that we are here in aliother 
 region of things, a region beyond and above the 
 limits we have marked out. And this, indeed, is 
 the position of certain theologians, who exhibit the 
 Church's dogma as something more than experience ; 
 more universal than it, more stable and trustworthy ;
 
 8 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 the rule, indeed, by which the individual experience, 
 full as it is of limitations and vagaries, is to be judged 
 and corrected. There are, it is contended, truths 
 in the dogma which transcend experience and 
 which appeal to another standard. 
 
 But claims of this kind, when carefully examined, 
 lead always in the end to the same conclusion. 
 When, for instance, we are asked to believe on the 
 authority of the dogma, the question immediately 
 arises : " Whence does the dogma derive its 
 authority ? " If it be answered that its authority 
 founds itself on that of the Church, we ask again : 
 " Wherein lies the authority of the Church ? " 
 Or if we are pointed to the Bible the same query 
 again emerges. And as we listen to the cry of 
 another party, " Neither Church nor Bible is the 
 ultimate authority ; the final voice is that of 
 Christ " ; the insistent question once more offers 
 itself : " Whence the authority of Christ ? " We 
 are at last, it seems, thrust back finally on a question 
 of origins. We pass up through nineteen centuries 
 of historical Christianity to its beginnings. But 
 the moment we begin to reflect on the beginnings 
 we discover that all the contents of Christianity 
 its dogma, its Church, its Bible, its Christ resolve 
 themselves inevitably into one question, that of 
 experiejice. Let us see a little how the matter stands. 
 
 Tt is to be observed that the various claims we 
 have just rehearsed really hang together. Theology, 
 indeed, recognises this. The orthodox Church in 
 all its branches unites in accepting Christ as the 
 supreme authority. It unites also in regarding the 
 Bible as the true witness concerning Christ's Person,
 
 INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 life and teaching. It holds dogmas as its reasoned 
 statement of these things. So that Church, dogma, 
 Bible and Christ are all considered as elements in 
 a congruous system. 
 
 IV 
 
 But whence does this complex of authority 
 derive itself ? Christ is declared as supreme, as 
 Divine, but how is that conclusion arrived at ? 
 There are two things here which Leesing, we 
 believe, amongst modern thinkers, was the first 
 to draw attention to the consciousness of Christ 
 Himself and the consciousness of Hia 
 
 about Him ; His own faith concerningjGrod and the 
 universe, and the faith of the Church in Him. 
 Here, we perceive, are twcTTorms of experience : 
 Christ's own immediate experience of life and the 
 world, and the disciples' own experience of His 
 personality. For the knowledge of both we have 
 to go to the New Testament. Between Christ and 
 ourselves stand the writers of this record. And 
 now we come upon all the crucial questions raised 
 at once by philosophy and criticism in relation to 
 experience. As we study the testimony of the 
 Gospel historians we are compelled to carry in our 
 minds the two factors of experience of which we 
 spoke at the beginning namely, the outside fact 
 and the mind which observes it. 
 
 We have pointed out the enormous contribution 
 made by the perceiving mind to what we call our 
 knowledge of the outside fact. That is true of 
 all minds. What is now in addition to be remem- 
 bered is the relation to experience of the quality
 
 1 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 and training of the perceiving mind. On this 
 depends our whole modern estimate of the value of 
 evidence. An eclipse, as witnessed by a savage 
 and by an astronomer, is, we say, in itself the same 
 event, but note the impression of it on these two 
 minds. To the one it is a miracle ; to the other it is 
 >_ the verification of a scientific forecast. The one 
 prostrates himself in terror, regarding the phenome- 
 non as manifesting the wrath of a vengeful Power. 
 The other takes photographs, makes rapid observa- 
 tions, scribbles notes which are to be the bases of 
 future calculations. These men in reporting the 
 occurrence would be each reporting a genuine ex- 
 perience of the same fact. But what a difference 
 in the mental content of the experience, and in its 
 value as evidence for us ! As compared with the 
 report of the scientist that of the savage would be 
 of no value. Its only interest would consist in the 
 view it gave of what passes, under such circum- 
 stances, in a rude, untutored mind. It is worthless 
 as an account of celestial phenomena. 
 
 But why is the one testimony of so much more 
 value than the other ? For answer we are thrown 
 back on the history of experience, a chapter fulj 
 of information on our special theme. We discover 
 now that there is a race-experience, the accumu- 
 lation of uncounted millions of individual ones. 
 From this accumulation has been born in the minds 
 of successive generations a race-consciousness 
 which, with the ages, becomes ever richer in its 
 contents and ever surer in its judgments. Securus 
 judicat orbie terrarum. The whole human race, 
 as Pascal observed, is in this way as a single indi-
 
 INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 vidual ever growing and ever learning. In this 
 common consciousness the mistakes of individual 
 
 ""'^^^^^Mi^***^^"*"***"'* "~ '**^"*^W^W 
 
 observation are one by one recognised and dropped. 
 It is a crucible which tries everything and which, 
 by an infallible process, rejects the dross and 
 retains the fine gold. The race-consciousness, 
 continually testing itself, continually adding to its 
 treasures, is the one guide we possess, the guide 
 whose judgment makes the nearest approach to 
 infallibility that is possible to humanity. 
 
 We have now to ascertain the bearing of all this 
 upon that New Testament record which, as we 
 have said, stands between us and Christ. As with 
 our eclipse so, in this greater appearance, our 
 first question is with the witnesses. What facilities 
 had they for observing Him ; with what eyes did 
 they view Him ; what inner prepossessions went to 
 the total make-up of their impression of Him ? 
 
 Of these witnesses let us begin with the one best 
 known to us. We could not get anywhere a better 
 illustration of our thesis than St. Paul. He is at 
 once authoritative and close to the fact. And his 
 Christianity is above all things^aT Christianity of 
 experience, founded on his personal consciousness. j 
 His career was moulded by what he believed to 
 have been an immediate contact with Jesus, and 
 he directed his course, and built up his theology 
 a theology destined to be that of countless 
 millions to follow on what that contact brought to 
 him. His testimony, moreover, is accepted by
 
 12 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 critics of all schools as that of a perfectly honest 
 and singularly able man. His guarantee of bona 
 fides is that he gave his whole life as a pledge. 
 What, then, was Paul's experience of Jesus, and 
 how far does it carry, as evidence for ourselves ? 
 
 From his own letters, and from the story in the 
 Acts which on this point corroborates them, we 
 learn that he had a trance or vision in which he 
 believed he saw the crucified Jesus, and which 
 convinced him that He, whose followers he was then 
 engaged in persecuting, was living and energising 
 in some sphere of the spiritual world. What the 
 physical and other concomitants of this vision 
 were, has been, in late years especially, the subject 
 of many-sided and many-motived investigation. 
 It is noted that this was not the only occurrence 
 of the kind that the Apostle mentions. He was 
 subject to visions and to dreams, to which he 
 attached a crucial importance. And this has led 
 to the criticism that regards these experiences as 
 pathological conditions, which, so far from adding 
 strength to his religious teaching, detract from it. 
 Paul was, in this view, a neurotic, with an abnormal 
 subconscious activity. He had trances similar to 
 those of the modern medium. His vision of Christ 
 was a piece of auto-suggestion, the result of long 
 brooding over this one theme. It was that visuali- 
 sation of an intensely excited subjective condition 
 with which scientific hypnotists are familiar, and of 
 which they can furnish us with innumerable parallels. 
 
 A delightfully easy solution this, according to 
 which Christianity, traced to its source, resolves 
 itself into an affair of medicine. A jury of doctors
 
 INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 have held inquest upon it and recorded their verdict 
 in terms of pathology ! 
 
 But the problem is not quite so simple. As 
 to what lay on the other side of Paul's vision ; 
 what precisely was the objective fact contained in 
 it, we are not, it must be confessed, in a 
 position to know. We are here on the hither 
 side of Reality and must accept the limitations 
 of the position. But even from this point of 
 view we see some things. We come now upon 
 another phase of our philosophy of experience. 
 Looking at the two elements we have to take into 
 account, the outside fact and the receptive mind, . 
 we observe a point in their relation which makes a 
 decisive factor in the final judgment. It is that 
 of the impression made by the fact on the receiving 
 mind regarded as a measure of its external cause. 
 Our experience of a thunderstorm, for example, 
 teaches us two things. Its impression on us is, 
 for one, a revelation of our own sensitiveness. But 
 it reveals also, not completely, yet, as far as it 
 goes, with entire accuracy, the range and intensity 
 of the storm itself. Could we give scientifically , 
 the entire content of our consciousness while under 
 the impression, it would be a true register of what 
 was happening outside. Let us now apply this 
 to what we have immediately in hand, the Pauline 
 experience of Christ. 
 
 His vision, we are told, is on a line with that 
 of the modern medium. Well, we know our modern 
 medium, his trances and performances in general. 
 We have full details of the experiments in hyp- 
 notism, in auto and other suggestion, made of
 
 14 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 recent years in America, France, and England. 
 In reference to them let us apply that gauge of 
 inner response we have just been examining. What 
 ie the response element in our medium ? We find 
 the experiments on him producing no faintest 
 approximation to the results which followed in 
 St. Paul from the experience he describes. Stand- 
 ing where we do, and trying to judge the business 
 as impartial spectators, our task is to measure the 
 quality of the force operating on the Apostle's 
 mind by the effects it produced. We do not see 
 the force or its origin ; we are not sharers in his 
 vision. But what we do see are its results. And 
 they are remarkable. The vision transfigured him. 
 It gave him a new view of the world, of himself, 
 of Christ, and of God. And the power under which 
 he came did not visit him as a solitary impact, but 
 remained throughout his life as an abiding influence. 
 It set him on a career which resulted in the founding 
 of a host of Christian communities in Asia and 
 Europe. It rilled him with an ecstatic emotion, 
 with an adoring love for Jesus which comes out 
 continually in his letters and addresses. It formed 
 the groundwork of a theology, including a morality, 
 which has lasted nigh two thousand years. It was 
 the starting-point of a movement which has per- 
 meated the modern world with the Christian idea, 
 and which is running with unabated force to-day. 
 These results, we submit to our medical jury, are 
 not those which we see flowing from the medium- 
 istic trance of to-day to which they point us. The 
 explanation of the Pauline experience must, at 
 any rate, go deeper than that.
 
 INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 VI 
 
 Let us in search of it come back to Paul himself. 
 In studying what he has to say, we are driven at 
 once to a constructive, and also to a- critical 
 attitude. He offers us material of a most 
 remarkable kind, and which we have, before 
 using it in our building, to sift with the utmost 
 care. On the strength of his experience he has 
 reared, as we have said, a theologv of imposing 
 dimensions. In this system he gives to Jesus 
 a cosmic position as the Son of God, who 
 died' as a ransom for sinful men, who will be 
 their future Judge, who is now the Head of the 
 Church, ever present with it, though invisible, 
 working in and through its members as surely 
 as He wrought upon the Apostle himself, though, 
 maybe, in less definite ways. In this theology he 
 speaks with equal confidence of a^ invisibl 
 
 and a future state, of heaven, ol angels, of evil 
 spirits, of Satan, of a speedy second coming of 
 Christ and end of the world. 
 
 How much, we ask again, does this theology 
 teach us as to the actual reality ? There was, we 
 have argued, a great spiritual force behind the 
 Apostle's visions. But how far does this go as 
 guaranteeing the accuracy of the Pauline views ? 
 Employing again our philosophy of experience, we 
 must examine now in Paul's case the mind and its 
 furniture on which the outside fact operated. We 
 have noted the difference between the Hottentot 
 and the astronomer as recipients of impressions. 
 Where does the Apostle stand as a recipient ?
 
 16 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 Here we have to make some serious 'admissions. 
 St. Paul does not observe his fact as our astronomer 
 would observe his. He was not, in our sense, 
 scientific. He was a child of his time and race, 
 and shared its limitations. He had the mental 
 consciousness of the Jew of nineteen centuries 
 ago, and what is evident is that his new spiritual 
 experience, whatever its value, in no degree disin- 
 herited him of that consciousness. No one, indeed, 
 who knows anything of the history of human 
 development would expect any such result. The 
 world's spiritual education does not proceed that 
 way. For its purposes men are taken as they are. 
 They are not first stripped of their skin. 
 
 St. Paul, then, we have to recognise, brings to his 
 fact his own peculiar way of looking at it. It is 
 in many respects very different from our way. 
 As we make an inventory of his mental interior we 
 find in it some strange enough furniture; strange, 
 that is, to the intellectual habits of our century, 
 though not strange at all to students of the litera- 
 ture of his nation and period. His view, for 
 instance, of the approaching end of the world 
 was that of the Jewish Apocalypses of the time. 
 His to us singular reason for the covering of women's 
 heads in church, given in I. Cor. xi. 10, is derived 
 from the Rabbinic view that evil spirits hovered 
 in the neighbourhood of women, seeking to gain 
 advantage over them. Entirely Oriental also is 
 his conception, in the same chapter, of God as being 
 (in the form of a man rather than of a woman. 
 Heaven is to him, as to his Jewish contemporaries, 
 a succession of spheres overarching the earth,
 
 INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 arranged in ascending grades of superiority. His 
 notions of original sin and of the Fall were also 
 the current ideas of the time. In the fourth book 
 of Ezra, with which he was assuredly familiar, we 
 read : " By reason of his evil heart the first Adam 
 fell into sin and guilt, and also all who came after 
 him." And in Ecclesiasticus we have the state- 
 ment : " From a woman was the beginning of 
 sin, and therefore of her we all die." 
 
 When, moreover, we come to Paul's Curistology 
 we have again to examine the kind of ground on 
 which his experience of Jesus actually fell. We 
 are in no position for understanding or properly 
 valuing his language here unless we know how 
 that language came to him. When, for instance, he 
 speaks of Jesus as the " Son of God," " the Lord," 
 the " image of God," and so on, the instinct of the 
 pious reader, nourished on the old traditions, is 
 to take these expressions as coined under a direct 
 inspiration, affirming with a Divine precision the 
 place of Jesus in the cosmic scheme. But, as 
 modern scholarship compels us now to recognise, 
 this is too na'ive a suggestion. The Apostle expresses 
 himself here in terms that were already made for 
 him, in thought-forms familiar to his contem- 
 poraries. The Messianic idea which possessed the 
 mind of the later Judaism had in Paul's time 
 developed into a full-grown conception of a Divine- 
 human Mediator, God's image and representative 
 to man. Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of 
 Jesus, with whose writings the Apostle may have 
 been acquainted, is full of this idea. Thus, in his 
 ''' De Monarchia," he says : " The Word by which 
 
 2
 
 18 
 
 the world was made is the Image of the Supreme 
 Deity." He speaks also of the Logos as " His First- 
 Begotten Son," and as " An Intercessor between the 
 Creator and the created." " God," he says further, 
 " has appointed a Prince and Ransom for the soul." 
 The Intercessor is also " The Image of God and 
 First-Born of all intelligent creatures." On the 
 office of the Mediator he observes : " It is necessary 
 for a person performing his duty to the All Father to 
 apply to His Son as to an Advocate, the most 
 perfect in every virtue, both to have his sins forgiven 
 and also for the obtaining of every good gift." 
 This Jine_^f^thought was, in fact, in the air ; it was 
 the ^entaljcnode^ of the time. It is impossible 
 for us to study this literature and not to recognise 
 ' its vital relationship to the expressions about Christ 
 used by St. Paul and the other New Testament 
 'writers. As a recent critic, Professor Wernle, puts 
 it : " They experienced something abnormal in 
 Jesus, but in order to express it their own words 
 fail them. So they turn to the Jewish categories 
 nearest at hand and attempt to confine the inde- 
 finable within these definitions." 
 
 VII 
 
 Our inquiry, so far as it has gone, gives us, then, 
 a witness entirely sincere, who has had a spiritual 
 experience of the greatest kind, but who, in his 
 report of it, uses the language of his time, and 
 accompanies the report with ideas which express 
 his mental limitations. Let us carry the investiga- 
 tion a point further. In St. Paul's testimony of
 
 INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 Christ one of the leading features is the account he 
 gives of His death. The Pauline theology may be 
 said, in fact, to centre in the cross. In studying his 
 letters one might suppose that he was ignorant of 
 the details of Christ's career, or that he regarded 
 them as unimportant. His whole teaching concen- 
 trates itself upon Christ as the crucified, as having 
 risen again and entered into the spiritual world, 
 and on the relations of all this to the problems of 
 sin and salvation. Here, again, in asking ourselves 
 as to the validity for us of this testimony, we are 
 thrown back on Paul's personal experience in these 
 matters and on the question as to what precisely 
 it was worth. How was it that the death of Jesus 
 so affected him ; that he saw it in this light ; that | 
 he came to build this theology upon it ? He had 
 not been a witness of the event himself. To him, 
 as to us, it was in itself a bare fact in history. 
 
 From whatever standpoint we regard the Cruci^ 
 fixion it remains as the miracle of miracles that,^ 
 occurring as it did, it should have produced the/ 
 effect it did. The amazing feature of it is that,) 
 accepted by all the Churches as the basis of their 
 theology, the participators in the tragedy, the 
 witnesses of it, including the disciples themselves, 
 never suspected there was any theology in it at all ! 
 All these people, Annas and Caiaphas, Pilate, the 
 Scribes and Pharisees who had assisted at the trial, 
 down to the Roman soldiers and the Jerusalem 
 mob who enjoyed themselves at the spectacle, had, 
 indeed, their own theology, but they saw none of 
 it here. They believed most of them in a Deity 
 who could be propitiated by sacrifices. But here
 
 20 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 was no offering to Deity. Jesus was simply a 
 prisoner condemned by the authorities. It never 
 occurred to them that His death was a sacrifice ; 
 it was an execution. 
 
 How, then, was the miracle wrought ? How 
 came it that this bloody death, in the mind of 
 the Apostle and of the early Christians, assumed 
 the significance which they gave to it ? We must 
 seek the answer in a fresh examination of the mental 
 ground on which the great fact fell. In studying 
 the Apostle's mind here the key to its workings 
 on this theme is found in the fact that he was a 
 Jew. He had been brought up in a religion of 
 sacrifices, of propitiatory offerings. The temple 
 at Jerusalem was standing during his lifetime and 
 its altars daily reeked with the blood of victims. 
 His mind, like that of his contemporaries, was full 
 of these early-world conceptions, and they were 
 bound to give their own colour to any new factors 
 that entered his consciousness. When, then, the 
 great experience came to him on the Damascus 
 road, an experience which assured him that the 
 Crucified lived and was potent in the spiritual 
 world, his interpretation was bound to follow the 
 line which his mental training opened. 
 
 In dwelling on this theme his thought took one of 
 those forward leaps which mark the great stages in 
 the world's spiritual evolution. In this one mind an 
 age's accumulation of human experiences had flashed 
 ipto a new synthesis. Jesus had died under the 
 law, a victim to Judaism, to that system whose 
 animal sacrifices, ritual requirements, and dull round 
 of observances had already filled this eager soul
 
 INTRODUCTION 21 
 
 with such a sense of futility and of spiritual barren 
 ness. And it now came to him that Jesus, the victim 
 of this system, had at the same time conquered it. 
 His suffering had carried the whole conception 
 of law, of penalty, of sacrifice into a new plane. 
 Evolution, as a formulated doctrine, was as yet 
 ages before its time, but what passed in the apostle's 
 mind here was an inspiration that followed the 
 true line of evolution. In the ascent of life, which 
 the doctrine of development teaches, the higher 
 form that has just emerged contains all the lower 
 forms in a transfigured way. It was this trans- 
 figuration of the lower idea of sacrifice contained 
 in Judaism which Paul now saw in the death of 
 Christ. It is impossible for us to enter fully into 
 the apostle's feeling here, because we have not had 
 his foregoing experience of Judaism. For a parallel 
 we have to go to Luther and the Reformation. 
 We are quite unable to understand the enthusiasm 
 of the first reformers for the doctrine of justification 
 by faith until we have realised the yoke of heavy 
 and utterly futile observances from which it was a 
 deliverance. The same may be said of St. Paul? 
 and his doctrine of the Cross. 
 
 Paul delights himself henceforth in pouring out 
 in his letters and addresses his hoarded Jewish lore, ' 
 and to show in'Christianity its glorious new applica- 
 tion. He has reached the upper side of that sacri- 
 ficial system which before had so plagued him. 
 Much of the lore which serves this new office was, 
 it is true, pure Rabbinism, touched with the defects 
 of the system. At some of his expositions we 
 are inclined to smile, and the world- view in which
 
 22 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 he places his thought has been largely superseded. 
 Not the less is the position which he takes on the 
 death of Christ a revelation. It is so in the true 
 scientific meaning of that term. For it was the 
 dawn in his spirit, at the appointed time, of a new 
 truth in the sphere of religion ; a fresh step in the 
 ascent of life on its inner side. As much as the 
 emergence of man from the anthropoid apes marked 
 /a step upwards in the scale of being, so did this 
 conception of the dying Jesus, as the ultimate and 
 eternal sacrifice, the consecration for ever of the 
 LL*-j principle of sacrifice as a love-offering and a love- 
 suffering in the service of the world mark a stage 
 , forward in the spiritual evolution, 
 
 We are now in a position to pronounce with some 
 degree of clearness upon this whole Pauline experi- 
 ence, regarded as evidence for ourselves. It amounts, 
 we perceive, in relation to the personality of Jesus 
 to something much less rigidly defined, to something 
 vastly more human, vastly closer to life as we 
 know it, than the theological formularies have 
 made out. We understand a good deal better the 
 significance of the titles and ascriptions Paul applies 
 to Christ when we see how he came by them. He 
 has, we find, translated here the immense impression 
 made on him by his personal experience of Jesus 
 in phrases current at the time. But the inquiry 
 which yields these results in no degree invalidates 
 his testimony as to the uniqueness of Christ, and 
 His claim to love and devotion. Jesus is not the 
 less divinely inspiring for us that we find our- 
 selves less able than before to draw His boundary 
 lines.
 
 I INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 VIII 
 
 Thus much of the Pauline experience. We have 
 next to note its relation to what else is given us in 
 the New Testament. Paul's picture of Jesus 
 is stamped everywhere with the character of his 
 own personality.- But in the main points it is 
 marvellously in accord with what else we find in the 
 record. The Gospels, like the Epistles, are the 
 reflection of an experience. And the reflection 
 again is shaped largely by the quality of the mirror. 
 The informants who offer to us the facts of Christ's 
 life are here also unscientific observers. They carry 
 in their eye a world of things which stood between 
 them and the bare fact. Signs and wonders pour 
 into their narratives because their minds, like those 
 of their contemporaries, are a wonder-factory. 
 They have no such sense of the uniformity of nature 
 as fills the modern chronicler. Their mental con- 
 dition is nearer that of the good Chinese Buddhist, 
 Hiouen Thsang, who, in his journey to India, 
 records of Buddha's footprint that " it seems of 
 more or less size according to the greater or less 
 faith of the beholder." 
 
 In studying these records, too, we have to remem- 
 ber that the earliest of them was put together, in 
 the form we have it, more than a generation after 
 the death of Jesus. That, as history shows us, 
 was a period long enough for a certain development 
 of myth and legend. To take a parallel instance, 
 that of the extant biographies of Francis of Assisi. 
 The accounts of his contemporaries, such as the 
 Speculum Perfectionis of Frater eo, contain some
 
 24 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 things sufficiently astonishing. But in the genera- 
 tion immediately following, imagination had given 
 itself fuller scope. The Life of Francis by Bona- 
 ventura, written at an interval not greater than that 
 between the death of Jesus and the publication 
 of Mark's Gospel, is stuffed with the incredible. 
 A yet more striking illustration, because so much 
 nearer our own time, is that afforded by the story 
 of the Babist sect of Persia. The Bab was Ali 
 Mohammed, a seer of Shiraz, who was regarded 
 by his followers as a kind of Mohammedan Messiah. 
 He was put to death by the Persian authorities 
 in 1850, at the age of thirty. The first account 
 of him, a contemporary one, was written by Merza 
 Jani, who was himself executed in 1852. Then 
 came another " Life," a generation later, in 1880 
 that is, by two disciples. When we compare this 
 new history with the earlier one, we have an illus- 
 tration made under our very eyes of the natural 
 history of legend in an Eastern country. This 
 last account is full of miracles. There is, for instance, 
 a narrative of the seer's transfiguration in 1846 on 
 a ride from Shiraz to Teheran. And yet this 
 " history " was written within the lifetime of the 
 prophet's widow. 
 
 Considerations of this kind are such as the 
 modern inquirer finds it impossible to ignore in 
 studying the Gospel records. Christ as a reality 
 is the fact he wants to get at. In his quest he 
 comes upon these reflections of Him, and he is 
 bound to ask himself how much belongs to the 
 objective fact, and how much to the mirror itself ? 
 
 We have nothing direct from Christ Himself.
 
 INTRODUCTION 25 
 
 He was not a writer of books or even of letters. 
 With the exception of the doubtful epistle to the 
 King of Edessa, there is no published thing from 
 His hand. We do not even know what He was 
 like. The race He belonged to had no taste for 
 the arts, and so, while we are familiar with 
 the features of Rameses and of Caesar, we have 
 no authentic statue or picture of Christ. The 
 early fathers who venture descriptions of His 
 personal appearance are evidently drawing on 
 their imagination. They are hopelessly con- 
 tradictory. Christ left no material trace of Himself 
 on His native land. Sir Christopher Wren is, as it 
 were, visible to us in his great stone mountain on 
 Ludgate Hill. The dome of St. Peter's, the frescoes 
 of the Sistine Chapel are the perpetual reminders of ' 
 Michel Angelo. The Egyptian kings live on in 
 their pyramids. But Jesus left no trace. He- 
 built nothing. The traveller in Palestine finds a 
 stony wilderness, a country at the farthest rear of 
 civilisation, in the grasp of an alien faith. 
 
 What, then, to-day do we actually possess on 
 which to found our knowledge of Jesus ? After 
 the survey we have been making of the ground ; 
 after recognising the various elements which enter 
 into experience and their differing value ; after 
 allowing for the mental limitations of the writers 
 of our Gospels ; after accepting the possible intro- 
 duction into their narratives of myth and legend, 
 what of actuality remains ? Has Christ under this 
 process ceased to be for us a reality ? Or, admitted 
 as historic, does He sink to a position inferior to 
 that which the Church has hitherto assigned Him T
 
 26 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 We see no likelihood of any such eclipse. For 
 the philosophy of experience, which compels us 
 to such seeming severities on the negative side, is 
 not less decisive on its affirmative. We have already 
 spoken of the element of response as a criterion 
 of truth. Our register of an outside fact is the 
 feeling it excites in us. Whether the outside fact 
 be a thunderstorm or an historic personage, the 
 truth about them is wrapped up in the consciousness 
 they produce in us, if only we can accurately 
 analyse that consciousness. We have, indeed, no 
 other way. of getting at our fact. With this in 
 mind, as we study our New Testament, we realise 
 Jesus as not so much in it as behind it. When 
 Vesuvius hurls its million tons of material into the 
 air, what holds us as we view the spectacle is not 
 so much the visible phenomenon as the thought 
 of the force beneath. In studying the Gospels and 
 Epistles we have a similar feeling. What, we ask, is 
 the power that produced all this ? For when all 
 the exaggerations have been discounted there 
 remains one element here whose accuracy cannot 
 be questioned. It is the element of response. The 
 book throughout is the expression of an immense 
 emotion, which we have to explain. When we 
 have finished our analysis of the language and 
 thought-forms in which the evangelists describe 
 Jesus it still remains that this is the language 
 which expressed their feeling ; which expressed 
 the love, the wonder, the awe with which His per- 
 sonality filled them. What we cannot doubt is 
 that they are trying here to offer us a sense of a 
 great and wondrous mystery that had come into
 
 INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 fv 
 
 their lives. The One they write about had made 
 on them the impression of something great, pure, 
 celestially beautiful, that had opened new horizons 
 to the soul. But by the dynamic law we are con- 
 sidering it follows that the impression on their 
 side argued a corresponding power on the other. 
 From the study of the New Testament, considered 
 as a recital of experience, we are led irresistibly to 
 the conception of a spiritual force behind it which 
 it is no abuse of language to call Divine. 
 
 IX 
 
 It has been the misfortune of theology that age 
 after age it has been so eagerly engaged in mapping 
 out the limits and boundaries of the Divine element 
 in Jesus. In the process theology has injured its 
 eyesight, like observers who gaze too fixedly on 
 the sun. The usefulness of the sun is disclosed to 
 us not by looking at it but by working in its light. 
 The original Christianity, that which lived in the 
 bosom of Jesus, which consisted of His own direct 
 experience of God, life and the world, is like the 
 solar centre, hidden from us. We know it only 
 by the burning heat which has radiated from it. 
 Men will easily accept the Incarnation if only we will 
 refrain from definitions of it. When Beyschlag 
 declares for the purely human consciousness of 
 Jesus ; when Bitschl finds here " the religious 
 value of God," God, that is, revealed along the 
 lines of spirit, will and love ; when Theodore of 
 Mopsuestia, one of the sanest minds in the whole 
 catalogue of the Fathers, sees *' the human spirit of
 
 28 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 Jesus so perfectly appropriating the Divine as to 
 become entirely one with it " ; we recognise the 
 honesty, and in a certain degree the value of these 
 appraisements. 
 
 Not the less do they make us realise that the 
 religion of experience gains little from these defi- 
 nitions. We know Christ's nature best by the 
 ? response it has created in others. And here we 
 come upon a great extension of our theme. For our 
 knowledge of Christ as a knowledge mediated 
 through human hearts does not end in the New 
 Testament records. It emerges from them into 
 the vaster sphere of the world and of the ages. 
 And this region we find to be one not only so much 
 wider than the first but where we find ourselves on 
 so much surer ground. It is not here a question 
 of historical detail, where it is so easy to be mis- 
 taken, but of those psychological facts, those 
 contents of the human consciousness which come 
 nearest of all to our conception of reality. We 
 deal here not with the accidents of time and place 5 
 but with the working of the inner laws, with the 
 impact of spiritual forces on the soul. 
 / What are the facts here ? As we survey the 
 course of history in the centuries that have followed 
 the Christian beginnings, we find ourselves every- 
 where in the presence of a new world-power. We 
 have to study here the significance of Jesus not 
 simply as He is given us in the Gospels, but as we 
 find Him wrought into the warp and woof of innu- 
 merable saintly souls. We have the Christ actual- 
 ised in a Perpetua, an Augustine, a Bernard, a 
 lif, a Fletcher of Madeley, a Chalmers of New
 
 INTRODUCTION 29 
 
 Guinea. The Bollandist collection of " Lives of the 
 Saints " fills fifty-five volumes and deals with twenty- 
 five thousand lives. But these are the merest 
 fraction of the whole. One of the surest things 
 we know is that during these last twenty centuries 
 there has been rolling over the world a stream 
 of spiritual life, which has flowed in upon generation 
 after generation of men, producing in them, amid 
 all varieties of temperament, education and en- 
 vironment, a certain moral result. ' It has been 
 a result of inner quickening, of a new refinement 
 of feeling, of philanthropic passion, of an ardour 
 of self-sacrificing love for the unfortunate and the 
 outcast. There is no doubt about these facts, 
 and the question is as to their explanation. There 
 are no effects without causes. The stream does 
 not rise above its source. Is there any explanation 
 which better fits all the facts than that which 
 St. Paul and the New Testament everywhere give, 
 of a Power behind the scenes, personal, related to 
 humanity, yet spiritual and immortal ? 
 
 Let us consider these last terms for a moment. 
 Christianity is the religion of a human life and 
 death, with the sequel of the invisible action of a 
 vast post-mortem power. This power was in its 
 operation moral and spiritual. But morality and 
 spirituality are qualities of persons. They sup- 
 pose personality and are inconceivable without 
 it. It is time we gave up being afraid of this 
 term in a cosmic connection, as though it were
 
 30 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 unscientific. The cry of " anthropomorphism " as 
 applied to an unseen personality is surely by this 
 time out of date. When we are told that this is a 
 mere projection of ourselves into the sphere of 
 causes, we reply that there is no theory of the 
 universe possible to us which does not lie open to 
 the same criticism. If we adopt the barest material- 
 ism and speak only of matter and force, we are still 
 entirely anthropomorphic. For the idea of force, 
 as much as the idea of will or of intelligence, is 
 derived entirely from our own consciousness. 
 Why, we repeat, should we be afraid of personality 
 in our conception of the world-process ? So far 
 as we can see, personality is the beginning and the 
 end of things. It is the one thing towards which 
 nature incessantly strives. It is the one interesting 
 thing. As Bradley, in his " Appearance and 
 Reality," puts it : " Outside of spirit there is not, 
 and there cannot be, any reality ; and the more 
 anything is spiritual so much the more is it veritably 
 real." There could be no use in a universe which 
 did not know itself. The seas, the mountains, the 
 cosmic forces, time, eternity, are significant only to 
 an eye that sees, to an intelligence that understands. 
 The New Testament writers, then, in ascribing 
 personality to the power which influenced them, 
 were so far assuredly within the limits of sound 
 thinking. Their further assurance that this personal 
 power was that of their Master, who had survived 
 death and was operating on them from some invisible 
 sphere, is, of course, more positive, and open to 
 criticism of another kind. But there is no a priori 
 impossibility. What we know of life, still more
 
 INTRODUCTION 31 
 
 what we do not know, makes it absurd to place 
 this supposition among the inconceivables. The 
 survival of personality, in its commonest forms, 
 is to-day being made the subject of a scientific 
 investigation which is accumulating a vast and 
 ever-increasing body of evidence. Men are ceasing 
 to deny post-mortem influences. They are, instead, 
 constructing a philosophy of them. When, to this 
 general impression, we add, as evidence of the 
 continued and exalted life of Jesus, the whole body 
 of experiences we have here been considering, the 
 entire result of it, upon some of us at least, is one 
 which no criticism of details, no argument from 
 the mental limitations of the recipients can weaken, 
 far less destroy. 
 
 Thus far, then, does experience seem to carry 
 us as a witness of religion, and of Christianity as 
 its highest expression. We can see now what it 
 has, and what it has not, procured us. The New 
 Testament is a record of human experiences. In 
 them, in their character and intensity, we have 
 to seek our register of the forces that lie behind. 
 They offer us no cut-and-dried theory of the Infinite, 
 nor of its relation to the finite. The word " Trinity," 
 which Tertullian introduced to Christian theology, 
 was, like some other of his contributions, a very 
 doubtful asset to the Church. We are better 
 without it ; better, for our knowledge of this theme, 
 with the primitive emotions of Evangelists and 
 Apostles, and with the phrases in which they seek 
 to express them. Placed as we are in the scale 
 of being, we look through too small an aperture to 
 be able to take in the scheme as a whole. We do
 
 32 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 not know the absolute as such. Our knowledge is 
 relative. We do not know how personality is 
 related to the ultimate Real. All we know is that 
 it is there. As the blue heaven above us yields its 
 cloud, born of itself, and by-and-by to be re- 
 absorbed into its infinitude, so does the Abyss of 
 Being, in whom all things are, yield its personality, 
 filled and penetrated with its own essence. The All, 
 to be the All, must contain personality. It must 
 express itself by personality. That is as far as we 
 can see on the upper side. 
 
 On the lower, that of history, we have the records 
 we have been trying to analyse. We have Jesus, 
 living His life in Galilee, dying at Jerusalem, and 
 leaving on His disciples the impressions we have 
 discussed. After that we have further experiences, 
 the first-hand testimony of St. Paul, and that other 
 evidence, accumulating through the following 
 centuries, of spiritual energies operating on 
 innumerable souls. As to these energies there 
 is no question. Their uplift is realised every 
 day by Christian men. In yielding themselves 
 joyously to these powers ; in carrying out, with 
 their reinforcement, the laws of love, of service, 
 and of sacrifice ; in projecting their thought and 
 hope onward to a future life, where their being 
 will find completion ; in a word, in holding on to 
 the essence of New Testament religion they know 
 themselves on sure ground. And that in face of 
 all that modern science and philosophy have to say. 
 For along every inch of the way the ground is that 
 not of abstract theories or a priori speculation, but of 
 the evidence which alone convincingly appeals to
 
 INTRODUCTION 33 
 
 us, the evidence of the actual impressions of the 
 mind in contact with outside facts. When we have 
 sifted these impressions, weighed them in the scales 
 of the modern world-consciousness, corrected them 
 by our latest and surest apparatus of science and 
 criticism, we have on the religious side the nearest 
 approach to ultimate truth that in this world is 
 open to us. It is on this ground the instructed 
 Christian of to-day claims to stand. His religion 
 becomes thus, in the best sense, a religion of 
 experience. 
 
 Having examined in this way the findings of 
 experience in Christianity considered as a whole, we 
 shall now, in succeeding chapters, endeavour to 
 discover what experience has to say in the applica- 
 tion of the Christian idea to some of the problems 
 of modern life.
 
 I 
 
 Our New Senses 
 
 THE best proof of evolution is the fact that we are 
 evolving. The work is going on before our eyes. 
 The thing that was not is there visibly coming into 
 being. In human nature and human history we 
 perceive the slow emergence of new forms of power, 
 glimmerings of vast possibilities yet to be realised. 
 Man is in the making, the greatest part of him still 
 to come. Behind is the boundless, inexhaustible 
 ocean of being. We have to measure that before 
 we can measure the man that is to be. 
 
 The movement is a slow one, for, as Herbert 
 Spencer points out, '* the higher the organisms the 
 longer they take to evolve." In certain directions, 
 indeed, there are retardations and retrogressions. 
 Civilisation has played havoc with some of our 
 faculties. Horology has destroyed our sense of 
 time. Koads and sign-posts have robbed us of the 
 instinct of the savage by which he finds his way 
 unerringly across hundreds of miles of trackless 
 forest. We neither see, nor hear, nor smell with 
 the quickness and accuracy of the man of the 
 woods. Even in the direction of the higher arts 
 we appear to have lost some things. The execution 
 
 34
 
 OUR NEW SENSES 35 
 
 of a certain Etruscan brooch, representing three 
 bees poised on a flower, could not be successfully 
 copied by modern Parisian experts, in spite of 
 repeated attempts. The Egyptians had a secret 
 of colours that are as brilliant to-day as four 
 thousand years ago. In that time our aniline 
 dyes would have absolutely disappeared. 
 
 But these are details that do not affect the main 
 result. Even in the matter of the senses civilisation 
 has given more than it has taken away. In the 
 telescope, the microscope, the spectroscope, and 
 a score of other instruments, man has reinforced 
 his eyesight and other senses to a degree which 
 the savage cannot even comprehend. His steam- 
 engine, his motor-car, carry him faster than the 
 swiftest brave can run. One may say that the 
 mind of the modern man has constructed for him a 
 series of outside senses which augment a hundredfold 
 the force of his physical organs. The Indian with 
 his ear to the ground could catch the crackle of a 
 leaf, the beat of a horsehoof at a distance which 
 seems incredible to the untrained townsman. But 
 the townsman, in return, putting his ear to a 
 telephone receiver, listens to a message across a 
 space which transcends the Indian's faculty as 
 hopelessly as the express train beats him in speed. 
 We may say that the upward movement has endowed 
 us with a new sense apparatus. 
 
 But it is not along these lines specially that we 
 are now thinking. It is to the evolution of what 
 may be called certain internal senses that we ask 
 our readers' attention. As we survey history and 
 literature, and note the way of thinking and feeling
 
 36 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 of our fellows ages ago, we discern at once a difference 
 so great that it points to the emergence in the mind 
 of at least the germs of new faculties. The mind 
 of man, we perceive, is steadily being remade. 
 Let us point out in one or two directions what 
 precisely we mean. 
 
 There has, then, to begin with, come to the 
 modern consciousness a faculty we fail to discern 
 earlier, in the shape of what is frequently called 
 " the historical sense." By that we mean the 
 power of realising the past exactly as it was, of 
 placing bygone ages in the dry light of actuality, 
 of cutting clean through the enormous and fantastic 
 structures which the human imagination has con- 
 structed round certain events, and reaching the 
 bare, simple fact. To appreciate the essential 
 modernness of this faculty, its entire absence from 
 the ablest minds of a not remote past, we have only 
 to consult the historical records of the times before 
 our own. One might, indeed, go beyond history 
 to art, for instance. The mediaeval, and even the 
 Renaissance, painters were quite without the 
 historical sense. They had no feeling for actuality. 
 The " Christ in the Pharisee's House " of Paul 
 Veronese, a splendid piece of work so far as colour 
 and drawing are concerned, is, as to its historic 
 setting, a banquet of the middle ages rather than 
 of the first century in Palestine. The treatment 
 would be as impossible to the modern painter as 
 would be Bonaventura's handling of the life of 
 St. Francis to M. Paul Sabatier. 
 
 It is to the appearance and steady growth of this 
 new faculty that we may look for changes of the
 
 OUR NEW SENSES 37 
 
 vastest consequence in the domain of man's relations 
 with the past, in the domain, that is to say, of history 
 and religion. The earlier mind could not see clearly 
 if it would. The medium in which it worked was 
 so charged with preconceptions, with unscientific 
 views of the universe, that it had no means of 
 reaching the actual fact. It was like searching for 
 a needle in a London fog. There were no rules or 
 instruments of accurate research ; no sense, indeed, 
 of the paramount value of accuracy. The happen- 
 ings of past times were seen by their recorders on 
 the background of a universe in which any and every 
 monstrosity was possible ; the more monstrous the 
 more possible. This attitude of mind was, we 
 have to remember, that of all the classical writers, 
 of all the early Christian writers, of all the mediaeval 
 writers, and of all the theological writers up to a 
 very late date indeed. So little did they regard 
 accuracy, that forgery in what seemed a good 
 cause was deemed a pious exercise. The writers 
 of the " Acts of Paul and Thecla," of the " Gospel 
 of Peter," and similar productions never imagined 
 that the false use of an Apostle's name was morally, 
 not to say historically condemnable. Their mental 
 condition was also that of the Church Fathers, whose 
 miracle stories were so mercilessly exposed by 
 Middleton in his famous " Inquiry." It is, we 
 say, a new mental development which compels 
 the modern mind, in contrast with all this, to 
 judge of the occurrences of the first century by 
 the occurrences of our own ; and to be perfectly 
 sure that nothing happened hi Judaea at that o r 
 any other time that might not happen in London
 
 38 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 or New York in our own. We are only 
 beginning dimly to recognise the changes in our 
 thought - world that the rise and operation of 
 this faculty will accomplish. We see enough, how- 
 ever, to be aware that it will make all things new. 
 
 Another of the higher senses, whose operation, 
 in its present form, constitutes a new evolution, 
 is that of universal sympathy. The idea of regarding 
 the whole human family as the subject of friendly 
 regards, as essentially one with us, and that inde- 
 pendently of race, creed or colour, is, as regards 
 average men, practically an acquisition of our time. 
 The great world teachers, Jesus, Gautama, Confucius, 
 possessed it, but for ages it was absent from the 
 common brain. Legislators, statesmen, theologians 
 constructed their systems as though unaware of 
 its existence. Qui Deum amat, amat omnes, says 
 Leibnitz, but as a matter of fact it has not been so. 
 There have been innumerable sincere lovers of God 
 who have had no such feeling for their fellow-men 
 as that which now is everywhere gaining ground. 
 With what complacency Plato and Aristotle base 
 their ideal state on slavery ! And Cicero is con- 
 vinced, as he tells us in the De Officiis, that " it 
 is not contrary to nature to despoil, if you can, 
 him whom it is a virtue to slay." The most culti- 
 vated minds of classic antiquity could not conceive 
 of the outsider other than as an enemy. Theology, 
 for long ages, did not improve matters in this 
 respect. Its doctrine of election, which carried the 
 savage tribal hatred into its conceptions of the 
 Divine government, was the emphatic denial of 
 human solidarity. Augustine's " City of God "
 
 OUR NEW SENSES 39 
 
 is founded on the notion of two species of men, 
 the blessed and the accursed. At the Reformation, 
 and for long after, Protestants and Catholics 
 regarded each other as dogs and reprobates, to 
 whom no quarter was to be shown in this world or 
 the next. John Knox recommended the burning 
 of Bonner ; Calvin advised the Protector Somerset 
 " to punish well with the sword Catholics and fanatic 
 Gospellers." The saintly Fenelon approved the < 
 infamous Dragonnades of Louis XIV. All this is 
 impossible to the modern mind. The brain of 
 humanity has risen to the height of an entirely new 
 view. It is conscious of a fresh inner sense, the 
 sense of the human oneness. It has acquired a 
 kind of X-ray which, penetrating beneath the 
 material envelopes of sects and creeds, discovers the 
 one universal soul ; a soul that suffers, grows, 
 aspires, in one common movement and effort. 
 This sense will also, like the other, work enormous 
 changes. It will have nothing to do with any gospel 
 that is not a gospel of the whole striving brotherhood. 
 It will have nothing to do with Imperialisms that 
 point their edge against other peoples. It will 
 have nothing to do with election doctrines that 
 leave other men out. It cannot think of a God 
 that is less kind than itself. 
 
 There remains the greatest of all man's higher 
 senses, his sense of the spiritual. We cannot, in 
 one way, speak of that as a new sense. One would 
 call it the oldest in existence. Assuredly what it 
 stands for is the oldest thing in the universe. And 
 yet, as related to human life as a whole, it may still 
 be regarded as the youngest of the faculties. Man's
 
 40 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 animal nature is old almost as the world. It derives 
 from all the million years of our planet's animal 
 story. Compared with this his spiritual quality 
 is indeed a late arrival. It is as yet a mere streak 
 on the top of his nature, a babe new-born amid the 
 ferocious tribe of his animalities. But the babe has 
 all the future before it. That streak of dawn means 
 a long and splendid day to come. Goethe's " Die 
 Oeisterwelt ist nlcht verschlossen " is the greatest 
 thing that can be uttered about man. ^ The religious 
 feeling, that baffling mystery to the psychologist ; 
 with its mystic exaltations, with its attendant 
 phenomena of dream, of vision, of psychic forces ; 
 with its stupendous moral driving power, with its 
 possibilities of all that is exquisite in feeling ; 
 with its hints of unimaginable acquisitions yet to 
 be realised ; the religious feeling, we say, is of all 
 the senses of man's inner nature the one that carries 
 in it the richest promise. 
 
 A supremely important question remains. What 
 is the mode of development of our higher senses ? 
 The whole scientific teaching here points one way. 
 We develop by effort, by struggle. It is under 
 strain and pressure that the organism evolves. 
 Anyone who realises that simple fact should see in 
 it an all-sufficient reason for the arduous, the strenu- 
 ous life. And that to its very close. The law 
 which bids us " scorn delights and live laborious 
 days," which assures us that 
 
 Mortals miss 
 Fair prospects by a level bliss, 
 
 is the very central law of life. To preserve our 
 faculties at their topmost level by constant work ;
 
 OUR NEW SENSES 41 
 
 to abhor and keep from the ruts of luxurious ease ; 
 to welcome the opportunity of sacrifice, the doing 
 of things that crucify the flesh ; to maintain in 
 every department the strict subordination of lower 
 to higher, of animal to spiritual this we are coming 
 now to recognise is not only the teaching of the 
 New Testament Gospel ; it is seen by science to be 
 the one and only way upward.
 
 II 
 
 "As an alienist, and one whose whole life has been 
 concerned with the sufferings of the mind, I would 
 state that of all the hygienic measures to counteract 
 disturbed sleep, depression of spirits, and all the 
 miserable sequels of a distressed mind, I would 
 undoubtedly give the first place to the simple 
 habit of prayer." To this effect spoke Dr. Hyslop, 
 the distinguished specialist, to his medical brethren 
 at a recent Congress. The utterance is noteworthy, 
 both for the words themselves and the audience 
 to which they were addressed. Of all men in the 
 world, the average Englishman is the most reticent 
 on the subject of religion. One might suppose 
 it had never been properly acclimatised with him. 
 He wears it awkwa'rdly, as though it were a misfit, 
 ask him for an expression of it is to produce 
 on him the effect of an indecent exposure] And 
 the medical faculty has shared to the full this insular 
 singularity of ours. Doctors have been supposed, 
 indeed, to be specially inclined to scepticism. 
 " Tres medici duo athei " is a hackneyed proverb, and 
 still current. The deliverance we have quoted, 
 calmly offered to this specialist audience as a 
 
 42
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OP PRAYER 43 
 
 scientific observation resulting from experience, ia 
 then, we say, a notable fact, worthy our best 
 consideration. 
 
 It reveals, for one thing, that new attitude towards 
 religion which prescient minds already discern 
 as the note of the coming age. We have remarked 
 on the awkwardness of English religion. That is 
 the result of its having been so largely a convention, 
 an artificiality with which we have had no proper 
 relations. But this is already, in the best minds, 
 passing away. We are on the way to naturalness 
 because we are on the way to humanness. Science 
 is the new religious mediator. It is entering this 
 great region of the human consciousness as a realm 
 whose facts and experiences demand its closest 
 investigation. It is beginning to realise the 
 absurdity and mischief of its previous shyness in 
 relation to them. And thus it will come about 
 that what has been previously held as the exclusive 
 property of theologians, to be dealt with in a jargon 
 of their own by the pulpit and the " religious 
 world," will be recognised once more as a common 
 property, a recognised part of the inalienable 
 human possession. 
 
 We treat Dr. Hyslop's declaration on prayer as a 
 sign of this new attitude. He discusses prayer, 
 not theologically, but as a phase of consciousness, 
 a recognised activity of the human spirit. That 
 is the new way. Our fathers started their religious 
 explorations from a standpoint in the heavens,, 
 attainable only in their imagination. Hence a 
 system handed down to us which we feel to be 
 saturated with unrealities. We are to-day building
 
 44 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 on surer ground. AVe commence with ourselves, 
 with the things we know and feel^> It is from this 
 standpoint we can best discuss prayer. And 
 dealing with it thus, we see how far we have travelled 
 from the mid- Victorian position, when Tyndall and 
 Huxley threw down their challenge to the Church to 
 experiment about the efficacy of prayer in a hospital 
 ward. So far have we travelled that science can 
 no longer think on those lines. It has been forced 
 off them on to a new track. Let us see, in one or 
 two directions, how the matter now stands. 
 
 There is, first of all, the old a priori philosophical 
 objection to prayer. It used to be argued as absurd 
 to suppose that the mere wish of a man, as expressed 
 in devotion, should cause any deviation in the settled 
 order of the universe. The eternal law to be turned 
 aside by a wish ! The infinite wisdom which fore- 
 sees all to take orders from a suppliant who foresees 
 nothing U^*Is not this for the fly on the wheel to 
 govern the machinery ; for Phaethon to take in 
 hand once more the chariot of the sun ? It is 
 curious to note how these ideas seem still to obsess 
 a certain order of mind. The present writer has 
 been frequently asked by correspondents whether, 
 in view of such considerations as these, he can 
 possibly himself believe in prayer. 
 
 But the new science does not reason in this way 
 at all. For one thing, it is giving up a priori 
 speculations as to what is and what is not possible. 
 And that especially in the relations between the 
 finite and the Infinite. For here we can pile up 
 by the score absolute contradictions that are yet 
 facts. ^Ve can prove motion impossible, and yjet
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER 46 
 
 we know things move. We argue a philosophic 
 necessity, and yet act on the supposition that our 
 will is free. The latest science is coming back to 
 an absolutely homogeneous something as the 
 ultimate beginning, and yet declaring this homo- 
 geneous something to be the cause of all variety ! 
 We have to accept these seeming contraries, and 
 to recognise at the start that our mind is not on a 
 scale for estimating truly the relation of the finite 
 to the Infinite. 
 
 But that is only the beginning. The argument 
 against prayer based on the distance between God 
 and man is really to-day out of date. We suspect 
 now that these two are more nearly related than we 
 thought. Modern philosophy, especially since Hegel, 
 has regarded man as the chief mode, on this planet, 
 of the Divine consciousness. It is in the human 
 soul that the Divine thought, immanent in the 
 universe, comes to its self-expression. It is thus 
 that the modern mind thinks of the Incarnation. 
 Humanity itself is an incarnation. As Augustine 
 has it, when we dig deep enough into the human 
 we find the Divine. 
 
 When we come, therefore, with these considera- 
 tions in mind, to our question " Can a frail mortal 
 influence by his prayer the Eternal Power ? '' 
 we are at another standpoint for discussing it. The \ 
 question, we discover, is, " How much in prayer is 1 
 of the frail mortal," and how much of " the Eternal) 
 Power " ? And in this argument also, let it be 
 noted, it is prayer in its truest expression, and 
 not in its imperfect forms, that is in question. 
 As Aristotle has taught us, our judgment of a
 
 46 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 thing is to be formed, not from its beginnings or 
 its history, but from the perfect idea of it which 
 the beginning and the history are labouring to 
 exhibit. Nature always begins her creations low 
 down. And prayer, considered historically, begins 
 low enough. But the beginning is not the end. 
 To decide on it from a study of savage incantations, 
 of pagan priests with their " Baal, hear us ! ", 
 of Tartar prayer-wheels, of the naive proposals of 
 some modern religionists to make God the 
 accomplice of their selfish schemes, is to go beside 
 the mark. Yet even these, at their lowest, rightly 
 considered, carry the great argument and justifica- 
 tion of prayer. / For they represent man's mysterious 
 right, felt as a right at the inmost of him, to appeal 
 from the visible to the invisible. These crudest 
 forms are, after all, a natural movement of the soul, 
 an instinct born of pur nature and of our position 
 in the scheme of things ; an instinct to which 
 we feel the universe has provided adequate response. 
 And when we trace this movement upward to 
 its higher manifestations, the more certain do we 
 become of its entire appropriateness, and of its 
 marvellous inner efficacy. We realise in these 
 experiences the fulfilment of that law, that wherever 
 you challenge the higher possibilities of the universe 
 it reacts upon you with entire generosity. Prayer 
 is in this sense the exercise of the soul's responsive- 
 ness, of its receptivity. It follows here with pre- 
 cision the whole process of human development. 
 Man has grown in all his departments of living by 
 this method. It is the method of preparing himself 
 for the action on him of outside forces. Light,
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER 47 
 
 heat, electricity, the chemical actions and reactions, 
 all these were in his world from the beginning, 
 waiting for his appropriation. The savage was\ 
 savage because of his lack of response to them. 1 
 As his receptive surface became widened by know- 
 ledge, he took in of these waiting powers, until now 
 they are his workers of miracles. Prayer, on pre- 
 cisely the same lines, is the appeal to subtler forces 
 even than these. It is a receptiveness on an even 
 grander scale. It recognises, as Clifford Harrison 
 in his " Notes on the Margins " has excellently 
 put it, that " if waves of force pass through earth 
 and rock ; if certain forms of light pass through 
 our bodies ..... v . it may well be that psychic 
 and mental force can be and is transmitted and 
 exercised in a hundred unknown and mysterious, 
 but absolutely natural ways in the unrecognised 
 ether of thought." 
 
 To put it broadly, prayer on the human side is 
 man's declared alliance with the Infinite. It is the 
 sap in us, all the warm life-current in us, rising 
 past every intermediate object of desire to our very 
 topmost, and thence streaming out to meet that 
 higher Beyond of which it knows itself a part. 
 For we know ourselves not as a finished product, 
 but as rather a process, a becoming, and in prayer 
 we seek the element which is making u&. It is in 
 this conception we finally meet the objection, 
 absurd in itself, of prayer being the dictation of 
 weakness and ignorance to the all-governing 
 wisdom. The objection ignores the whole system 
 of things in this world. It supposes that man's 
 prayer begins with man, whereas nothing in man
 
 48 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 begins with him. It began first in his universe, in 
 his Maker. It is as the action of sun and rain. From 
 out of the ocean the sun draws up the vapours, 
 which later come back hi showers upon the earth. 
 Here is a circulation from deep to height, and from 
 height again to deep. So, under the shining of the 
 Sun behind the sun, out of the deeps of man's mind 
 and heart are carried up the invisible currents of his 
 aspiration and soul's desire, to descend afterwards 
 in secret responses which he knows, nevertheless, 
 to be real. Real, though the first form of his 
 desire is often enough left unanswered. The response 
 lies, indeed, often enough in the heightening and 
 purification of his desire. In Gethsemane's agony 
 he prays, maybe, for his cup to pass from him. He 
 leaves the garden with no other wish than that 
 God's will be done. 
 
 Apart, then, entirely from considerations of 
 technical theology, prayer will come more and more 
 to be recognised as an indubitable spiritual experi- 
 ence, as a moral force of the first quality. It is 
 indispensable to the man who would deal with 
 and judge men and things from the highest plane. 
 Its reactions on the human spirit and in the world 
 of affairs are, indeed, incalculable. For this reason 
 alone it is time that science took up, as it has not 
 yet attempted to do, the whole literature of prayer 
 took it up as a unique study of the soul in the 
 greatest of its manifestations. There is no literature 
 on the whole so wonderful. Who wants man at his 
 highest cannot leave this page unturned. It would 
 be an entirely new sensation for our generation to 
 leave the latest novel, and to Uike a turn instead
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER 49 
 
 at the world's devotional record. We should not 
 pronounce on this subject until we know what men 
 before us have accomplished in it ; until we know 
 our Augustine, our Francis, our Luther, our St. 
 Teresa, our Madame Guyon, our Andrewes and Wil- 
 son, our Methodist Bramwell, our Romanist Vianney. 
 
 We cannot come into contact with these great 
 spirits without realising that, apart from their 
 varying opinions on speculative points, they were 
 in their prayers on the common ground of a great 
 spiritual reality. What may be the precise relation 
 of our nature to that unseen side of things to which 
 in prayer it appeals, we may not accurately know. 
 But this we are assured of, that the response from 
 that other side is immense. Under certain inspira~ 
 tions the giants of faith have asked and received, 
 because the asking and the receiving were alike 
 of God. It is in this region the heroes have found 
 their strength. Gordon in his tent here won his 
 battles beforehand. Here the common man con- . 
 quers himself and the world. Fides impetrat quce 
 lex imperat. " Faith obtains what the law enjoins." 
 
 There are all kinds of prayer. Much of it in a 
 well-attuned man is a joyful acquiescence. As 
 Coleridge has it : 
 
 No wish conceived, no thought expressed, 
 Only a sense of supplication, 
 A sense o'er all my soul impressed 
 That I am weak, yet not unblessed 
 Since in me, round me, everywhere, 
 Eternal strength and wisdom are. 
 
 But a man in healthy contact with the unseen 
 will not be content with that. To such, as a 
 
 4
 
 50 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 mediaeval mystic puts it, " seeking is as good as 
 beholding." There arises in us a sense of intimacy 
 in which, as Marie Bashkirtseff daringly puts it, 
 we find " a God from whom we can ask everything, 
 and to whom we can tell everything." We may 
 go even .further and say, as did Fenelon to an 
 inquirer, " Si Dieu vous ennuie, dites lui qu'il 
 vous ennuie" That is the highest intimacy. 
 
 In sum. Religion will come back to its true 
 place when it is put once more on a natural basis. 
 We discover that basis in the study of the soul's 
 nature and powers. Chief among those powers is 
 prayer, the faculty by which man expresses his 
 affinity with the Unseen. In the exercise of it he 
 widens immeasurably his relations with the Universe, 
 and increases beyond all reckoning the sum of his 
 inner resource.
 
 Ill 
 The Religion of Calamity 
 
 PERHAPS the most immediate effect of the San 
 Francisco disaster was the shock it gave to men's 
 religious convictions. Good Christian people asked 
 the most startling questions. The event indeed 
 seemed to have no ascertainable connection with 
 orthodoxy. Nature was here actiitg with a savagery 
 more brutal than that of the greatest savage we 
 know. The Hottentot, the Australian bushman, 
 has a heart and conscience of some sort, but people 
 see no heart or conscience in this wreckage. Could 
 there be any approximation to feeling, to love as 
 we know it, in a Power which murdered and de- 
 stroyed in such fashion ? Moreover, could men 
 continue to regard themselves as of any serious 
 account in a universe which treated them thus ; 
 which paid seemingly as much attention to their 
 tears and prayers as to the buzz of summer flies ? In 
 those hours of horror man rushed everywhere to help 
 his brother, but there seemed no help outside man. 
 
 < 
 
 The sky which noticed all makes no disclosure, 
 And the earth keeps up her terrible composure. 
 
 This apparent cosmic indifference to human welfare 
 is the feature of life which, perhaps, more than any 
 
 51
 
 52 
 
 other, has impressed itself on the modern conscious- 
 ness. " There is no justice in the outside universe," 
 says a modern writer ; " justice exists only in the 
 soul." A German poet of to-day echoes the senti- 
 ment : 
 
 Das ganze Weltall zeigt nur Leid und Pein ; 
 
 Jedoch das Mitleid fiihlt der Mensch allein ! 
 
 " The whole world shows but sorrow and pain, but 
 compassion is felt by man alone." 
 
 The questions that are here raised are of course 
 not new. They are as old as the world. Man's 
 earliest experiences were not of a nature to teach 
 him an easy optimism. What happened to himself 
 and his neighbour was indeed, at times, of a character 
 to excite his worst fears. As soon as he began to 
 think he seems to have framed two hypotheses 
 about his position : one, that he was the sport of 
 blind chance or fate ; the other, that he was in the 
 hands of invisible beings as cruel as himself, but 
 a great deal more powerful, and whom he must 
 propitiate by all available means. The latter is 
 evidently the older of the two beliefs. Primitive 
 man personalised everything. Thunder and light- 
 ning, earthquake, flood, were the signs of some- 
 body's anger. x Early world religion was accordingly 
 largely a religion of calamity. Its grand stimulant 
 was fear. " Timor fecit deos" Livy's remark that 
 it is more natural for man to be impressed by his 
 catastrophes than by his prosperities is here strictly 
 appropriate. Terror goes deeper than joy, and 
 it was terror that reared the altars. Plutarch 
 seems to mean this in his remark that " man's 
 attention, especially in what concerns the worship
 
 THE RELIGION OF CALAMITY 53 
 
 of the gods, is seldom fixed but by a sort of violence 
 and constraint." And it is the great argument 
 of Lucretius, in his attack upon the current beliefs, 
 that in ridding themselves of religion men would be 
 freed from the terrors which made cowards of them 
 all. 
 
 The other view, that does away with personality 
 and declares the world to be the product of blind, 
 unconscious forces, is, we say, a later one. It 
 seems to spring naturally out of the decay of a 
 civilisation. It fits that mood of hopelessness 
 which comes from a surfeit of unhealthy living. 
 It is to a Rome decayed from its pristine vigour and 
 sunk in gross sensuality, that Propertius, in elegant 
 elegiacs, preaches the doctrine of devil-may-careism 
 as the only true philosophy. " While the Fates 
 permit let us satiate our eyes with lust, seeing the 
 long night hastens to which there will be no succeed- 
 ing day." Out of a like temper, though with a 
 less cynical note, Sulpicius writes to Cicero, on the 
 death of his daughter : " Why," he asks, " bemoan 
 the death of a girl, when she and all of us, together 
 with cities and empires, are passing down the 
 throat of everlasting oblivion ? " In some well- 
 known lines Ennius argues away the idea of a 
 Providence. If, says he, " the gods cared anything 
 about man it would be well with the good and ill 
 with the wicked. But that, we see, is not the case." 
 The mood here has indeed, age after age, been a 
 literary fashion. Omar Khayyam voices it, in 
 lines which are the laughter of despair : 
 
 Drink, for we know not whence we came, nor why, 
 Drjnk, for we know not why we go, nor where !
 
 54 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 The old Persian was never more relished than to-day. 
 There is a multitude now of his denomination. 
 
 What, then, with all this in view, has religion 
 to say for itself ? Assuredly this attitude of 
 humanity, and the things that have occasioned it, 
 are not to be passed over lightly. The truth- 
 seeker will give to every one of these considerations 
 its due weight. But when the utmost has been 
 urged on that side, how does the account stand ? 
 Dismissing, as we may easily do, the notion of an 
 unseen malevolence as the cause of our human 
 calamities, what evidence do these disasters offer 
 against the contrary Christian view of a benign 
 Providence as directing our affairs ? How far do 
 they support a doctrine of chance medley ? The 
 first thing here to be said is that the Universe, 
 regarded as a whole, obstinately refuses to be 
 taken at this valuation. Earthquakes, and the 
 whole line of destructions for which they stand, are, 
 we perceive, not the only things in it. They are, 
 in fact, only an insignificant part of all we see. 
 Just as clear to us as the brutality of these 
 forces, is the spirituality of other forces. When 
 you have loaded one scale you have to begin 
 to load the other. Nature's wholesale murders are 
 a part of life. True, and so are art and science, 
 beauty and happiness, the death of Christ and the 
 soul's aspirations. We cannot work out our sum 
 without taking in these factors. If the other side 
 means something so does this, and the question is, 
 Which means most ? 
 
 It is, indeed, curious, when we come to think of 
 it^that our accusation against Nature on such
 
 THE RELIGION OF CALAMITY 55 
 
 occasions as the present seems to rest entirely 
 on her mode of action instead of on the action itself. 
 
 is when she kills or destroys suddenly and whole- ' 
 sale that we exclaim and despair.^ As a matter of 
 fact, in these operations she is only doing what she 
 is always doing, in another way. She kills a thou- 
 sand people in an earthquake, but she will kill the 
 fifteen hundred million of us now alive on this 
 planet just as certainly, and all the generations 
 that are to follow. Every birth carries with it 
 a sentence of death. " Nascentes morimur, finisque 
 ab origine pendet" Faith has long ago accustomed 
 itself to death, has indeed flourished upon it. The 
 best thought of Greece and Rome refused to regard 
 it as an evil. " No one," says Socrates, in his 
 Apology, " knows whether death, which men in 
 their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may 
 not be the greatest good." ^Eschylus calls it the 
 healer, the curer of all ills. 
 
 Indeed, we of these later ages are in greater 
 danger than were the men of the earlier ones, of 
 taking our comfort-theory as the ground for judging 
 the cosmic morals. We make the blunder of regard- 
 ing the physical consciousness as our one scale 
 of measurement. Whereas, as the deeper philosophy 
 of our time has so abundantly shown, the physical 
 consciousness offers only the outermost edge of 
 reality. Its verdicte are full of illusions, full of 
 contradictions, which it is for philosophy, in its 
 search for the core of things, to exhibit and to 
 think away. It is the business of catastrophe and 
 of calamity to rid our thought about God, the 
 Supreme Reality, of the provincialism which we
 
 56 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 permit to cling about it. Our human analogies 
 are no measure at all of His meaning about us. 
 If we try to bring His working to that scale, the 
 scheme breaks down at once. We know the argu- 
 ment. " We do not kill the man we love. We do 
 not, if we can help it, let our little children fall 
 into the fire and burn to death. Can He be love 
 who does slay, who does let the fire kindle on these 
 innocents ? " The answer is simple. Our love 
 expresses itself according to the limitations of our 
 knowledge. It is in that limitation a true and 
 natural expression. But let us remember it is 
 a limitation. What do we know ultimately about 
 burning and about slaying ? We see one side of 
 them, whereas there are a thousand sides. We 
 judge as though we have here a completed transac- 
 tion, whereas \what happens is only the beginning 
 of an endless series. Could we see the whole 
 process as God sees it, the thousand sides of it at 
 present to us invisible, the whole infinite series 
 of after results, our feeling concerning it would 
 be entirely changed. Our feeling would then be 
 like His. 
 
 And let us remember that the shock to our con- 
 sciousness occasioned by physical catastrophe, the 
 sense it creates of an utter indifference in nature, 
 as though the shaking down of our cities were to 
 it as the disturbance of an anthill, may be sus- 
 ceptible of an interpretation quite the opposite 
 of the ordinary one. That man can lose so much 
 shows how rich he is. But that is not all. His 
 revolt against the physical universe here, his sense 
 of injury under its blows, is in itself the most
 
 THE RELIGION OF CALAMITY 57 
 
 significant feature of the situation. His attitude 
 is inexplicable on the supposition that he is a mere 
 part of this physical nature. That he can lose so 
 much, that he has a range of consciousness capable 
 of being struck at in this tremendous way is 
 the opposite of an argument against the vanity 
 of life. It is, on the contrary, man's disasters, 
 his catastrophes, that give the cachet to his rank 
 and his destiny. 
 
 To this is to be added that the common interpre- 
 tation of these calamities that they are entirely 
 indiscriminate in their dealing with men, striking 
 down with the same indifference innocent and 
 guilty, saint and sinner is equally wide of the 
 mark. Here again we see how the surface view, 
 the appeal to the physical consciousness, blinds us 
 to the ultimate fact. Ennius, whom we have 
 quoted, is quite wrong. For the most striking 
 feature of these events is the entire and delicate 
 discrimination with which they distribute their 
 effects. Nature, even in her earthquake moods, 
 grades her dealings with the nicest exactness. 
 The one event may smite us all, but each will take 
 it in a different way. And our separate way will 
 be in strict accord with our entire inner state and 
 training. How different the same pain to the 
 weakling who howls under it, and to a Posidonius, 
 who in his torture says to Pompey, " Pain do what 
 thou wilt, I shall never be drawn to say thou art 
 an evil ! " It is a sense of this which leads Plato 
 to his great declaration in the " Republic," that 
 *' the just man, though stretched on the rack, 
 though his eyes are dug out, will be happy," and
 
 58 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 to that even more wonderful word of his, in which 
 he anticipates St. Paul, where, speaking again of 
 the just man, he says, " Even when he is in poverty 
 and sickness, or any other seeming misfortune, 
 all things in the end will work together for good 
 to him in life and death." The outer edge of an 
 event is, in fact, always the least part of it. The 
 essential is its relation to our mental and spiritual 
 state. 
 
 Man has lived with catastrophes through all his 
 history, and his faith has survived them. No number 
 of them in the future will persuade him that the 
 scheme of things under which he finds himself 
 is a farrago of nonsense. He will persist rather in 
 believing with Bourget, that " this obscure universe 
 has a mysterious and kindly signification." The 
 people of San Francisco, we read, reared altars in 
 the midst of their ruins, and on the first Sunday 
 after they had lost all joined their voices in the 
 worship of God. And many of them, we dare say, 
 felt His presence as they had never felt it before. 
 A " Deus absconditus," a God that hideth Himself 
 truly, and yet One who in secret marvellous ways 
 discloses Himself to the human spirit. 
 
 Christianity is, in the best sense, a " Religion 
 of Calamity." Goethe called it the religion of 
 sorrow. Assuredly, as none other, it has sounded 
 the depths of sorrow and exhibited to us their 
 meaning. One who had sounded those deeps as 
 few have asks, " Is not He who made misery wiser 
 than thou art ? " Deepest of all interpretations 
 of calamity is the interpretation of Christ. In His 
 Cross we have a religion built on catastrophe. Ifc
 
 f THE RELIGION OF CALAMITY 59 
 
 is a defiance of it and a victory over it. In Jesus, 
 who, while enduring there the worst that nature 
 and the world could inflict, breathes the name of 
 " Father," we have the clearest, divinest ray of light 
 that, from the darkened heavens, has ever shot 
 athwart the deep mystery of life.
 
 IV 
 What Was Pentecost? 
 
 PENTECOST, as the Jews knew it, was one of those 
 nature festivals in which the early world expressed 
 at once its poetry and its religion. There is a strong 
 family likeness between this feast of first fruits and 
 the great gatherings for mystic rite and popular 
 rejoicings with which Rome, Greece and the East 
 hailed the coming of spring and of summer. We 
 do not sneer to-day at Paganism, any more than we 
 sneer at Judaism. We feel the solidarity of humanity. 
 We have a sympathy born of insight for those 
 who, at Eleusinian mystery or Dionysic procession, 
 sought to exhibit their sense of the mystery of life, 
 their desire to interpret its meaning, their gratitude to 
 the Power that gave it. The world was young then, 
 infantile. We are so much wiser to-day, and yet 
 with all our knowledge do we not miss something 
 of that early exuberance ? We can understand 
 Keats's elegy over what is gone : 
 
 Glory and loveliness have passed away ; 
 
 For if we wander out in early morn, 
 
 No wreathed inoense do we see upborne 
 
 Into the East to meet the smiling day ; 
 
 No crowd of nymphs, soft-voiced and young and gay, 
 
 In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, 
 
 Roses eyid pinks and violets to adorn 
 
 The shrine of Flora in her early May,
 
 . - 
 
 WHAT WAS PENTECOST ? 61 
 
 That phase indeed has gone. But the Jewish 
 Pentecost, decaying like the rest of those ancient 
 festivals, was rgborn to gj\n1ifig.tij>n in the most 
 startling way. The story given us in the Acts is 
 the story of one of those ,births of timej which 
 introduce a new era, a fresh quality of life. It has 
 been largely spoiled for us by theology. We have 
 to clear away a good many of its conventional 
 interpretations, to see the whole happening in 
 the light which modern knowledge sheds upon 
 it, before we reach its true significance. The 
 account in the second chapter of the Acts is 
 not, as to all its details, taken by the modern 
 critic au pied de la lettre. The earlier chapters of 
 the book are not contemporary history in the same 
 sense as the " travel document " which comes 
 later. There has been time for a certain embellish- 
 ment. The " Acts " chapter is an Eastern story 
 told us in the Eastern way. In reading it we are 
 irresistibly reminded of another occurrence at 
 Jerusalem three centuries later and of the account 
 given of it by Christian historians. When Julian 
 the Apostate ordered workmen to dig the foundations 
 of a new Jewish temple, Gregory Nazianzen declares 
 there was a whirlwind and an earthquake. There 
 appeared " balls of fire." Sozomen and Theodoret 
 add that crosses, star-shaped, and of blackish 
 hue, appeared on the garments of the beholders. 
 The Eastern imagination, especially in matters of 
 religion, has always been a vivid one. 
 
 We have to construct our own theory of what 
 precisely happened. Neander suggests that the 
 external concomitants of the scene were largely
 
 62 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 subjective impressions. What the gift of tongues 
 amounted to is to some extent interpreted for 
 us by St. Paul's account of the "[gift," as exercised 
 in the Church at Corinth, where men and women 
 in a state of high exaltation uttered mysterious 
 sounds unintelligible to the outsider, similar, ap- 
 parently, to the ululations of the early Irvingite 
 meetings. These outward signs, whatever they 
 were, are reported to us in the narrative as accom- 
 paniments of the descent of " the Holy Ghost." 
 We are not so sure to-day as were our fathers that 
 the conventional theology has properly under- 
 stood the New Testament writers in their use of 
 this phrase. What we have to remember here is 
 that they did not invent their religious terms. 
 They used those that were already in vogue, and 
 in the sense then currently received. They spoke 
 of the Holy Spirit as the men of the time spoke. 
 In the generation to which Jesus belonged the 
 Spirit was thought of not as an independent person- 
 ality, but as the power of God, working especially 
 in inspiration and inner purification. It was 
 common amongst the Jews of the time to speak 
 in this sense of the Holy Spirit or the " Spirit of 
 God." Nor was either the term or the conception 
 confined to the Jews. In the ancient Persian cult 
 of Mithras, the initiate, after performing certain 
 rites, prays " that I through the Spirit may be 
 born again, and that in me, purified by sacred rite 
 and delivered from guilt, the Holy Spirit may live 
 and move." When, therefore, the story speaks of 
 the gathered people as " being filled with the Holy 
 Ghost," we have room for a less straitened, a less
 
 WHAT WAS PENTECOST ? 63 
 
 rigidly restricted interpretation of the phrase than 
 theology is accustomed to give. 
 
 Looking into our narrative in this modern way, 
 we begin to get an idea of what seems to have 
 happened. A number of Jews, who had been 
 followers of Jesus, at one of their public meetings 
 have a remarkable spiritual experience. There~Ts 
 a great ferment of souls, accompanied by out- 
 ward manifestations not dissimilar to those of a 
 modern revival. The excitement amounted to 
 ecstasy, and there was a confusion which led the 
 bystanders to think the people affected either 
 drunk or crazy. This, be it noted, was the more 
 remarkable since the Jews, compared with other 
 nations, could not be called a neurotic or emotional 
 people. There are races whose temperament lends 
 itself easily to religious frenzy. The Phrygians, 
 from whom sprang the Montanist sect distinguished 
 in the second century for its extravagant enthusiasm, 
 were known before their conversion to Christianity 
 for similar excitements in the worship of Cybele. 
 To-day the Celt shows an emotional susceptibility 
 which is foreign to the Saxon. But the Jew, as we 
 have said, was not of this type, The New Testament 
 is hardly a " revivalist " book. It would be 
 difficult, indeed, to imagine a greater contrast than 
 that between the majestic calm of the Sermon on 
 the Mount and the wild incoherencies of a back- 
 woods camp meeting. 
 
 If anyone suspects the genuineness or the depth 
 of the inner movement in this Jerusalem meeting 
 let him attend to what follows. Its immediate 
 effect was the production of a new social order.
 
 64 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 There was a redistribution of property. When 
 we reflect on the tenacity with which the Israelite, 
 from father Jacob down to his descendant in 
 Houndsditch, holds on to his personal belongings, 
 we arrive at some sort of idea of the force which 
 was operating on these minds and consciences to 
 compel them to this great renunciation. A modern 
 critic makes the somewhat cynical observation 
 that the Jerusalem enthusiasm which gave up 
 everything, so impoverished the congregation that 
 they were obliged, ""as Paul's letters show us, to 
 sue for help from their Gentile brethren. That may 
 be so. Their communism was premature, and its 
 first form did not subsist. But the principle 
 that was started in that room, under the influence 
 of this primal emotion thejprinoiple that humanity 
 is a family, every member of which is entitled to the 
 household love and succour is to-day the principle 
 to which international society by one path or 
 another is everywhere laboriously pushing its 
 way. 
 
 What, then, was the power which, working on 
 these strong self-contained souls, stirred them 
 so mightily ? The modern psychologist, arguing 
 on purely natural lines, would explain it as a kind 
 of " burst upwards " of the disciples' subliminal 
 consciousness. They had been living and brooding 
 together, possessed with one idea, the tragic 
 death of their Master, and the mysterious events 
 that had followed. In this way had been accumu- 
 lated in the storehouse of their emotional nature 
 quantities of combustible material, a material which 
 in the excitement of the Pentecost gatherings and
 
 WHAT WAS PENTECOST ? 65 
 
 of this special meeting had reached explosion point. 
 These " explosion points " of nations and societies 
 are continually met with in history. They are a 
 feature of the human evolution. The Renaissance, 
 the Reformation, the French Revolution are illus- 
 trations. There is in each case a long hoarding of 
 material, a long silent work of the human sub- 
 consciousness upon it ; then some fact or circum-' 
 stance comes as torch to the fuel, and all goes up 
 in thunder and flame. 
 
 There is no doubt much in this statement, but 
 it is incomplete. In human spiritual evolution, 
 as in the natural evolution, we trace the operation 
 of the eternal laws. But law here is not every- 
 thing. Before law can work it must have some- 
 thing to work upon. 'The sun's action comes 
 before the laws of the sun's action.- Man's move 
 upwards has endless natural concomitants, which 
 we~can more~or less distinctly trace. But" behind all 
 that is ever'' the mystery of the power that moves 
 him. Pentecost in its innermost meaning exhibits 
 to us one of those spiritual overflows which*mark 
 every stage of the human ascent. But high tides 
 and overflows represent a pull somewhere from 
 an outside force. The sea is urged by the njoon ; 
 the soul's wave-movement has also its lunar laws. 
 The immense human response of Pentecost was in pro- 
 portion to an impulse from behind. The disciples 
 personalised that energy. Peter, in the story, 
 declares that the power poured upon them was 
 an influence diffused by their crucified Master 
 from His place in the Unseen. Why should we 
 not accept that statement ? Philosophy, which 
 
 5
 
 66 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 only a short while ago jeered at the personal in 
 these matters as a mere anthropomorphism, is 
 to-day in a new attitude. It finds that materialism 
 is just an anthropomorphic as is the New Testa- 
 ment, only in another way. Philosophy has, in 
 fact, to-day no valid argument against the doctrine 
 that the spiritual force that is transforming man 
 is a personal force. 
 
 Can we repeat Pentecost ? There is nothing 
 more doleful than attempts at spiritual repetitions. 
 The soul knows its hour and will not be coerced. 
 Moreover, to propose to repeat a thing is to deny 
 the law of progress. To-day is greater than yester- 
 day. It has its own work and its own revelation. 
 What we learn from Pentecost is not to hark back to 
 the old, but to push on courageously to the new. 
 For amongst other things this Jerusalem event was 
 an immense break with the past. .It inaugurated 
 ^revolution At bottom it meant the substitution 
 of jblie religion of the spirit for a religion of form. 
 We are only at the beginning as yet of all that this 
 meant. For to-day we are carrying this evolution 
 into a vaster sphere. Precisely as Pentecost 
 meant a religion which transcended Judaism, so the 
 movement now going on means a religion which 
 transcends mediae valism. The Christianity we have 
 inherited was set in^a framework which is visibly 
 falling to pieces. [Our task is to build its vital 
 elements into a new and larger synthesis^) The 
 Jerusalem Christians in their Pentecost message 
 were the supreme heretics of their time. All the 
 same they were God's appointed workers. The 
 Power which moved them is the Power which in
 
 WHAT WAS PENTECOST ? 67 
 
 our time is carrying Church and world into another 
 and yet higher phase of thought and life. 
 
 The Jerusalem Pentecost drove the early Church 
 into a great propaganda. Our Pentecost will in 
 like manner have its propaganda. It will carry 
 with it all the spiritual elements, the love, the 
 sympathy, the human brotherliness which belonged 
 to that first phase. But it will take with it some- 
 thing more. The Church's missionary effort is, 
 before our eyes, developing an entirely new element. 
 We cannot better describe it, or complete what we 
 have here had to say, than by quoting Professor 
 Seeley on this point in his " Natural Religion." 
 " The children of modern civilisation are called 
 to follow in the footsteps of Paul, of Gregory, of 
 Boniface, of Xavier, Eliot and Livingstone. But 
 they must carry not merely Christianity in its 
 narrow clerical sense, but tl\pir whnlp, ma-ga of 
 spiritual treasures to those who want them. Let us 
 carry the true view of the universe, the true astro- 
 nomy, the true chemistry and the true physiology 
 to polytheists still wrapped in mythological dreams ; 
 let us carry progress and freewill to fatalist nations 
 and to nations cramped by the fetters of primitive 
 custom ; let us carry the doctrine of a rational 
 liberty to the heart of Oriental despotisms. In 
 doing all this. . . we shall admit the outlying 
 world into the great civilised community, into 
 the modern city of God."
 
 The Law of Change 
 
 NOTHING is more pathetic, and, at the same time, 
 more singular, than the persistence with which 
 man has rebelled against the primal law of his being, 
 the law of change. The words he loves most are 
 those which express the opposite of change. " Firm,'' 
 '' immovable," " steadfast," " eternal " are his 
 first-class adjectives ; just as " shifty," " unstable," 
 " evanescent " are at the bottom of his value-scale. 
 There are matters here questions, anomalies 
 which most of us as yet have, perhaps, hardly 
 puzzled out, and which it may be profitable to in- 
 vestigate. (_ Change, we say, is written large on 
 life. It might be called its hall-mark/ The 
 " eternal flux " was the watchword of one of the 
 old Greek philosophies. In the majestic, melan- 
 choly lines of Lucretius there is no thought that 
 more often recurs : 
 
 Nee manet ulla sui similis res. 
 Omnia migrant. 
 
 " Nor does anything abide like itself ; everything 
 is on the move." We realise this even more in- 
 tensely now than did the ancients. Science gives 
 us a universe which is a stupendous dance of atoms ; 
 
 68
 
 69 
 
 " atomic shivers," as one researcher calls them. 
 We live, in fact, by change. Did our bodies remain 
 fixed |from one moment to another that moment 
 would be our last. In this rush we seem to keep 
 nothing. We lose our children as much by living 
 as by dying. You have had to exchange your 
 two-year-old, with his sweet, engaging ways, for 
 this stur4y_schQoihay who is another affair alto- 
 gether. Men think of deluges, earthquakes, revo- 
 lutions events that are sudden and violent as the 
 great change-instruments. But at the world's 
 quietest the movement goes on not less surely 
 than in its great uproars and upheavals. Take 
 the story of a London street Cheapside or Ludgate 
 Hill. For nigh two thousand years, from the days 
 of old Londmium in the Roman time, there has 
 pulsed, without ceasing, a tide of life along these 
 thoroughfares. And it was as day succeeded day 
 silently, imperceptibly, as the crowd moved over 
 the pavements that there crept into it bit by bit 
 all the changes, in raiment, in speech, in manners, 
 in ideas, that make the enormous gulf between that 
 far-off time and our own. ^ 
 
 We ourselves are on this flood, helpless to stay" 
 its movement. We may stop our clocks, but not 
 the heart-beats that measure our days. " I have 
 seen," says Montaigne, " the green shoot, the 
 flowers and the fruit. Now I see ' la secheresse.' 
 I see it happily because it is natural." Undoubtedly 
 the best way to see it. But the " natural " here 
 will become still more welcome to us when we 
 enter more deeply into what is contained in it. 
 For now we discover that the change-flood which
 
 70 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 sweeps us along is not master in the universe. It 
 has its limits and Its" laws. Its limits to begin 
 with. For it seems set here as the antithesis of 
 something greater, older than itself namely, the 
 permanent. Change, we find, is an affair of the 
 surface of things ; it is of the outer rind of reality, 
 not of its innermost core. It belongs to that order 
 of phenomena with which science has to do. But 
 science, to use the words of Wundt, one of her 
 most eminent students, " indicates the path to 
 territories beyond her own, ruled by other laws 
 than those to which her realm is subject." Philo- 
 sophy, which underlies science, shows us thatrwe 
 could, in fact, have no idea of change apart from 
 ' the concept of a permanent) It shows us, in that 
 thought-world which for us is the greatest of all 
 realities, how the sweep and movement of the 
 evanescent obtains all its strange effect upon us 
 by contrast with a something within which tells 
 of fixity, of eternity. Our thought-world is as 
 full of the changeless as the material world is of 
 change. Here we find laws of mathematics, of 
 logic, of the inherent relations of things, which, 
 amid all outward permutations, remain the same. 
 The truths of geometry, of thought sequence, of 
 harmony, are more solid than the hills. The 
 whole sphere of the invisible, hi short, is a sphere 
 ^ of the eternal. 
 
 Change, we see, has its limits. It has also its 
 laws. There is, we find, .an invisible wrapped 
 around every visible, and it is this invisible that 
 is permanent. We transmute our products by 
 chemical processes ; but we can never change the
 
 THE LAW OF CHANGE 71 
 
 law of the processes. We can combine our oxygen 
 and hydrogen, but we have no power over the 
 combining proportions, t Nature, so prodigal of 
 her mutations, is also the greatest of conservatives. 
 How she keeps to her forms ! Why is it that 
 carbon when it crystallises into diamond invariably 
 assumes some form derived from the cube, while 
 quartz will as invariably take the shape of a six- 
 sided prism) The same metal goes on eternally 
 yielding tlie same spectrum. Indeed, there is an 
 aspect in which we might speak almost of the 
 monotony of nature. Plus ca change, plus c'est la 
 meme chose. It is this aspect which certain pessi- 
 mists have seized on as a ground for their grumble 
 at the universe. Marcus Aurelius complains that 
 " things are repeated and come over again apace." 
 Goethe tells of a contemporary who disliked the ) 
 ever-returning green of spring and wished that L 
 " by way of change it might once appear red." 
 Schopenhauer likens life to a conjurer's booth ; 
 where the tricks are made to be seen only once. 
 If you live through two generations you see them 
 twice over and their effect is gone. Spinoza has 
 erected this sameness into a philosophy, and offers 
 us a universe which, being eternally perfect in 
 itself, can as such make no progress, any more 
 than a circle can ever be more a circle than it is. 
 This brings us to the real point of our discussion. 
 Spinoza has had a new vogue of late, and there is 
 a certain order of mind for whom he will always 
 have a great fascination. Always, indeed, he will 
 stand amongst the noblest and purest of spirits, and 
 his system for one of the most wonderful of intel-
 
 72 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 lectual creations. But humanity is wiser than the 
 wisest of its sons, and it is outgrowing Spinoza. 
 We see to-day that his geometrical demonstrations 
 are misplaced as applied to the mystery of the 
 universal life. Mathematics go deep into the cosmos, 
 but they do not contain the whole of it. His denial 
 of ends, and of final causes, is an a priori assump- 
 tion which the facts, as we now know them, do 
 not bear out. He wrote before the key of evo- 
 lution had been discovered, the key which has 
 unlocked so many secret chambers and opened 
 so many new perspectives. In particular it opened 
 a view unknown to him, of vastest significance 
 both for science, philosophy and religion. It is 
 that of infinite progression. It gives us, in short, 
 the essential law of change, in which we see that 
 change is ever in the long run a change upward. 
 
 Spinoza says the universe is perfect. Its per- 
 fection is in itself. There is nothing else than it. 
 God is the universe and the universe is God. It 
 is the sum of all there is, and you cannot have 
 more than there is. But what are the facts, so far 
 as we can now see ? Do they not reveal to us, 
 rather, a universe that is not so much perfect as 
 perfecting ? We see everywhere movement, and a 
 movement one way. Science points us to a life- 
 series which has always been mounting the ladder, 
 from zoophyte to man. Nature in this showing 
 does not repeat herself, but to the old adds ever 
 her something new. The history of civilisation is 
 the repetition on another scale of the zoologic 
 story. Man has not only moved ; he has climbed. 
 His ideas, his morality, his religions, have shown
 
 THE LAW OF CHANGE 73 
 
 ever the fresh increment. He has not repeated 
 simply what he had. The later generations show 
 an accretion, an importation of what the earlier 
 did not possess. The most striking feature in 
 to-day's religious thought is that men are bewil- 
 dered by their own upward movement. They are 
 distressed to find a something in themselves to 
 which their sacred books, their religious traditions 
 do not properly respond. They are unable to see 
 what, nevertheless, is the plainest of truths, that 
 they, because they stand farther on in the move- 
 ment, are the recipients of an inspiration which is 
 higher than the older and written one, and by 
 which the older is being judged. 
 
 But what does all this point to ? Surely to a 
 cosmic view which neither philosophy nor religion 
 has as yet fairly discussed, but which they will 
 have to discuss. Science and philosophy run 
 after Monism to-day, but the signs are that when 
 all is done they will end in Dualism. The signs are, 
 that is, of an external universe which is not per- 
 fected, but on the way to perfection. Which in its 
 turn means a Perfect of Being and Reality that is 
 behind and beyond the visible universe, greater 
 than it, and which, in its constant self -disclosures, 
 brings ever the cosmos closer to its own height 
 and beauty. Why should we think of the universe 
 other than as we think of ourselves ? Why should 
 we not say that, just as the soul in us is in a way 
 a mirror of the Deity, but an imperfect one ; and 
 that in proportion as the soul grows, in that degree 
 the Divinity is more clearly revealed ; so this 
 external frame of things is just a vehicle for the
 
 74 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 self -disclosure of God, and will, in its infinite pro- 
 gression, open to us ever more of the inexhaustible 
 riches of His perfection ? 
 
 It is, we say, to some such point as this that 
 the higher science and the higher philosophy of 
 to-day are steadily moving. And the lesson from 
 it is that which religion has taught from the begin- 
 ning, the lesson, namely, of^our inheritance in the 
 Invisible, of our permanent home and treasure 
 there.) What is seen has all come out of the un- 
 J seen, is a sort of deposit from it, and there is an 
 infinity more to follow. But our share is in the 
 fountain as well as in the stream. We are not 
 of the visible only ; our inmost texture is of the 
 invisible, and we partake of its eternity. 
 
 Kein Wesen kann zu nichts zerfallen, 
 Das Ewige regt sich fort in alien. 
 
 " No being can to nothing fall, in everything the 
 Eternal moves." So sings the German prophet. 
 But we can go further. Science and philosophy 
 take us to the threshold ; the Christian Gospel 
 introduces us to the presence chamber. These 
 suggest a power, a wisdom, greater than all we 
 see ; this tells us of a love that passeth knowledge. 
 Spinoza offers us the Amor intellectualis Dei : 
 Jesus shows us the heart of the Father, and that, 
 and that alone, suffices us.
 
 VI 
 Religion and Crime 
 
 THE other day, passing up Ludgate Hill the 
 present writer saw a thief taken in the act. There 
 was a sudden rush ; half a dozen hands held the 
 struggling wretch until a policeman, appearing at 
 the nick of time, took over the capture. " Got it 
 in his hand, has he ? " said the grinning officer, as, 
 seizing the culprit by the collar, he marched away 
 with him, followed by the crowd. " He's got 
 pinched," said an urchin to a group of companions, ' 
 who entered heartily into the jest. Everybody 
 seemed interested. The incident was a relief to 
 the monotony of the day. Meanwhile the indi- 
 vidual who formed the centre of it all was clearly 
 not enjoying himself. He was a type of the London 
 vaurien of its lowest class, undersized, with bent 
 shoulders, squalid ; hunger and despair looking out 
 of his eyes. The most astonishing part of the affair, 
 to one onlooker at least, was the perfect ease with 
 which it seemed to fall into a pre-arranged system 
 of things. Everything and everybody appeared 
 to be ready for that thief. The British Constitu- 
 tion, the law court, the magistrate, the policeman, 
 thejprison,^were all waiting for him. They were 
 
 75
 
 76 RELIGION AND. EXPERIENCE 
 
 there in anticipation of his procedures ; he performed 
 his share in a business, every detail of which had 
 been previously thought out. The catching and 
 immurement of thieves, is not that a feature of 
 civilisation ? Society knows exactly the part it 
 has to play. "Three months' hard," endured by 
 the prisoner and paid for by the nation, will per- 
 fectly settle the account. 
 
 But is the account settled ? Have we done with 
 our criminal when we have caught and gaoled him ? 
 It may after all appear that this is the beginning 
 rather than the end of the matter. We have, let 
 us remember, a criminal class in London alone 
 equal to the population of a large town. Has 
 society done its part towards these teeming thou- 
 sands when it has erected its palace of justice, 
 increased the cell accommodation of Portland, and 
 made new appointments to the magistracy ? Or is 
 'it not time to reconsider this whole business of 
 crime and the criminal, and to realise that, wrapped 
 up in this one question, is the whole problem of 
 life, of religion, and of the social pact ? 
 
 Thought on these matters is moving swiftly in 
 our day. We have got a long way, for instance, 
 from the Carlyle attitude. His recipe, in the 
 " Latter Day Pamphlets," of "a hearty hatred 
 for scoundrels " ; his sneer at the notion of " drilling 
 twelve hundred scoundrels by methods of kind- 
 ness " ; his gibe at the philanthropic treatment 
 as that of a crew which, having lost its way round 
 Cape Horn, instead of taking to their sextants 
 and asking about the laws of wind and water, 
 and of earth and heaven, are serving out to the
 
 RELIGION AND CRIME 77 
 
 worthy and unworthy alike a double allowance 
 of grog " ; all this has become clean out of date. 
 It is precisely because society has been asking 
 about " the laws of heaven and earth " that " the 
 hating of scoundrels," and the mere hanging of 
 them, as the final word, have become impossible. 
 The Carlylean method pays no attention to facts 
 of human nature and of society which we have 
 now become fully aware of. It takes the criminal 
 there as he is, but asks no question as to how 
 he came to be what he is, or as to what other thing 
 than this he may become. It regards society 
 always as the judge, and never inquires as to 
 whether, in the balance between these two, society 
 itself may not sometimes be the greater criminal. 
 It is dawning upon us that in this department 
 of life a huge mistake has been made, a mistake 
 centuries old, closely allied with other great mistakes 
 that it is now more than time we set to work to 
 rectify. In exploring this region we find ourselves 
 brought inevitably into contact with religion. 
 Religion has all along been a governing factor in the 
 treatment of criminals, and will continue to be. 
 But its record is a strangely mixed one. It is to 
 religion we must look for the purifying forces 
 which will cleanse this dark corner of life. At the 
 same time it has to be said that to false views of 
 religion an enormous amount of the mischief done 
 in it is plainly due. The most fatal thing in theo- 
 logy has been its notion, diligently taught for 
 centuries, that punishment was an end in itself ; 
 that God's way with wrongdoers was to torture 
 them for ever. Mediaeval doctrine and its survivals
 
 78 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 have here certainly not been complimentary to 
 Deity. The Churches who held it worshipped God, 
 but assuredly they did not trust Him. Instead, 
 they warned men against Him ; they warned 
 them of what He might do to them, of what horrors 
 He was capable of inflicting on them. And it 
 was of an equal barbarity they convicted Him in 
 their suggested methods of placation. They could 
 get round Him, it was suggested, by substitu- 
 tions and sacrifices. Even the ancients knew 
 better than this. Plato, in the " Laws," says there 
 were three suppositions about the gods on which 
 evil-doers rested their hopes that they did not 
 exist, or that they did not care for man, or that they 
 might be easily appeased by sacrifices. And Ovid, 
 in the " Fasti," has a cutting remark on ceremonial 
 salvation : 
 
 Ah, nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina caedis 
 Fluminea tolli posse putetis aqua. 
 
 (" Too easy-going are you who imagine that flowing 
 water can carry away the sad crimes of blood.") 
 How much nobler and nearer the fact than all this 
 priestly juggling, the view which Plutarch maintains, 
 that punishment does not so much follow upon 
 wrong-doing as that it is contemporaneous with 
 and inherent in it ! 
 
 The false view of God and His ways fostered 
 by the Latin Church (for it was never held by the 
 Greek fathers) reacted with fatal effect upon the 
 authorities both of Church and State. If God 
 punished for punishment's sake so might man. 
 The hell which flamed in the next world must have
 
 RELIGION AND CRIME 79 
 
 its counterpart in this. The priest was here more 
 cruel than the layman, and the survival of this 
 feeling is to be noted in later history. One of the 
 darkest blots on the Church, down almost to our 
 own day, has been its full acquiescence in the worst 
 features of our criminal law, and its resistance 
 to any amelioration. The strongest defenders of 
 the savagery of the English code, of its death sen- 
 tences for sheep stealing and similar offences, were 
 the Anglican bishops. And the outside churches 
 were not much better. In the " Heart of Mid- 
 lothian " Scott tells us how, in Edinburgh, 
 " criminals under sentence of death were brought 
 to the Tolbooth Church to hear and join in public 
 worship on the Sabbath before execution." The 
 clergyman, on the occasion he describes (and he is 
 here reciting history), " preached an affecting 
 discourse." Doubtless. They were good at that. 
 And so far as one can see they would have gone 
 on preaching " affecting discourses " to condemned 
 sheep-stealers and smugglers for ever, without 
 ever asking about the ethics of the condemnation. 
 But a mighty change has come over the public 
 mind. We think differently to-day about both 
 man and God, and the new thought is filtering 
 rapidly down into our whole theory and. practice 
 of law and of punishment. On this theme science 
 has, by the sheer accumulation of facts, cleared 
 away a whole cloud of ecclesiastical misconceptions. 
 It has shown us that human nature, in its worst 
 criminal forms, is simply good stuff badly handled. 
 Man is the greatest force we know, and he requires 
 careful management. People who deal with dyna-
 
 80 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 mite the wrong way will get a bad opinion of it 
 those who are left of them. And your human is 
 mightier than dynamite. Now the human force 
 means well where it gets a chance. When Lord 
 Palmerston startled the orthodoxy of his day by 
 declaring in the House of Commons that " all 
 men are born good," he was only repeating what 
 Plato and Clement of Alexandria had said centuries 
 before him. Innumerable experiments have shown 
 that, taken at its worst, where knowledge and 
 sympathy have been brought to bear upon it, the 
 material is good. Our human wreckage, like other 
 waste products, can be made profitable when 
 scientifically treated. In the " Creevey Papers " 
 it is recorded how Lord and Lady Duncannon, 
 in the early part of the nineteenth century, by 
 three years' work on their estate and town of 
 Peltown, in Ireland, brought the population to a 
 condition unsurpassed in order, comfort and 
 civilisation. " And yet it was only four miles 
 from Carrick, one of the most lawless towns 
 in Tipperary." That is only one of a thousand 
 similar testimonies that might be cited. Dr. 
 Barnardo showed how the riff-raff of the London 
 gutters, taken out of its evil surroundings and 
 translated to a proper environment, could be 
 turned into good citizens. No fact, in short, is 
 better established than that of the human recover- 
 ability. Jesus taught this, though His Church 
 forgot it. It was this knowledge which sent Him 
 over to the outcast and the lost. 
 
 But this opens to us another consideration. 
 Society hitherto has been busy indicting the criminal.
 
 RELIGION AND CRIME 81 
 
 It has called him all the bad names of its vocabulary. 
 It has caught him, judged him, prisoned him ; 
 and our Chelsea philosopher winds up by recom- 
 mending a wholesale shooting and hanging of him. 
 We are now, however, beginning dimly to perceive 
 another side to all this, and are asking uneasily 
 whether Society, of which we are a part, is not on 
 the whole the greater criminal ; and whether, if 
 any shooting or hanging is to be done, it were not 
 better to begin nearer home ? Society, we perceive, 
 has blundered villainously in two ways ; first in 
 making the criminal, and second in doing the worst 
 with him when made. There needs to be a redis- 
 tribution of blame, and also of correction. 
 
 Where, to begin with, has the criminal come 
 from ? How did he come to be what he is ? Would 
 our Ludgate Hill wretch, lugged by the grinning 
 policeman to the lock-up, choose this lot, as com- 
 pared for instance with that of the sleek, well-fed, 
 well-pursed bystanders who looked on ? Who 
 chose it for him ? What of the system which has 
 allowed a fellow mortal to sink to this depth ? 
 But we are the makers and supporters of the 
 system. Do not the words of Maeterlinck here 
 burn the skin of every one of us ? " For it is 
 enough that we should feel the cold a little less 
 than the labourer who passes by, that we should 
 be better fed or clad than he, that we should buy 
 any object that is not strictly indispensable, and 
 we have unconsciously returned, through a thou- 
 sand byways, to the ruthless act of primitive man 
 despoiling his weaker brother." Here speaks that 
 social conscience outside the Church which, in 
 
 6
 
 82 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 these matters, is nearer the Christianity of Christ 
 than the modern Church itself. The earlier Church 
 was bolder. In teaching that the goods of the 
 world are not properly partitioned, that poverty 
 and crime are an indictment not so much of the 
 poor and the criminal as of the rich, the Socialist 
 of to-day is only saying what Chrysostom and 
 Basil and Jerome and Tertullian said ages ago. 
 
 Initial robberies on the vastest scale depriving 
 the people of their land and liberties, and forcing 
 them to herd in the amorphous masses of the cities, 
 have been one cause of the creation of the criminal 
 classes. Another cause has been our stupidity and 
 neglect. We are a wonderful people, we English ! 
 We are spending millions of money on the education 
 of children between the ages of five and thirteen. 
 To give them during those years the proper brand 
 of theology we fight like tigers, turn out Govern- 
 ments, become Passive Resisters and what not. And 
 when our child has reached thirteen ; when, that 
 is to say, he has entered upon his most critical and 
 dangerous age, we forget all about him ! He is 
 free then to go to the devil by whatsoever quickest 
 way he can find ! 
 
 Thus we make our criminals. When made, we 
 immure them in gaols, clothe them in a hideous 
 garb, set them up, as poor Oscar Wilde said, as 
 " the zanies of sorrow, clowns whose hearts are 
 broken." We fix on them an indelible brand, and 
 carefully shut out from them the means of return to 
 an honest life. What barbarism it all is ! And 
 this in a day when no serious sociologist any longer 
 believes in fear or pain as agencies in the reformation
 
 RELIGION AND CRIME- 83 
 
 of character. Nearly four centuries ago More in 
 his " Utopia " taught that punishment should have 
 as its only end the destruction of vices and the 
 saving of men. It is time we had learned that lesson. 
 Let us sum up, in terms that may be easily 
 remembered, the gist of what has been here ad- 
 vanced. Crime is a disease, and one that is every- 
 where curable. The existence of a criminal class 
 is an indictment, not of that class specially, but of 
 Society at large, whose greed and neglect have 
 produced it. Every time a man enters the dock 
 Society enters with him as particeps criminis. 
 And, finally, the only way of curing our criminal is 
 not by the infliction of pain, but by Christ's way 
 of Divine sympathy, by standing in with him as a 
 brother, by using our skill to fight his inner ailment, 
 by changing his environment, by bringing in our 
 goodwill to assist his diseased will ; in a word, by 
 giving his better self a chance.
 
 VII 
 Pleasure 
 
 WHATEVER he is doing man i8 always the most 
 interesting of studies. He is never more so than 
 when " taking his pleasure." Often enough it is a 
 sufficiently frivolous business in itself, yet nowhere 
 than here are the heights and deeps of humanity, 
 its weird problems, its endless vistas of possibility 
 more strikingly displayed. At the outset a most 
 singular question confronts us. How is it that 
 pleasure has obtained so ill a name ? The word 
 lies under a religious ban. It has become one of 
 the most sinister and equivocal in the dictionary. 
 To call any one " a man of pleasure " is, in most 
 circles, to suggest the worst. In hymns, sermons, 
 devotions, the soul is warned against pleasure as 
 one of its chief dangers. What does it mean ? 
 
 For when, putting aside all prepossessions, we 
 come to examine the matter for ourselves, we find 
 Nature offering this banned product as her master- 
 piece, as her chief good. To that glow, that over- 
 flow of sensation which we know as a sense of 
 pleasure, the whole machinery of life, at its best 
 and highest, has contributed. It is only in the 
 harmony of all Nature's powers, in the delicate 
 
 84
 
 PLEASURE 86 
 
 adjustment of a million"" co-operators within and 
 without us, that this result is achieved. So won- 
 drous delicate, is, indeed, the process, that it is 
 never kept up for long at its first pitch. The 
 pleasure of a walk, of a piece of noble scenery, of 
 listening to great music, is never a fixed quantity. 
 At the end one is sensible of fatigue, of strain, 
 perhaps of vacuity. It is the earlier moments that 
 give us the high rapture. Life seems then to 
 exhale a delicate perfume, to offer a flavour which 
 dissipates, almost ere it is fully recognised. To 
 taste it again we must wait till another drop of 
 that subtlest of essences has once more collected 
 within us. 
 
 But this supreme product of Nature, this result 
 of what seem her highest and healthiest states is, 
 as we have said, placed under a ban, made the object 
 of a thousand warnings. " This vain world's 
 pleasure " is the refrain of our hymns. Pascal, 
 one of the greatest of human spirits, made it one 
 of his maxims " to renounce every pleasure." 
 Bernard of Clairvaux speaks of himself and his asso- 
 ciates as having " rejected as filth all that shines 
 bright or sounds sweet to the ear." St. John of 
 the Cross made it his rule to renounce all that was 
 agreeable to the senses and to embrace all that 
 was repulsive. How has this come about ? The 
 answer is given in the wondrous story, not by any 
 means ended yet, of the human soul. 
 
 The story is in many parts. The education of 
 the soul in relation to pleasure has been conducted 
 not only by religion, but in an important degree 
 by philosophy. We may spend a moment here
 
 86 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 in inquiring as to its verdict, Ancient Greece and 
 modern Germany have given us much that is illu- 
 minating on our subject, but nowhere, as Voltaire 
 in his day acknowledged, has the moral question 
 here been discussed with more depth and vigour, 
 or with a clearer grasp of the issues involved, than 
 in England. By Hobbes and Shaftesbury and 
 Hutcheson, by Hume and Hartley, by Tucker and 
 Paley of the earlier time, and by Bentham and 
 Spencer, by Sedgwick and Martineau and Green in 
 the later day, almost everything has been said 
 that can be said. Some of these wage war without 
 quarter against the ascetic position. To Abraham 
 Tucker, to Bentham and to Paley happiness is 
 simply the sum of pleasures. Pleasure, without 
 qualification, is the chief good. Hartley, in his 
 " Observations on Man," improves on this with 
 his division of pleasures into those of gross self- 
 interest, of refined self-interest, and of rational 
 self-interest. But it was Hutcheson, in his " In- 
 quiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil " and his 
 " Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions 
 and Affections," who first developed into clear- 
 ness the principle of the absolute difference in the 
 quality and value of pleasures. It is from this 
 starting-point that we are able to reduce the earlier 
 chaos of opinion to harmony. It is in the light 
 of his principle that we discover the real meaning 
 of renunciation, and that the ascetics were not in 
 such discord with nature as at first seemed. When 
 he declares that " we have an immediate sense 
 of a dignity, a perfection, or beatific quality in 
 some kinds of pleasure which no intenseness of the
 
 PLEASURE 87 
 
 lower kinds may equal," we feel ourselves at once 
 at the key of the position. 
 
 What we have learned since Hutcheson's day is 
 all a confirmation of his teaching. Evolution, 
 properly understood, shows us the way along which, 
 on this question, science, philosophy and religion 
 reach their reconciliation. It shows us, to begin 
 with, pleasure as unquestionably a good. On all 
 its planes it is a harmony, an achievement, a nature's 
 triumph. Its varying forms, of lower and higher, 
 represent the marvellous story of man's growth. 
 Nature here is as a great musician, who begins 
 his composition with a simple air, which as it pro- 
 ceeds is incessantly repeated, but ever with a fresh 
 note, a new element brought in, until what at first 
 was the barest musical thread has been woven into 
 the most elaborate and complicated harmony. 
 
 That pleasure is an integral part, and a final 
 end in the scheme of things, is a conclusion which 
 it is impossible to escape. The lack of it is in 
 itself a sign of unhealth, of an unnatural condition. 
 Every element is charged with pleasure, every 
 action yields it. To eat, to drink, to work, to 
 rest, to sleep, to awake, to listen, to converse, to 
 hear, to see all is, to a wholesome nature, to 
 enjoy. Sir James Paget, arguing from the whole 
 analogy of things, maintained that dying, as a 
 natural act, contained its own pleasure. The oppo- 
 site of it that is, pain, discomfort is a signal of 
 danger, of a breach in the constitutional order. 
 The most unlikely things, properly treated, yield 
 their pleasure. The anatomist finds delight in a 
 skeleton. Nature is continually hoarding her
 
 88 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE. 
 
 delights for us, and making them, like old wine, 
 the more valuable for the keeping. It has taken a 
 million years to ripen the exact sensation with 
 which a geologist breaks open his stone and finds 
 his fossil within. And as with things, so with 
 circumstances. Renan is assuredly right in his 
 observation that " everything considered, there 
 are few situations in the vast field of existence 
 wherein the balance of debt and credit does not 
 leave a little surplus of happiness." Were it other- 
 wise men would not cling to life as they do. John- 
 son, in his last days, swollen with dropsy and 
 choked with asthma, would, he declared, have 
 given one of his legs for another year of life. Poor 
 Dodd, condemned to be hanged, when told 
 by pious friends as a consolation that he was going 
 to leave a wretched world, would not join in the 
 cant. " No, no," said he ; "it has been a very 
 agreeable world to me." 
 
 How comes it, then, that, with all this before 
 us, we have that note from religion ; that there 
 rises in us the scorn for the mere man of pleasure ; 
 that we revolt against the whole hedonist theory 
 of living ? Are we right in our disgust for Lord 
 Chesterfield when he writes to his son a natural 
 son, by the way exhorting him to pursue pleasure 
 as " the last branch of his education " ? Should 
 we approve Madame du Chatelet, Voltaire's mis- 
 tress, in her assertion that " we have nothing else 
 to do in the world than to obtain agreeable sen- 
 sations and sentiments " ? Has De Chaulieu uttered 
 the final word in declaring that " la voluptt is the 
 art of using pleasures with delicacy and to taste
 
 PLEASURE 89 
 
 them with sentiment",? What is the difference 
 between this attitude and that of the patriot who 
 dies for his country, of the martyr who endures 
 the scorching flame as a witness for his faith ? Is 
 there any ascertainable link between the attitude 
 of the Chesterfields and those others we have 
 quoted, and that, to take one instance out of many, 
 of a Pionius, one of the Decian martyrs, who, when 
 told by the people of Smyrna that " it was good 
 to live and to see the light," replied : " Yes, life is 
 good, but there is a better life. Light is good if 
 it be the true light. All around us is good and 
 fair ; we do not wish for death or hate the works 
 of God. But there is a better world in comparison 
 with which we despise this." 
 
 We are here at the root of the whole matter. 
 These utterances, so widely contrasted, are never- 
 theless all human and all natural. But they are 
 on varying scales. They are a kind of psychological 
 strata, exhibiting different stages in the evolution 
 of the soul. Throughout them all there is, be it 
 observed, one ground-note. Nature is in all of 
 them true to her assertion of pleasure being essen- 
 tially a good. The difference is in the kind of 
 pleasure and the kind of good. The renunciator, 
 the patriot, the martyr, in a word, the spiritual 
 man, has no disagreement with the rest on our 
 first question. They do not belittle God's world. 
 They are not so foolish as to decry that marvellous 
 system evidence in its every detail of the Eternal 
 beneficence by which the sum of things yields un- 
 ceasingly to us its usufruct of enjoyment. But the 
 music for them has become scientific. It has
 
 90 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 advanced beyond the first simple air. It contains 
 that, losing none of its melody, but into the com- 
 position some other elements, from a higher source, 
 have come. Knowing the animal pleasures, they 
 find they are more than animals ; that they are 
 spirits, in a spiritual universe, which in its turn 
 yields its delights. Their endurance of bodily pains, 
 of material losses at the call of principle, was never 
 regarded by them as a contradiction of that law 
 of Nature which fixes enjoyment as the outcome 
 and goal of all healthy effort. If the delight was 
 not there at the moment their faith saw it waiting. 
 Their endurance was a price paid for the truer 
 well-being and enjoyment of their fellows. " Oh, 
 my beloved and dearest," writes Athanasius from 
 his exile to his friends, "if it is from tribulations 
 we must pass to comfort, we ought not to be grieved 
 or frightened . . . but to treat such things 
 as a probation." There is here, we say, always 
 the ground tone of a happiness present or to come. 
 More than that. We have spoken of that mar- 
 vellous range of the law of pleasure by which the 
 most unlikely objects are made to yield it. A 
 modern school of philosophy has sneered im- 
 measurably at the Christian theory of self-denial. 
 And undoubtedly the principle in earlier times was 
 carried to unreasonable lengths beyond all that 
 the New Testament enjoins. Yet in what seem to us 
 their wildest excesses the ascetics exhibit to us 
 no breach of continuity in the law of enjoyment ; 
 what they instead reveal are the immense joy- 
 reserves of the soul. We see here men stripping 
 themselves of every outer good, of every comfort
 
 PLEASURE 91 
 
 of the senses, because they had discovered inner 
 resources so full and so intense as made these other 
 pleasures infantile in comparison. Does anyone 
 doubt that Jesus on the Cross had a deeper joy than 
 Caesar on his throne ; that Francis of Assisi pos- 
 sessed the world more truly than the reigning 
 pope and emperor ? 
 
 The truths which emerge from a study of this 
 kind seem now fairly obvious. The system of 
 things has been constructed with a view to uni- 
 versal enjoyment. Man at the height he has now 
 reached has a vast scale from which he may choose. 
 To live amongst the lower animal pleasures is to 
 desert his rank, to deny the spiritual order to which 
 he belongs. The martyrs, the renunciators, believe 
 in pleasure ; they have it in their sacrifice ; they 
 know they are by their sacrifice procuring it for 
 others. No present circumstances can hinder the 
 ultimate reign of the nobler joy. Out of the present 
 tribulation will come the far more exceeding and 
 eternal weight of glory.
 
 VIII 
 Religion and Ghosts 
 
 EVERYBODY to-day talks of psychic phenomena. 
 The theme has become almost the next after the 
 weather. The subject is not as yet an entirely 
 serious one with the public. It is, like mothers-in-law 
 or marriage with a deceased wife's sister, a topic 
 for badinage. There is, nevertheless, far more in 
 it than has been discovered by the jesters. The 
 facts, so far as we know them, are indeed not at all 
 a laughing matter. They come and go, leaving 
 scant opportunity for accurate observation ; yet 
 even in passing they flash a gleam which, like 
 sudden lightning on the waters, opens the vision 
 of unfathomed depths beneath. 
 
 . /; We propose here to discuss the relation of this 
 question to religion. We are, of course, not the 
 first to follow that track. A modern philosophy 
 greatly in vogue goes back to ghosts for its theory 
 of religious origins. Mr. Herbert Spencer finds 
 here the starting point of the belief in a future 
 state, and of the systems of religion that are built 
 upon it. In his dreams the savage, while his 
 body lay inert on the ground, found himself moving 
 freely, conversing, recognising as close to him 
 
 92
 
 RELIGION AND GHOSTS 93 
 
 people who he knew were far distant, or long since 
 passed away. These apparitions, in sleep or trance, 
 were to him as real as the actual world. From 
 them he conceived a spiritual world, where the 
 soul moved when the body was inert or dead. His 
 waking imagination easily confirmed the dreams 
 of the night. The vision, the ghostly appearance, 
 became actualities in his scheme of life. The 
 ancestor he had seen hi his dream was existent in 
 the unseen. He must open communication with 
 him ; he must pay homage to his chiefs yonder, 
 and to whatsoever powers ruled there beside. 
 
 On this, it may be said, to begin with, that if it 
 were admitted as in itself an accurate account of 
 religious beginnings, there would lie here no argu- 
 ment whatever against the authority and the 
 sanctions of religion as we know it. To say that 
 religion came to us through a lowly gateway is 
 simply to offer us one more instance of the uni- 
 versal order. Everything has come to us that way. 
 Nothing would be more absurd than to judge of 
 the proportions and significance of a life-fact 
 by its first appearances. Nature, in planning her 
 great achievements, always begins low. She makes 
 no show at the start ; gives no hint, in the first rude 
 sketch, of the wealth of genius that is yet to appear. 
 With a millionaire's resources, she starts on thirty 
 shillings a week. In her magnificent evolution, what 
 appears at first is nothing. The question always to 
 be asked is, " What lies behind ? " And nowhere 
 do we so need to ask it as in discussing religion. 
 
 But a defence of this kind is now almost un- 
 necessary. A curious change is coming over opinion.
 
 94 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 Thirty years ago the dream and ghost theory was 
 being urged as a disparagement of the religious 
 position. The spiritual concept was shown as a 
 product of savagery, and that seemed enough to 
 dispose of its claims. But to-day we approach the 
 subject from another starting-point. A different 
 question is being asked. " Why is it," the modern 
 thinker demands, " that among all the races of 
 mankind, civilised and uncivilised, there has appeared 
 and has survived, the belief in a life after death ? " 
 For nothing apparently is more contrary to the 
 evidence. The vote of the senses is dead against it. 
 The mind, as Lucretius long ago pointed out, 
 appears to follow exactly the fortunes of the body. 
 His 
 
 Prseterea gigni pariter cum corpore et una 
 Crescere sentimus pariterque senescere mentem. 
 
 (Besides, we see the mind to be born with the body, 
 and grow with the body, and to decay with it) 
 seems to settle the whole matter. When death 
 comes the entire system breaks up. The separate 
 particles, held together no longer by the vital bond, 
 form new combinations. The elements are here, 
 for they are eternal, but the form we knew is gone 
 and will return no more. 
 
 With all this for man to think about, why his 
 permanent belief in survival ? We say nothing here 
 of those new aspects of matter and its mysterious 
 potencies which the latest science is revealing. 
 Radium, the properties of radiant matter, the 
 energy of electrons, the composition of the molecule, 
 the entire range of supersensual physics, open to 
 us vistas of thought of which our fathers knew
 
 RELIGION AND GHOSTS 95 
 
 nothing. But what they count for in the argu- 
 ment is aside from our immediate question, which 
 is, " Why have men in all the past ages, with the 
 evidence of the senses so powerfully against them, 
 believed that the soul survived death's catastrophe ? " 
 That they did so is seen in all literature. Vedic 
 hymns, 3,500 years old, sing of a spiritual body inside 
 the fleshly one, by which the dead rise to heaven. 
 And that note is everywhere. The answer which 
 is being given to-day, and by men who have every 
 claim to be heard, is largely in the Spencerian direc- 
 tion, but with a new point and a new emphasis. 
 They hold that the belief did come from the dream 
 and the apparition, but with the addition that 
 some at least of the dreams and some of the appari- 
 tions were really valid as evidence, and have to-day 
 to be accepted as such. 
 
 We have in fact on this subject reached a new 
 position. For the first time in history the question 
 of apparitions, of psychic phenomena in general, 
 has been taken up as a branch of science. We are 
 far from the attitude so humorously expressed by 
 Fontenelle, who " didn't believe in ghosts, but ^ 
 was afraid of them." Our age wants to know, and 
 is on the track of knowing. It is collecting the 
 evidence that has floated down the ages, and is 
 examining it with a new eye. It is boldly entering 
 this dim region in search of its laws. The frame of 
 mind which dismissed the ancient stories with a 
 shrug, is recognised not as science but as ignorance. 
 A record such, for instance, as that of Apollonius 
 of Tyana, that when at Ephesus he saw in spirit the 
 assassination of Domitian at Rome ; crying out
 
 96 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 suddenly in the midst of his friends, " Strike him 
 down, the tyrant ! " and declaring immediately, 
 " Domitian has just been slain," is accepted to-day as 
 falling entirely within the category of the possible^ 
 The researches of a Oookes, of a Myers, of a Gurney, 
 of a Rochas, of a Gabriel Delanne, have brought 
 within our view a mass of facts which are as solidly 
 based as they are wonderful. With many of these 
 explorers the existence of an ethereal body within 
 the material, which can be exteriorised under 
 certain conditions, is held as proved. Sir William 
 Crookes has taken photographs of these materiali- 
 sations. M. Rochas speaks of an externalised 
 consciousness which feels a touch or a pin prick. 
 Swedenborg communicated messages from deceased 
 persons to relatives on matters of fact which were 
 found to be accurate in every detail. Had Kant 
 lived in our day he would probably have gone further 
 than his recorded admission on this subject, striking 
 as it is from one of his quality : " For my part, 
 ignorant as I am of the way in which the human 
 spirit enters the world, and the ways in which 
 it goes out of it, I dare not deny the truth of many 
 of the narratives that are in circulation." 
 
 But if this body of evidence is to be accepted 
 as containing at least a nucleus of fact, what is 
 the relation of it to religion as we know it ? The 
 relation is very evident and very immediate. 
 The sphere we are investigating, let us admit, is 
 one that lends itself readily to imposture, and it 
 is one where the impostor has revelled. " Sludge, 
 the Medium," has displayed himself here in all 
 his cunning, in all his vulgarity. Yet a Brown-
 
 RELIGION AND GHOSTS 97 
 
 ing, in the midst of his merciless exposure, finds 
 at the bottom of the business a residuum which 
 his scepticism cannot get over. His own belief 
 one sees is in that final question, 
 
 Which of those who say they disbelieve, 
 Your clever people, but has dreamed his dream, 
 Caught his coincidence, stumbled on his fact, 
 He can't explain ? 
 
 And amid the thousand impostures it is the one 
 fact that counts. As Hegel has it : " Dem Begriffe 
 nach einmal ist allemal." ("In the region of 
 ideas ' once ' is equal to ' always.' ") The one 
 fact clears away all a priori impossibilities, for, as 
 Aristotle says : " Things which have happened 
 are manifestly possible, for if they had been im- 
 possible they would not have happened." One 
 single message from the unseen world and that 
 unseen is proved as actual. One demonstration 
 that the soul can act outside the body, and the 
 question of its~survival of death has entered on a 
 new phase. 
 
 And this question becomes, we say, immediately 
 religious. It gives the death-blow to that material- 
 ism of which Goethe once said " the theory which 
 reduces all things to matter and motion appeared 
 to me so grey, so Cimmerian, and so dead, that we 
 shuddered at it as at a ghost." On the contrary, 
 man is here shown to be a spiritual being, in a 
 spiritual universe, and the difference is immense. The 
 thought of a continuance of being is, and by the 
 constitution of human nature must necessarily be, 
 one of the great religious motives. We may talk 
 
 7
 
 98 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 of " virtue being its own reward," and of " doing 
 right because it is right," but it remains that the 
 thought of sheer extinction ; of our endeavour 
 ending, so far as we are concerned, in utter nothing- 
 ness ; of OUT virtue or our vice debouching, after 
 a few brief years, into the same all-swallowing 
 n/ant must make all the difference to the struggle. 
 
 Moreover, the facts won in this research carry 
 so much that is intimately religious with them. 
 They are in accord with all the soul's aspirations, 
 when it is at its highest. Are we not continually 
 saying to ourselves : 
 
 And thus I know this earth is not my sphere, 
 For I cannot so narrow me but that 
 I still exceed it ? 
 
 And this other feature of the situation, that into 
 the unseen state we carry no smallest item of our 
 outward possessions ; that houses, lands, shares, 
 our ornaments and jewels of price, our luxury and 
 splendour of living, fall absolutely away, leaving 
 as sole residuum the accumulations of our inner 
 consciousness, what make we of that ? Once 
 scientifically apprehended and solidly fixed in 
 the mind, it should be the death, surely, of that 
 insane coveting, of the mad lust for wealth which 
 rages to-day ? Filled with these truths, a man 
 ceases to be in a hurry. His outlook takes in 
 eternity. As the years pass his interest in life 
 does not diminish, but rather increases. He r has 
 a stake in it beyond what is seen. 
 
 But the soul 
 
 Whence the love comes ; all ravage leaves that whole. 
 Vainly the flesh fades ; soul makes all things new. 
 
 4M
 
 RELIGION AND GHOSTS 99 
 
 Finally, it is on the great fact of the spiritual 
 world that the New Testament rests. Its whole 
 implication is there. That the visible is the vesti- 
 bule of a greater invisible ; that the material is 
 symbol of the immaterial ; that body is for the 
 sake of soul ; that earthly conditions are for the 
 working out of Divine conclusions ; that death is 
 but transition ; that the spirit in which we are 
 now doing our work will show itself in consciousness 
 a thousand ages hence ; these are parts of Christ's 
 Gospel ; and these are carried also in the facts 
 offered us to-day. Truly they are facts to ponder. 
 And in pondering them we may ask our poet's 
 question : 
 
 When earth breaks up and heaven expands, 
 How will the change strike me and you, 
 In the house not made with hands ?
 
 IX 
 Religion and the Concrete 
 
 PHILOSOPHY, since Locke's day, has made a pro- 
 digious pother over the aphorism of which he, 
 having first borrowed it from the schoolmen, made 
 such use : " Nihil in intellectu quod non 'prius in 
 sensu " (the intellect holds nothing which did 
 not come first as an appeal to the senses). Kant, 
 starting where Locke left off, and taking his thesis 
 as a challenge, showed how much there was in 
 the intellect beyond the sensuous impression ; 
 how the external fact, on its way to us, took its 
 entire shape and colour from the mental machinery 
 that received it. But the Locke dictum, though, 
 as we now see, it has to be taken under conditions 
 and limitations, is one we all need to study, and 
 especially those whose business is with the problems 
 of religion. Religion is, first of all, a psychology ; 
 to deal with it properly, either in thought or action, 
 we need to know the laws of the realm in which it 
 operates. And one of the chief things to be noted 
 in this region is the relation of the senses to the soul 
 behind. It is to the way in which the different 
 churches have understood this relation, a good deal 
 more than from this or that dogma they have 
 handled, that they owe their success or their failure. 
 
 100
 
 RELIGION AND THE CONCRETE 101 
 
 The point is this that before we can get effec- 
 tively at a man's reason or his conscience, we have 
 to touch his senses. Our neighbour is a being who 
 first of all sees, hears, tastes and feels. And his 
 inner life consists in largest degree of memories, 
 mental pictures, of things he has seen, heard, tasted 
 and felt. The abstractions of the philosopher are 
 a later development, quite out of range of masses 
 of men, and even to the most cultured as personal 
 experiment will easily show far less operative 
 and powerful than the fact that impinges on the 
 senses. Compare the impression on a man of any 
 general proposition you can frame with the announce- 
 ment to him that he is to be hanged to-morrow, 
 or that some one has left him a fortune, and you 
 will have the measure of the difference in psychical 
 effect between the abstract and the concrete. 
 
 It is this simple truth, so obvious when we come 
 to look at it, that opens to us, as by a magic 
 " sesame," the secret of the world's religions. 
 Man, to be impressed, must have first and foremost 
 the concrete. The abstract is the latest term 
 at the other end of the string. The invisible must, 
 ere we can do anything with it, be embodied in a 
 visible. It is because of this that philosophy as 
 such can never become a religion. Aristotle himself 
 recognises this when, speaking of treatises on morals, 
 he says : " The truth is they seem to have power to 
 urge on and to excite young men of liberal minds 
 . . . but that they have no power to persuade 
 the multitude to what is virtuous and honourable." 
 Your truth must become a life, be seen visiblyt 
 walking about, before it can move men. The)
 
 102 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE. 
 
 Baptist theology of the seventeenth century is at 
 present read by no mortal ; or, at least, by very few. 
 But that theology, incarnated in a Greatheart, a 
 Mr. Honest, and the other characters of Bunyan's 
 immortal dream, has been and is the delight of 
 millions. " For truth embodied in a tale, may enter 
 in by lowly doors." But it must be embodied. 
 That is why abstract theisms and other intangible 
 systems have never had, and never will have, any 
 position amongst the religions of the world. 
 
 And this brings us to the centre of our theme. 
 Religion, which has to deal with the highest reality, 
 can only in this matter follow the universal law. 
 Its truth must be embodied. But that statement 
 spells Incarnation. It is wonderful to see how, 
 in the twentieth century, the roads of the new 
 science, of the new culture, are found to be leading 
 all of them in one and the same direction. 
 The central truth of the New Testament shows, 
 in the new light of this culture, as a truth embedded 
 in the nature of things, as inevitable to the human 
 evolution. God could never be known to man 
 except by a self-manifestation. What He is and 
 means could only, human nature being what it is, 
 be exhibited by a Life. It is curious here to note 
 how, in the view of human spiritual development 
 which modern research is offering us, the old 
 controversies concerning the Divinity of Christ 
 have lost their starting-point. The rival camps are 
 deserted, for the world has moved on. The new 
 conception derived from history and psychology of 
 the whole human movement, gives us at once 
 Christ's Divinity and Humanity as the natural
 
 RELIGION AND THE CONCRETE 103 
 
 expression of a cosmic process. We are here to 
 know God and to be united with Him. And we 
 could not have reached up to Him unless He had 
 first reached down to us. We could not see Him 
 unless He made Himself visible. God must come 
 into the sphere of the concrete ere he can be appre- 
 hended of the human heart. As Ritschl puts it : 
 " The essence of God, as it is Spirit, and^Will, and 
 especially Love, can become operative in a human 
 Life, as man in fact is constituted for spirit, will, 
 love." To quote Jacobi's profound word : " Nature 
 conceals God ; man reveals Him." He is in all of 
 us, for there could be no outside revelatior unless 
 it appealed to one within. In Christ we see this 
 eternal idea reaching its culmination. As the 
 great Greek Father Theodore of Mopsuestia puts 
 it: "Jesus so perfectly appropriated the^ Divine 
 as to become one with it." In Him, our 'Aca 
 ivSpw, our " Divinest Symbol," as Carlyle has 
 it, we have the Divine concreted, as much of God 
 as humanity could contain. 
 
 But the concrete in religion is far more than a 
 doctrinal question. It enters in the most intimate 
 way into the Church's whole method of presenting 
 religion to the world. As we study the history of 
 this matter and observe the different methods 
 of appeal to the various religious bodies, we wonder 
 continually whether it ever occurred to their leaders 
 that there was such a thing as a psychological law 
 in this region, whose observance or non-observance 
 spelt success or failure ? Where they have hit on 
 the law seems so often to have been by sheer chance 
 rather than by insight. It is clear, for instance,
 
 104 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE, 
 
 that the enormous^and continued power ot Rome, 
 notwithstanding the immense and ever-growing 
 forces against her, has been owing more than 
 anything else to an apparently unconscious follow- 
 ing of our law. She has held men by giving them, 
 in every direction, the concrete. It was she who 
 introduced the picture into the churches. Her 
 creed, however faulty we may consider it, was at all 
 events a concrete creed, full of clear-cut statement. 
 What has been the fascination of her Mass ? Has it 
 not been in the belief she created that here, in view 
 of the humblest soul, was the God so thirsted after, 
 made present and visible ? The problem she sets 
 before all competing religious bodies a tough one, 
 it must be confessed is to follow her method while 
 avoiding her impossibles ; to offer a religious appeal 
 as vivid as her own, but whose basis shall be fact 
 and not fiction. 
 
 The Reformation Churches have been Churches 
 of speech rather than of sign ; they have sought the 
 soul through the ear rather than the eye. But here 
 again we have to notice that this appeal has been 
 effective or otherwise just in proportion as the 
 principle of the concrete has been observed or 
 neglected. Any one who takes the trouble to 
 study Church eloquence the utterances of the 
 religious orators of all ages and their effects upon 
 men will always find that their power has rested 
 largely on obedience to our law. The addresses 
 that tell are stuffed with the concrete ; they are not 
 abstract discussions, but live facts, live experiences, 
 live pictures. The truth they wanted to enforce 
 had always hands and feet ; it lived and breathed
 
 RELIGION AND THE CONCRETE 105 
 
 before men. The early Fathers had abstractions 
 enough, but always at one end of them there was 
 some homely, earth-born fact. Take, for example, 
 as one out of a thousand, this extract from Alexander 
 of Alexandria : " They suspended Him on the tree"! 
 who stretches out the earth ; they transfixed Him 
 with nails who laid firm the foundations of the world ; 
 they circumscribed Him who circumscribed the 
 heavens ; they bound Him who absolves sinners ; 
 they gave Him over to the tomb who raised the 
 dead to life." The words remind us of Hooker, 
 who more than a millennium later speaks thus of 
 the sacrament : " These mysteries do as nails 
 fasten us to His very cross ; that by them we draw 
 out astonishing efficacy, force and virtue, even the 
 blood of His gored side ; in the wounds of our 
 Redeemer we there dip our tongues, we are dyed 
 red both within and without ; our hunger is satisfied, 
 and our thirst for ever quenched." We are dis- 
 cussing here, be it remembered, not the doctrine 
 but the method. The words quoted may easily 
 offend our taste or our philosophy, or both. The 
 point is that they offer in religious speech the 
 example, followed by all the great pleaders from 
 Chrysostom to Spurgeon, of discourse in which , 
 spiritual truth is clothed in concrete forms that' 
 appeal to every man's senses and imagination. J 
 The lessons from all this are tolerably obvious. 
 The religion of to-day must in all its departments 
 fill itself with the concrete. The preacher must have 
 his grasp upon facts, upon experiences, upon life. 
 His business is with the invisible, but unless he can 
 turn his invisibles into visibles condense his cloud
 
 106 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 into rain he is of no use in the pulpit. In like 
 manner the Church, in its collective operations, 
 has to master the same art. It must learn to 
 embody its aspirations, its enthusiasms, its faith, 
 into institutions and organisms which catch the 
 world's eye and compel its attention. The engineer 
 builds his creed into his bridge. The Church must 
 build hers into something as evident and as useful. 
 But the greatest of all concretes is man himself. 
 He is full of mysteries, of invisibles, the secret of 
 which he cannot fathom. The end of all the ages 
 is there hidden within him. Could he but under- 
 stand himself he would understand God and the 
 Universe. He is a vast embodied idea. But the 
 idea needs clarifying, unifying. The supreme 
 effort of religion is to accomplish this for him. It 
 seeks to incarnate its own spirit in him. Chris- 
 tianity in the creed, Christianity in the institution, 
 are nothing in effective force compared with Chris- 
 tianity alive in the man. Darwin found in the South 
 Sea Islanders, transformed by missionary effort, 
 an argument for Christianity such as he had met 
 nowhere in books. The Church, whatever its name 
 be called, which succeeds best in making the New 
 Testament faith and love concrete in human lives, 
 will be the Church of the future.
 
 X 
 Doctrine and Life 
 
 HAS modern society a genuine and definable doctrine 
 of life ? Has it, that is to say, a practical creed, 
 which it entirely believes, and by which it seeks to 
 shape its conduct ? The question, it will be remem- 
 bered, was directly raised in the famous " Do we 
 Believe ? " controversy, which occupied the columns 
 of a leading London daily some time ago. In the 
 letter which started the discussion, the writer 
 placed the formulated doctrines of orthodox Chris- 
 tianity in direct and vivid contrast with the maxims 
 by which, as he asserted, modern society regulates 
 its practice. The inference was that a gulf separated 
 the two ; that society's orthodoxy was a pose, if 
 not an hypocrisy ; that the creed which it repeated 
 in church was quite other than the one by which 
 it worked and lived. The public answer to this 
 challenge was of a very varied character, but one 
 thing clearly revealed in it was the confusion on the 
 subject which prevails in the general mind. The 
 same condition is shown in the attitude to religious 
 education. The Englishman met by the question, 
 " What is the religious teaching you wish for your 
 children ? " is puzzled for a reply. He is not quite 
 
 107
 
 108 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 sure what, on these matters, he believes himself. We 
 do not propose here that would be too presump- 
 tuous to supply him with his answer. But, as a 
 help in that direction, it may be worth while to 
 study an anterior and closely allied theme. Before 
 we talk of this or that doctrine we need to know 
 something about the nature of doctrine hi itself, 
 and its actual relation to life. 
 
 The subject, when looked into, divides, we find, 
 into two separate departments. There is, for one 
 thing, the relation of the doctrinal system we 
 profess to our individual life and conduct, and for 
 another the relation of our system, or any system, 
 to life itself as a cosmic process. The two depart- 
 ments, as we shall see, are intimately allied, but the 
 results they offer are entirely distinct. 
 
 The doctrinal systems with which we are most 
 familiar are,of course,those of the Christian Churches. 
 As we contemplate these structures the massive 
 thought-monuments of Christendom, standing up 
 so clear and so majestic out of the mists and 
 the wrecks of the past we receive an impression 
 of passive and immobile strength. " Semper Eadem" 
 is the motto engraven on their front. Enduring 
 without change, amid the passing of dynasties and 
 kingdoms, they remind us of some Alp or Apennine, 
 lifting its eternal summit in sublime contrast with 
 the hurry and swift wasting of the human crowds 
 below. 
 
 The illustration might indeed be used, but its 
 lesson is different from the one we have suggested. 
 The great creed-systems are like the mountains ; 
 but it is not immobility, rather the opposite of it,
 
 DOCTRINE AND LIFE 109 
 
 in which their likeness consists. It is precisely because 
 " the everlasting hills " are everlasting only in 
 appearance that they resemble so closely the 
 theologic ranges which dominate from their heights 
 the thoughts of men. Nowhere than in the moun- 
 tains, though we call them our monuments of 
 eternity, can we study better the constant flux 
 of all visible things. Your Alp changes from 
 year to year. There is no moment when the winds, 
 the frosts, the rains, the summer heats are not 
 leaving their mark upon it. The Matterhorn, 
 most impregnable apparently of rock fortresses, 
 is really, as Tyndall called it, a huge ruin. Geo- 
 logists say that our Snowdon is only a remnant 
 of itself. Its original mass, which lifted it once 
 to twenty thousand feet of height, is now strewn 
 over Wales and Western England. 
 
 This beat of the elements upon the mountains 
 represents, we say, hi some degree, though not 
 entirely, the process which our doctrinal systems 
 are undergoing. These also, while meant by their 
 builders to be final, belong to a sphere where there 
 is no finality. Indeed, the law of change here is 
 more rapid, and more certain in its operations, 
 than upon a Helvellyn or a Mont Blanc. The 
 attack upon the hills is mainly an external one. 
 The thought-hills, on the other hand, while subject 
 to impacts of that kind, are exposed to a process far 
 more rapidly and inevitably disintegrating. They 
 are exposed to a constant movement from within. 
 
 To explain that we need now to ask ourselves 
 the question, " What is doctrine ? " It is some- 
 what odd that in the multitude of controversies
 
 110 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 which rage round this theme, so few seem to have 
 made for themselves that preliminary but all- 
 important inquiry. If we examine the matter 
 scientifically that is to say, by study of the manner 
 in which doctrine, in the instances known to us, has 
 arisen, and of the manner in which it has assumed 
 its particular form, we reach a formula which 
 seems to cover the entire field. Doctrine, we find, 
 is the answer of the inner spirit to the outside 
 fact. It is the response of the collective conscious- 
 ness of a given age to its experiences. The doctrines 
 of the Christian Church, for instance, are the echo 
 of the impressions made on the first disciples by 
 the historical Christ, and the circumstances of His 
 life and death. But with these two factors before 
 us, the outside fact and the inner mind, as the 
 builders of doctrine, we at once perceive the opening 
 to vast and inevitable change. 
 
 For whatever may be said of the outside fact, 
 the mind of man, which perceives and registers its 
 impression of it, is, we know, constantly on the 
 move. And the interpretation of the fact varies 
 with that movement. Thousands of years ago 
 men looked on the sun, moon and stars that we 
 know. But the theory they formed of them was 
 very different from ours. And the facts whose 
 interpretation constitutes religious belief cannot 
 be divorced from this law of "change. The witnesses 
 of nineteen hundred years ago, who give us their 
 impressions of Judsean happenings then, saw them 
 in a light and through mental instruments quite 
 other than the light and mind of to-day. And 
 the question which here thrusts itself on us is as to
 
 DOCTRINE AND LIFE 111 
 
 whether, on the impossible supposition that our 
 instructed mentality had been in Judaea at that 
 time to report, it would have rendered any such 
 account of those happenings as that we now possess ? 
 What, in fact, criticism is now doing, as a kind of 
 second best to a first-hand report of that kind, is to 
 reconstruct those early impressions of the first 
 believers in the light of our modern knowledge. 
 
 It is under this process of the mind that the 
 doctrinal systems of the past are wearing down and 
 altering their aspect. They are great and vener- 
 able ; but life, that subtle, all-creating force life, 
 which sends perpetually its new pulses into the 
 human soul, is greater still, and will have its way. 
 What the Church has to do is at last to recognise 
 this simple fact. It has to recognise in its relation to 
 old-world interpretations, the law of the inner spirit 
 which ever expands and ever clarifies its view. 
 Its failure to do this in the past ; its ignoring, in 
 this matter, of one of the ultimate cosmic laws, is 
 at the root of the present confusions, and the 
 explanation of the intellectual bankruptcy of the 
 older Churches. What it has brought Romanism 
 to is pathetically expressed in the lament of Cardinal 
 Guibert, who, as far back as 1870, wrote thus of 
 his Church in France : " We Christians form a 
 society, a people apart, which, no longer being 
 in communion of ideas with the immense society 
 which surrounds us, is becoming disintegrated, 
 and is, in fact, in full process of dissolution. It is 
 a world nearing its end." Surely that world of the 
 Romanist ideas is coming to an end and we can 
 now see the entire rationale of the process !
 
 112 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 What, then, is the position and the value of 
 religious doctrine ? Does this element of change 
 invalidate it ? Is there no doctrine which can be 
 spoken of as inspired, as of Divine authority ? 
 Let us, in reply, bear in mind all the elements of the 
 question. In dealing, as we have just done, with 
 the action of the mind, we touch, let us remember, 
 only one of the factors. In addition there remains 
 that other, the outside fact or happening, which 
 first set the mind in motion. The sun, we said, 
 is different to us from what it was to our ancestors. 
 But it is still the sun, and a bigger fact than it 
 was to them. Their view of it also had as much 
 reality in it as was adequate to their mental con- 
 dition. It'was such an approximation to reality as 
 was congruous to their general growth. 
 
 In like manner, the facts, the events that form 
 the basis of Christian doctrine are'still there~; and 
 assuredly not diminished in their religious sig- 
 nificance because of the growth of the percipient 
 mind ! And whatever modification may come 
 to those earlier explanations, there will, we may 
 confidently assert, be no change in the peculiar 
 appeal which the facts themselves make to the human 
 spirit. We find here a correspondence not lightly 
 to be got rid of, whose importance grows the more 
 we consider it, between what has happened in 
 history and certain primal elements of the soul. 
 The soul asks for a moral explanation of the uni- 
 verse, and it is this which Christianity supplies. 
 Its spiritual explanation is, we say, precisely the 
 thing that humanity insistently demands. It asks 
 for a solution which science acknowledges its entire
 
 DOCTRINE AND LIFE, 113 
 
 impotence to give. As Sabatier puts it, " Science 
 will never tell us, outside an act of faith, why life 
 is to be lived well." Herbert Spencer is of the 
 same mind. In one of his latest utterances he 
 recognises that religious creeds " occupy the^ sphere 
 which material interpretation seeks to occupy, and 
 fails the more it seeks." The latest philosophy 
 admits that the intellect alone is incapable of holding 
 or representing the entire truth of life. The deepest 
 things in us are moral and spiritual impulses which 
 cannot be put into an equation or a syllogism. 
 
 And corresponding with this attitude and need 
 of the mind, history and especially the New 
 Testament record offers us personalities and events 
 through which there gleam suggestions and hints of 
 a transcendental order, behind the phenomenal 
 world, which the soul's highest aspirations leap 
 to recognise. The creeds are the charts and maps 
 of this spiritual realm. The draughtsmen were, 
 if we will, clumsy and ill-informed, but the realm 
 they sketched was there. We may revise their 
 drawings, but the reality they outlined is as big 
 and as rich as ever. 
 
 Between doctrine and life there will be ever 
 that sort of antagonism which subsists between 
 greater and less. It is like the battle of sea and 
 shore. We fence in our plot of the idea ; we wall 
 it off from the outside savage and untamed material 
 universe, as men build embankments against the 
 Atlantic. Again and again man has awaked to 
 find this outer ocean, mute, vast and terrible, 
 invading his defences and sweeping away his 
 structures of granite. For a moment he despairs ; 
 
 8
 
 114 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 the world is too great, too subtle, too savage as it 
 seems for his soul. But the miracle here is that 
 the Power which deals thus with him will not per- 
 mit his despair. It tells him that land and sea 
 together are his. Let him build on the one and 
 embark on the other. Each has its treasure for 
 him f each shall help him to his final kingdom. 
 
 DOCTRINE AND LITE. II. 
 
 With the topic opened in this way, we can now 
 proceed to some of the other problems which it 
 offers to the religious thought of our time. One of 
 the lessons of the past which the Church by this 
 time should have thoroughly learned is the folly 
 of claiming for itself a monopoly of doctrine. In 
 earlier ages it aspired to be the universal pro- 
 vider. It was not content with teaching the things 
 it knew. It taught also all the things it did not 
 know. Worst of all, it proclaimed its ignorance as 
 the infallible and final truth, which it was heresy 
 and spiritual destruction to deny. Its arrogance 
 has been boundless. It claimed at one time to 
 have even a special artistic inspiration, which put 
 the painter and sculptor, in their own depart- 
 ment, in the second place to the ecclesiastic. There 
 is a Council decree on record which declared that the 
 painter should have to do only with the execution 
 of a picture, the holy fathers guarding it as their 
 province to invent and dictate ! The Church long 
 ago retreated from that position, but it still fails 
 to see that its right to offer the world a theological
 
 DOCTRINE AND LIFE 115 
 
 cosmogony is equally unfounded. We look to-day 
 with curiosity on a decree such as that of the Council 
 of Carthage, which denounced an anathema on 
 those " who say that man was created mortal, 
 and would have died even though he had not 
 fallen." But in our churches we have it still read 
 out as a reason for keeping Sunday, that " in six 
 days the Lord created the heavens and the earth." 
 That the Church calmly goes on announcing this 
 and similar statements, knowing that nobody 
 believes them, is one of the religious dangers of our 
 time. To stake its authority on declarations 
 which are not true, is surely the best possible way 
 of earning discredit for the part of its teaching 
 which is true and vitally important. 
 
 But it is time to turn to some other features of 
 our theme. In studying doctrine and life we 
 discern two opposing positions ; one in which 
 doctrine is above the life, and the other in which 
 life is above the doctrine. It will be worth while 
 to examine them both. Of the former position 
 Christianity offers us some of the most striking 
 examples. It has been one of the constant re- 
 proaches against the New Testament that it offers 
 a rule of life which is impossible and unreal. The 
 Sermon on the Mount is, we are told, not " practical 
 politics." It is a dream-legislation, fitted for the 
 other side of the moon rather than for London and 
 New York. But the objection here is not really 
 serious. It ignores a fundamental law of the 
 human spirit. Humanity progresses by a series of 
 anticipatory projections of its highest self, which 
 itTthen sets itself laboriously to realise. It sees its
 
 116 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 mountain summit in one glance of the eye. How 
 many thousand thousand movements of its weary 
 limbs will it take to reach it ? Man has ever been 
 flinging out his great ideals ; it is the law of his 
 nature to do so. All the legislators have had 
 them. Plato's Republic and More's Utopia have 
 never been translated into act, but they have been 
 an inspiration from one generation to another. As 
 M. Fouille puts it : " The ideal is but the deepest 
 sense and the anticipation of future reality." 
 The hitherto seen but unreached is surely coming. 
 That the New Testament life is still floating as a 
 vision above the world's practice is one of its best 
 credentials. It is not the opportunist scheme of 
 a day, but the prophecy and moving force of all 
 time. That is an illuminating statement of Wernle 
 where, dealing with the Early Church, he says : 
 " From the very first there was a sharp distinction 
 between the Christianity that was actually lived 
 in the Churches, and the Christianity which the 
 teachers of the Church postulated in their writings. 
 That which is called worldliness did not make its 
 way into Christianity through decline from some 
 high level of excellence. It came through the 
 mission itself as each new convert brought in a 
 portion of the world along with him." Man's 
 doctrine is to his soul what sun and sky are to his 
 body. Far beyond him in the heavens, it is never- 
 theless irreversibly linked to his destiny. From 
 its height it is ever his nourisher and inspirer. 
 
 But there is another aspect of this disparity 
 about which a different language has to be held. 
 The one just noticed arises from the human limi-
 
 DOCTRINE AND LIFE t 117 
 
 tation and normal rate of progress. But history 
 and contemporary life offer us the spectacle of 
 aberrations which exhibit not so much slowness as 
 perversity ; where doctrine is used not as a helper 
 of right conduct, but rather as a substitute for it. 
 Nowhere has human ingenuity shown itself more 
 vividly or more deplorably than in its exploitation 
 of orthodoxy in the interests of immorality. Man, 
 most amazing of creatures, has concluded an alliance 
 between theft and the creed. Your Sicilian bandit 
 will pistol you in the name of the Church. The 
 most entertaining part of the memoirs of that 
 scoundrel of genius, Benvenuto Cellini, is the 
 description of his pious raptures, preceded and 
 followed, as if in perfect sequence, with the accounts 
 of his assassinations and debaucheries. The fashion 
 here has been a world- wide one. Lord Melbourne, 
 on hearing a sermon which dealt closely with cha- 
 racter, is reported to have said, " No one has a 
 more sincere respect for the Church than I have, 
 but things have come to a pretty pass when religion is 
 allowed to invade the sphere of private life ! " 
 Laurence Oliphant, dealing with the financial crash 
 in New York in 1873, writes : " Founders of theo- 
 logical seminaries, secretaries to charitable asso- 
 ciations, and the leading elders of various deno- 
 minations are among the principal defaulters. . . . 
 There is scarcely an instance of a prominent frau- 
 dulent bankrupt who has not made a show of 
 piety the mask under which he ensnared his victims." 
 The theological system which permits this is near 
 its end. Nay, its day as an effective force is already 
 over. It is not only dead but corrupt, and we
 
 118 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 may welcome the earthquake which buries it out of 
 sight. How heaven-high above all this is that 
 word of neo-platonist Porphyry, who told the 
 Christians and non-Christians of his time that 
 " it is a man's actions that naturally afford demon- 
 stration of his opinions ; and whoever holds a belief 
 must live in accordance with it, in order that he 
 may himself be a faithful witness to the hearers 
 of his words ! " 
 
 Let us come now to the opposite position ; the 
 one, namely, where the life is above the professed 
 doctrine. There are few conditions more sugges- 
 tive than this, or that contain more singular pro- 
 blems. What society continually offers us is the 
 spectacle of people owning a creed whose crudity 
 in parts revolts us, but whose nature reflects none of 
 this crudity ; whose life throughout is high and 
 beautiful. Christianity has abounded in these 
 characters. What notions have haunted the sweet- 
 est souls ! We think of Aquinas, as noble a man 
 as the middle ages produced, actually writing that 
 the joys of the saints would be augmented by 
 watching the tortures of the damned ! And in our 
 own time Greg's complaint that " the Churches 
 have too generally proclaimed a hell too horrible 
 to be believed in, and a heaven too dull to be 
 desired," has had too abundant foundation. The 
 ideas and the life have been so oddly associated ! 
 Mr. Moncure Conway, in his autobiography, tells 
 of a negro woman, " Becky," " whose humour, 
 humility, and simplicity and indefinable qualities 
 that I never knew in any white person, made her 
 to me a revelation." " Becky " was a devout
 
 DOCTRINE AND LIFE 119 
 
 Methodist, with theological views that, stated on 
 paper, would have been regarded by Mr. Conway 
 as naiTow indeed. But her religion, he assures us, 
 was delightful. 
 
 What account have we to give of this anomaly ? 
 Much might be said, for half the history and the 
 mystery of human nature is here. What these 
 stories show for one thing is that the unconscious 
 in us is so much greater than the conscious, that the 
 unformulated or shall we say the soul behind the 
 formula ? transcends the formula to so infinite a 
 degree. And it is the soul, so essentially divine 
 in us, working behind the mere brain-reasonings, 
 that from out of the written creed has, with infallible 
 instinct, selected and absorbed the essential, and 
 left the accidental and the inferior to he on the 
 rubbish-heap outside. Men have found their reli- 
 gion as a treasure hid in a field. The field is wide 
 and weedy, its soil largely a poor soil. But the 
 treasure makes it an invaluable acquisition. 
 Schopenhauer had all manner of criticisms of 
 Christianity. But when he declared that " it was 
 reserved for Christianity to theoretically formulate 
 and to expressly advance loving-kindness, not only 
 as a virtue, but as queen of all, and to extend it even 
 to enemies," he had touched the spot. There was 
 the treasure. The Emperor Julian, in his sneer 
 at the Gospel, said, " What folly to erect fishermen 
 into theologians ! " But there was one thing about 
 the Galilaean fisher-theology which confounded him. 
 After hig attempt to produce a charitable move- 
 ment in the paganism he favoured, he exclaimed, 
 " It is a scandal that the Galikeans should support
 
 120 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 the destitute, not only of their religion, but of 
 ours ! " 
 
 There the murder was out ! The creed of the 
 fishermen contained endless material for attack. 
 But this something behind, which filled the people's 
 hearts and set them on every deed of nobleness and 
 sacrifice, where was the weapon that could reach 
 that ? Thus has it ever been. The body of reli- 
 gion may change and decay, but its soul ever lives, 
 and immortally renews itself. Men formulate their 
 theory of Calvary, of Atonement ; they form and 
 re-form it. Meanwhile, amid all the varying pre- 
 sentments of it, the Cross draws men ; until at 
 last it is dawning upon us that it is not the theories 
 at all that have been the attraction, but the treasure 
 that is hid deep in the wood of Calvary's tree, even 
 the love of God which passe th knowledge. 
 
 The subject, as thus passed under review, has 
 now yielded us its main results. The soul has 
 been in every age the organ of Divine revelation, 
 and it is still performing its function. The spiritual 
 universe enlarges continually to our eye with the 
 growth of our power of vision. And as in the 
 physical cosmos, so in the spiritual, the change 
 of view produced by our wider knowledge is a 
 change not from greater to less, but ever from 
 more to more.
 
 XI 
 Life's Accumulations 
 
 THE cumulative process may be said to be the 
 secret of the universe, the plan on which its whole 
 organisation has proceeded. It was in operation 
 long before we came on the scene was, in fact, 
 the means by which we became possible. 
 The geologic times were times of storing. It ^ 
 took six hundred thousand years to lay a coal bed. 
 That was Nature's leisurely way of stocking our 
 cellar. The further man investigates his planet 
 the vaster becomes the inventory of this wonderful 
 storehouse. The point to be noted here is that the) 
 development of the world's riches synchronises in a) 
 subtle but perfectly exact way with man's owm 
 development. It is precisely as he becomes ric$ 
 inwardly that he becomes rich outwardly. The 
 savage treads century after century his wilderness, 
 and remains a savage in a wilderness. The civilised 
 man comes along and finds in the wilderness an El 
 Dorado. The knowledge within him weds the 
 possibilities outside until it fills the land with 
 wonders. And this process never stops. Man 
 finds the outside always a match for his inside. 
 His universe grows perpetually with his growth, 
 
 121
 
 122 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 becomes daily richer as his mind is enriched. Let 
 him reach an archangel's dimensions, and still his 
 cosmic dwelling-place will stretch beyond him, 
 immeasureable in its immensity, exhaustless in its 
 wealth. 
 
 What we want to deal with specially here, how- 
 ever, is not so much the outside storehouse as this 
 other entity that stands over against it, the human 
 soul. That, too, is a storehouse to whose contents 
 we are perpetually adding. Life, as it beats in our 
 brain and heart, is an enigma whose ultimate solu- 
 tion we are never likely to reach ; but we are, bit 
 by bit, picking up suggestive fragments of informa- 
 tion concerning it. On this subject of accumulation, 
 for instance, our age has made a discovery of 
 vast significance. It is in this respect, we find, 
 on another plane from the accumulations of the 
 outside world. In that region the region of 
 matter and force the total amount is always con- 
 stant. You pile up matter in one direction, you 
 diminish it to the same extent in another. You 
 may change your matter into various forms ; 
 you may exhibit your force now as electricity, 
 now as heat, now as motion ; but neither in the one 
 nor the other will you make any difference to the 
 amount. But the scientist who reaches his cer- 
 tainties in this sphere has no such result to record 
 in his analysis of life. Its laws are not those of 
 either matter or force. You cannot convert them 
 into it, or it into them. Related to them in a 
 thousand intimate ways, using them as its instru- 
 ments, clothing itself in the garments they weave, 
 it is, nevertheless, not of them. It belongs, so
 
 LIFE'S ACCUMULATIONS 123 
 
 science now admits, to another sphere, and is 
 governed by other laws. 
 
 We can trace some of its methods of operation 
 as we feel our way into this matter of accumulation. 
 The outstanding feature at the beginning is that, 
 so far as we can ascertain, there is no limit to the 
 possible supply of life. Whence it derives ulti- 
 mately we cannot say ; but the source seems in- 
 exhaustible. The one condition of its action 
 a condition which is frequently an impediment 
 is the quality of the organ. But a counter- 
 balancing point here, and of the highest importance, 
 is that the organ constantly grows by a proper 
 use of it. Function, the modern physiologist says, 
 creates structure ; and the higher the structure, 
 the richer the flow of the life. The process is 
 visible in every man we meet. In all of them the 
 inner life is creating the outward structure. Iri 
 the thinker the daily habit drives the blood to the 
 brain ; in the blacksmith the blood goes to the 
 arm ; in the sensualist the blood feeds the stomach 
 and the rest of his animal appetites. And in all 
 these directions, according as our will directs the 
 flow of the nutrifying blood, the separate structures 
 will gain new powers, in which the life will concen- 
 trate itself ; in which its resources will accumulate 
 for higher or lower, for good or ill. Development 
 of character, stated physiologically, lies in this\ 
 that the souPs jnner motions, repeated and con-^- 
 tinued, tend to create organisms which work with 
 an ever cumulative effect. 
 
 Life as an accumulator works in mysterious, 
 baffling ways. Often it will store up for long
 
 124 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 antecedent periods the materials that are finally 
 to exhibit themselves on the great scale in one 
 commanding personality. It took generations of 
 obscure musicians to produce finally a Bach, a 
 Rossini, a Beethoven. The current runs under- 
 ground for far distances until finally its hidden 
 forces burst up in some mighty geyser-fountain, 
 towering heaven high. There were generations 
 of Wesleys, all full of character, but when we 
 speak of " Wesley " we know the one we mean. 
 Patrick Bronte, in his gloomy moorland parish, 
 cherished a world of thought and passion in his 
 stern, silent nature. It was his daughters who 
 gave it vent in " Jane Eyre " and " Wuthering 
 Heights." Our separate personality is, indeed, 
 the greatest puzzle in the world. We can never 
 apportion its boundaries ; so little of it is ours, 
 so much a borrowing from the man before us. 
 
 Young children gather as their own 
 The harvest that the dead have sown 
 The dead, forgotten and unknown. 
 
 But not less striking is life's cumulative process 
 as seen in a single career. Nature seems here 
 to proceed on a kind of power-grade system. She 
 allows us to stumble along at a certain level for a 
 time, longer or shorter according to our diligence 
 and faculty, and then, suddenly as it seems, lifts 
 us to another plane. She effects a " remove," 
 in school phraseology, to a higher form. The 
 writer who has been vacillating from one borrowed 
 style to another, from Johnson to Stevenson, 
 at last finds himself in possession of one of his own.
 
 LIFE'S ACCUMULATIONS 125 
 
 He has discovered himself, and that is the moment 
 when the world discovers him. The same thing 
 holds of the singer, the speaker, the scientific dis- 
 coverer. Every man who knows his work and 
 faithfully keeps him to it is aware of these Nature- 
 promotions. Are we strenuous and faithful ? We 
 shall hear from time to time her whisper in the ear, 
 " Come up higher ! " 
 
 That is by no means the only way in which life's 
 accumulations serve the worker. The true man 
 casts his word, his deed, day by day, into the hum- 
 ming world outside, and finds afterwards if the 
 word be true and the deed brave enough that 
 these have become mighty co-workers. His deed 
 of the past is the chief reinforcement of the deed of 
 the present. What he says now is, may be, in itself 
 no truer or stronger than what he said twenty years 
 ago, but how much farther it carries ! The ancients 
 used to attach a mystic power to certain names. 
 All their schemes of sorcery were built on the 
 potency of names. In primitive religions the name 
 carried a mysterious relationship to the nature 
 and fortune of the bearer. To pronounce the name 
 of a god or a demon was to invoke an awesome, 
 swiftly-working power. These ideas were the 
 primitive clothing of a deep truth. We state it 
 differently to-day, but this power of the name is, 
 to us as much as to the ancients, a leading factor 
 in affairs. It is one of the chief results of life's 
 cumulative process. A great name is the concen-l 
 tration of a career. It is the essence of a man's ; 
 million deeds. As the man stands there, a Welling- 1 
 ton at Waterloo, a Nelson flying his Trafalgar'
 
 126 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 signal, he is, in effective force upon his followers, 
 the man of to-day, plus all he has been and done 
 in ten thousand yesterdays,/ 
 
 It is time to draw some lessons from this theme. 
 One is that of the proper art of accumulating. 
 When we turn out our rooms, our libraries, we are 
 continually astonished at the rubbish we have 
 allowed to gather, rubbish that has crowded out so 
 much better things. The life record shows often 
 worse than that of the rooms. The supreme effort 
 here should be to gather and find house-room for the 
 best only. It is thus we can make life interesting 
 to the last moment. Some of the chief occupations 
 of to-day are occupations which store nothing. 
 What inner accumulation comes from spending 
 six nights in the week at bridge ? There are worse 
 pursuits than this, whose storage department is for 
 ailments, diseases, and chagrins. Seneca in his 
 treatise on the " Brevity of Life " bids us review 
 our days and years : " Say how often you have 
 allowed them to be stolen by a creditor, a mistress, 
 a patron, a client ; how many people have been 
 allowed to pillage your life while you were not even 
 aware you were being robbed ! " Diderot wrote 
 on the margin of his copy : "I have never read 
 this chapter without blushing ; it is my hjetory." 
 It is the history of a good many more./^ 
 
 A scientific ordering of life, we repeat, will be 
 largely a science of accumulations. We shall 
 settle with ourselves what things are to be sought 
 and retained, and what treated as negligible. 
 The strange thing is to see the eagerness for lumber. 
 Cicero asks if anything can be more absurd than,
 
 LIFE'S ACCUMULATIONS 127 
 
 in proportion as less of our journey remains, to seek 
 a greater supply of provisions. And pagan Por- 
 phyry, a far better Christian, surely, than many in 
 the Church, gives us the true sense of the matter 
 in that letter to his wife where he bids her lay up 
 the things that can be carried into the world beyond, 
 instead of being solicitous about what will have to 
 be left behind. How striking is the Persian motto^ 
 " The bricks are made on earth with which to build | 
 our heavenly palace " ; and that saying in the Lawr 
 of Manu, " For after death neither father, nor 
 mother, nor son, nor wife, nor relatives are his 
 companions : his virtue alone remains with him." 
 These souls of the early world, seekers after God, 
 whose earnestness shames our indifference, knew 
 well the lesson of our theme. They saw life as 
 continuous, death as a liberation, and the realm 
 beyond as a sphere where the spiritual accumu- 
 lations of the present would be built into the 
 structure of eternity.
 
 XII 
 Past and Present 
 
 IT is interesting to note how the questions which 
 agitate religious minds to-day are related to certain 
 other questions which lie deeper down. Amongst 
 these " problems of the rear " there is, perhaps, none 
 wider in its reach, or bearing more vitally upon 
 our other solutions, than that of (the connection 
 ) between past and present.. Whatever be the im- 
 mediate controversy in view, whether it be the re- 
 vision of a creed, the observance of Sunday, the 
 authority of a Church, we see how immediately 
 and inevitably the modern mind, on its way to a con- 
 clusion, finds itself faced by this prior consideration. 
 For all these matters, we discover, resolve themselves 
 into a mandate of the past to the present. The 
 Church, ~tEe creed, the observance are the call 
 of the past on our obedience. But what is our 
 connection with the past ? What do we owe to it ? 
 Why should we obey it ? It is an illustration of 
 the essentially mystical nature of human life that 
 such questions should be possible. How destructive 
 of the commonplace, of the materialistic idea of our 
 existence, if only we come to think of it, that every 
 one of us is at each moment, and at each point of 
 
 128
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 129 
 
 his being, pressed, magically wrought upon, and 
 at times completely enthralled by this invisible 
 something, dead, we say, yet most mysteriously 
 alive, which we call the Past ! 
 
 One could well linger on that side of the theme, 
 for it is one of infinite suggestion ; but our concern 
 is now with the more practical aspect we have 
 raised. How stand we to-day, in matters of religion 
 and conduct, to the past ? Are we its pupils or 
 its masters ? Is there such a thing as a possible 
 clean slate, an ignoring of what is gone, and an 
 absolutely fresh start ? Or did the world in some 
 bygone age receive its marching orders, which are 
 valid for all time ? We, of course, are not the first 
 to ask such questions. The eighteenth century 
 rang with them. The French Revolution had as 
 one of its watchwords the sovereign rights of the 
 present as against all previous ages. " Death," 
 cries Camille Desmoulins, " extinguishes all rights. 
 It is for us who now exist, who are now in possession 
 of this planet, to give the law to it in our turn." 
 That is the essentially revolutionary idea. It did 
 immense things a hundred years ago, and it will do 
 more yet. How vigorous it is in our time and 
 amongst ourselves is, perhaps, nowhere better 
 evidenced than in these lines of William Watson, 
 written for Christmas Day : 
 
 Fated among time's fallen leaves to stray, 
 We breathe an air that savours of the tomb, 
 Heavy with dissolution and decay ; 
 Waiting till some new world-emotion rise 
 And with the shattering might of a simoom 
 Sweep clear this dying Past that never dies. 
 
 9
 
 130 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 The poet here, undoubtedly, interprets the secret 
 thought of many minds. It is time clearly we all 
 of us, whether > believers or non-believers, set our- 
 selves strenuously to the business of ascertaining, 
 if we can, our actual position in regard to this 
 theme. It may turn out that both sides, the re- 
 volutionaries and- the conservators, have more to 
 say for themselves than we have hitherto imagined, 
 and that to the final solution both will be equal 
 contributors. 
 
 On our way to that solution it has to be noted, 
 first of all, that the matter has a transcendental 
 side, which neither party can afford to ignore. 
 The modern mind is a believer in progress, in 
 evolution, and in the consequent superiority of 
 to-day over yesterday. But if we believe in a God, 
 in a pre-existent Absolute Being, from whom all 
 things have come, and in whom all things consist, 
 we realise that our notion of progress must be a 
 purely relative one. (For there has always been 
 something better than our bestp The past has 
 contained a quality of being which has surpassed 
 infinitely our greatest ideas. If we take the matter 
 on Spinoza's lines, and think of God as Eternal 
 Substance, with the two attributes of extension 
 and thought, the conclusion is the same. It is here, 
 indeed, that we reach that concept of religion 
 which Schleiermacher has so finely developed in 
 the " Reden " : "It is the seeking and finding of 
 the Universal Being in all that lives and moves, in all 
 becoming and change, in all action and suffering. 
 It is to have and to know, in immediate feeling, 
 life itself as the infinite and eternal life." This sense
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 131 
 
 of the transcendency of the Eternal, as including 
 the whole relation of past and present, has 
 possessed certain nations and ages far more than 
 others. It has been the ruling thought of India, 
 with the result that India is full of metaphysics 
 and has no history ! 
 
 It is not, however, this aspect of our 
 question which chiefly occupies the Western 
 mind to-day. What men everywhere are demand- 
 ing, as a matter of immediate practical moment, 
 is a statement of our proper relation, not 
 to the metaphysical but to the historical past, 
 and of our obligations towards it. Have 
 the bygone ages, with their Scriptures, their 
 creeds, their Church institutions, any right to 
 command us ? Must we on the subjects they deal 
 with take their view rather than our own ? Are we 
 necessarily conditioned by what these people did and 
 said ? Are we not as good as they, or better, 
 both for opinion and for practice ? May we not 
 cut clear from their tracks, and sail off on a voyage 
 of our own ? Questions of this order, formulated 
 or unformulated, in the front of men's minds, or 
 lying away in their brain's back-chambers, form 
 part of the revolt of our time. 
 
 About one part of the answer there is no doubt. 
 So far as the facts of the past are concerned, there 
 is no room for revolt. The facts are there, and not 
 Omnipotence itself could put them out of the way. 
 And in certain respects these facts are all-powerful. 
 That the world has come about in such a way as 
 it has ; that history has taken the course it did 
 take ; that such a thing as Christianity, with its
 
 132 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 Founder, its institutions, the beliefs to which it has 
 given rise, is actually there these are a piece of 
 the past which no dialectic, no iconoclasm can get 
 rid of if it would. And none of us, whatever our 
 mental attitude, can for a moment disassociate 
 ourselves from the influence these facts exert. 
 That we are in the twentieth century means there 
 are nineteen Christian centuries behind us, every 
 one of which is living in our pulses to-day. When 
 our revolutionaries talk of their " clean slate," 
 they need to be reminded of these elementary 
 points. It is no good quarrelling with our universe. 
 It has conducted its business after this fashion, 
 and will go on doing it without asking our leave. 
 And apart of its method clearly is the enforcement 
 upon the present of this tremendous energy of 
 the actual past. 
 
 But here, upon the other side, comes in a con- 
 sideration which restores to our revolutionist a 
 great deal of what he seems to have yielded. For 
 while the past thus acts on us, we with not less 
 energy, react upon the past. The iacts, the things 
 that have happened are there. /But the human 
 spirit has this quality, that it can change to an 
 ./indefinite degree its views of them, the use it makes 
 (of them, its whole attitude towards them./ As 
 illustration of what we mean, take the facts. involved 
 in our modern geology. They were there precisely 
 as they exist to-day through all the generations 
 of our forefathers. Yet when we consider the 
 elements involved here these strata, with their 
 formations, their fossils, the story they contain in 
 their relation to the human mind, may we not say
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 133 
 
 that the rocks themselves, so hard and stubborn, 
 have to-day changed before our eyes ! Certainly 
 they are no longer to us what they were to our 
 fathers. They are fitted into a new frame ; they 
 recite a new history ; they offer to us a thousand 
 suggestions of which our fathers never dreamed. 
 Thus in this sphere the past changes as the mind 
 changes. The present is here seen to control the 
 past by touching it with instruments which open 
 new meanings. 
 
 It is on precisely analogous lines that the mind 
 of to-day is proceeding, in dealing with that other 
 past, of the facts which constitute religious history. 
 It is along this line we discover that the religion] 
 of the future, while absolutely faithful to everything) 
 in the spiritual sphere that has happened on our; 
 planet, will, nevertheless, undergo as complete aj 
 transformation as geology has wrought in our) 
 science of the rocks. In both instances we have a 
 concrete mass of solid rock here, of solid history 
 there. In both instances we have brought to 
 bear on this concrete a magic of research, of the 
 mind's better insight, which in the one as in the 
 other makes all things new. In both realms the 
 whole question is, we see, of the interpretation of 
 our facts, of the use we make of them, of the cosmic 
 framework into which we fit them. 
 
 It is at this point we have finally to recognise, 
 with our revolutionary, that the present is, indeed, 
 master of the past, and not its slave. The prophetic 
 minds have ever gone on this assumption. It was 
 the attitude of Jesus. (He was crucified for being 
 a Revolutionary, for believing that there was a
 
 134 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 greater inspiration living then in His soul than was 
 i to be found in any old-world writings. The 
 orthodoxy of the day pored over the scrolls of the 
 synagogue as the only authentic message from the 
 heavens^/ The Man of Nazareth, with His " But I 
 say unto you," instead proclaimed for ever the rights 
 of progressive revelation, jit is precisely as men 
 have followed Him here, precisely as they have 
 ^/ caught the new note for their time, and fearlessly 
 uttered it, that they have become of use to their 
 generation, l^hey were here witnessing to that 
 supremest of all truths for us, that God's book of 
 life is for ever in the making, and is by no means 
 finished yet. 
 
 It is on this view of the right relations of past and 
 present that our whole religious thought in the 
 future must proceed. When Pascal declared that 
 the human race was, in its totality, as an individual, 
 ever growing and ever learning, he uttered a truth 
 whose implications went further probably than even 
 he himself perceived. For it proclaims the newest 
 mind as>ever the oldest and the most experienced 
 mind. The race is older with each generation, 
 and knows more. And its new knowledge is always 
 a fresh chapter of the human Scripturey When 
 men generally have perceived this there will be 
 surcease for ever of the pitiful spectacle of religious 
 minds tormenting themselves and others with 
 notions of God, man and the future derived from the 
 childhood of the world. It will be seen that we are 
 on an ascending scale of height and vision, and that 
 the view open to us is more trustworthy than that 
 of men for their time truly inspired, but who his-
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 135 
 
 torically and evolutionarily were lower down on the 
 road. The past is ours not for our enslavement, 
 but for our use, for our learning, for means of con- 
 quering a vaster future. No less than this is in- 
 volved hi our belief hi God the Living Spirit. With 
 Vinet we hold that " the Reformation is ever per- 
 manent hi the Church even as Christianity. It is 
 Christianity restoring itself by its own inherent 
 strength. So that even to-day the Reformation 
 is still a thing to be done, a thing ever to be re- 
 commenced, and for which Luther and Calvin only 
 prepared a smoother'and broader way."
 
 XIII 
 When it is Heaven 
 
 LAMB, writing to Wordsworth, on receiving from 
 the poet a copy of his just issued " Excursion," 
 declared the reading of it had given him " a day 
 of Heaven." There may have been a friendly 
 exaggeration in the words, but, all the same, one 
 reads them with pleasure. That such words are 
 in the language is in itself suggestive. Their sig- 
 nificance deepens when we remember that they 
 stand for a truth, for a valid experience. This 
 word " heaven " has been coined out of human 
 life. It would never have been here apart from 
 what men have felt and seen. In its religious use 
 it points mainly to transcendental ideas, to a world 
 beyond this ; but it would be entirely without 
 meaning were it not for things we know of the 
 life here and now. Men believe in a heaven yonder 
 because they have already found a heaven closer 
 at hand. They remember elect times when _the 
 consciousness has been lifted to its highest, when 
 the soul has tasted its noblest satisfactions, and 
 has revelled in the bliss of the good and of the 
 beautiful. With some these moments are too few ; 
 to some they come never at all. Faust, in one of 
 
 136
 
 WHEN IT IS HEAVEN 137 
 
 the scenes with Mephistopheles, is willing to wager 
 his soul if the tempter can procure him a moment 
 of which he can really say, " Verweile dock, du bist 
 so schon." He is sure there is no moment so perfect 
 that he could wish it to stay. But Faust was in a 
 bad state. There are myriads of such moments ; 
 and when our race has developed further towards 
 its true dimensions and its true goal there will be 
 myriads more. That man has reached thejdea of 
 all this, that he has had fleetingest sense of his true 
 joy is a pledge of what is to come. It is the sailor's 
 glimpse from the wave top ; a vision of land which 
 no subsequent tossings or fog bewilderments can 
 henceforth disprove. 
 
 It is the healthiest of exercises to turn the mind 
 to this side of its experiences. " Life is twice 
 lived," says the Roman poet, " in the enjoyment 
 of our past." The sunshine of those soul-festivals 
 will irradiate the darkest sky, and give it promise of 
 better to-morrows. As we look back we realise 
 through what different gateways our heaven has 
 opened upon us. How often, to begin with, has 
 njiture filled us to the very full ! There are diviner 
 scenes on this earth than any apocalypse has 
 pictured. And the remembrance comes back to 
 us of the rapture beyond words with which we have 
 gazed upon them. The present writer can never 
 forget the sensations of one summer day when, 
 solitary amongst the mountains of the Grisons, 
 he was held as in a trance by the scene before him. 
 The magical hues of the atmosphere playing over 
 the far-stretched valleys and lower heights, the 
 blue of the cloudless sky, the hush upon all nature
 
 138 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 seemed supernatural ; while the vista of mighty 
 peaks, virginal in their snowy whiteness, soaring 
 into the very heavens, seemed visibly to link our 
 world to a faker universe beyond. One had seen the 
 mountains before ; for years the view of them had 
 daily fed the eye, but never before or since has 
 there been in contemplation of them such a quality 
 of feeling. <lt was as though the utmost essence 
 of all that was beautiful had suddenly passed into 
 the soul^. There was nothing for it but worship. 
 It was heaven. 
 
 At other times the soul reaches these heights in 
 human fellowship. There has been nothing more 
 lovely in history, and nothing more potent, than 
 those groups and circles of eager souls, that in every 
 age have formed 'round some great spirit^ athirst 
 for the truth and grace it distilled. That is why 
 men left home and business for the society of Jesus. 
 To follow Him was the divinest of luxuries. In 
 this fellowship men tasted life's choicest fruit- 
 Fed with such words, such tones, their inmost 
 nature vibrating with such harmonies, men felt 
 that poverty, homelessness, persecution, were no 
 hardship. They tasted through all that inner joy 
 which, as Matthew Arnold has it, overflowed upon 
 the world and was their secret of its conquest. It 
 has always been so. In every age we see the 
 mysterious attraction, surpassing all others, of the 
 prophet and his circle. Now it is Origen, whose 
 disciples declare that in his presence there is " per- 
 petual sunlight," and " the inspiration of divine 
 things " ; later it is Bernard fleeing into the wil- 
 derness, pursued by young knights, who give up
 
 WHEN IT IS HEAVEN 139 
 
 arms and the world for his society ; again it is 
 Francis at Assisi, making men realise that absolute 
 poverty, plus his companionship, was a wealth 
 beyond that of pope or emperor. It is under the 
 same instinct that further on in those mediaeval 
 times we have formed the Gottesfreunde, circles of 
 brethren who, outside the ceremonies of the popular 
 religion, seek together for deeper spiritual realisa- 
 tions. The Methodist circles with their marvellous 
 store of ecstatic feeling are the Gottesfreunde of 
 the eighteenth century. Under far different circum- 
 stances, but illustrating the same instinct, is that 
 circle at La Chenaie, where Lamennais gathers 
 around him in religious retreat such choice spirits 
 as Maurice de Guerin, Rohrbacher, Montalembert, 
 and Lacordaire. And not only has it been among 
 the elite that exquisite emotion of this kind has 
 been known. In humble gatherings of unnoted 
 men and women, in conventicles and bare rooms, 
 the heart has been caught by the Spirit's deepest 
 tides, and unspeakable things realised. " This is 
 heaven," has been the common thought. The 
 experience of these people has borne witness to 
 the great saying of Hegel in his " Philosophy of 
 Religion " : " All the various peoples feel that it is 
 in the religious consciousness they possess truth, and 
 they have always regarded religion as constituting 
 their true dignity and the Sabbath of their life." 
 
 It is along lines that are strictly parallel with 
 the religious consciousness, though not generally 
 regarded as immediately connected with it, that the 
 mind finds other experiences that give it the noblest 
 expansions. One of these is great music. We are
 
 140 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE, 
 
 not at the bottom yet of all the soul's subtle alliances. 
 We are sure, however, that harmony, as it expresses 
 itself in sound, is flesh and blood relation to what- 
 soever is highest in us. Plato saw this when he 
 associated music so closely with education in 
 virtue. Browning has put it all into three lines 
 where, in " Pauline," he speaks of 
 
 Music, which is earnest of a heaven, 
 Seeing we know emotions strange by it, 
 Not else to be revealed. 
 
 Who that has heard the great Fribourg organ, or 
 sat at the feet of Joachim, or listened (as we did 
 once in boyhood enraptured hour !) to Thalberg, 
 but has felt at moments that this too was heaven, 
 the heart's heaven, filled to the full so that it could 
 hold no more ! 
 
 I$ut often man's heaven reaches him without any 
 external aids whatever. It comes to him sometimes 
 in dreams. There are experiences here, at rare 
 intervals it may be, of a feeling so intense and so 
 exquisite as to make the waking a kind of expulsion 
 from Paradise. Where and what is that realm 
 we have left ? Is it less real that we saw it with 
 another eye than this in its socket ? Some have 
 had these dreams in their waking hours ; as Jacob 
 Boehme, in that " Sabbath of the Soul " which he 
 describes as lasting seven days, when he was " as it 
 were inwardly surrounded by a Divine light," and 
 when " the triumph that was in my soul I can 
 neither tell nor describe " ; or as Plotinus, who 
 speaks of being caught up into an immediate con- 
 tact with God ; or Philo, who, when " coming
 
 WHEN IT IS HEAVEN 141 
 
 to his work empty suddenly became full, ideas 
 being invisibly showered upon him and, as it were, 
 implanted in him from on high " ; or that sudden 
 vision of the American doctor of whom Professor 
 James speaks, who " saw that the universe is not 
 composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, 
 a living Presence, that all men are immortal, and 
 that the cosmic order is such that all things work 
 together for the good of each and all." 
 
 But there is more. Surely the crowning wonder 
 is when men, and weak women, have found heaven 
 in the midst of cruellest sufferings and approaching 
 death ! We with our comfort standard, with our 
 income and four meals a day as the essentials 
 of well being, find that story of the martyrs almost 
 psychologically impossible. And yet it is true. 
 We have their inner mind in their own words. 
 Here is Perpetua, the young mother, at Carthage, 
 who, when lodged in the horrible prison, writes : 
 " The gaol became to me suddenly a palace, so that I 
 liked better to be there than anywhere else." She 
 writes up her diary to the night before her delivery 
 to the wild beasts, closing it thus : " This is what 
 I have done up to the day before the sports : how 
 the sports themselves will go let someone else write 
 if he pleases." Men have felt the goodness of God 
 while actually burning. We read of Fructuosus 
 in the Valerian prosecution calling out to his brethren} 
 from the flames : " The kindness of the Lord can 
 never fail, either here or hereafter. This which 
 you see is but the weakness of an hour." The 
 greatest refutation of pessimism is surely the story 
 of the world's sufferings.
 
 The world's history is then, we see, full of sublime 
 realisations, wrought out of all kinds of material, 
 entering the soul through the most opposite roads. 
 As we study them they suggest to us irresistibly 
 certain questions. CAre such times the heart's 
 triumphant hours on the increase among us ?) 
 Are they to be looked for and worked for, as life's 
 normal and legitimate products ? And is the mode 
 of life to-day the best calculated to develop them ? 
 About one thing we may feel sure. The way of the 
 true life lies always in the direction of these ex- 
 periences. The world's real wealth is a wealth 
 of the nobler feeling and of the conditions and 
 opportunities for it. And man is meant for these 
 things. He is made for his heaven. Any road that 
 leads away, any method of living that dulls the 
 appetite and clogs the capacity for these states of 
 the soul, is to be avoided as a road, a method of 
 death. 
 
 If that be so, what shall we say of our own time ? 
 To judge by much we see, the twentieth century 
 might appear in this matter to be trying its hardest 
 to contradict the verdict of history and of the 
 nature of things. \It is trying after a heaven for 
 
 !the body rather than for the soul^ It spends 
 so much time and labour over the preparation for 
 living that it has none left for life itself. JVTillion- 
 aires are building palaces, and forgetting that 
 these caravanserais can never exhale the perfume 
 of a home.'- They are consumed with the passion 
 for dollars, as if dollars could breed either great 
 ideas or noble emotions. There are multitudes 
 \whose heaven is frankly sensual. Their paradise
 
 WHEN IT IS HEAVEN 143 
 
 is an orgie. The world ought by this time to know 
 better. That way has been so often tried and 
 always with one result. What a sensualist once 
 said to the present writer is so universally true. 
 "It all becomes very disgusting after a time." 
 It is a profound student of human nature who 
 observes on this point : " We find as man grows 
 more civilised (he might have said spiritualised) 
 sexual love assumes ever less value in his eyes if 
 there go not with it, if there do not precede, accom- 
 pany, and follow it the emotions built up of our 
 thoughts and feelings, of our sweetest and tenderest 
 hours and years." 
 
 No. The way to the human heaven is not by 
 following the animal in us, but rather by the extri- 
 cation of ourselves from it. It is a foundation 
 to build from, not a house to live in. We are 
 here to grow the soul in us, a soul worthy of the 
 heaven above and around, which waits to reveal 
 itself to us. 
 
 It is precisely as the soul thus grows, and finds 
 in this world its ethereal food, that it becomes sure 
 of the other heaven. It is with such natures, 
 that with the passing years, the certitude increases 
 
 that 
 
 This life of mortal breath 
 
 Is but a suburb of the life Elysian, 
 
 Whose portal we call Death.
 
 XIV 
 Fatigue 
 
 FATIGUE, we are beginning to discover, is one of the 
 first-class themes in modern life. It is an affair 
 not simply of medicine and hygiene, but of morals, 
 of philosophy, of religion in fact, of the entire 
 human welfare. A new psychology is arising, 
 destined to profoundly alter our whole perspective, 
 a psychology which deduces the conditions of right 
 living from a rigorous and scientific observation of 
 the facts and laws in our mental life. And this 
 psychology is paying special attention to the phe- 
 nomena of fatigue. It is studying its relation to 
 the various features, not only of our physical, 
 but also of our mental and moral life. We find there 
 is an ethic of fatigue, almost a religion of it. In 
 that reconstruction of the ethical and religious idea 
 which is arising out of a clearer knowledge of the 
 contents of consciousness, this subject will occupy 
 a foremost place. 
 
 What is fatigue ? It is curious how hazy the 
 average notion is. We know it as a phase of feeling 
 associated with certain physical states. When by 
 walking, singing, hammering, or other exercises, 
 the muscles and nerves employed have given off 
 
 144
 
 FATIGUE 146 
 
 a certain amount of energy, the fact is registered 
 on our consciousness, and we say we are tired. But 
 the feeling here is one thing, and the condition 
 another. The whole of the body is working, per- 
 petually giving off energy. But it is only a portion 
 of the body that produces fatigue as a sensation. 
 The blood circulates, the heart performs its rhythmic 
 motion, the liver secretes, the cells in their myriads 
 form and reform, and all this without sense of 
 weariness. Fatigue, as felt, belongs purely to the 
 voluntary nerves and muscles. 
 
 Fatigue is an affair of life, of sentient beings. 
 There is no tiredness in the universe. Its sum of 
 infinite energy continues from age to age its stupend- 
 ous, complicated movement, without trace of 
 exhaustion. We may speak of a wearing down 
 here and there. Steel, by use, becomes tired and 
 loses its edge. It will regain it by rest. The sun, 
 which is now computed to be at a temperature of 
 three million degrees Fahrenheit, or fourteen thou- 
 sand times hotter than boiling water, may be ex- 
 hausting its heat, but that is only to have it stored 
 in another form elsewhere. The cosmos as a whole, 
 amid eternal change, retains eternal freshness. 
 How purely local and personal is the idea of fatigue 
 may be realised when we remember that the body 
 of the most weary mortal on the planet at this 
 moment is, as to its every particle, one with a 
 universe that is of everlasting strength. His 
 body in one sense is no more tired than Mont Blanc 
 or the Atlantic Ocean. The fatigue here is really 
 a phase of consciousness, a danger signal giving 
 notice of a physical condition requiring readjustment. 
 
 10
 
 146 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 The inner life, which modern science now recognises 
 as distinct from energy, requires a full complement 
 of this energy, stored in the nerve and muscular 
 centres, as the condition of its proper action, and 
 the sense of fatigue is the warning bell rung in the 
 brain when that store has been unduly diminished. 
 But this is not the end of the analysis. That 
 oneness of mind and body which Spinoza placed at 
 the foundation of his philosophy is being reaffirmed 
 in new ways by modern science. We see how in a 
 thousand directions mental life plays into the 
 bodily and bodily life into the mental. Every 
 physical condition repeats itself in the mind's 
 sensation ; every feeling and thought of the mind 
 reacts immediately upon the body. Henle's 
 researches show that joyful emotions quicken the 
 respiration and make the circulation freer. The 
 depressing emotions, like sorrow and fear, contract 
 the arterial and bronchial muscles and so dis- 
 tinctly interfere with both circulation and breathing. 
 A bright, inspiring thought is the finest of all 
 physicians, whose medicine is working on every 
 organ and every cell of our bodily system and 
 arming it with a new power of life. But not less 
 true and important is the obverse side, that the 
 physical conditions exert their full influence upon 
 the mental and the moral states. It is this side 
 of the matter that the new psychology is specially 
 investigating, with results that must tell to a 
 momentous degree on our entire ethical and religious 
 outlook. 
 
 It has shown, for instance, with an almost 
 mathematical precision, that over-fatigue, exhaus-
 
 FATIGUE 147 
 
 tion of the nerve-centres, means for the time being 
 a lowering of status of the entire inner man. In 
 this condition his perceptions are less clear, his 
 memory is defective, and, most of all, his volition 
 faculty is weakened. It is precisely when the nerve 
 forces are at low ebb that impulses of the animal 
 nature, kept down and out of sight by the higher 
 interests of the normal manhood, are apt to rush 
 in upon the consciousness and endanger, sometimes 
 to the wreckage point, the entire moral fabric. If 
 the cases could be traced where men of former 
 repute have made shipwreck of character, it would 
 be found in a vast number of instances that they 
 coincided with a period of overstrain, in which the 
 physical reserve balance had been drained away. 
 And where matters have not reached this extremity, 
 yet what minor catastrophies have they to account 
 for ! A domestic explosion which breaks the peace 
 of a household, and for weeks, may be, glooms 
 and shadows two lives, as often as not means simply 
 that a tired husband at the end of his day has met 
 a tired wife, and that a single spark lighting on 
 two overstrained nerve-systems has set both ablaze. 
 And that is not all, or, perhaps, even the worst. 
 It is bad enough to note the evil to which fatigue 
 may introduce us ; to realise, as Hesiod ages ago 
 put it, that then " vice may be found easily ; 
 that her way is smooth and her dwelling-place 
 near." Quite as serious a consideration is the 
 higher life interests against which a constant over- 
 strain bars the door. The things which make a 
 man's career great, the things to see, to think and 
 to do, are possible only to his days of power. It
 
 148 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 is when our nature is full to overflowing that the 
 supreme visions come. It is then we get lifts of 
 insight which show us a self beyond our self. It 
 is then that men plan their daring deed, the seeming 
 impossible enterprise which, achieved, becomes 
 history. The orator magnetises his audience by 
 his overflow ; when his life fountain can water not 
 his own soul only, but a thousand others. As we 
 realise all this we may say with Voltaire, though in 
 a new sense, " Le superflu, chose si necessaire." 
 
 With this exposition we may come now to some 
 practical considerations. One is the scientific con- 
 demnation of asceticism as an aid to the nobler life. 
 By that, of course, we do not mean the control and 
 severest discipline of the animal nature. There 
 science and the New Testament are at one. But 
 the mediaeval religion of fasts and flagellations and 
 bodily emaciation generally in the supposed inter- 
 ests of sainthood, a religion which in many circles 
 still survives, is by the new psychology proved a 
 false one. Some of the noblest men the world has 
 seen have been martyrs to its delusion. What a 
 picture is that, drawn for us by his biographer, 
 of Pope Gregory the Great, who, brought by his 
 austerities to such a pass that throughout his 
 pontificate he was never a day without pain, tran- 
 sacted his world-business, wrote his letters, com- 
 posed his treatises, and gave his instructions in 
 music lying on a couch because he was unable to 
 stand or sit ! The story is similar of Bernard, of 
 St. Francis, of a host of noble souls of that time. 
 How much greater had they been, and happier, could 
 they have seen, as we now do, that the soul's
 
 FATIGUE 149 
 
 % 
 
 inspirations, the mind's thinking, the will's reso- 
 lutions, are at their mightiest when the physical 
 states are at their best ; that the culture of the body 
 is an integral part of the religious life ! 
 
 But the subject has more than an individual 
 reference. There is discernible in history such a 
 thing as a fatigue of races. A population over- 
 driven by labour, or exhausted by its passions, will 
 become old and decrepit before its time. To keep 
 a nation young is the highest task of social economy, 
 and that can only be achieved by knowledge of the 
 whole complex law of living. And that is much 
 more than a physical law. A people's entire soul 
 may become fatally fatigued by the limitation of 
 its interests. Vice limits the human interests to 
 a few things the lowest things. The soul, worked 
 incessantly on this one level, becomes mortally 
 weary, to the hating of its life. That was the secret 
 of the Roman decadence.^ In Matthew^Arnold's 
 
 words: 
 
 On that hard pagan world disgust 
 
 And secret loathing fell ; 
 Deep weariness, and sated lust, 
 
 Made human life a hell. 
 
 What a spectacle is that of the later Rome which 
 we get in the pages of Cassiodorus, when the ener- 
 vated population, forgetful of their mighty ancestors, 
 were to the vigorous Gothic race who ruled them, 
 as the Greeks became later to their masters the 
 Turks ! 
 
 It is plain, then, that as individuals and as a 
 people we need a philosophy and a religion of 
 fatigue and of rest. When our activities go beyond
 
 150 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 their limit ; when we work not from our overflow, 
 but from the dregs of our vitality ; when we keep 
 going, not by sleep and rest, but by the stimulant 
 and the spur, we are sinning against the whole 
 Decalogue of life. If we would see our highest, 
 we must limit the output. We must never let work 
 choke our top springs. For joy is not only our 
 heritage ; it is our duty. " La joie de V esprit," 
 said Ninon, " en marque la force." We want gladness 
 enough, not only to flood our own life, but to flow 
 over perpetually upon our neighbour. And there 
 is no gladness in exhaustion. The highest philosophy 
 of living is to work as the universe works, and to 
 rest as it rests. We want to catch for ourselves 
 the secret of that mighty cosmic rhythm ; to catch 
 the secret of its storing and of its giving forth of 
 energy ; of its repose and its multitudinous motion. 
 The universe finds its rest in the interplay of a 
 myriad of interests. That is how we shall find ours. 
 The wider the keyboard the less strain on this 
 note and that. The vaster the music we make 
 the longer will the instrument last.
 
 XV 
 Of Moral Stimulants 
 
 AT certain seasons of the year London exhibits 
 on a great scale the phenomenon of gregarious 
 religion. Its public halls are in requisition day by 
 day for crowded assemblies, met there to be played 
 upon by orators. There is an orgy of speech, of 
 song, of excited feeling. People come up to the 
 gatherings from town and country to be " stimu- 
 lated." Where the rhetoric is unusually fervid 
 the stimulus becomes an intoxication, which is felt 
 to be better still. After a sufficiently long course 
 of these exercises, mind and body have a sensation 
 resembling that of waking after a debauch. But 
 people recover easily their constitutions are well 
 seasoned and the world goes on as before. 
 
 These gatherings are, we say, an excellent 
 illustration of the action of moral stimulants, a 
 subject about which neither the Church nor society 
 in general has as yet thought sufficiently. And 
 there is no topic about which there is greater need 
 of clear thinking, because, both by its uses and its 
 abuses, the moral stimulant is at every moment 
 acting on^the community's most vital parts. We 
 need to have first a proper idea of what a stimulant 
 
 151
 
 152 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 is. In relation to the body we are using the term 
 continually in a restricted and somewhat sinister 
 application. In this department of things the 
 " stimulant " is getting a bad name. We think 
 naturally of alcohol, of drugs, of the spur, of some- 
 thing which makes a man feel stronger at the 
 moment than he really is, and which results as 
 surely in a corresponding diminution of vital 
 power. If this were the sole range of action of the 
 stimulant, and if the parallel held strictly in the 
 sphere of morals and religion, we should indeed 
 have here an indictment of some gravity against 
 certain areas of religious activity. 
 
 But such a conception of the stimulant would be 
 an entirely erroneous one. There is, of course, 
 an unhealthy action, physical and moral, of which 
 we shall have more to say ; but what is first to be 
 considered is the fact that in the overwhelming 
 majority of instances the action of the stimulus 
 is natural and wholesome. Our entire constitution, 
 physical and moral, is constructed with a view to 
 the stimulant. The whole muscular system, backed 
 by the subtler one of the nerves, is worked in this 
 way. We see. hear, think, feel, move by means of 
 the stimulus. At every second our nerve system 
 is in a state of new excitation, received from within 
 or from without, and is sending its shock to the 
 appropriate muscles. These in their turn contract 
 with an energy proportionate to the spur received. 
 At each moment those telegraph messengers, the 
 afferent nerves, flash their messages to the conscious- 
 ness behind, messages which in their joy or pain 
 are at times the most tremendous of stimulants ;
 
 OP MORAL STIMULANTS 153 
 
 at each moment that mysterious force, the will, sets 
 its current moving outward, thrills the efferent 
 nerves with its power and purpose, and bids them 
 with then* flash of energy stir the obedient muscles 
 into play. We have only to think of this machinery 
 to realise how infinitesimal really for all its seem- 
 ing formidable proportions is the abuse of the 
 stimulant in the physical organism, as compared 
 with its wholesome and necessary use. 
 
 Carrying all this in our minds, we can now, with 
 less likelihood of going astray, discuss the action 
 of the stimulant in the moral and religious sphere. 
 Nothing is more interesting or instructive than to 
 watch, over the vast area of human living which 
 history opens to us, the methods employed in this 
 business and their results. It has always been 
 realised that if man needed a spur anywhere it 
 was in the region of character, of the higher part 
 of him. His^animal appetites needed no help 
 from the philosopher or moralist. They were 
 always ready, too ready, for their part. They 
 needed the curb more than the spur. They are 
 the oldest in him and the most securely planted. 
 On the other hand, the moral and spiritual are the 
 latest features of his development. They are new 
 born in him. The whole future is theirs, but at 
 present they are infantile and feeble. And so at 
 every point their force has needed to be nursed and 
 stimulated. To guard this precious dower the 
 religions have arisen ; in its interest philosophers 
 have erected their systems. To enhance its authority 
 theology has called in the tremendous conception 
 of rewards and punishments in a world to come.
 
 154 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 It is true that both in ancient and modern times 
 the idea has possessed men of a time coming when 
 character and virtue would require no stimulants 
 of this kind ; when men would do right for right's 
 sake alone. Thus Diderot, in his essay " Sur les 
 Femmes," speaks of a woman who promenaded 
 in the streets of Alexandria, her feet bare, her hair 
 disordered, a torch in one hand, a ewer in the other, 
 and who cried, " I would burn heaven with this 
 torch, and extinguish hell with this water, in order 
 that man might love God for Himself alone." 
 And Cicero, in the De Officiis, nobly pleads for a 
 virtue sufficient to itself without aid from gods 
 or men. " We ought," says he, " to be convinced 
 that though we could conceal any transaction 
 from all gods and men, yet that nothing avaricious 
 should be done, nothing unjust, nothing licentious, 
 nothing incontinent." We remember how Lessing, 
 too, in his " Education of the Human Race," 
 predicts the time when men will have no need 
 to borrow motives from the future " but will do 
 what is right because it is right." 
 
 As, upon a question of this kind, we study the 
 non-Christian nations, while we find much that 
 is repugnant, it is not this which most strikes us. 
 Far more impressive is the spectacle they present 
 of an inspired movement of the human spirit. He 
 were blind indeed who failed to see in this the work- 
 ing of the Power that makes for righteousness. We 
 have here an education of the race in which at every 
 point one recognises a Divine Preceptor every- 
 where. We find a straining for the highest, and 
 every known stimulus applied to the dormant
 
 OF MORAL STIMULANTS 155 
 
 faculties of the soul. Under a Plato, a Seneca, an 
 Epictetus, philosophy becomes a theology. Epictetus 
 might be a Methodist preacher. He is ardent for 
 conversions. Following his system, he says, " from 
 a shameless man you will become a modest man, 
 from a disorderly an orderly man, from a faithless 
 a faithful man, from a man of unbridled habits 
 a sober man." Plato calls in the aid of external 
 stimulants. He realises, as the modern Church 
 realises, the power of music, properly applied, as a 
 soul's excitant. He would agree with Luther 
 that " music is the finest thing in the world after 
 theology." The Greek philosopher, indeed, saw 
 deeper into this than the moderns. In the " Re- 
 public " he argues that rhythm and harmony enter 
 into the deepest parts of the soul, and that by the 
 educated sense of harmony we may discern between 
 the good and the base, the ugly and the beautiful, 
 in all things. 
 
 And nowhere than among those ancient peoples 
 has there been more vividly realised, as a stimulus 
 of the soul, the power of great dominant ideas. 
 The Roman's patriotism may have had a lower 
 significance than our own, but have we any such 
 sense of what we owe to our country as that which 
 made a Regulus go back to Carthage, to deliver 
 himself there to torture and death, because he 
 deemed that course necessary to the honour and 
 welfare of Rome ? Who can read his Plutarch 
 without realising the majesty of the ideas which 
 stir his heroes, and the strength of the characters 
 these ideas helped to form ! Plutarch to-day even 
 is a great school of morals. His draught is_an
 
 156 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 invigorating one. We do not wonder when we 
 read that at the French Revolution it was on him 
 a Carnot, a Vergniaud, a Madame Roland formed 
 themselves. 
 
 And yet the ancient philosophy, considered as a 
 universal moral stimulant, was a failure. Aristotle 
 himself confesses as much. Speaking of treatises on 
 morals, he declares that while they seem to have 
 power to move generous and liberal minds, they 
 have none to persuade the multitude to what is 
 virtuous and honourable. Nor was there much 
 moral stimulus in the classic religions. Their 
 ceremonies were aesthetic and spectacular rather than 
 moral. In fact, as to morals, their influence, on 
 the whole, was the other way. How get moral 
 inspiration from the worship of gods that were 
 themselves grossly immoral ? 
 
 It is when we take all this into review that we 
 are able the better to estimate the new stimulus 
 introduced into the world by Christianity. As 
 against all that had gone before, or was outside, we 
 have here a religion that was, for one thing, through 
 and through ethical ; that for another possessed, 
 apart from its precepts, a unique source of stimulus ; 
 and that, for a third thing, set its inspired ethic 
 working not amongst the philosophers, amongst the 
 elite, but amongst the obscurest and most neglected 
 portions of humanity. To the virtues of the Greek 
 and Roman schools it brought, as Schopenhauer 
 himself acknowledged, a new passion, the passion 
 of love, of tenderness, the passion for helping and 
 saving men. Personality, as the world is now 
 beginning to recognise, is the foundation of every-
 
 OF MORAL STIMULANTS 157 
 
 thing, and the new Gospel won its fight in the old 
 world, as it does in the new, for the reason that 
 its doctrine of love centred in a Personality with 
 an absolutely unique example of love in Himself 
 and in the power to create it in others. We have 
 spoken before of the moral stimulant of great ruling 
 ideas. There has been no idea so potent in stimulus 
 of character as the faith and trust that have anchored 
 themselves on Christ. What a testimony to this is 
 Renan, where, as an avowed outsider, speaking of 
 the Port Royalists, he says, " Sister Marie-Claire 
 exclaiming ' Victory ! Victory ! ' with her last 
 breath, may have been sustained by a faith no 
 longer our own, but she proved that man by his 
 will creates a force the law of which is not the law 
 of the flesh. She set forth the nature of the spirit 
 by an argument superior to all those of Descartes ; 
 and in showing us the soul quitting the body as 
 a ripe fruit drops from its stalk, she taught us not 
 to pronounce too lightly on the limits of its destiny." 
 With this unequalled stimulant hi its keeping 
 the problem of the modern Church is how to apply 
 it. We are here immediately on the question of 
 uses and abuses. As a matter of fact, and dealing 
 with the broad masses of the people, there is at 
 present no great danger of producing too much 
 moral intoxication. The spiritual sense of the 
 British public is not at all overcharged. It can 
 stand a large amount of prodding. The man who 
 can gather together the multitude from its ordinary 
 occupations and dissipations and pour on them 
 the stores of purifying emotion that are hid in the 
 Gospel ; who can in this way create a contagion of 
 
 1
 
 7 
 
 158 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 love, an enthusiasm for righteousness, is doing 
 the best possible service to Society and the State. 
 The point here is that the exaltation must be a 
 normal and not an abnormal one. The process 
 should, in fact, be like that of kindling a fire." We 
 set light to the paper and the wood in order that, 
 when their crackle is over, there may be the stead- 
 fast heat of the coal. 
 
 There should, in these matters, be no emotion 
 which stops with emotion. Few addresses, we 
 suppose, have been more immediately powerful 
 than those of Napoleon to his troops. But they 
 were always an incitement to action. Their effect 
 did not rest in feeling. It showed in the battle 
 that followed. We have no business to stir men, 
 unless it is to fight or to work. The mischief of 
 much of our religionismg to-day is that its heady 
 draught is for intoxication rather than for business. 
 A revival that simply burns up the emotional fuel 
 of a neighbourhood ; that is an %ff air of singings 
 and shoutings rather than of ethical renewal ; 
 that puts lyric exaltation and fevered imaginings in 
 the place of a changed character is a species of 
 mental dram drinking, which people were better 
 without. As Mrs. Poyser, in an immortal pro- 
 nouncement, has made plain to us, the stimulus 
 should be that of food rather than of medicine. 
 
 A final word. No one can study such a theme as 
 this, on any broad scale, without realising the high 
 destiny of the human spirit. The movement it 
 discloses has been so uniform, so universal, towards 
 so evident an end. The spiritual faculty in man 
 is here to-day. It is only beginning to show its
 
 OF MORAL STIMULANTS 159 
 
 infinite capacity. All things conspire for its 
 development. The story of the world is the 
 history of its incessant stimulation. And the 
 process will go on for ever, because as surely as 
 our planet is stirred through spring and summer 
 through the light and warmth the sun pours on it, 
 so surely are we wrought on for ever by a Sun 
 behind the sun, whose light and heat are the 
 forces by which our soul grows, and by which the 
 Eternal Kingdom eternally comes.
 
 XVI 
 A Question of Age 
 
 THE world has of late been discussing the question 
 of age as related to efficiency. But there is here 
 another question than that of efficiency. What is 
 the relation of age to character, to morality, to the 
 general outlook upon life ? Are old men morally 
 higher than young men, or the reverse ? Is public 
 or private honour safer in the keeping of sixty 
 than of thirty ? Does religion count for more at 
 one end of life than at the other ? Is there such 
 a thing as ethical continuity, or are all kinds of 
 characters developed successively in the progress 
 through the years of a single individual ? Not one 
 question, it appears, but dozens of questions start 
 to view on this theme and ask for the answers 
 which study and experience can give. 
 
 At first sight the answers are singularly confusing. 
 The witnesses appear to contradict each other, 
 and by their halting replies to bar the way to a 
 verdict. What stands out most clearly in the 
 investigation is the range of man's variability. It 
 is, perhaps, the most wonderful thing about him. 
 We can predict the character of an oak through its 
 oakhood. The same may be said of a rattlesnake 
 
 160
 
 A QUESTION OF AGE 161 
 
 or a crocodile. But no one prophesies in that way 
 about a man. Where he is to-day, in thinking and 
 feeling, in politics, in religion, in character, offers 
 no certain clue as to where to find him two decades 
 further on. The strange thing here is that one half 
 the world disproves the rule about the other half. 
 For there are multitudes of men whose later career 
 is an exact and orderly development from the 
 earlier. But the induction we should make from 
 studying these people would be utterly upset by 
 the experience of their next door neighbour. . There 
 are people whose endings flatly contradict their 
 beginnings. '-- English politics of to-day and yester- 
 day offer us examples of cetat sixty disavowing 
 and contemning every principle believed in and 
 fought for by cetat thirty. What would Newman 
 have thought, in his evangelical boyhood, had it 
 been whispered him that he would die a Roman 
 Cardinal ? Imagine the gulf between the Lam en - 
 nais who wrote the " Essai sur PIndifference," 
 and the intransigeant Lamennais of the " Paroles ! " 
 Society presents us with the spectacle of ex-monks 
 who are preachers of atheism, of ex-profligates and 
 roues who are active in religious revivals. Our 
 species is a fascinating study, but clearly not an 
 easy one. 
 
 When we study the relation of the years to these 
 changes the first result is, we have said, confusing. 
 There is a certain class of facts which seem to estab- 
 lish a case against age on the score of feeling and 
 character. Huxley, in one of his letters, makes 
 laughing allusion to senile morality as if he sus- 
 pected it. It has been remarked of George Eliot 
 
 11
 
 162 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 that in her novels the characters deteriorate as 
 they grow older. They drop their idealism. Dinah 
 Morris, from inspired preacher, settles down to a 
 comfortable housewife. Lydgate, the young doctor 
 in " Middlemarch," who begins with the highest 
 scientific aspirations, is content at the end with a 
 fortune made out of a gouty clientele. And history, 
 on one side at least, seems to support this view. 
 It offers numbers of reputations ruined by the years. 
 Nero as a young man seemed well-disposed when 
 uncfer Seneca. Had Harry the Eighth died at 
 thirty he would have been reckoned one of the 
 most popular of English Sovereigns. In the career 
 of Alexander the Great nothing is more noticeable 
 
 w 
 
 than the moral worsening which the years brought. 
 In place of the early generosity and self-forgetfulness 
 came caprice, cruelty, the murder of old friends 
 such as Clitus, Philotas and Parmenio. This side 
 of the matter the case, that is, for deterioration 
 has evidently impressed the modern mind. So 
 much so, indeed, that a recent medical writer 
 has advanced the view that the moral sentiments 
 suffer a natural decay in the course of years, and 
 v that age becomes ethically inferior to youth by a 
 process as natural as the whitening of its hair or 
 the lowering of its vital force. 
 
 This last assertion is, of course, in sympathy 
 with that materialistic determinism which has gained 
 such wide currency, and which makes character 
 an affair purely of molecular movements in the 
 organism. But this solution is far too simple for 
 the facts. For in those so far adduced we have 
 only one side. What is equally certain is that if
 
 A QUESTION OF AGE 163 
 
 some men have worsened with age, others have 
 grown better. The world is full of instances where 
 the highest levels of idealism, of spiritual character, 
 of heroic doing and suffering have been exhibited 
 at life's farther end. Polycarp, through all his long 
 .life, was never nobler than when, asked by his 
 judges to renounce his Master, he replied, " Eighty 
 and six years have I been His servant. . . . How 
 can I now blaspheme my King and my Saviour ? " 
 Epictetus is at his best when, as an old man, he 
 finds his one occupation is " to praise God." It 
 is not the young but the old Augustine that we 
 revere. There was no moral falling off in aged 
 WycKffe, nor in Sir Thomas More, as he with a 
 laughing serenity laid his head on the block for 
 his faith. No, nor in Baxter, who according to 
 Calamy " talked about another world like one 
 that had been there ; " nor in Zinzendorf, nor 
 Swedenborg, nor in John Wesley. These facts 
 are as plain as the others, and have to be fitted 
 somewhere into our result. Whatever else they 
 do they disprove the mere mechanical theory, 
 Man is not to be reckoned up simply in terms of hia 
 brain tissue or blood corpuscles. 
 
 From what sources, then, are we finally to derive 
 our judgment ? What does the age factor amount 
 to in the question of character ? Here, to begin 
 with, we have to concede something, though, as', 
 we have just said, by no means everything, to the 
 nature processes. Our own consciousness, our 
 own volition are, we soon discover, not the only 
 makers of ourselves. The child mind becomes 
 the youth mind, and the youth mind the man
 
 164 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 mind, without any leave asked of us. As life 
 proceeds we are astonished to find how we 
 have grown into things and out of them. Our 
 loves, our fascinations, our obsessions, take leave 
 of us, and we cannot explain why. It is as if our 
 nature has fed on one kind of food to repletion, 
 and then had suddenly lost appetite. The long 
 persistence in one kind of life brings, in some natures, 
 a reaction, in which desire calls out for all that 
 other side which it has missed. Under this influence 
 the debauchee becomes at times an ascetic. In 
 other instances it is the contrary that happens. 
 The ascetic discovers stirring in him the inclination 
 
 To seize on life's dull joys from a strange fear 
 Lest losing them, all's lost and nought remains. 
 
 There was a certain truth to nature in Renan's 
 painful drama, " The Abbesse de Jouarre," where 
 he depicts the devotee, as after a life-long career 
 of devotion, falling suddenly into sensuality. It 
 is indeed the greatest mistake to imagine that the 
 animal inclinations lose their hold with the advance 
 of years. Thackeray's Lord Steyne was no fledgling, 
 and he was true to type. The debaucheries of a 
 Tiberius were greatest at the end. The tendency 
 here has shown itself not only in mere profligates, 
 but in men otherwise of highest character and per- 
 formance. How otherwise are we to explain the 
 fact that John Knox, and Farel, the Swiss reformer, 
 the one at sixty and the other at sixty-nine, each 
 married a young girl to the astonishment and 
 grief of their friends ! 
 
 And these mysterious processes actions and
 
 A QUESTION OP AGE 165 
 
 reactions of the inner nature are, in their effect 
 upon character, supplemented by circumstances 
 which are special to age. Both by what they gain 
 and by what they lose, v men in later life find them- 
 selves far more dangerously placed than in earlier 
 years. They are, for one thing, freer from restraint > 
 They are no longer subordinates, but lords of them- 
 selves. Their old guides and teachers have disap- 
 peared. In many instances, and notoriously to-day, 
 beliefs which once exercised a restraining influence 
 have lost their power. Idols have been shattered. 
 Ideals which shone once as with light from heaven 
 are gone. The " vjsionjsplendid " has faded " into 
 the light of common day." They have been behind 
 the scenes to discover that effects which imposed 
 on their youth as something angelic and celestial 
 are an affair of stage carpentry and the big brush. 
 Age is thus with multitudes the time of disillusion- 
 ment, in itself the most perilous of mental states. 
 It is at this later period, too, that men, if ever, 
 become rich. And the rich man has always found 
 it hard to enter the Kingdom. No age is fonder of 
 its money than ours, or more prolific of arguments 
 for its possession. It nevertheless remains that 
 between property and the highest idealism no 
 nexus has yet been found. It is moneyless youth 
 that dreams the great dreams, that attempts the 
 heroic. We never hear of an elderly millionaire 
 going as a missionary. It is money, too, that buys 
 all the animal pleasures, all the magnificences, 
 all that holds men by their senses and that dulls 
 the eye of the soul. What is more, the possession 
 of wealth not only buys gratifications of this kind,
 
 166 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 but it can purchase condonation of the most illicit 
 of them. A man, if he is rich enough, can buy 
 up the whole Ten Commandments. There is a 
 growing number of this class who act on the prin- 
 ciple expressed by the famous Duchesse du Maine : 
 " Ce que chez les mortels est une effronterie, entre 
 nous autres demi-dieux n'est qu'honnete galanterie." 
 And apart from this use of its possessions there 
 comes with man in mature years that mere love 
 of hoarding than which nothing more abases the 
 soul. The moralists of all ages have protested 
 against it, but, as it seems, in vain. How convincing 
 is the satire here of Cicero : " What avarice in an 
 old man can propose to itself I cannot conceive ; 
 for can anything be more absurd than, in proportion 
 as less of our journey remains, to seek a greater 
 supply of provisions ? " Were the Roman orator 
 here to-day he would find more reason than ever for 
 his rebuke. 
 
 Avarice, power, unrestrained freedom, disillusion- 
 ment, the increase of material satisfactions, these 
 are some of the handicaps which maturity puts upon 
 the pursuit of the spiritual life. No wonder that, 
 in the soul's pilgrimage, this patch of ground should 
 at times have fallen into such bad repute. We see 
 the reason for it. Men fall so often here because 
 they neglect to regard this period as, not less than 
 the earlier ones, a time of probation. The mistake 
 is to suppose that in its later stage the battle of 
 life is over, whereas, as a matter of fact, it has 
 reached its hottest phase. We give all manner of 
 instructions, guidances, safeguardings for youth 
 and young'manhood, as though these were the only
 
 A QUESTION OP AGE 167 
 
 breakneck parts of the climb. A man may go 
 through them all to find himself bogged at the last. 
 The Slough of Despond is for many at the end rather 
 than the beginning. 
 
 But is there any necessity that men should fall 
 here ? The examples we have cited, units from an 
 innumerable host, are testimonies to the contrary. 
 There is, indeed, nothing either in the circumstances 
 or the inner evolution of age that furnishes a real 
 excuse for failure. At best the excuses are cowards' 
 reasons for running away. Are men disillusioned ? 
 What with ? Persons, circumstances, beliefs ? 
 What then ? Am I to turn false because someone 
 else or something else has proved so ? If we 
 have discovered some frauds and hollownesses 
 in the world, has not our journey discovered to 
 us also some grand and solid realities ? If 
 external authorities have lost their hold, has 
 not their place been taken by a nobler inward 
 compulsion ? Have we not discovered that " the 
 soul is free, not when it is at the mercy of 
 every random impulse, but when it is acted upon 
 by congenial forces, when it is exposed to spiritual 
 pressure, to constraint within itself ! " The achieve- 
 ment of a serene old age ; of preserving, amid its 
 manifold and peculiar temptations, a mind un- 
 stained, unspotted, is indeed faith's mightiest 
 work. It is its final, crowning victory over this 
 present world.
 
 XVII 
 " Under Direction " 
 
 " ONE only thing has been a terrible pang to me, 
 the giving over of my own judgment in questions 
 of moral judgment to any human authority. It 
 is so absolutely new and incomprehensible an idea 
 to me, that any other test should supplant, without 
 risk to itself and me, the inner test of my actions 
 that my conscience affords." Thus wrote Alice Le 
 Strange, one of the most gifted and delightful of 
 women, the future wife of the brilh'ant mystic, 
 Laurence Oliphant, to Thomas Lake Harris, the 
 mysterious American preacher and hypnotist to 
 whom the Englishman had already sold his soul. The 
 lady, the descendant of one of the oldest famih'es in 
 England, had already been persuaded by her 
 betrothed to accept the American as absolute director 
 of her mind and conscience, though she declares in this 
 same letter that " she felt she was throwing her 
 own conscience overboard and putting out the one 
 clear light God had given her." What came of 
 this " direction," both for herself and her future 
 husband, the world has read in Mrs. Oliphant's 
 biography. The quotation, and the incident alto- 
 gether, may serve as introduction to the discussion 
 
 168
 
 " UNDER DIRECTION " 169 
 
 of a question full of vital issues, and about which 
 the present generation is in grievous want of some 
 clear leading. 
 
 The action of the Oliphants in placing themselves, 
 body and conscience, under the absolute will of 
 another, would probably strike most of us in the 
 way it struck the lady herself when it was first 
 proposed to her. It would be throwing the con- 
 science overboard, the putting out of our guiding 
 light, an act in defiance both of our religion and our 
 common sense. Yet, let us remember, their act was 
 only the carrying to a certain length of a tendency, 
 a principle, we may say, that is embedded deep in 
 human nature. We are all of us, more or less, 
 " under direction." " Direction," in one form or 
 another, is taken for granted in the very constitution 
 of society. Some of our greatest organisations are 
 founded entirely on this idea. The relation of 
 children to their elders is one of " direction." The 
 whole theory and practice of education suppose the 
 constant subordination of the pupil to his teacher. 
 We pour our facts, our doctrines, our views into 
 these young minds and expect them to be received 
 without contradiction. To refuse acceptance is 
 a disobedience, demanding reproof or punishment. 
 
 The grown-up man is, over a large surface of his 
 life, in the same condition as the child. The soldier, 
 the sailor, has given over his mind to that of his 
 superior. The world will have autocracy as long 
 as a ship sails the seas. We cannot navigate by 
 popular suffrage . The safety of the vessel and the 
 making of the voyage depend on the understanding 
 that the hundreds beneath him execute the will
 
 170 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 of the man at the top. On a larger scale we have the 
 State, by its laws and statutes limiting and directing 
 the conduct of the citizens. On a wider scale still 
 we see superior races governing the destinies, 
 developing the whole mind and interior life of the 
 inferior and feebler peoples. 
 
 The principle, we see then, is everywhere at 
 work. The point of dispute is as to how far the 
 principle shall be carried. The dispute has been 
 one of the fiercest in history. It is on this question 
 that religion has fought some of its greatest battles, 
 and has undergone its sharpest divisions. In the 
 Roman Church the " confessor " and the " director " 
 are all powerful. The devout Catholic on the most 
 vital questions of his interior life takes the mind 
 and will of the priest as a substitute for his own. 
 In the religious orders the submission is still more 
 absolute. The first duty which Ignatius Loyola 
 enjoined on his followers was that of obedience. 
 He tells them what he means by obedience. As a 
 corpse has no motion of its own, but is moved 
 solely from the outside ; as the violin is passive 
 in the hands of the musician, so must it be with 
 the Jesuit and his superior. 
 
 The Roman Church has, however, by no means 
 a monopoly of religious " direction." Anglicanism, 
 as we know, in its later Ritualistic phases, has 
 developed a kind of Confessionalism in which we 
 have the dangers of the Roman system without 
 the Roman safeguards. But let us be candid here. 
 There is a Protestant " direction " as well as a 
 sacerdotal. The principle under a different form 
 is in as vigorous operation on the one side as on
 
 " UNDER DIRECTION " 171 
 
 the other. The Reformation, as we trace its history 
 throughout Europe, was the affair of about half 
 a dozen dominant wills. The leaders had no 
 qualms about impressing themselves with their 
 authority's utmost weight on the minds of their 
 followers. Calvin's Geneva Constitution, Knox's 
 " Book of Discipline " were drawn up with the 
 intention of ruling men's actions and consciences. 
 The peace of Augsburg made a man's religion an affair 
 of the state he belonged to. In modern times the 
 Free Churches, though organised on a democratic 
 basis, have given full play to the principle of " direc- 
 tion." A Wesley, a Spurgeon did the theological 
 thinking for their followers. The popular preacher 
 of to-day expects that his congregation will take 
 its doctrinal colour from his expositions. 
 
 One could enlarge on this statement of existing 
 conditions, but it is time we went in search of 
 the principle which should guide us in our judgment 
 of them. Direction clearly, of a certain kind, 
 and up to a certain point, is a good thing. If it 
 were not there would be no such general acceptance 
 of it. It is easy, indeed, to see where the good of it 
 lies. Human education all through is an affair of 
 the greater minds leading and inspiring the smaller 
 ones. Redemption has ever been through the 
 higher soul possessing the lower souls, pouring its 
 energy into them, lifting them towards its own 
 standard. The principle has been at work in every 
 age. In the Symposium of Plato, Alcibiades, 
 speaking of the influence of Socrates upon him, 
 opens to us the secret. After a jest at the ugly 
 head of Socrates, which he likens to the mask of a
 
 172 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 Silenus, he continues : " But when I opened him 
 and looked within at his serious purpose, I saw in him 
 divine and golden images of such fascinating beauty 
 that I was ready to do in a moment whatever 
 Socrates commanded." Here we see the legitimate 
 ascendancy, the true " direction." The soul bows 
 to the greater spirit because it recognises the inner 
 beauty there exhibited. It realises at once that 
 the road it points out is the true way to the heights. 
 
 But how far shall " direction " go ? That, we 
 have observed, is the crucial point. Can we, amid 
 the prevailing confusion, find our way to any 
 sure dividing line ? We spoke at the beginning of 
 the training of the children. Let us come back to 
 that. At the opening of its career a child is carried 
 in arms. Its entire movement is in the hands of 
 nurse or mother. Later it is taught to walk, the little 
 feet upheld by the guiding hand. But the " direc- 
 tion " is progressively relaxed, until at last our 
 youngster runs alone. The training here we see 
 has been one of restriction and guidance, but 
 always with a view to an ultimate independence. 
 The end aimed at is that the child may walk alone. 
 
 This is the training of the body, and it is im- 
 possible not to see its analogy to the training of 
 the soul. Education, politics, religion are all phases 
 of human development, and the enlarged vision sees 
 them all as working towards one end, the perfection 
 of the individual. Where authority is exercised 
 over others the object, in any proper conception, 
 is that these others may in their turn gain authority 
 over themselves. Their present guidance is to 
 help them by-and-by to walk alone. When govern-
 
 "UNDER DIRECTION" 173 
 
 ment, when religion pursue any other aim than 
 this, they have become not the friends, but 
 the enemies of man. The worst disservice we 
 can render to another is to try and create 
 him after our image. Who are you who 
 seek to turn this brother man from his own 
 proper destiny ? Who are you who seek to stifle 
 this soul's voice and to make it a mere echo of your 
 own ? We have heard people speak sometimes, in 
 their dealing with the young, of " breaking their 
 will." But what of their own will ? Shall someone 
 break that ? 
 
 Where " direction " has gone so fatally wrong, 
 in governments and so many forms of religion, 
 is in the failure to recognise that their proper end 
 is not to suppress individuality, to suppress the 
 will, but to develop it to its utmost and highest. 
 The priest, the teacher has made hideous wreck 
 and failure of his work when it leads the disciple 
 to lean ever more heavily upon him instead of to 
 walk in his own freedom. To " break the will " 
 forsooth ! One might as well talk of mending a 
 watch by breaking its mainspring. The human 
 will is of all things in this earth the most wonderful, 
 the most sacred. To add to its resources, to secure 
 its freedom of action, to open up to it the way of 
 inner reinforcement, should be the one supreme 
 object of spiritual education. For it is here, in this 
 secret place, man touches his godhood. It is here, 
 in the soul's innermost, holiest ground, when with 
 this single invisible force he meets the onset of 
 passion, the craven voice of his fears, the solicita- 
 tions of the world, the threats of foes, with his
 
 174 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 invincible " I will," that man shows his kinship 
 with the God who made him. 
 
 But the way to this freedom is a slow one, and 
 there are no safe short cuts. That is religion's 
 excuse, and a good one, for keeping its children in 
 tutelage so long. Goethe, enamoured as he was of 
 inner liberty, saw this clearly. " Everything," 
 says he, " that frees our spirit without giving us 
 the mastery over ourselves is pernicious." Indeed, 
 we come only to our freedom by yielding ourselves 
 to another compulsion. As a modern writer puts it : 
 " The soul is free, not when it is at the mercy of 
 every random impulse, but when it is acted upon 
 by congenial forces, when it is exposed to spiritual 
 pressure, to constraint within itself." The will 
 feels itself most divinely free when it mysteriously 
 realises its unity with the universal Will out of which 
 itself has come. In Quaker Barclay's phrase it is 
 at its true level when it finds itself " led inwardly 
 and immediately by the Spirit of God." 
 
 It is by this reinforcement and spiritual direction 
 of the individual will that man will eventually 
 fight down all his foes and come into his kingdom. 
 To weaken it, whether by passion or by despotism, 
 is to slay the soul. Poor Oscar Wilde in his " De 
 Profundis," that confession of a broken heart, 
 writ in blood and tears, tells us how the flesh can 
 slay. " Desire at the end was a malady or a mad- 
 ness or both. ... I ceased to be lord over myself. 
 I was no longer the captain of my soul and did not 
 know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended 
 in horrible disgrace." On the other hand, when 
 prieste and religious teachers assail the will with
 
 "UNDER DIRECTION" 175 
 
 spiritual threat or brow-beating they are enemies 
 only less to be dreaded than the passions. It was 
 the emasculation a misplaced zeal has produced that 
 led Gibbon to declare that " it was the virtues 
 rather than the vices of the clergy that were danger- 
 ous to society," a remark that Hume has endorsed. 
 Not coercion, but inspiration ; not the forging of 
 fetters for the soul, but the surrounding it with 
 heaven's own freest air is the function of the 
 teacher, the true mission of the Church. 
 
 The freedom thus won can never be misused, 
 or turned to licence. For the souls that reach it 
 find themselves everywhere overarched by the same 
 spiritual laws and controlled by the same beneficent 
 forces. Nature is in no hurry in granting this 
 freedom. She knows the danger of hurry. Until 
 tutelage has become a hindrance rather than a 
 help she will keep men in tutelage. But the 
 government, the Church, the teacher that are wise 
 in their generation will work always by her secret 
 instructions. They will govern, guide and teach 
 in order that man may at the end govern, guide 
 and teach himself.
 
 XVIII 
 The Ethics of Victory 
 
 " STRIFE is the Father of all things, the King 
 of all ; it makes of some Gods, of others men : of 
 some it makes slaves, of others free men." Thus 
 Heraclitus of Ephesus. In periods of great 
 national excitement in America a Presidential 
 election, in England or France a national vote at 
 the polls we have what appears almost a con- 
 firmation of the old sage's contention. We witness 
 a tremendous conflict ; in our ears rings the shout of 
 the victors, the moan of the vanquished ; we watch 
 an astonishing displacement of power ; the ascent 
 of unknown men to prominence, the descent of 
 known ones to obscurity. Every citizen feels him- 
 self either conqueror or conquered. His private 
 and individual affairs are swallowed up in the 
 common consciousness. That his side, his party 
 is up or down makes his happiness or his chagrin. 
 In this immense tumult of feeling one feature of 
 the situation, even in the sanest minds, is apt to be 
 obscured. The intoxication of victory may make 
 us forget that there is an ethic of victory, and that 
 this is really in the long run the only thing worth 
 considering. It may be worth while to examine 
 this aspect of the matter. 
 
 176
 
 THE ETHICS OF VICTORY 177 
 
 Man has been diligently fighting his neighbour 
 from the beginning ; but it was comparatively 
 late in history that our question about the business 
 dawned upon him as even a subject for discussion. 
 In the dim unwritten past he fought as those 
 
 Dragons of the prime 
 
 That tare each other in their slime. 
 
 The morality here, if such we may call it, was worse 
 even than that of the beasts of prey. The brutes 
 conquered to satisfy their hunger, but with man 
 an essential part of the joy of victory was the 
 discomfiture and agony of his vanquished foe. 
 In imperial Rome, at the height of its civilisation, 
 a conqueror's "triumph " offered as its chief and most 
 enjoyed feature the spectacle of distinguished cap- 
 tives dragged, manacled, behind his car. What 
 " ethic of victory " was in the mind of an Attila, 
 of a Genghis Khan ; of the Ottoman Bajazet, who 
 at the battle of Nicopolis, where the flower of the 
 Western chivalry were slain, had the thousands of 
 prisoners beheaded before him, the frightful work 
 going on through all the long hours of a summer 
 day ; or of Timour the Tartar, Bajazet's conqueror, 
 who as he swept through Asia made of city after 
 city a smoking ruin, where neither man nor beast 
 survived, and where all that was left was a pyramid 
 of skulls ? 
 
 And that kind of victory is not yet obsolete in the 
 world. There are races, counting millions of men, 
 ready, if the chance offers, to repeat it to-day. 
 What we call civilised warfare reproduces three- 
 parts of it. And in our own civic and political 
 
 12
 
 178 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 contests, waged with tongue and pen, on the 
 platform and at the polling booths, have we not 
 all felt the ancient savagery stir in our blood, and 
 leap ever and anon to expression in thought and 
 speech ? The barbaric inheritance in us is so 
 old, so firmly established ; and the new in us, 
 the high and spiritual, is so new and inexperienced, 
 that the battle is continually flinging us back 
 again on that prehistoric instinct which links us 
 with the Druid and the stone age man that went 
 before us. We find in us for the moment his lack 
 of imagination ; his failure to appreciate the stand- 
 point of the other man ; even something of his base 
 delight over the humiliation our opponent is suffer- 
 ing. There is evidently and we realise it when we 
 have regained our heads no moral discipline more 
 needed, no moral danger more imminent and for- 
 midable than that of the moment of victory. 
 
 The first danger here is that of mistaking an 
 outside triumph for an inward and real one. A 
 very considerable proportion of what are hailed as 
 victories are, to the seeing eye, bad defeats. That 
 is true both of persons and causes. In the struggle 
 with our rival he may have gone down. But who 
 has conquered ? If we have been unjust to him, and 
 fought him with unhallowed weapons, we may be 
 called the victors, but our place is lower than his. 
 The best men found that out long ago. Plato never 
 ceases to reiterate how infinitely better it is to 
 suffer injustice than to do it. " The unjust doer of 
 unjust actions," says he in the " Gorgias," " is 
 miserable in any case more miserable, however, if 
 he be not punished." If through and after our
 
 THE ETHICS OF VICTORY 179 
 
 battle, pride, vainglory and the instinct of revenge 
 have swept over us and had their way in us, what- 
 ever shouts and jubilations are rising outside, we 
 are the defeated party. 
 
 A similar thing has to be said of causes. The 
 worst day for a spiritual movement often enough 
 has been that of its outward success. Constantino's 
 imperialising of Christianity was the defeat of its 
 inner idea. The elevation of its teachers to temporal 
 power was their degradation as prophets of the Un- 
 seen. When the Church had won to the top, 
 and was lording it over princes and emperors, it 
 forgot the thing it had come for. And do not 
 let us imagine that the dangers of victory are con- 
 fined to any one department of the spiritual move- 
 ment. They show everywhere. The German Ana- 
 baptists of the Reformation time were many of 
 them excellent men, examples of learning, piety and 
 blameless life. But when, as at Miinster and else- 
 where, in the troubles of the time, the party gained 
 a momentary political mastery, we have the story 
 of monstrous excesses, of ruthless slaughterings of 
 unoffending people, of wildest debauchery. It is 
 the saddest of histories, indeed, this of a temporal 
 victory acting on undisciplined natures to blight 
 their early promise, and wreck the moral beginnings 
 within them. We remember Plato's description 
 of the tyrant. He begins always, says he, as a pro- 
 tector. 
 
 It is significant also to note how different are 
 the results of the most resounding victories from the 
 expectations of the combatants. A public triumph 
 sets forces in motion new, incalculable which
 
 180 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 neither side had wotted of. Most victors in these 
 scenes suffer soon after from cruel disillusionments. 
 Human nature, one may think, has to pay a price to 
 the infernal powers for all its achievements. The 
 European Reformation was a great deliverance, but 
 over its whole area, over England, Scotland, Ger- 
 many, Switzerland, the after conduct of princes 
 and nobles on the one side, and of the peasantry on 
 the other, filled its leaders, filled Knox and Luther, 
 Calvin and Melancthon, with despair. The French 
 Revolution at its beginning excited the noblest 
 spirits to rapture. The planting of the tree of 
 liberty on the Champ de Mars seemed the dawn 
 of a millennium. Wordsworth sang of it : 
 
 Bliss were it in that dawn to be alive, 
 And to be young were very heaven. 
 
 What followed drove the poets into pessimism, 
 and the world-rulers to the extremities of reaction. 
 The English democracy went mad with delight 
 over the Reform Bill of 1832. Two years after 
 only two short years Earl Grey had resigned, 
 beaten over Irish coercion ! In all these instances, 
 and many more could be cited, a great and lasting 
 thing had been done, a long stride forward had 
 been taken. But all the problems had not been 
 solved, nor had Paradise been regained. Men 
 found themselves instead in the region of new dis- 
 ciplines and new fatigues. 
 
 From this long experience of the past it is time 
 we had all of us reached a juster estimate of what 
 victory means and entails. It is time, especially, 
 that we realised the stern ethic it imposes on us.
 
 THE ETHICS OF VICTORY 181 
 
 That ethic leaves amplest room for joy. It is, 
 after all, a great thing to win, and Nature meant us 
 to believe it is great. Else why our apparatus of 
 enthusiasm ? But we need to be sure of what 
 we are winning. There is to be no mean Schaden- 
 freude, no ignoble delight that our opponent is 
 humiliated. Our victory is unworthy unless we 
 believe it to be as good for him as for ourselves. 
 If it be not a gain to humanity at large, in which 
 he is included, it is no end that we should fight for. 
 If the triumph be over a gross injustice, from which 
 we have suffered, and in the perpetration of which 
 our opponent has taken part, the victory for him 
 and us will be simply in the reinstatement of 
 justice. Here " not to do likewise is the best re- 
 venge." Our quarrel is with narrowing ideas-, 
 with hateful survivals, with worn-out institutions ; 
 never with the persons who represent them. We 
 fight that they, with us, may come into a larger in- 
 heritance. 
 
 It is as we become possessed with this higher 
 ethic that our fighting enthusiasms are more and 
 more turned from the old arena to a new one. 
 To-day man's greatest fight is with one whom he 
 loves while he wrestles with her : his conquests 
 are not over his fellow, but over Nature. Here the 
 joy of victory is without alloy ; its rapture means 
 no "opponent's humiliation ; the enemy is a friend, 
 a mother who laughs as her child wrests from her 
 the latest secret. In view of all this one may say 
 the true human advance lies aside from politics. 
 The kings of music, of art, of science, nf literature ; 
 the great souls that give us a Hamlet, a Moonlight
 
 182 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 Sonata, a Madonna Ansidei ; that discover the secret 
 of steam, of electricity ; that track the germ of a 
 disease and find its remedy ; that open new spiritual 
 horizons to these it is given to win victories 
 which help all and hurt none. More and more the 
 fighting element in man will find in this noblest 
 arena the scene of its energies and rewards. 
 
 Nevertheless, there is a victory over persons, a 
 
 worthy and a notable one, the joy of which we may 
 
 all legitimately seek. It is not one of coercion, 
 
 of subjugation in any form. The world has tried 
 
 that long enough, with an invariable result of 
 
 disaster. Far back in history Asoka, the Buddhist 
 
 king, one of earth's wisest, struck the true note in 
 
 that wonderful saying, " They must not think that 
 
 conquests by means of arrows deserve the name of 
 
 conquest ; they are but disturbances and violence. 
 
 The conquests of religion alone are real conquests. 
 
 They hold good for this world and the next." 
 
 And even here we have to discriminate. There 
 
 are moral conquests that are conquests by violence. 
 
 They represent the breaking down of a man's own 
 
 individuality by an unlawful pressure. We are only 
 
 on the right track when we have recognised that the 
 
 fight here is not to subdue a man's will, but to help 
 
 him to assert it. The battle for us all finally is in 
 
 that viewless realm the republic of the soul. And 
 
 here we can fight for others as well as for ourselves. 
 
 We may well bear a hand for our neighbour in 
 
 the mortal struggle of his nobler part, his spiritual 
 
 faculty, to assert itself over the lower powers that 
 
 war against it. The battle for you and me is 
 
 not that we may master our fellow, and so rule over
 
 THE ETHICS OF VICTORY 183 
 
 him, but to help him to that self-mastery which, 
 when everywhere achieved, will give us a com- 
 munity of nobly independent personalities, each 
 giving of his best to his brethren, and all guided by 
 the same Divine, universal law. 
 
 To sum up. The experience yielded by our long 
 world-history should enable us to discern the true 
 and false, the noble and the base, in victory. No 
 instructed spirit will find its joy in the humiliation 
 of others. Its triumphs will be in results, whose 
 benefits are for all, opponents included. Such a soul 
 works for causes, and not for aims that end in self. 
 In the personal sphere there will be no moral 
 coercion, but only a help to self-mastery. Finally, 
 external victories will be judged by their spiritual 
 contents. A resounding outside triumph may in 
 this view be the most serious of defeats, and the 
 outside disaster the noblest victory. The greatest 
 of all human achievements was the ascent to a 
 Cross.
 
 XIX 
 The Soul's Distillations 
 
 THE title expresses only a part of what we propose 
 here to deal with. It is an affair not simply of dis- 
 tillations, but^of extractions, of subtilisations, 
 the whole of the processes in short by which raw 
 material is refined, transmuted, raised to a higher 
 power. We want to inquire whether "anything 
 similar to this is to be found in the inner life of the 
 soul. We are all more or less familiar with the 
 outside operations. At Cognac there are great 
 establishments where we may watch the turning 
 of wine into brandy. It is a distillation. Else- 
 where men obtain spirit from beet-root, from 
 potatoes and other sugar compounds. In other 
 directions we have subtle essences, where the force 
 spread originally over a vast quantity of the originat- 
 ing material has been concentrated into a few 
 drops^The greatest triumph of modern extraction 
 is the miracle of radium, where, out of tons of 
 quartz, crushed, pounded, passed through one 
 process after another, we see emerging at the end 
 a substance which stands as the very quintessence 
 of energy ; a substance into one ounce of which 
 is compressed a power computed to be capable 
 
 181
 
 THE SOUL'S DISTILLATIONS 185 
 
 of raising 10,000 tons a mile high. It would seem 
 as though the material progress of the world, the 
 whole triumph of man in this sphere, will become 
 more and more an affair of this concentration of 
 energy ; of the elaboration of methods by which the 
 power of winds and waves, of the solid earth and its 
 elements, will be distilled into new and ever subtler 
 forms, obedient to his lightest touch. ,- 
 
 With this before us we may now come to our 
 special inquiry. Does the inward life in any degree 
 correspond in this aspect to the outer ? Have we 
 there also what, with any accuracy, may be called 
 distillations or extractions ? Do we discern in 
 the soul such a thing as ^he conversion of raw 
 material, the raising it to a new quality and power 1 
 The inquiry is not a merely speculative one. It opens 
 up questions of the utmost importance in psycho- 
 logy, in religion, and the general conduct of life. 
 
 We cannot look long into the nature of the life 
 within us without coming to the conclusion that 
 the analogy is a very close one. As we think the 
 matter over we begin to suspect, indeed, that<he 
 soul is the greatest of all distilleries. Its one busi- 
 ness is a transmutation, an obtaining and using 
 of essences^ The soul begins by distilling for 
 itself a J^ojjy. According to an eminent French 
 psychologist, M. Delanne, the theory that best 
 fits modern research is that " a human being 
 is a psychic form which assimilates matter. When 
 its energy is exhausted it assimilates matter no 
 longer, the physical body is disintegrated, and 
 the soul in another form pursues its career." " A 
 mere hypothesis," says someone, " and a disput-
 
 186 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 able one." It may be disputed, we admit. But 
 whatever view we may take as to the precise form 
 in which the relation of soul and body is pre- 
 sented, we have all to acknowledge the wonder of 
 that unknown energy by which out of air and water, 
 out of vegetable and animal, the unseen something 
 within is extracting perpetually the thing we call 
 our visible selves. 
 
 What is quite certain also is that the outside 
 world, as we recognise it, is a distillation of our own 
 mind. When we speak of seeing sun, moon and 
 stars, the world and our fellow men, what we mean 
 is that we receive certain ether vibrations on our 
 retina, which are translated, by some process un- 
 known, into sensations, to which then, by another 
 process, we attach certain ideas. In a sense we all 
 make our world. That it agrees with the world 
 our neighbour makes is, we may say, a guarantee 
 of harmonious mental co-operation, and a help to 
 the belief that our sensation has some solid relation 
 to the outside reality. But what, after all, lies 
 behind sight, touch, hearing, and our other sense 
 perceptions is ever the unknown. We know our 
 distillation ; that is all. 
 
 With that as a beginning a somewhat bewilder- 
 ing one it must be confessed let us come to some 
 processes in which we may feel more at home. 
 On this theme we find ourselves dealing, not only 
 with our individual consciousness, but with that 
 universal consciousness, that world soul, if we may 
 so term it, in which our own swims, and of which 
 it forms a part. We belong, we discover, to a mental 
 universe which has been made what it is by an
 
 THE SOUL'S DISTILLATIONS 187 
 
 age-long series of distillings and extrac tings. Our 
 language is one of these results. When we use such 
 words as " whiteness," " humanity," any abstract 
 term in short, we are handling mental tools which 
 it took our remote ancestors thousands of years 
 to fashion. Out of a multitude of objects con- 
 stantly presenting themselves to his mind, man, 
 bit by bit, sorted out words that covered not only 
 one of these objects, but a multitude of them, and 
 enabled him to think from the particular to the 
 general. A more striking mental distillation is that 
 of scientific discovery. An observer, planted 
 down amidst a heterogeneous congeries of appar- 
 ently isolated facts, watches, compares, experi- 
 ments, until, it may be suddenly, as in a flash, 
 there takes place in his brain a kind of precipitation. 
 Out of the seeming confusion he has extracted a 
 law which makes all plain. Or he has struck on 
 the application of a force steam it may be, or 
 electricity which henceforth quadruples human 
 powers. What has come to this solitary soul, 
 this new distillation from the outside, comes next 
 into the world-soul. The new generation is born 
 with this extraction this fresh power essence as 
 part of its inheritance. The world-soul will con- 
 tinually add to these acquisitions, until it becomes 
 mighty beyond our present dreams. 
 
 Where this view of things grips us as individuals 
 will, however, be seen more clearly when we study 
 some of its practical applications. We note, for 
 instance, how our spiritual culture to-day is an affair 
 of inner distillations. Take, for instance, the present 
 position of religion. It is offered to us externally
 
 188 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 as a matter of Bibles, of creeds, of churches, and 
 their allied institutions. A great deal of the 
 material here is crude enough. Much of what our 
 fathers accepted as facts has become legend. Many 
 of the credal statements held throughout genera- 
 tions as necessary to faith are to us incredible. We 
 can no longer say credo quia impossibile. Yet faith 
 lives and the churches thrive. Never was religion 
 more active, more potent in the lives of men. Why 
 is this ? We discover the secret in the soul's 
 method of inner extraction. The institutions, the 
 theologies, the sacred books are there, and of 
 service, not for what they are in themselves. 
 They are the materials in a process. Out of them, 
 with all their roughness, their inequality of value, 
 their nearer or farther approximation to fact, 
 the soul, by its own infallible methods, has in each 
 age extracted the nutriment it needed, and to-day 
 its organs are performing the same office. (It is 
 not because the churches have maintained this or 
 that opinion that they have lived,> It is because 
 they have stood age after age close to the souls of 
 men; stood there with a history, , an example, a 
 force, out of which these souls direw love and 
 courage, and the spirit of brotherly service. The 
 material itself is, we say, open to every criticism, 
 but these essences extracted from it are beyond 
 criticism, and are the life of the world. 
 
 The truth of this statement can be discerned 
 by anyone who cares to study history. We make 
 the direst of blunders if we judge of the Church's 
 function in any generation by its outward symbols. 
 Am I to judge of the early Benedictines by their
 
 THE SOUL'S DISTILLATIONS 189 
 
 theology ? I think rather of them issuing in the 
 sixth century from Southern Italy to cover Europe 
 with their faithful labours, making waste places 
 fertile with the toil of their hands, and preserving 
 for us the ancient literatures by the labour of their 
 brains. Is the thirteenth century Church a mere 
 triumph of the Papacy ? We look beneath to see 
 a spirit developed as truly evangelical, as passionate 
 for truth, for righteousness, for the soul's freedom 
 as the world has ever known. Nay, for a proper 
 view here we must extend our survey beyond 
 Christendom. Let us read our Plutarch on the 
 true inwardness of the ancient religious feasts. 
 Says he : " For it is not abundance of wine and 
 well-baked meats that gladden our hearts in a reli- 
 gious festival ; it is our good hope and belief that 
 God Himself is graciously present and approving 
 our acts." The outward material here, we say, 
 is " a pagan festival." But words like these show 
 us how true souls extracted from the materials their 
 age and place offered, those essences of faith and love 
 which are religion's highest and ultimate meaning. 
 
 It is most interesting, in this connection, to note 
 how men who have fought most stoutly for their 
 own separate formulas have come sooner or later 
 to realise the truth of our doctrine here. They 
 find that the root of the matter lies not in the 
 " ism " they quarrelled about, but in the distillation 
 it yielded. Wesley in his old age declares himself 
 sick of opinions. " My soul loathes the frothy 
 food. Give me solid and substantial religion ; 
 give me a humble, gentle lover of God and man ; 
 a man full of mercy and good faith, without par-
 
 190 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 tiality and without hypocrisy ; a man laying himself 
 out in the work of faith, the patience of hope, the 
 labour of love. Let my soul be with those Chris- 
 tians, wheresoever they are and whatsoever opinions 
 they are of." On the opposite side let us hear 
 Martineau. " In Biblical interpretation I derive 
 from Calvin and Whitby the help that fails me 
 in Crell and Belsham. In devotional literature 
 and religious thought I find nothing of ours that 
 does not fail before Augustine, Tauler and Pascal. 
 And in the poetry of the Church it is the Latin or 
 the German hymns, or the lines of Charles Wesley, 
 or of Keble, that fasten on my memory and heart, 
 and make all else seem poor and feeble." We may 
 go beyond Martineau to Huxley, who testified in a 
 letter to Kingsley that, outside theology, life had 
 taught him a deep sense of religion, that love had 
 opened to him the sanctity of human nature, 
 and impressed him with a deep sense of responsi- 
 bility. These men in their several stations had been 
 surrounded with materials widely differing in outer 
 character. They belonged to schools of sharply 
 opposed thinking. But it was not these oppositions ; 
 it was the invisible essences their souls drew from 
 the outward surrounding that make their memories 
 alike dear to-day to all who love truth and goodness. 
 As with outside substance so in the soul there are 
 double and quintuple distillations. A man pours 
 his discourse upon me. It is powerful because it is 
 the essence of his own life experience. But to be 
 of profit to me I must make an extract of this ex- 
 tract. We do the utmost damage to ourselves 
 if_we allow any other man to make us in his own
 
 THE SOUL'S DISTILLATIONS 191 
 
 image. I must instead distil from his individuality 
 the drop that feeds my own. It is also in the light 
 of this doctrine that we discern the meaning of the 
 human passions. We understand by it that striking 
 phrase of Vauvenargue's that " we perhaps owe 
 the greatest advantages of the spirit to our pas- 
 sions." The man who prospers most inwardly is 
 not the monk or ascetic, who denies half his nature. 
 It is he rather who, recognising within their true 
 limits the social and passional instincts, uses them 
 as material from which, in co-operation with the 
 higher spiritual powers, he develops that highest love 
 in which he sees his relation to the Divine nature. 
 P" There seems no limit to this power of the soul. 
 It can distil and doubly distil, until it has become a 
 repository of all the forces. From the rough ex- 
 periences of his life a man draws the need and then 
 the power of faith and of prayer. These first 
 spiritual acquisitions become in their turn the 
 material for others, more refined and yet more 
 powerful. The process, in some great natures, has 
 continued until their simplest word has fallen as fire 
 on the souls of men, and kindled conflagrations there. 
 The doctrine, so potent in its applications for 
 this life, supplies us with what seems the best of 
 clues to the life beyond. All the distillations are a 
 step upward ; a movement from a lower to a higher 
 quality and power. On this analogy death will 
 be the human step upward. It will be the transmu- 
 tation of our experiences here our sorrows, joys, 
 knowledges, our triumphs and failures into an 
 existence which is the essence of them all, while 
 immeasurably more than they.
 
 XX 
 Our Unordained Ministry 
 
 THE education question has had a front place on 
 the national programme for some years now, but 
 it is doubtful whether the English people are yet 
 awake to its real significance. We are deep in 
 the politics of the matter. What is called " the 
 religious question " absorbs public attention. And 
 religion here stands for the quarrel of the denomi- 
 nations. When we talk " education " we mean 
 the legislation of recent years. But this phase 
 of the question, important and exciting though it be, 
 is after all merely temporary and incidental. It is 
 only when we are through this debatable land, at 
 its farther side, that we face the real facts of the 
 position. The actual question, beside which all 
 other matters are trivial, is as to the making of 
 England, and the part our schools are to play in the 
 process. That, we repeat, is the aspect of educa- 
 tion to which the nation has yet to be awakened. 
 It is not in the least degree alive to the potentialities 
 hidden in the common school. The religious 
 bodies have of late been much exercised as to the 
 actual influence they are exerting upon the national 
 life. They are in doubt as to whether it increases 
 
 IM
 
 OUR UNORDAINED MINISTRY 193 
 
 or declines. The statistics of church attendance have 
 certainly had no great encouragement to offer. 
 They show a vast and growing population that lies 
 outside their reach. 
 
 But side by side with the church, with its empty 
 seats, stands the school, which is always full. Here 
 is a teaching institution, the church, shall we say, 
 of the young, which knows of no dissenters and 
 practically of no absentees. It is the one moral 
 instructor left us which can back its appeal with 
 authority. There was a time when the Church 
 had this power. Buckle, amongst others, has given 
 us a vivid picture of Presbyterian ascendency in 
 earlier Scottish days, when non-attendance at 
 service without adequate reason was visited with 
 heavy penalties. But the Church to-day, of what- 
 ever name, in Scotland as elsewhere, has lost its 
 coercive power. Its only claim on the multitude 
 is by the attractions it offers. 
 
 But the school, as moral and spiritual guide, has 
 other present-day advantages over the church. 
 Its congregation, vast with the vastness of the entire 
 juvenile population, and subject to no vicissitudes, 
 to no ebb and flow of popularity, is a congregation 
 meeting not for one day in the week only, but 
 almost every day. Here is an influence which, 
 instead of obtruding itself once a week, as does the 
 church, into a whirlpool of other and often conflict- 
 ing forces, occupies for a term of years practically 
 the whole mind of the pupil. More than that. The 
 school possesses this unlimited sway at the time 
 when of all others the soul is most impressionable, 
 the most retentive, the most plastic to the hand 
 
 13
 
 194 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 that forms it. Nothing holds us like the early 
 memories. They have the supreme advantage of 
 being the first in the field. The old man, who 
 forgets all else of his life, remembers the things of 
 his boyhood. The mind becomes afterwards a 
 palimpsest on which a thousand other characters 
 are imprinted. But the school teacher has the 
 first use of the parchment. 
 
 This, then, is the situation. The England of the 
 future is being mentally and morally born in the 
 common school. Here its shape and size are being 
 given to it. According to what our school is the 
 nation will be. Are we clear yet as to what our 
 school is and ought to be ? Have we taken the 
 correct measure of this -stupendous instrument ? 
 Have we inquired as to the kind of work it should 
 be set to ? Have we properly estimated the 
 position and responsibilities of that vast army of 
 teachers of both sexes who are its directing forces ? 
 Are they in their turn awake to the real magnitude 
 of their calling ? Do they know themselves as, 
 though unordained, the greatest ministry which 
 England to-day possesses ? It may be well, in 
 the light of questions of this sort, to probe the position 
 a little more closely. 
 
 We have spoken of the common school as the 
 children's church, of the teachers as an unordained 
 ministry. But this, it will be said, is just bringing 
 us back into our present squabbles. Instead of 
 keeping outside the debatable ground it plumps 
 us into the very middle of it. It is the religious 
 question over again. Yes, truly, we answer, a reli- 
 gious question, but not that of the old contro-
 
 OUR UNORDAINED MINISTRY 195 
 
 versies. The present need, as we conceive it, is 
 for a view of the school and its functions which 
 shall at one and the same time stay the religious 
 quarrel and recreate the nation. A recent book 
 which has created much attention, has been pub- 
 lished under the title, " Bushido ; or, the Soul of 
 Japan." The point now is whether there be not 
 such a thing as " the soul of England," and whether 
 that soul cannot be made the inspiration and the 
 governing power of our school life. 
 
 In the work just mentioned we are told how certain 
 ideas, sentiments and traditions, handed down 
 from generation to generation, and wrought into 
 the very fibre of the people, have made Japan 
 what it is. In that exposition we have the key 
 to the secret of effective education. It is first and 
 last an affair of soul. Amid the clash of our present 
 controversies there is a thing on which all honest 
 men are agreed, and it is that the one prime asset 
 of a man and of a people is character ; the one 
 problem is how to produce it. The school that 
 cannot get this as a result, whatever else it can 
 offer, is a failure. You may teach handwriting 
 and equip a forger ; you may have a chemistry class 
 and turn out expert poisoners and bomb-throwers. 
 " Clever men," said Huxley, " are as common as 
 blackberries ; the rare thing is to find a good one." 
 
 But how are we going to get character, virtue, 
 our " good man," out of the school ? Plato, in more 
 than one place, elaborates the thesis that virtue 
 cannot be taught. And assuredly you cannot 
 teach it as you teach arithmetic. And you cannot 
 get it, though masses of men are not yet convinced
 
 196 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCED 
 
 of this, by teaching theological dogmas. Of all the 
 experiments for putting a soul into the new gener- 
 ation, that of compelling it to parrot off abstruse 
 metaphysical propositions to which the boy and 
 girl mind brings neither the remotest comprehen- 
 sion nor the slightest sympathy, is at once the most 
 dismal and the most stupid. Moreover, the now 
 proved impossibility of bringing the rival denomi- 
 nations to any agreement in dogmatic teaching 
 bars the way to any further experiments of this 
 kind in the common schools. We have to face 
 the problem of securing the one prime asset of 
 character, of getting into the body and brain of our 
 youth the highest soul of the nation, apart from the 
 catechisms of warring Churches. 
 
 Is there a way ? For answer we have only to 
 question the human experience. And, fortunately, 
 we have for this purpose such an array of evidence 
 as never before has been open to the inquirer. 
 We have a world-history which goes back for 
 thousands of years ; we have documects, books 
 and monuments which lay bare the secret of all 
 the religions. And from them we can with some 
 certainty deduct the way in which virtue has been 
 acquired. We learn that if it cannot be taught 
 it can be caught as a contagion is caught. Inside 
 of every religion has been a soul, and it is this 
 soul whose secret essence has penetrated the human 
 heart and stirred it to goodness. This soul of the 
 religions offers nothing to fight against ; it is not a 
 dogma to be combated, but an atmosphere to be 
 breathed. It has dwelt in different degrees in all 
 the nations and all the faiths. We are learning
 
 OUR UNORDAINED MINISTRY 197 
 
 now the varying expressions which it took amongst 
 the peoples. Even the definitions are wonderfully 
 alike ; but we discover that the spirit was always 
 greater than the definition. Listen to some of 
 its voices. The religion of Zoroaster, according to 
 Beausobre, consisted in " purity of faith, in sincerity 
 and honesty of speech, and in the justice and holiness 
 of actions." In China, Lao-Tse gives as his great 
 principle : "To the good I would be good. To 
 the not good I would also be good, in order to 
 make them good." In Greece, we know the insis- 
 tence with which Socrates taught that it was in- 
 finitely better to suffer injustice than to do it. In 
 India, the Buddhist King Asoka defined religion 
 as " the least possible evil, much good, piety, 
 charity, veracity, and also purity of life." 
 
 In England the moral driving power for long 
 generations has been Christianity. But the power 
 here has not been the theological formula, but the 
 soul which the Gospel contained and the person- 
 alities in which it lived. A man may oppose 
 its formulated doctrine of the Trinity, or of the 
 Eucharist, but no man opposes its fountains of 
 tenderness, its spirit of philanthropy, its passion 
 for purity, its aspiration for the perfect. The best 
 men in every age have seen that its reality lay here. 
 Zwingli says so in his declaration that " faith does 
 not depend on the discussions of men, but has its 
 seat and rests itself invincibly in the soul." Pascal 
 from his side finds the same thing ; the perfect faith, 
 he holds, is God felt in the heart (Dieu sensible au 
 cceur). And Froude expresses the mind of our 
 time in his plea to " have done with theological
 
 198 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 refinements. There is an excuse for the Fathers 
 because the heretics forced them to define particular 
 points. But every definition is a misfortune. . . . 
 Inquire if you will, but do not define. Then we 
 shall have no more quarrels, and religion will take 
 hold on life." 
 
 Now it is this undefined soul of Christianity, as 
 exhibited in its love, its purity, its fidelity to duty, 
 its reverence and aspiration for the highest, by 
 whose means the schools, without hurting any 
 man's conscience, may be made the regenerators 
 of England. This soul, to find its way into the 
 new generation, must be incarnated in the teachers 
 who instruct it. Religion is to be, not on their 
 lips as a dogma, but in their hearts as a life. It 
 should be found in the school not as a babble 
 of catechisms but as the ceaseless intake of an 
 atmosphere. At work in our schools we need not 
 merely the drill of the daily lesson, but also a con- 
 tagion of goodness. It was a conviction of Cobden's 
 that good examples are more influential than bad 
 ones. And nowhere does a good example tell so 
 mightily as upon the soul of a child. Here are 
 your true hero-worshippers. At such an age the 
 simple passing of a good man, a stray word from him, 
 may leave an indelible impression. When Welling- 
 ton was a boy, Wesley, who was of the same family, 
 gave him a Bible, the " Imitation," and a book by 
 Jeremy Taylor. The Iron Duke continued to read 
 these to the end of his life. 
 
 The whole bearing of this argument narrows 
 then to one point the teacher. The tens of 
 thousands of our English men and women who
 
 OUR UNORDAINED MINISTRY 199 
 
 have given themselves to the work of the common 
 school, are, we believe, amongst the worthiest of 
 the land. We shall not offend them however, we 
 trust, when we say that great masses of them 
 have scarcely risen yet to the full height of their 
 vocation. They have not realised how great 
 their office, how vast the trust reposed in them 
 by the nation. The worst is that the nation itself 
 does not realise it, and so belittles their work. But 
 that must end. Carlyle, in a memorable passage, 
 gives his view of the transcendent value to the 
 State of the true schoolmaster. Scotland has been 
 made by its schools, and England can be. Far be it 
 from us to underrate the power of the Churches, 
 and of whatever other moral forces are at work in 
 our midst. But we repeat the destinies of England 
 lie in our schools. We shall be on the way to the 
 greatest things when our teachers, " our unordained 
 ministry " by study, by self-discipline, by every 
 physical, mental, and, above all, by every spiritual 
 reinforcement, seek to gain the fullest height of 
 their own soul, that upon those little ones, who are 
 the nation that is to be, they may pour forth the 
 treasure of its secret life.
 
 XXI 
 The Solitaries 
 
 THAT is a suggestive word of Charles Lamb where, 
 in a letter to Coleridge, he speaks of " the silent 
 thoughts arising in a good man's mind in lonely 
 places." For truly it is life's " lonely places " 
 that have been among our chief formers and teachers. 
 It is the men who have loved solitude and under- 
 stood it the true solitaries who have been the 
 mediators to humanity of its most precious things. 
 Nature, one might think, had taken this into special 
 account in fitting up the earth for our dwelh'ng- 
 place. She has made provision for the solitaries. 
 The race grows with amazing rapidity, and we talk of 
 our overcrowded world. But there are silent spots 
 in it yet, and will always be. And how immense 
 is their attraction ! ^The great mountains draw us 
 partly because, in their aloofness and upward point- 
 ing aspiration, they are the image of our own 
 souO Do our readers know that view of Mont 
 Blanc from Sallenches ? We have gazed upon it 
 time and again with an indescribable fascination ; 
 and always with those words of Michelet in mind : 
 " From a close view-point one sees it in all its 
 loftiness, alone, an immense white monk, buried 
 
 200
 
 THE SOLITARIES 201 
 
 in its cloak and hood of ice, dead, and yet standing 
 erect. . . . Mont Blanc leads nowhere ; it is 
 a hermit apparently, wrapped up in its solitary 
 musings." 
 
 The sense of solitude, so far as Nature can give it, 
 reaches its highest point at night among the moun- 
 tains. The present writer will never forget the 
 sensations of a moonlight ride through a lonely 
 valley in Norway. Beyond the rock wall that enclosed 
 us we caught glimpses of interminable wastes of 
 ice and snow, gleaming high up there in the cold 
 rays of the moon. The imagination flew into the far 
 recesses of these inaccessible heights, and drank its 
 fill of their awful silence. We seemed to feel here 
 
 The wind that shrills all night 
 
 In a waste land where no man comes, 
 
 Or hath come since the making of the world. 
 
 But these far retreats of mountain and of wilder- 
 ness are not the only silent places of the world. 
 It is not on glacier or snowfield merely that life 
 offers us the sense of solitude. Men and women 
 who never stirred from home have tasted the full 
 flavour of it. It is a part of the human education 
 that none of us misses. But it requires a special 
 taste to appreciate it. To some the training is 
 entirely irksome. Pascal is perhaps right in his 
 remark that " there are so few persons capable of 
 enduring solitude." Certainly he is in that other 
 word : " The man who lives only for himself hates 
 nothing so much as being alone with himself." 
 But a countryman of his, a century before, had had 
 an education in this line of which he knew the
 
 202 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 value. How admirable is that chapter of Montaigne 
 on solitude ! Florio, in his quaint translation, 
 gives us the pith of the old Gascon : " We should 
 reserve a storehouse for ourselves, altogether ours 
 and wholly free, wherein we may hoard up and 
 establish our true liberty and principal retreat of 
 solitariness, wherein we must go alone to our- 
 selves, there to meditate, discourse and laugh as 
 without wife, children, and goods, or train of 
 servants ; that if, by any occasion they be lost, 
 it seem not strange to us to pass it over. We have 
 a mind moving and turning on itself ; it may keep 
 itself company. In solis sis tibi turbo, locis." (In 
 lonely places be to thyself the crowd.) The old 
 essayist was evidently of the mind of Scipio Africanus, 
 of whom Plutarch records that " he was never 
 less alone than when he was alone." 
 
 There are all kinds of solitaries good, bad, 
 and indifferent, and that in the degree in which 
 they have learned their lesson. But the lesson, as 
 we have said, is thrust upon us all. It is marvellous, 
 considering how naturally gregarious, social, chatter- 
 ing a being the average human is, to note the 
 extent to which he is a solitary. Observe our 
 race as a whole. ^Humanity is surely the loneliest 
 thing in the universe. Shut off by its height from 
 the lower animals, it looks upward and outward 
 for companions and finds none. There is no inter- 
 stellar communication. If the shining orbs yonder 
 have inhabitants they have, so far, had no speech 
 with us. The silence of the heavens has been in all 
 ages man's baffling mystery. Lucretius made it the 
 argument of his scepticism. Our own day has been
 
 THE SOLITARIES 203 
 
 weighted with the same thought. One poet, in 
 two pregnant lines, suggests the entire modern 
 query : 
 
 When the sky which noticed all makes no disclosure, 
 And the earth keeps up her terrible composure ! 
 
 Another finds here his doubt of Providence : 
 
 Rather some random throw 
 
 Of heedless Nature's die, 
 'Twould seem that from so low 
 
 Hath lifted man so high. 
 Through untold aeons vast 
 
 She let him lurk and cower ; 
 'Twould seem he climbed at last, 
 
 In mere fortuitous hour, 
 Chilci of a thousand chances 'neath the indinerent sky. 
 
 There is, indeed, nothing more striking in modern 
 thought than this sense of this human loneliness, of 
 our apparent isolation in the universe. It has 
 obsessed all classes of thinkers, who have expressed 
 the feeling in their several ways. Lamennais, a 
 solitary if ever there was one, speaks of man as the 
 most suffering of creatures, because torn asunder 
 between two worlds. Taine, sceptic and hopeless, 
 bemoans humanity " dragging its incurable hurt 
 along the roads which Time opens to it." Schopen- 
 hauer, destroyer that he is, is yet sure that the 
 mystery has some deep solution behind it. "If 
 this existence were the ultimate goal of the world 
 it would be the most senseless ever contrived, 
 whether it were ourselves or any other who fixed 
 it." 
 
 But this apparent isolation of the race as such,
 
 204 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 so baffling to the human intellect, so trying to its 
 faith, does not complete the statement of our 
 solitude. { On the life journey there come to us 
 varieties of it, each with a flavour of its own. We 
 doubt if there is ever a keener sense of it than 
 some children have. The world is so much stranger 
 to them than to us, its unknown so much more 
 terrifying. The agonies endured by voiceless little 
 souls left in the dark form indeed one of the tragedies 
 of unwritten history. Lamb's statement of his own 
 terrors is, we are sure, not overdrawn. " And from 
 his little midnight pillow this nurse-child of optimism 
 will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in 
 sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned 
 murderer are tranquillity." And who, but those 
 who have experienced it, can sound the depths 
 of desolation opened in the heart of the timid 
 schoolboy, who, away for the first time in his 
 life from home, awakes in the night to know 
 himself alone in a stranger world ! It is a different 
 species of solitariness which awaits us at life's 
 farther end. The sensation of age is that of a 
 world which becomes ever fuller in itself and yet 
 ever emptier for us. There are more faces in 
 the street, but " the old familiar faces," where 
 are they ? Steadily that front rank thins, and 
 we ourselves, who aforetime gazed upon it from 
 behind, pushed now into the vacant place, have 
 nothing henceforth to look at but empty space 
 and the coming end. 
 
 But before that stage is reached there await 
 many of us special solitudes of the spirit, painful, 
 pleasurable, never explainable to our fellows,
 
 THE SOLITARIES 205 
 
 but always, we discern, fruitful in their results 
 upon life. The great minds, the leading spirits, 
 are by the law of their nature solitaries. To ascend 
 is to put a distance between ourselves and the crowd. 
 Summits are cold, lonely places. The penalty of 
 greatness is to be out of touch with the non-great 
 humanity's larger half. And the isolation is at 
 times terrible. " I felt for her," said Tennyson 
 once of the Queen, " all alone on that height. It 
 is dreadful." 
 
 f 
 
 The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain 
 For the reed which grows nevermore again 
 As a reed with the reeds in the river. 
 
 Then, beyond the loneliness of genius, the loneliness 
 of high station, is that of the elect spirits to whom 
 has been committed some high fate of doing or 
 suffering. The path to Calvary has never wanted for 
 its Man of Sorrows. The mid-night shadows of 
 Gethsemane have, in every age, fallen upon some 
 soul bowed there, heavy with the weight of a world. 
 What an example of this, of a Gethsemane of 
 lonely suffering, have we in John Knox's account of 
 his beloved Wishart, when close to his martyrdom ! 
 " He passed forth into a yard a little before day. 
 When he had gone up and down in an alley for 
 some time, with many sobs and deep groans he 
 fell upon his knees, and remaining thus his groans 
 increased. From his knees he fell upon his face, and 
 then the persons forenamed heard weeping and an 
 indistinct sound as it were of prayers. Afterwards 
 questioned about this, he said, ' I tell you I am 
 assured that my travail is near an end. Therefore
 
 206 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 call to God with me, that now I shrink not when 
 the battle waxes most hot.' ' 
 
 In the human race as a whole, in its separate 
 stages of life, in- the experiences of elect and suffer- 
 ing souls, and, as if sympathising with all this, in the 
 very configuration of our globe itself, we are, then, 
 met at every point with this mystery of solitude, 
 as an essential part of life. What is its meaning ? 
 Is it by chance that it happens so, or is there a 
 purpose here ? Are we really alone when we seem 
 so ? These are the questions. And it is precisely 
 when we study the action of solitude upon the indivi- 
 dual soul that we obtain there a glimpse into what 
 man's solitude in the universe really means. He is 
 left to himself that he may grow. It is precisely in this 
 condition that he does grow,- Gregory of Nazianzen 
 realised that, when he " retired into himself, deem- 
 ing quiet the only safety of the soul." Wordsworth 
 realised it, " retired in the sanctuary of his own 
 heart, hallowing the Sabbath of his own thoughts." 
 It is thus indeed that all his great thoughts, all 
 his revelations, have come to man. And so his very 
 isolation is evidence that he is guided. His guide 
 keeps out of sight, remains a Deus absconditus, 
 but not the less surely does He open up and indicate 
 the road. 
 
 We have, then, to comprehend and to accustom 
 ourselves to the Cosmic habit. It is not enough for 
 us 
 
 To bear 
 Without resentment the Divine reserve. 
 
 We have to understand it and to achieve in our- 
 selves all that it designs for us. It is studies such as
 
 THE SOLITARIES 207 
 
 these, of the mere facts of life, that show us faith 
 in the New Testament sense of it, as the only 
 rational solution of our riddle. Our isolation is an 
 insulation. We are shut off from visible signs 
 that there may develop in us the sense and certitude 
 of the invisible Reality.
 
 The Broadening of Life 
 
 THE moralist and the religious teacher of our 
 time, as they study the problems the world offers 
 to their thought, are met at every turn by a new 
 difficulty. It is the difficulty arising from the grow- 
 ing complexity of life. Their fathers, in both 
 their thinking and their acting, moved within 
 definitely-drawn boundary lines. The lines limited 
 the view.Jbut in other respects were very con- 
 venient. LTo know exactly the right and wrong 
 of everything ; what to accept and what to avoid ; 
 to have a formula for every circumstance, a text 
 for each^contingency all this wonderfully simplified 
 matters./ Let anyone read the sermons and religious 
 treatises of a generation ago, with then 1 clear-cut 
 distinctions between the Church and the world, 
 between the sacred and the profane, between godli- 
 ness and secularity, and compare all this with the 
 mental attitude of to-day, and he will understand 
 what we mean./ For to-day the boundaries are 
 'down, and the community, intoxicated with a 
 sense of freedom and of a new country to be ex- 
 plored, is wandering at large, in imminent danger 
 of getting lost. 
 
 206
 
 THE BROADENING OF LIFE 209 
 
 An urgent need of the hour is of some fresh de- 
 finitions which shall include all the new know- 
 ledge, and correctly relate it to the business of 
 living. And in no direction is such a reconstruction 
 needed more than in the conceptions of " broad " 
 and " narrow," in religion and life. Both as to the 
 principlesThvolved here and as to their applications 
 one sees a strange confusion of thinking which 
 is reacting disastrously on both communities and 
 individuals. <People are making the greatest mis- 
 takes, both about breadth and narrowness . v > They 
 praise or blame the one and the other without any 
 proper reason. It is time we saw the real signifi- 
 cance of these terms, and the part they fill in the 
 economy of life. 
 
 To begin with, let us be sure of our ground when 
 we condemn, as we are apt to do, the " narrowness " 
 of our neighbour. We talk continually of 
 " narrow " views in religion or in conduct. There 
 are such, undoubtedly, of which we may speak 
 presently ; but what we have first to learn on this 
 question is that narrowness is not in itself neces- 
 sarily an evil. If it were, be sure we should not 
 find it so continually and so deeply wrought into 
 the innermost processes of living. " Here," the 
 observer is compelled to say, after running up 
 against a thousand instances, " here assuredly is 
 nature herself, and she is always wiser than we 
 are." Nature, we find, is narrow as well as broad; 
 and her narrowness is as needful as her breadth. 
 In order to get her results she is perpetually limiting 
 things, shutting them behind her barriers. She 
 wraps her seed up close till its time comes to unfold. 
 
 14
 
 210 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 She is continually purchasing intensity at the cost 
 of expansion. If our electric force is to deliver 
 itself, undiminished, at yonder far extremity, 
 we have to insulate it. There must be no talk of 
 itrgadth herer We cannot have it both ways. 
 When we come to human life we see nature working 
 ,on the same lines. The genius of a given nation has 
 been nursed by a process of shutting off. The 
 variety which gives the world half its charm has 
 been reached by what we may call a cellular arrange- 
 ment, in which, safe from outside interference, 
 the separate result has been worked out. 
 
 Yet, with this said, and its truth fully taken into 
 account, we find on interrogation that nature, 
 using thus her tools of narrowness, works inces- 
 santly towards breadth as a result. Beginning at 
 'simple combinations, her tendency is always to 
 a greater complexity. She widens her conception. 
 As we track her up the ascending scale of life, 
 we find in the higher organisms a repetition of the 
 lower, but ever with some subtle twist added. The 
 central directing agency has to take over a larger 
 area of control. The mollusc's simple business 
 of opening and shutting its"snell is succeeded in the 
 mammal by a thousand complicated movements. 
 And as the complexity grows there is accompanying 
 it a constantly enlarged freedom. The limpet sticks 
 to its rock ; the man roams the world at his will. 
 
 When from such studies as these we come to the 
 problems of morals and religion we find a similarity 
 of phenomena which shows us, on a higher plane, 
 the working of the self-same process, under the 
 self -same guidance. Religion, to secure its results
 
 211 
 
 has used, and effectively used, the narrowing in- 
 stincts, and has therein followed strictly the order 
 of nature. It is the order which tells us that certain \ 
 blooms, fit for expansion in May, must not show ] 
 themselves before, on peril of frostbite and de- 
 struction. Nature for some of her work makes use 
 of human ignorance just as much as of human know- . 
 ledge. For a child of months, ignorance is a con- ' 
 dition of health. To fill its brain with a man's 
 intelligence, were that possible, would te to kill; 
 it right off. Precisely the same thing is witnessed V 
 in religious development, both of communities and 
 of individuals. 
 
 Christianity, for instance, would not, humanly 
 speaking, have won its victories and gained its 
 position in the world, apart from the employment 
 at certain periods, of nature's method of narrow- 
 ness. The early Christians concentrated on one 
 side of life. They lost view of some others, but 
 what they gamed thereby, for t/Jiemselves and the 
 future, was worth the sacrifice. \^ certain insulation 
 was required in the making of a martyr./ The feel- 
 ing which led Ignatius, in view of his' approaching 
 doom, to exclaim, /' The wild beasts are the road 
 to God "/or which enabled Thomas Hawker, the 
 Marian martyr, when burned at Canterbury, to 
 raise his hands in the flames as a token to his friends 
 that his soul was at peace, required a special cult 
 which had a certain exclusiveness about it. And 
 the faith of the Church, as a whole, was for a long 
 while of too naive a kind to bear sudden expansions. 
 It followed a true instinct in looking askance at new 
 elements. It was by slow degrees, amid much mis-
 
 212 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 giving, and after hard fighting, that art and litera- 
 ture, and science last of all, found a place in it. 
 As with the community, so with individuals. A 
 convert hi his first rapture asks for nothing beyond 
 what feeds his exalted feeling. Ignatius Loyola 
 tells how, in his early sainthood, he found secular 
 studies almost intolerable. They were the wilder- 
 ness after paradise. There is, too, the story of a 
 
 . Methodist preacher returning an English grammar 
 offered him by a friend with the remark, that " he 
 could find nothing about Christ in it " ! 
 
 v And all this, we repeat, is, for a certain stage of 
 development, entirely natural, and because natural, 
 wholesome. Remember, too, it is not religion only 
 that has followed this route. All the special ex- 
 periences, all the expert knowledge by which the 
 world is enriched, have been reached in the same 
 way. Every specialist is a disciple of the narrow./ 
 When Sir Joshua Reynolds, asked how long it 
 had taken him to paint a certain picture, replied, 
 " All my life," he was a witness to this doctrine. 
 The curious materialism of the scientists of the 
 Victorian era a materialism now breaking down 
 at all points was the narrowing effect of that de- 
 votion to the purely physical aspect of things 
 which secured them such signal gains in that de- 
 partment, but at the price of colour blindness to 
 another, even more important. 
 
 But nature, so slow, so careful, so conservative 
 in her operations, yet never stands still. The 
 
 r May-time comes, and then her blooms, hitherto so 
 carefully shut up from the wintry blast, must unclose 
 and dare the open. In humanity as a whole,
 
 THE BROADENING OF LIFE 213 
 
 and in the development of the individual mind in 
 particular, a point is at length reached when the 
 simpler form has to blend with the new elements. 
 Its life is to be enriched by a new complexity. 
 The soul discovers in itself an irresistible instinct 
 to prove all things, to know life in its fulness, in its 
 wholeness. In Professor Royce's phrase, we begin 
 to " look for the whole of ourselves." Outside the 
 circle of the creeds life spreads before us in its 
 wonder and its mystery, and we say with Fra 
 Lippo Lippi : 
 
 This world's no blot for us, 
 Nor blank ; it means intensely and means good ; 
 To find its meaning is my meat and drink. 
 
 It is when we have reached this point of growth 
 that we are faced with a question which may be 
 said to constitute the peculiar problem of our day. 
 It is that of combining the wider interest with the 
 older fervour. We_ cannot escape this, for it is 
 part of the inevitable movement of things.^ A press- 
 ing form of this difficulty to-day, which we touch 
 here both for its own sake and as an illustration 
 of the general theme, is the question of the Church 
 in relation to amusements. If we correctly appre- 
 hend the doctrine that has here been set forth, there 
 should be room for a settlement of this matter, 
 without the bitterness and heartburning which 
 some sections of the Church just now are exhibiting. 
 
 What is the position ? Some Christian commu- 
 nities are for extending their operations overTnew 
 areas of interest. The people, they find, want 
 relaxation and amusement " a natural want," they
 
 214 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 say ; " why should we not help to provide it ? 
 Why should provision for this side of life be left 
 entirely in the hands of the irreligious, who ex- 
 ploit it purely for their own gain, not scrupling to 
 pander to the lowest passions, not recking of the 
 ruin of men ? slf billiards is a good exercise, 
 why not provide a billiard-table ? If the drama 
 has supplied the noblest extant literature in the 
 world, why should there not be room for a drama 
 in the Christian conception of life ? J 
 
 To all which comes a reply, and from men of 
 whose worth and absolute sincerity there can be no 
 question. " No," say they; " this thing has been 
 tried and found wanting. To tamper with these 
 things means a direct loss of spirituality to the 
 Church. Your cannot have your billiard-tables 
 and the Holy Spirit. You must choose between 
 one and the other. They are not compatible." 
 
 The dilemma here stated is to-day a jberribly 
 serious one to many earnest souls. But if we have 
 correctly stated the doctrine of this question there 
 should be no difficulty about its solution. It is all 
 a matter of the stage of development. ^If individuals 
 or if Churches are at the level where the new com- 
 plexity is proved harmful, they are better without 
 it, and are right in rejecting it. The flowers must 
 not appear in March that are meant for May. 
 Let each man, each community, judge of their 
 own condition, of what is safe for their highest 
 interests, and act accordingly. With the conserva- 
 tive attitude here we have all sympathy, realising 
 with Goethe that < everything which frees our 
 spirit without giving us the mastery over ourselves
 
 THE BROADENING OF LIFE 215 
 
 is ' pernicious." Till a thing can be safely done 
 it were better not done. Not the less certain is it, 
 however, that in the spiritual development of 
 humanity the point will be reached when these 
 diverse elements will be included. They will be 
 included in the consciousness of the spiritual 
 man because they are included in the 
 consciousness of God. And that stage has 
 already been reached by many souls. ^^They 
 have learned the spiritual life as at once an 
 unfathomed depth, and as an illimitable breadth/ 
 They pass from one phase to another without loss, 
 but with a conscious enrichment. And the point 
 they have attained will be attained in the end by 
 all. To the common humanity will come at last 
 the experience and the conviction which Browning 
 has expressed for us : 
 
 You've seen the world, 
 
 The beauty and the wonder and the power, 
 The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades, 
 Changes, surprises and God made it all !
 
 XXIII 
 Politics and Religion 
 
 WHAT is the true relation between religion and 
 politics ? Is religion necessarily political ? Or is it, 
 in the highest view, non-political ? Or can it be 
 non-committal ? Or, looking from the other side, 
 can politics, with any consistency or success, steer 
 clear of the religious question ? Can the principles 
 and the personalities represented by the two sides 
 run on parallel lines without touching ? 
 
 These questions, be it noted, stand for opinions 
 which have been actually held. There are, for 
 instance, excellent people in England who would 
 regard an interference in politics as compromising 
 their Christian character. " Let the potsherds 
 of the earth strive with the potsherds of the earth " 
 was the reply made to an acquaintance of the 
 writer when soliciting the vote of a devout religion- 
 ist. And it is curious in this connection to note 
 that the Anglican, whose Church is as to its external 
 position an essentially political institution, which 
 owes its status to an Act of Parliament, whose 
 chief officers are chosen by the Government and sit 
 in the Legislature, is of all others the person to 
 endorse \n certain directions the exclusive view of 
 
 216
 
 POLITICS AND RELIGION 
 
 our devotee . Our good Churchman, who owes every- 
 thing to politics, cannot endure politics in his 
 Dissenting neighbour. The " religious Noncon- 
 formist " may be tolerated, but the " political 
 Nonconformist " is anathema. There are other 
 anomalies both of opinion and of feeling on this 
 subject, which show how confused is the issue in 
 the general mind, and how important it is we should 
 get some clear thinking and some plain conclusions 
 in regard to it. 
 
 As a start towards these conclusions, it may 
 be well to glance at the history of the question. In 
 the early world there was hardly any difference 
 upon it. Everything then was tribal, and the new 
 point introduced by individualism had not arisen. 
 Politics and religion were one, because the primitive 
 politics relied always upon a supernatural sanction. 
 The early Judaic constitution, as the Bible shows 
 us, was a theocracy, with a legislation promulgated as 
 from heaven. But Moses was not the only law- 
 giver who appealed in this way to the unseen. His 
 method was, in fact, a commonplace amongst the 
 statesmen of his time. Thus, we have the Egyptians 
 referring their code to the God Thoth ; Minos in 
 Crete receives his from Jupiter, Lycurgus in Sparta 
 is inspired by Apollo, Zoroaster in Persia by 
 Ahura Mazda, Numa Pompilius in Rome by the 
 nymph Egeria. . And as with the laws so with the 
 other forms of the national life. Religion was a 
 department and a function of the State. Our 
 question as to politics and religion was, we say, not 
 even in view. 
 
 We reach it, however, and in its acutest phase,
 
 218 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 when we come upon the history and the principles 
 of Christianity. Was Jesus a politican ? In one sense, 
 we may say the vulgar sense, assuredly He was 
 not. He refuses the argument of force. He 
 knows nothing of lobbying, of the bribe, of " the 
 pull." " My Kingdom is not of this world," is 
 one of His most decisive sentences. The masterly 
 reply to the question of tribute to Caesar, the refusal 
 to head a popular movement when the opportunity 
 offered, as well as the whole tenor of His teaching, 
 are the commentary upon that utterance. And 
 yet, with reverence be it said, Jesus was the politician 
 of His time. He was so in the sense in which 
 i Socrates, centuries before, declared he was the only 
 politician in Athens, and that, because his object 
 was to improve the State by improving the souls of 
 the citizens. And it is that newer sense of the 
 human solidarity, by which we realise the essential 
 oneness of life, the intimate and inevitable relation 
 of each part to all the rest, that enables us to-day 
 to see this so clearly. Jesus, the eternal type of 
 the spiritual man, has shown us for all time that 
 religion is in the high sense necessarily political, 
 and for the reason that, as a reality, it permeates 
 every feature and aspect both of the individual 
 and the communal life. Without aiming at what 
 are called political results it achieves these on the 
 greatest scale. Thus is it that the prophet is 
 always a founder or a reformer of the State. 
 
 It is worth remembering here that this was 
 precisely the view which those shrewd worldlings, 
 the heads of the Jewish State, took of Jesus and His 
 work. Whoever else failed to recognise it, they
 
 219 
 
 saw, with the clearness of self-interest, the political 
 aspect of the matter. To them Christ was the 
 most dangerous of revolutionaries. They would 
 have accepted Camille Desmoulins' definition of 
 Him as " le sansculotte J^sus." Annas and Caiaphas 
 had no illusion on this subject. The teaching of the 
 Galilaean, whatever else it meant, meant political 
 death to them. It was an indictment of their 
 methods which blood alone could avenge. And 
 so they crucified Him. 
 
 We have here, then, a political action which from 
 beginning to end was purely ethical and spiritual. 
 But it would be easy to mistake the inference 
 this carries. The whole of Christianity is not 
 contained in its beginning. The first believers, the 
 early missionaries of the Cross, had not the entire 
 problem before them as their successors had. It 
 is one thing to start a new spiritual movement in a 
 country, leaving the whole business of administra- 
 tion to its existing holders. The situation is 
 changed when the movement has reached the top, and 
 is felt and accepted by the administrators them- 
 selves. In the one case you can be entirely spiritual ; 
 you are, in fact, shut up to that. In the other you 
 have not the souls of men only, but the whole 
 national and communal problem before you ; with 
 the question : " How is the new religion to worls 
 upon that ? " And the history for long and troubled 
 centuries is one of experiment after experiment 
 in getting this question answered. 
 
 The beginning was when Constantine, master of 
 the Roman world in 315 A.D., made Christianity 
 the religion of the State. The faith which hitherto
 
 220 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 had worked from the bottom upwards was now to 
 work from the top downwards. Politics were to 
 become religious, and religion political in a new 
 way a bad way. For in both it meant the employ- 
 ment of force in a sphere where force is absurdly 
 out of place. Emperors, by their civil authority, 
 dictated to Church Councils what was to be pro- 
 claimed as the true belief. As though the mind's 
 belief can be compelled by anything that is not 
 mental ! Augustine, following in this vicious track, 
 found in the Scriptural admonition " compel them 
 to come in " an argument for persecution as an aid 
 to conversion. For ages kings and priests were 
 allied in this conception of things. They both 
 believed in force as the supreme religious agent ; 
 their only quarrel, and it was a fierce one, was as 
 to which should wield it. Charlemagne, when he 
 conquered the Saxons, offered them the choice of 
 baptism or the sword, and made them believers 
 on those terms. But he dictated to the clergy, 
 from the Pope downwards, as to their position 
 and duties. On the other hand, as early as the 
 fifth century, we have Pope Gelasius declaring 
 the spiritual power superior to kings ; a doctrine 
 which Hildebrand and Innocent III. at a later 
 day carried to so supreme a height. 
 
 Early Protestantism had no clearer ideas on this 
 subject than its rival. The Protestant Churches 
 were, for the main part, frankly political. Lecky 
 does not scruple to say that Anglicanism was 
 " created in the first instance by a Court intrigue." 
 Zwingli's ideas of a Christian State were avowedly 
 Erastian. Calvin gave Geneva a constitution in
 
 POLITICS AND^RELIGION 221 
 
 which the spirituality ruled by political force. He 
 had no scruples about persecution. He exhorted 
 the Protector Somerset in England " to punish 
 well by the sword heretics and fanatic gospellers." 
 Knox fought for a similar system in Scotland, 
 and advocated the execution of Gardiner and other 
 Romanists. Lutheranism had the same story. The 
 religious peace of Augsberg in 1555, with its principle 
 of " Cujus regio, ejus religio," in which Protestantism 
 received from Charles V. a legal status, made a 
 man's religion an affair of the country he lived in. 
 The careful student of history has, in fact, to 
 admit that the Reformation in England and Scot- 
 land and, on the Continent, in Denmark, Sweden 
 and Norway, and some of the German States, 
 in so far as it was carried into effect by the govern- 
 ing classes, was on their part more a scheme of 
 plunder, of appropriation of the Church lands, than 
 a religious movement. 
 
 This view of the relation of religion to politics, 
 the view, that is, of making religion a department of 
 the State, has in all the modern countries where 
 it has been tried produced two curious results. 
 One is the creation amongst the educated classes 
 of a philosophic indifferentism, such as that of 
 Montaigne in France, and Shaftesbury and Lord 
 Melbourne in England, a view which regards religion 
 as merely a useful instrument of government, 
 and, on the other hand, of a Nonconformity which 
 has been always a reaction from the State formalism 
 towards a deeper and more genuine spiritual life. 
 Nonconformity seems in religion the Hegelian 
 opposite which is necessary to complete its idea.
 
 222 ; RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 Protestantism was the Nonconformity of the six- 
 teenth century, a Nonconformity which, be it re- 
 membered, produced not simply the moral reform- 
 ation of the Protestant States, but the vast counter- 
 Reformation in the Roman Church which transformed 
 and renewed it. The Nonconformity of England 
 has had the same twofold result. Not only has its 
 influence been felt as an incalculable moral force 
 among the classes it has directly influenced, but it 
 has acted with a scarcely less intensity upon the 
 Establishment to which it is a rival. Some 
 of the best influences at work to-day in Angli- 
 canism, as well as some of its most potent 
 personalities, are easily traceable to Nonconformist 
 sources. 
 
 We have not yet reached the final solution of 
 the problem of religion and politics. The best 
 minds are clear about the negative issues. They 
 see that in the sphere of conviction force is no 
 remedy. To apply force to compel belief is not 
 only cruel, it is ridiculous. Force may produce 
 fear, may compel submission, but never belief, 
 which is an affair purely of the mind's answer to 
 evidence. But the positive side of this relation is, 
 we say, still in a formative stage, and that because 
 our notion both of religion and politics is also 
 in that stage. What we are reaching towards is a 
 position in which all politics will be religion. But in 
 a new sense. For in this later, and, we may say, final 
 view, politics will be regarded as the form in which 
 the common human life is to express itself ; while 
 religion will be accepted as the inner spiritual 
 force by which that life is developed, purified, and
 
 POLITICS AND RELIGION 223 
 
 lifted to its highest term. But these two things 
 are one one as inner and outer, as the convex 
 and concave of a circle, as the body and soul 
 which make the one personality. In this sense, 
 to be truly religious is to be truly political, and to 
 be truly political is to be truly religious.
 
 XXIV 
 A Study of Backgrounds 
 
 IN the summer, months English people, on travel 
 bent, often leave their home scenery in search of 
 backgrounds. For foregrounds and middle dis- 
 tances our own island is incomparable. From end 
 to end it is a dream of pastoral beauty. Its land- 
 scapes are such as a Cuyp, a Claude Lorraine 
 dreamed in their most inspired hours. But the 
 view has nowhere the gigantic backing of Alp 
 or Apennine. There are effects which the snow 
 mountains alone can offer. If any one wants their 
 spiritual interpretation let him read or reread the 
 first volume of " The Stones of Venice." Yes, the 
 Alps for background. We shall ourselves not 
 easily forget one moment when, on a hot summer 
 day, toiling up the St. Nicholas valley it was before 
 Zermatt knew its railway we turned a sharp 
 corner, and had for the first time our vision filled 
 by the gigantic Matterhorn, " the cock that crows 
 over Europe," to use Michelet's term, its solid rock- 
 mass cleaving the very heavens. 
 
 But there are other backgrounds than those 
 of Alpine scenery, the study of which, we perceive, 
 may carry us much further than Zermatt or the 
 
 224
 
 A STUDY OF BACKGROUNDS 225 
 
 Matterhorn. It is startling to note how the great ) 
 human interests, life's raptures and despairs, its/ 
 problems and mysteries, its charms, fascinations^ 
 retributions, are all matters of background. \ Every- 
 where the story is of the thing in front of us, and 
 the thing behind it. It is, indeed, hi the perpetual 
 comparison and contrast between these two that 
 we pass our existence ; that, in fact, we have our 
 existence, and know ourselves alive. Our world- 
 consciousness is a consciousness of opposites. We 
 could not imagine a " self " apart from a " not self," 
 an upper apart from an under, this colour apart from 
 those different ones. Our notion of good relies 
 on a background of not good. There could be no 
 sense of superiority did not the world oblige us 
 with the indispensable inferior. 
 
 We note, also, how the interest of life is in pro- 
 portion to the sharp collision and contrast of these 
 opposites. In a Beethoven sonata we have the 
 climax of effect when, from the crashing thunders 
 beneath, some celestial melody leaps out and sings 
 itself in the clear heavens. All the arts, indeed, 
 are constructed upon this law. There are painters 
 who have lived on contrasts. A typical Rem- 
 brandt is, in its colour effect, like a flash upon a 
 thundercloud. Millais, in his " Princes in the 
 Tower," makes the whole picture, with its shadowy 
 forms and outlines, into a background for those few 
 inches of illuminated space in the centre where the 
 pale faces of the doomed lads look out upon us with 
 such pathetic, tragic intensity. The great orators 
 build also on this foundation. A born speaker 
 will not strive all the time for brilliancy. He knows 
 
 15
 
 226 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 the human heart better. He can afford to be dry 
 on occasion ; to quietly accumulate his facts, to 
 plod through his argument. The experienced lis- 
 tener knows what is afoot. The artist is here 
 preparing his background, out of which, in vivid 
 and magnificent contrast, will by-and-by leap the 
 lightnings. 
 
 Nature, we have said, produces her main effects 
 this way. She works by contrast. \Some of our 
 most exquisite joys are struck straight out of pain. ' 
 So much is this so that, built as we now are, a 
 world of perpetual comfort and luxury would be 
 one deprived of half its zest. The joy of a holiday 
 is one-half background the reaction from hard 
 work and fatigue. The fresh air of the mountain 
 is doubly sweet because of the taste of city smoke 
 which lingers with us. And thus the mere idler 
 never has a holiday. The essential ingredients are 
 wanting. " I pity you," wrote Lamb to his friend 
 Bernard Barton, " for overwork ; but I assure you no 
 work is worse. The mind preys on itself, the most 
 unwholesome food." And what would life be 
 without its background of danger and hardship ? 
 All the good stories are of pain and difficulty vic- 
 toriously won through. .Perhaps the most delicious of 
 all sensations are those of escapes, of deliverances. 
 When a poor man becomes prosperous he tastes 
 a sensation which the languid air of riches cannot 
 purchase. Have our readers ever known what it 
 is to reach port after wildest tossing and expected 
 shipwreck ? There are certain sensations which have 
 to be earned. There is no broad road to them. The 
 way is through a strait gate of peril and endurance.
 
 A STUDY OF BACKGROUNDS 227 
 
 It is by a curious and terrible perversion of the 
 human mind that this law of contrast, of the back- 
 ground, has been used "io obtain pleasure by the 
 spectacle of others' suffering and misfortune^ It 
 is to us difficult to conceive that men in any stage 
 of civilisation should find their enjoyment en- 
 hanced by a background of misery. t But man, 
 through whole periods of his history, has exhibited 
 this instinct. The Roman triumph required the ( 
 manacled, humiliated captives in the conqueror's 
 train. The feudal chief derived gratification from 
 the thought that beneath the banqueting-hall 
 where he feasted were dungeons and torture- 
 chambers in which his prisoners languished and 
 suffered. Men, Christian men, carried this savagery . 
 into theology and made heaven into a kind of 
 feudal castle, with its arrangement of cells and 
 oubliettes beneath. Thomas Aquinas writes with 
 entire complacency that " the blessed in heaven 
 will behold the tortures of the damned, that their 
 own beatitude may thereby be increased." And 
 what a passage is that in which Tertullian, in the 
 " De Spectaculis," allows his fiery Punic blood to 
 exult over the coming fate, in hell, of the pagan 
 world ! " What theme excites my admiration ? 
 What my derision ? Which sight gives me joy ? 
 . . . I shall have a better opportunity then of 
 hearing the tragedians, louder voiced in their own 
 calamity ; of viewing the play-actors, much more 
 * dissolute ' in the dissolving flame ; of looking upon 
 the charioteer all glowing in his chariot of fire ; 
 of witnessing the wrestlers, not in their gymnasia, 
 but tossing in the fiery billows." This, of course,
 
 228 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 is not Christianity, but African savagery. One 
 might, in fact, study Christian theology, in its 
 progress through the ages, simply to note its separate 
 stages, the struggle of the original brute nature 
 in the theologian, with the actual mind of Christ. 
 
 Another curious form of mental background 
 reveals itself in the history of certain movements. 
 One notes, for instance, how the success of a reli- 
 gious leader and his cause depends not merely on 
 the qualities of the leader, or on the goodness of his 
 work, but to an equal degree apparently on a certain 
 background of circumstance. The odd thing is 
 that these circumstances are continually being 
 deprecated by the worker as the very evil against 
 which he is striving. The mission of a Luther, of a 
 Wesley, obtains its immense vogue from the lack 
 of anything similar at the time. The previous 
 absence of what they bring is the hunger which 
 gives savour to the meal they supply. Were the 
 thing they brought already there, our reformers 
 had been superfluous and their career a fiasco. 
 A famous Congregationalist preacher of the last 
 generation, John Graham of Sydney, tells the 
 story of a religious meeting he held in the bush. 
 Notice had been given of it, and the hardy diggers 
 and shepherds had flocked to the rendezvous from 
 far and wide. Numbers of them had not been at a 
 service for years. The preacher, who knew how 
 to put the great truths in homeliest fashion, was 
 enormously successful, and one can see why. He 
 was playing upon a great hunger. All the memories 
 of childhood, all the unsatisfied aspirations of 
 solitary after-years, all the deep undercurrents of
 
 A STUDY OF BACKGROUNDS 229 
 
 religious feeling rose in the rough bosoms of the 
 listeners, and flowed into one mighty stream of 
 passionate emotion. They would not let the 
 preacher stop, and the meeting went on till near 
 midnight. Would it have been thus with an 
 audience full fed with regular ministration ? The 
 singular reflection is forced upon us that the very 
 want and spiritual indigence with the evangelist is 
 so accustomed to deplore is in reality his own best 
 ally. It is the indispensable background of his 
 work. 
 
 In these instances the background is, we see, 
 in a lack, an emptiness, a hunger. More often, 
 however, it is something positive. Philosophers 
 have speculated somewhat cynically on the physical 
 concomitants of moral actions. Burke, for in- 
 stance, argues that a time of general mortality 
 induces a special outburst of wickedness. " It 
 was so in the great plague of Athens. It was so in 
 the plague of London in 1 665. It appears in soldiers, 
 sailors, &c. Whoever would contrive to render 
 the life of man much shorter than it is, would, 
 I am satisfied, find the surest recipe for increasing 
 the wickedness of our nature." Renan has the 
 same idea in his " Abbesse de Jouarre." In another 
 direction Taine has argued for climate as at the 
 back of our insular morality. " It was impossible 
 for the Saxons to go in for pleasure in their detest- 
 able climate, and so they went in for morality, 
 which they are likely to get in that kind of atmo- 
 sphere." We accept none of these data. They are a 
 philosophy pour rire. Not the less does it remain 
 that at the back of men's actions, at the back of
 
 230 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 their characters, lie incalculable elements, un- 
 reckoned by their fellows, unknown even to them- 
 selves, but which work on them with irresistible 
 power, and the remembrance of which should 
 make us chary indeed of judgment. 
 
 The background of men's doings, we say, is, 
 for one thing, the universe ; and until we have 
 reached its inner secret we are in no condition 
 for oracular pronouncement about them. But 
 there is another background ourselves. The 
 quality of my work to-day is an affair of 
 all_niy yesterdays. And it is not only the 
 quality, it is also the present effect of our 
 work that rests on this background. When a man 
 seeks to influence his fellows, it is his past that 
 empowers or nullifies his word. " What you are," 
 says Emerson, " stands over you and thunders 
 go that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary." 
 Goodness, urges Quintillian, is the first qualifica- 
 tion of the orator. It assuredly is of the Christian 
 orator. Ophelia gives us the secret of innumerable 
 pulpit failures : 
 
 Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, 
 Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, 
 Whilst like a puffd and reckless libertine, 
 Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads 
 And recks not his own rede. 
 
 Man, it seems, cannot in any direction get on 
 without his background. He must lean upon a 
 power behind him. His own past, if it has been re- 
 putable, is a constant and invaluable reinforcement. 
 But it is not enough. The great issues demand 
 more from us than either our past or present can
 
 A STUDY OF BACKGROUNDS 231 
 
 furnish. The heroes have always known this. 
 William the Silent, when told his cause was hope- 
 less, replied : " When I took in hand to defend 
 these oppressed Christians, I made an alliance with 
 the mightiest of all Potentates the God of Hosts 
 who is able to save us if He choose." There is, 
 indeed, no background like that. When a man 
 has his back against this wall of defence, he is not 
 to be put down. 
 
 We began by depreciating the English back- 
 ground. But often, as we have looked at it, we 
 have felt that the slight is undeserved. For beyond 
 the horizon line have we not at all times the in- 
 finite sky, and what background is comparable to 
 that ? And human life, when we lift our eyes from its 
 pettinesses, has ever the sublimest of backgrounds. 
 When we look up we must cease to be trivial. 
 Dr. Johnson had engraved on his watch the motto 
 Nu yap epxerai " For the night cometh." It is 
 the thought that lies at the bottom of every serious 
 mind. For such the scene is the symbol of a vaster 
 unseen ; and time but the foreground of eternity.
 
 XXV 
 Concerning Births 
 
 MAN, poet and mystic that he is, in all his literatures 
 has spoken of the new year as a birth. He will 
 persist in projecting the mystery of his own life 
 upon the outside world, and in associating its 
 fortunes with his own. Thus, the year, prosaic 
 enough as a mere annual swing of the planet round 
 the sun, is figured by him as at the beginning an 
 infant of days, passing thence to its youth of spring, 
 its lusty vigour of the summer, its decline in autumn, 
 its old age and death in winter. And in thus 
 associating himself with his world, endowing it 
 with his own fates, man follows a true instinct. 
 For the world, too, is alive with his own life. The 
 last word of the old Hindoo philosophy, " Thou art 
 that," had reality in it. What travellers are we 
 and our world through time and space ! We belong 
 both of us to infinity and eternity. How busy 
 our universe is ! What traffic through its boun- 
 daries ! Not only are we spinning round the sun, 
 but tlje_ solar motion of which we partake has carried 
 those of us who are fifty years old some two thou- 
 sand millions of miles from the spot where we first 
 saw the light. But let us get to our question of
 
 CONCERNING BIRTHS 233 
 
 births. The first of all births, the birth of the 
 universe, was the first miracle and the greatest. 
 Science to-day is puzzling over the absolute con- 
 tradiction of an endless variety arising out of what, 
 according to its own hypothesis, must at the begin- 
 ning have been a perfectly homogeneous substance. 
 Here indeed was a begetting before the worlds. 
 
 Not less wondrous is the thought of our own 
 birth, our coming to be what we are on this planet. 
 Think of the chain of births by which we hang ! 
 Here are we in the twentieth century, but for the 
 other end of the chain we grope through countless 
 millienniums of dim, warring populations without 
 a history, until we are back at that Pithecanthropus 
 or erect man-ape found in the Pliocene, probably 
 a quarter of a million years old ; and still on to the 
 man-like apes of the Miocene period another half- 
 million years further back ! We safeguard our births 
 to-day with all manner of moralities, but our life's 
 continuity was maintained through vast periods 
 which knew no morality save Nature's. We are 
 here to-day, with all we have and hope for, because 
 these myriad savage generations, without a single 
 failure, amid all the gusty blasts of that early world, 
 kept aloft the torch of life and handed its mystic 
 flame, brightly burning, to their successors. 
 
 Birth is the greatest thing in the world. Here 
 is a force for change, for movement, against which 
 no human thought-structure, however venerable, 
 however authoritative, can hold out. A new 
 universe, says Richter, is created every time a 
 child is born. That is a double-sided truth. Our 
 universe comes with us. So far as we are concerned
 
 234 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 it began when we did. But the truth here is not 
 only one of perception. It is one also of creation. 
 The new-comer never leaves the world as he found 
 it. Here is the power that makes all new. The 
 babe is the oldest, the most authoritative of us all. 
 It brings the latest news of the world's secret. It 
 is to start where we leave off, and we are at its 
 mercy. A hoary theology may have uttered its 
 last word ; have published decrees backed with 
 ecclesiastical thunders and the authority of a 
 thousand years. It breathes the word infallibility. 
 Roma locuta est ; res finita est. In vain. The 
 scheme might answer if the same men lived on for 
 ever. But it is birth that kills these pretensions. 
 There comes into this sphere a fresh mind and soul, 
 a fresh generation of souls, that finds in itself a 
 sense, a perception of things, that nothing of the 
 old system answers to ; these souls have, in fact, 
 brought with them a new atmosphere, through 
 which they read history and the universe in their 
 own manner. And so the infallibilities go, or 
 reconstruct themselves. Birth is thus the pledge 
 of eternal movement, of an endless inner progression. 
 Nothing is more ludicrous, ore might say indecent, 
 than the jealousy of the old against the young. 
 Utterly useless are these exclamations of our 
 venerables at the audacity of their successors. It 
 is they, if they only saw it, who are the pre- 
 sumptuous, for their anger is a revolt against the 
 universal order ; it is a proclamation that their worn- 
 out mind, and not that of the Eternal from whom 
 all the generations come, should speak the final 
 word.
 
 CONCERNING BIRTHS 235 
 
 Nothing is more mysterious than birth. For 
 ages philosophers have been trying to construct 
 a science and an art of it ; they have speculated 
 on the true eugenic laws and sought to elaborate 
 them into State enactments. Plato's ideal Re- 
 public is made to rest for its prosperity on a proper 
 regulation of births. The idea is that as we can 
 so enormously modify and improve animal races 
 by such means, so the true human progress must 
 be along this road. And that there is a vast truth 
 here to be explored and applied is becoming in- 
 creasingly clear to thoughtful minds. All that 
 relates to birth needs to be investigated with the 
 exactitude of modern science, for it is in this realm, 
 as hi no other, that are hid the secrets of human 
 well-being. And yet how baffling are the facts ! 
 We talk of heredity, but how few great fathers 
 have had great sons ! How often, on the contrary, 
 is the son a mocker of the father's character! 
 Marcus Aurelius is succeeded by a Commodus ; 
 at the dawn of the Middle Ages Clovis in the West 
 and Heraclitus in the East, doughty warriors them- 
 selves, are each followed by a long line of incom- 
 petents ; Cromwell is succeeded by the weakling 
 Richard. 
 
 On the other hand, the men of supreme vigour 
 and capacity spring from the strangest origins. 
 Justinian was the child of a Slavonian peasant. 
 Luther said of himself, " I am a peasant's son ; my 
 father, grandfather and ancestors were peasants." 
 D'Alembert was an enfant trouve exposed on a door- 
 step. Indeed, one might go on without end with 
 examples. When we have made all our investiga-
 
 236 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 tions we are as far as ever from answering the ques- 
 tion, " What is the origin of genius ? " To investi- 
 gate family history here is to bewilder rather than 
 to inform. We find four or five children born of 
 the same father and mother, brought up under 
 the same roof, with the same environment, with the 
 same teaching. The parents are nothing in par- 
 ticular. What was there in Shakespeare's parents, 
 or Bunyan's ? The other children are nothing in 
 particular. Whence, then, has this one of them, 
 who fills the world with his name, derived his gifts ? 
 It would seem as though the heredity here, if there be 
 any at all, were linked to another sphere and system 
 of things, than to a physical and earthly succession. 
 Assuredly, the question of noble birth is not 
 settled by a reference to Debrett. As Schiller puts 
 it : " The question is not ' art thou in the nobility ? ' 
 but, ' is there nobility in thee ? ' If it comes 
 to a comparison of social stations, a man of ability 
 and character may, on the whole, congratulate 
 himself if he begins low down. There is so much 
 more to conquer ; so vastly interesting an ascent, 
 and such invaluable lessons and treasures to be 
 picked up on the road. Mr. Carnegie, who knows 
 by experience both poverty and wealth, said recently, 
 after speaking of millionaire's sons, of whom he 
 seems to have a very poor opinion, that " the young 
 man who has poverty for a starting-point, has a 
 vastly better chance of a wholesome and happy 
 life." The " accident of birth," a phrase so often 
 used of our titular aristocracy, is apt to be followed 
 by so many other " accidents " which are not 
 happy ones.
 
 CONCERNING BIRTHS 237 
 
 Nature has a wider birth-system than that of 
 the individual. She has her birthdays of nations, 
 of institutions, of religions. It is wonderful to 
 watch here her labour and her bringing forth. The 
 law on this larger field is, we find, the same as with 
 the individual. The newly born takes the material 
 of its system from what it finds already there, 
 but always adds something of its own. When the 
 Western Empire fell finally in 476 under the stroke 
 of Odoacer there was a travail of three turbulent 
 centuries before the new order of the European 
 kingdoms rose to a coherent individuality and life. 
 This new was full of the old, but all transformed 
 and made over again. Imperial Rome had passed 
 away, but in these fresh lusty nations its laws, its 
 language, its institutions found a subtle renewal. 
 Thus does the past eternally partner itself with 
 the future ; thus, through all her mighty schemes, 
 does Nature hint her resurrection secret, whispering 
 in our ear that death is never final. 
 
 A strange feature in this larger birth-history is 
 that of the seeming false births that century after 
 century have mocked human hopes. Man has 
 continually imagined his Paradise to be nearer 
 than it was. His eye travels so much farther 
 and faster than his feet. His City of God gleams 
 before him in vision, ready to be entered on at once ; 
 he grasps his staff for the forward move, to find the 
 splendour vanished. How pathetic, in the light 
 of the world's after-history, those exultant lines of 
 Lucan in his " Pharsalia," in which he predicts the 
 reign of universal peace and brotherly love ! How 
 fair seemed the prospect for religious liberty, when
 
 238 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCED 
 
 Henry IV. of France, with Bodin and Pasquier as 
 his literary backers, proclaimed toleration as the 
 only policy for Church and State, and offered the 
 Edict of Nantes as his pledge of sincerity ! What 
 visions of the perfect social State have floated before 
 the eyes of men from Plato to Charles Fourier ! 
 The history since seems so disappointing, and yet 
 these prophets were neither deceivers nor deceived. 
 They were simply before the time. The perfect State, 
 the perfect Church, the perfect brotherhood are 
 not yet. 'Their gestation is long because their 
 quality is so high'. But the world will see them in 
 then* time. . 
 
 There is a yet higher birth than any we have so 
 far spoken of. It is that given us in the words of 
 the Fourth Gospel : " That which is born of the 
 flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit 
 is spirit." In his highest realm man finds a birth 
 system, less clearly marked, perhaps, than lower 
 down, but with evidence enough of its reality. The 
 doctrine of the physicist, that life comes only from 
 life, has here also a perfect confirmation. Paul, in 
 that great rencontre on the way to Damascus ; 
 Augustine, hearing the " tolle, lege " in the Milan 
 garden ; Wesley, at the Aldersgate meeting in 
 1738, " finding his heart strangely warmed," with 
 all that followed in their lives, are witnesses, standing 
 amidst countless similar ones, to a fact of the 
 higher psychology, without which human history 
 can never be explained. The " new birth," as 
 these and others have experienced it, is the fruit 
 of an alliance between man and the " something 
 more," as Professor James puts it, which he finds
 
 CONCERNING BIRTHS 239 
 
 in his universe. It is the conscious union of the 
 individual with that greater Self which is the spiritual 
 ground of humanity, that " Eternal Word " of 
 whom, as Justin Martyr puts it, " every race of 
 man are partakers." And it is this mystic Divine 
 fellowship, this birth from above, which, in its turn, 
 gives us the assurance of yet another birth in our 
 life story ; when the materials we have gathered in 
 our earthly career, dissolved by death, shall re- 
 emerge to a higher form and a diviner service in 
 the realm beyond.
 
 XXVI 
 Public Meeting Religion 
 
 THE question may be asked whether the public 
 meeting, as an organ of expression and as a power 
 in affairs, is not, amongst the cultivated classes 
 at least, losing its hold. Men begin to realise 
 more acutely than beforetime the disabilities of 
 the thing. In a meeting they are so much less 
 free than at their club or their fireside. They cannot 
 smoke ; they cannot talk ; they cannot move 
 about. The man on the platform is probably a 
 bore, and they are unable to extinguish him. They 
 cannot throw him away as they do their newspaper 
 when they have had enough. They must listen 
 as long as he speaks. And the average speaker, 
 even if not a bore, has probably less of value 
 to say on his subject than the book we can pick 
 up and lay down at our will. There is a constant 
 growth in the modern mind of the sense of inde- 
 pendence, and more and more men prefer to get 
 their information in the way that least interferes 
 with it. 
 
 The public meeting will, however, last our time 
 and that of many a generation to come. It has 
 had much to do with the making of history, and 
 
 240
 
 PUBLIC MEETING HELlGIOtt 24i 
 
 will have much more ; and in itself as a function it is 
 amazingly interesting. There is a psychology of 
 assemblies which offers all manner of problems. 
 As we study the demeanour of a crowd we find our- 
 selves in contact with subtle laws of life, with newly- 
 evolved powers of which we are at present largely 
 ignorant, but which, we may be sure, will occupy 
 the science of the future. We see, for instance, 
 here, how, in certain directions, a whole is some- 
 thing quite different from the sum of its parts. 
 You could not at all reckon the quality of a meeting 
 its feeling, its probable action from examining 
 the separate qualities of the individuals composing 
 it. This fusion has produced a new entity with a 
 force and character of its own. We are learning 
 to-day something of the mysterious magnetisms 
 which sweep through the earth from equator to 
 pole. There is a still mightier magnetic evolution 
 in the coming together of the thousand life-centres 
 of which a great audience is composed. Shall we 
 ever be able to measure the range, or catch the 
 full effect of the vibrations then set up in the 
 invisible ethers that surround us ? 
 
 Observe, too, the miracle that is wrought in 
 this business of public speech. That out of throat, 
 vocal chords, tongue, teeth, lips, we can produce at 
 will, with unvarying accuracy, these myriad sounds; 
 announce them as the translation of our subtlest 
 thought and feeling ; and that these air waves, 
 vibrating at inconceivable velocities, should be 
 caught on the tympanum of our neighbour, and 
 be translated back in his brain once more to the 
 invisibles of his thought and feeling, is assuredly 
 
 16
 
 242 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 wonderful enough. But that is not all. A public 
 meeting repeats before our eyes the wonder of the 
 five thousand, fed from one tiny store, which does 
 not diminish in the process. The one speech 
 spreads itself over the entire assembly. Each 
 member of it takes the whole ; yet his absorption 
 of that whole diminishes no whit the portion of 
 his neighbour. Here, surely, is a mystery of 
 " the many and the one " greater than those 
 expounded of Parmenides ! On the other hand, to 
 the psychological whole furnished by an assembly 
 every separate member, though he utters no 
 word, contributes an appreciable part. If we 
 had proper instruments for inner measurement we 
 should be able to register the exact effect which 
 each member of an audience produces on the 
 speakers, and on the psychological entity of the 
 entire gathering. Another department for our 
 instruments would be the progress of inner move- 
 ment in the assembly the gradual fusion that 
 takes place under the influence of genuine oratory 
 by which the separate souls, as it were, melt into 
 one and become a kind of huge common conscious- 
 ness which laughs, sorrows, exults together. 
 
 This fusion, in its entirety, is rarely accom- 
 plished. A cultivated speaker, with a difficult 
 theme, and delivering himself, we will say, with 
 the cool, average English utterance, will at one 
 and the same time be making a thousand different 
 speeches to the thousand auditors before him. 
 Each man will interpret the speaker's words accord- 
 ing to his standpoint, according to the level of 
 his culture and comprehension. It is amongst
 
 PUBLIC MEETING RELIGION 243 
 
 the more emotional races, which produce] at once 
 the genuine orators and the ideal audiences, that 
 the full magnetic possibilities of speech are realised. 
 The result here is not so much opinion as feeling. 
 The effect, indeed, is largely that of music. The 
 oration is a chant. The sentences group them- 
 selves in a rhythmic combination. We have 
 listened to French and to Welsh orators who have 
 in this way stirred the soul precisely as great 
 music stirs it. The words we listen to are creat- 
 ing their effect not by the ideas or facts they 
 impart ; they seem, in both the speaker's soul 
 and our own, to be but the foam on the surface 
 of a deep hurrying flood of emotion, that bears 
 both him and ourselves away in its mighty move- 
 ment. 
 
 When we come to estimate the meeting as a 
 factor in public life, we find an accurate and dis- 
 criminating judgment to be a difficult business. 
 Good and evil are so closely mingled in the part 
 it has played. Froude had a theory that eloquence 
 was a public bane, and that orators were never to 
 be trusted. He divided men into talkers and 
 doers, to the immense disparagement of the 
 former. But the distinction is baseless. There 
 are speeches that are mighty deeds. Caesar was as 
 potent with pen and tongue as with the sword. 
 Athanasius, Augustine, St. Francis, Luther, Pitt, 
 are names of giants who hewed fresh channels 
 for the human stream to run in, and did it as 
 much by speech as by act. We have to remember 
 here Plato's distinction, in the Gorgias, of the 
 two kinds of rhetoric one which is mere flattery
 
 244 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 and declamation, ' the other which is noble 
 and aims at the training and improvement of 
 the souls of the citizens." The Greeks, indeed, 
 had full experience of the good and evil of the 
 public meeting. The government of the republics 
 was largely a government of rhetoric. The art of 
 speech took first place in a liberal education ; 
 for in a democracy it was felt that in the faculty of 
 stirring the multitude lay the surest way to power. 
 A Pericles, a Demosthenes held sway by eloquence. 
 Not the less did the wisest minds discern the peril 
 here. We remember Plato's famous comparison 
 of the populace to a huge, passionate animal, 
 and his declaration that the skill of the governor 
 consists in gaining his ends by flattering its humours. 
 It was this aspect of the matter that, doubtless, 
 led him later to speak of democracy as ' : the worst 
 of lawful governments." 
 
 The public meeting as a factor in affairs has, 
 perhaps, nowhere shown a more mixed record 
 than in the story of religion. In some departments 
 of it the influence one must confess, has been of the 
 most sinister kind. And nowhere more notably 
 than in the elucidation of religious truth ; in the 
 region, that is to say, of dogmatic theology. The 
 idea of discovering and authoritatively declaring 
 truths by means of public meetings would be 
 scouted as in the highest degree absurd by the 
 modern scientist ; yet it is precisely in this way 
 that the Church creeds, which undertake to settle 
 for us the profoundest questions of human life, 
 reached their affirmations. When we try to think 
 of a Newton or of a Darwin proposing to themselves
 
 PUBLIC MEETING RELIGION 245 
 
 to accept, in their separate departments, the resolu- 
 tions of a heated assembly as the proper way of 
 deciding on the planetary motion, or the descent of 
 man, we begin to understand the difference between 
 the fourth century and our own on the criteria of 
 truth. And yet it is on the results of the fourth- 
 century methods that the Church still professes 
 to found its doctrine ! And what public meetings 
 these Church assemblies were ! We think of the 
 second Council of Ephesus, " the robber synod," 
 where, amid wildest uproar, the Patriarch of Con- 
 stantinople was trampled to death. We remember 
 how the Council which gave us the Nicene Creed 
 acted under the orders of an Emperor ; while a 
 later Council, under the dictation of his successor, 
 fastened on the Church a directly opposite affirma- 
 tion. At the Council of Trent it was the persuasive 
 eloquence of the Jesuit Lainez that carried the 
 assembly on point after point of doctrinal dispute. 
 To the modern mind the search after truth is an 
 affair of the ripest intellects, to be carried on year 
 after year in silence, by constant, patient experi- 
 ment and slow deduction. In theology we see 
 truth, or what passes for it, declared to the world 
 on the authority of public gatherings, torn by fiercest 
 passions, swayed by facile oratory, or coerced 
 and dictated to by a tyrant Emperor. That the 
 Church has survived such processes and such nursing 
 fathers is surely the best evidence of the innate, 
 immortal vigour at its heart. 
 
 But the influence of the public meeting in religion 
 has not been all of this kind. Misused, it has 
 often enough helped the enslavement of the human
 
 246 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 spirit. Into her hands it has been a mighty instru- 
 ment of liberation. The entire difference between 
 Romanism and Protestantism, one might say, 
 is exhibited in their use of the public meeting. 
 The one has used it for forging chains, the other 
 for breaking them. There was a humble Baptist 
 meeting in London in the early seventeenth century, 
 of which Masson, in his " Life of Milton," thus 
 writes : " The obscure Baptist congregation seems 
 to have become the depositary for all England of 
 the absolute principle of liberty of conscience. 
 . . . It is, in short, from this little dingy meeting- 
 house somewhere in old London that there flashed 
 out first in England the absolute doctrine of religious 
 liberty." One may compare this with what went on 
 in another obscure meeting-house on the other side 
 of the Atlantic, when Dr. Hopkins, of Newport, 
 Massachusetts, preaching to a congregation whose 
 capital was largely embarked in the slave trade, aj; 
 the peril of his position and livelihood, declared the 
 whole business an unchristian iniquity ; and, so 
 saying, started the movement which finally liberated 
 the slave. 
 
 The fortunes of Protestantism have hitherto 
 been linked largely with those of the public meeting. 
 Its worship, its propaganda, have been through the 
 popular assembly. Its force has been largely in 
 speech, in preaching, in the enthusiasm, the emotion 
 of the crowd. It was thus that Luther, Zwingli, 
 Calvin fought for the Reformation. It was among 
 their gathered crowds that Wesley and Whitefield 
 sowed the seeds of the evangelical revival. It is 
 amid thejglow of impassioned oratory that the
 
 PUBLIC MEETING RELIGION 247 
 
 religious leaders of to-day stir the multitude to 
 repentance and reformation, and the Church to 
 higher ideals of service. 
 
 It may be, as we hinted at the beginning, that 
 with the growth of knowledge, and with a better 
 organised science of living, the fortunes of the public 
 meeting may undergo a change. In religion, for 
 instance, it is possible that to the Catholic era of 
 symbol and ceremony, and to the Protestant era of 
 speech and argument, there may succeed yet 
 another in which the emphasis will be on organisa- 
 tion and the scientific direction of life. But no 
 social development, we may be satisfied, can render 
 obsolete the divine passion of common worship, 
 or stay that marvellous evolution of the higher 
 powers when, under the magic touch of the inspired 
 speaker, a thousand souls melt into one. Indeed, 
 in the common consciousness, shared at such times 
 by a'myriad ^separate personalities, we have the best 
 suggestion of that Eternal Mind which, living in all 
 the forms of universal being, is yet undividedly 
 One.
 
 XXVII 
 Our Topmost Note 
 
 " HE has not yet reached his topmost note ! " 
 The remark, which was made to the present writer 
 
 >. awhile ago concerning a mutual acquaintance, 
 recurred later as offering matter for contemplation. 
 It brought to mind for one thing the saying of 
 Bunsen concerning Gladstone : " Gladstone is the 
 first man in England as to intellectual power, and 
 he has heard higher tones than anyone else in 
 the land." There is a suggestive variation here 
 in the reference. Gladstone, according to Bunsen, 
 
 t> had heard tones, whereas our topic is the producing 
 of them. Yet the meaning is essentially the same. 
 For a man produces in proportion as he hears. 
 According to the note that falls on our soul, out 
 of the music that sounds in the 'invisible, is our 
 life made. 
 
 And herein we come upon a fundamental difference 
 between man and the things that surround him. 
 We know matter, in all its forms, by its properties. 
 And these properties are always the same. Oxygen 
 never surpasses itself ; it is always oxygen. When we 
 know granite we know its best and worst. We can 
 build it into our wall, or hew it into our statue, 
 
 248
 
 OUR TOPMOST NOTE 249 
 
 sure that it will neither rise above nor drop beneath 
 its level of quality. There are, of course, hidden pos- 
 sibilities in our granite or our oxygen which a deeper 
 intelligence than ours can see into, but our asser- 
 tion about them is good enough for practical purposes. 
 And it points, we say, to the whole difference 
 between these things and ourselves. 
 
 For the certainty, the knownness, the invariability, 
 we predicate of our oxygen is precisely the element 
 that is lacking in ourselves. We may have had 
 our neighbour's acquaintance for forty years ; have 
 studied all his words and acts during that time ; and 
 et b 
 
 _ 
 
 The greatest part of him is hid from you, and 
 perhaps from himself. This is specially true ofi 
 his upper ranges. The mass of us, indeed, fail, in 
 this world, to reach our highest. /The precise! 
 conjuncture of circumstance necessary for that 
 does not arrive. And so our topmost^ notejs never 
 struck. In a musical instrument all the parts, 
 all the strings, keys, hammers are there, the same 
 now as yesterday. It has its scale, and goes never 
 beyond it. You can strike its top note any hour 
 of the day and be sure of the response. But the 
 instrument we call " ourselves " is not built that 
 way. The Maker of it has doubtless views about 
 it, but they are only partially disclosed. We have 
 our fingers on the keys, and make out something 
 of a tune. But we are quite ignorant of its ultimate 
 range ; and we have the vaguest knowledge, so 
 far, of the music which it is designed to produce 
 
 What tyros we are in these matters is seen when 
 we contemplate the various views people have as
 
 250 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 to what constitutes life's highest note. There is, 
 of course, a material side about which there is 
 practically no controversy, It is comparatively 
 easy to say when a man is physically strongest, 
 when his bone and muscle are at the top of their 
 condition. Plato, in the Republic, put the elect 
 age of woman as between twenty and forty, and of 
 man as between twenty-five and fifty-five. This, 
 he said, is the period during which they are to pro- 
 duce children to the State. It is a different thing, 
 however, to maintain, as some have done, that the 
 inner life, in its range of sensation and accomplish- 
 ment, corresponds to this adjustment. Froude, 
 when in a pessimistic mood following on the death 
 of his wife, said to Sir George Colley that " the 
 interest of life to a thinking man was exhausted at 
 thirty or thirty-five." But he lived to revise that 
 judgment and to find old age sufficiently pleasant. 
 There is indeed here, despite some notable exceptions, 
 a general consenus of the best minds in favour 
 of Channing's view that " life is a gift which acquires 
 a greater value every day." 
 
 But the point we are now seeking is as to what 
 constitutes -the .. top , note, the supreme height of 
 life. The differences of view, we say, are so curious. 
 It takes all sorts to make a world, and each type 
 has on this question ventilated its theory. A 
 Madame du Chatelet is of opinion that " we have 
 v nothing else to do in the world than to obtain 
 agreeable sensations and sentiments." The idea 
 exactly fitted a society which Sainte Beuve has 
 delineated as from top to bottom incurably frivolous. 
 There are masses of people whose supreme moment
 
 OUR TOPMOST NOTE 251 
 
 is the culmination of a debauch. A City alderman 
 was quoted in our hearing as saying that at a 
 certain age all that was left was the pleasures of 
 the table. We will not stop to characterise that 
 deliverance. Other men have found their rapture 
 in battle Caesar did and Napoleon. That stout 
 old soldier, Marshal Manteuffel, expressed the 
 warrior note in a sentence which all the great 
 fighters would probably have endorsed : " That 
 elevated sentiment of commanding in battle, of 
 knowing that the bullet of the enemy may call you 
 at any moment before God's tribunal, of knowing 
 that the fate of the battle, and consequently the 
 destiny of your country, may depend upon the 
 orders which you give this tension of mind an4 
 of feelings is divinely great." Doubtless it is, 
 and yet one reflects that beneath this top note in 
 the General what undertones there are of un- 
 noted suffering in his men ! Of the great moments 
 of the battlefield we have to say with Horace 
 Walpole : " What is the fame of men compared 
 to their happiness ? How many must be wretched 
 before one can be renowned ! " 
 
 There are people who, as we have seen, place 
 their highest moments in sensation ; others, again 
 in action ; others, from Plotinus to Wordsworth, 
 have found them in contemplation. And there are 
 still other forms yet to be enumerated. But we 
 may stop at this point to observe that men of all 
 conditions, in seeking what they deem their highest, 
 Took always for some kind of reinforcement of their 
 normal self. The reinforcement is noTlilways of 
 the ^best^kind. Enivrez-vous, cries Baudelaire in
 
 252 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 one of his prose poems : and the exhortation, even 
 by some of the cho'cer sp ; rits, has often been 
 only too literally carried out. Ue Quincey reached 
 his thought-paradise through opium, as did Coleridge. 
 Lamb's " Confessions of a ITFunkard " were not, 
 Bias, pure imagination. His friend Crossley declares 
 that " on one evening, when in manner, speech 
 and walk Lamb was obviously under the influence 
 of what he had drunk, he discoursed at length upon 
 Milton with a fulness of knowledge, an eloquence, 
 and a profundity of critical power which left an 
 impression never to be effaced." That was the top 
 note . But heights attained by such .aids have abyse s 
 close by. What it feels like to be in them is given 
 in a letter to Coleridge, where Lamb has reached 
 the bottom. " I have been drinking too much 
 for two days running. I find my moral sense in 
 the last stage of a consumption, and my religion 
 getting faint." We see a glint of impish humour 
 in his eye as he writes the words, but the confession 
 is, nevertheless, a sorry one. This is not the true 
 road to our top, as none knew better than he. 
 
 The drug and stimulant habit is indeed only a 
 perversion of that law of human life which demands 
 " a something beyond ourselves " in order to the 
 realisation of our fullest self. The poet's muse 
 is a psychological reality. Tennyson's friends 
 noticed that at times he fell into a kind of trance 
 in which he seemed sensible of no outward thing. 
 Says De Musset describing his own feelings : " On 
 ne travaille pas ; on ecoute ; c'est comme un inconnu 
 qui voua parle a Voreille." The orator has the 
 same experience. His greatest effects are pro-
 
 OUR TOPMOST NOTE 253 
 
 duced he knows not how. It is as if a divine fury 
 seizes him and carries him and his audience away in 
 the rush of its movement. All the prophets of 
 humanity are inspired, whatever be the form in 
 which they express themselves. Boehme with his seven 
 days' sabbatical ecstasy, Cicero with his " divine 
 afflatus," Socrates with his daimon, Philo and 
 Plotinus with then* vision-trances are all telling 
 us practically the same thing. /They are describing 
 the penetration of the normal mind by the higher 
 consciousness which surrounds us, and which 
 continually makes itself known to the more attuned 
 spirits/ 
 
 Most strange, most interesting, at times most 
 tragically pathetic, is the way in which men reach 
 their topmost note. There are those with whom 
 it is a solitary utterance, never repeated. Sidney 
 Carton finishes his futile career with a divine act of 
 self-renunciation. There have been many Sidney 
 Cartons. The man at the pit-mouth, drunken 
 often and foul-mouthed, who beat his wife yesterday, 
 goes down the reeking shaft after the explosion 
 and lays down his life in the effort to rescue a 
 comrade. Amid all his blasphemies and his brutali- 
 ties, that deed lay possible in him. When we 
 imprison men, when we read over them the denun- 
 ciations of our theology, when we hang them, 
 what we denounce and imprison and hang is indeed 
 a sorry affair enough. But as, in these processes, 
 we operate on our man, something has escaped our 
 touch. In these worst whom we thus handle 
 there was .a divine possibility, higher, mark you, 
 than our own present best. Of these also it has
 
 254 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 to be said, in Milton's great words, " There is 
 surely a piece of Divinity within us, something 
 that was before the elements, and owing no homage 
 to the sun ! " Will not, in the future, the note of 
 society be, with reference to its criminals and 
 failures, not how to punish for their worst, but how 
 to help them to their best ? 
 
 The cosmic process is a puzzling one, but as we 
 trace its long, sinuous course we recognise that its 
 effort is to get from the world, from humanity, the 
 topmost note. Even the brute forces of Nature 
 are working to this end. Says Aquinas, in his deep 
 way : " Things which have no perception can only 
 tend towards an end if directed by a conscious 
 and intelligent being." And surely they are being 
 directed, and " a God orders the march." The 
 suffering of the world has this, amongst other 
 things, for its end. " Is not He who made misery 
 wiser than thou art ? " Oscar Wilde, out of the 
 deeps of his prison experience, wrote this : "If 
 the world has been built of sorrow, it has been 
 built by the hands of love ; because in no other 
 - way could the soul of man, for whom the world 
 was made, reach the full stature of perfection." 
 
 Better men than Oscar Wilde had discovered 
 this truth before him. But each of us has to find 
 it out in his own way. We learn, with the mighty 
 ones before us, that the road to our topmost is 
 not just by exquisite sensations^ but also by toils 
 and sacrifices and endurances. Gautama was at 
 his highest when he renounced all under the Bo 
 tree, Socrates in his discourse before drinking the 
 hemlock, Jesus as He suffered on the Cross. Wonder-
 
 OUR TOPMOST NOTE 255 
 
 ful is it, too, and a thought that might well reconcile 
 us to everything, that the road to the supreme 
 sensations lies this way. /You have not told 
 what martyrs felt in describing the scorch and 
 bite of the flames. There are sensations within 
 sensations. Said Dr. Taylor, when he reached 
 the stake at Hadleigh. " Thanked be God, I 
 am even at home." Indeed, that ours has 
 been, and is, a suffering world is the great- 
 est thing that can be said of it. Had life been 
 plain and simple, a mere swine-trough happiness, 
 it had not been worth the trouble of history. Its 
 significance is in what it has endured. Since i\ 
 has been laid upon humanity in all times to be a 
 cross-bearer ; to have its Gethsemane and its 
 Golgotha, so, as we read, must there have been also 
 reserved for it a resurrection and ascension, an 
 exaltation to God's right hand.
 
 XXVIII 
 The Unpurchasables 
 
 THE world history of late years has offered some 
 singularly impressive examples on the subject of 
 what may be called life's imponderables. Politics 
 and commerce are regions where the lower forces 
 are constantly in evidence, where wealth and 
 material power seem to have undisputed sway. 
 Yet it is just here where the illustrations we refer 
 to have been given ; illustrations which show how 
 matter and force, all-controlling as they seem, are 
 really impotent before a something which is invisible 
 and spiritual. In politics we have had the spectacle 
 of Gejrman relations with France. A generation 
 ago Germany attacked and overwhelmed France 
 with its military forces. The conquest seemed 
 complete. And in one sphere it was. In point 
 of arms, in point of strategy, the Teuton showed 
 supreme. He won all in France except one thing 
 the French soul. And now, after three and a 
 half decades, the truth is dawning on the conqueror 
 that, compared with this imponderable, the milliards, 
 the territory, the military glory are a worthless 
 asset. Germany to-day yearns for a thing she 
 has not. Her best men realise that a nation, 
 
 256'
 
 THE UNPURCHASABLES 257 
 
 like an individual, cannot live healthily without 
 the love and confidence of its neighbours. And 
 love and confidence are neither to be bought nor 
 forced. 
 
 The other example comes from America. Our 
 cousins across the water are suffering just now, 
 like ourselves, from a wave of materialism which 
 is beating with perilous impact upon the country's 
 noblest moral traditions. There is a delirium of 
 display. We read of Lucullus banquets, of fortunes 
 spent on a meal. People meet at receptions not 
 for talk, the healthy interchange of soul with soul, 
 but to exhibit their jewellery. In reading of these 
 affairs the mind runs not on social or mental qualities 
 so much as on the glitter of costume. To describe 
 that one might fall back on Marlowe in his " Jew of 
 Malta," and talk of 
 
 Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, 
 Jacinths, hard topaz, grass green emeralds, 
 Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds. 
 
 Life has become a race as to who shall have the 
 grandest house, the finest yacht, the longest purse. 
 But on the American side of this competition 
 some curious things have happened. In the great 
 insurance scandals that so shocked the public a 
 while ago some well-known names were implicated. 
 Men who had the finest Puritan tradition behind 
 them, whose forbears were scholars and saints, 
 who themselves had earned a reputation for refined 
 and scholarly instincts, stood revealed as having 
 bartered these imponderables for hard cash. They 
 discovered later what an altogether curious asset 
 
 17
 
 258 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 conscience is. You can sell it. Nothing is easier. 
 No stock on the market is more readily moved. 
 But you cannot buy it back. And the tragedy is 
 that the man, once of high aim and purpose, who 
 has disposed of this inner outfit, finds too late 
 that the thing which has passed from him, and that 
 he cannot recall, is the one supreme value he 
 possessed. 
 
 An actual understanding of this truth is the 
 world's clamant need to-day. We want a clear 
 teaching, which shall appeal especially to the 
 business man, as to the position of money in any 
 true scheme of life. We have abundant treatises 
 of political economy, all worthy our best study. 
 But when we have understood the theory of ex- 
 changes, the currency, the laws which regulate 
 the movements of capital, we find ourselves in 
 front of a question bigger than all these. The 
 currency realm is that of the purchasables. But 
 bordering it, and touching at every point, is a 
 realm of unpurchasables. And we, in the most 
 puzzling manner, are related to both,, With money 
 in his pocket, man stands so curiously between 
 animal and spiritual. The beasts do not carry 
 purses ; neither do the angels, so far as we know. 
 " Aut deus, aut bellua " (" Either God or beast "), 
 used to be said of the hermits of the Thebaid. 
 The proverb has more than a local application. 
 In the twentieth century we feel both inside us, 
 and are continually wondering how, in so strange 
 a composition of forces, to find the resultant. 
 Political economy, that teaches so much, will not 
 teach us this. Ricardo and Mill show the laws of
 
 THE UNPURCHASABLES 259 
 
 material wealth, but what we want first and most to 
 know is how these stand to the deeper laws of life. 
 
 Political economy is a young science. The 
 world was singularly slow in grasping the theory of 
 the creation and distribution of wealth ; but it 
 realised very early how the property question 
 was at every point mixed up with the invisible 
 values. Cicero in his remarks on fortune in the 
 *' De Officiis," has a vivid sense of the spiritual 
 side of riches. " Fortune," says he, " should 
 be originally acquired with honesty, without any 
 scandalous or oppressive practices ; it should then 
 be made serviceable to as many as possible, pro- 
 vided they be worthy ; it should next be aug- 
 mented with prudence, by industry and frugality, 
 without serving purposes of pleasure and luxury, 
 rather than of generosity and humanity." Here, 
 we see, is a doctrine of capital saturated in its 
 every part with the moral sentiment. The 
 Roman sage, who borrowed here from the Greeks, 
 his teachers, sees that the money question can 
 only be solved by reference to the anterior life 
 question. 
 
 A kind of delirium tremens on the wealth subject 
 prevails in the world to-day ; otherwise it would 
 be difficult to comprehend how anyone could in 
 such a matter miss his way. The pointers are so 
 numerous and so unmistakable. The millionaire 
 can buy all sorts of things, but never the best. 
 The seventy years of lusty health hid in the ruddy 
 growing lad yonder can moneybags buy that ? 
 He may be blind, and that street-hawker across 
 the way, with two eyes in his head, holds a treasure
 
 260 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 worth more than the other's millions, and which 
 these cannot purchase. Says poet to Dives, " The 
 land is yours, the landscape is mine." Our capitalist 
 may buy books by the ton to fill his brand-new 
 library. They are the world's classics. Does he 
 possess them ? How absurd for him to fumble 
 with his clumsy gold key at the delicate lock which 
 gives admittance to this realm ! The key does not 
 fit at all. The scholar, the kindred spirit to these 
 thought-kings, has the open sesame to their en- 
 chanted kingdom, while the money-spinner, if he 
 be that and nothing else, must stand outside. 
 He can buy his way to the door, and that is as far 
 as his purse carries. 
 
 As long as man is man this must be the rule. The 
 laws here are certain and irrevocable. The imponder- 
 ables are greater than the things which are weighed, 
 measured and bought. The truth asserts itself in 
 all sorts of ways. At a company which comprised 
 duchesses, peers, a whole crowd of the fashionable 
 world, Dr. Johnson was announced. " As soon 
 as he was come," we read, " and had taken a chair, 
 the company began to collect around him, till 
 they became not less than four or five deep, those 
 behind standing and listening over the heads of 
 those that were sitting near him." Thus did 
 wealth and fashion wait on the man of Bolt-court, 
 with his pension of 300 a year. " Pauperemque 
 dives me petit, the rich man seeks me the poor 
 man," cries Horace in his time. The reason in both 
 instances was the same. The Roman and the 
 Englishman had each a life-value which Dives in his 
 inmost soul knew was greater than his own.
 
 THE UNPURCHASABLES 261 
 
 The young people, who are to be the creators 
 of the coming generation, need to make up their 
 minds on these questions. At present they seem 
 all on the side of the ponderables. They will have 
 appearances, at whatever cost. Love, it is voted, 
 is not nearly as good as a thousand a year. On 
 one side we see strenuous, fine young fellows, 
 with capacities in them for the best things. On 
 the other side are our growing Engh'sh girls, who in 
 a right and sane world, should blossom into sweet- 
 est wifehood and motherhood. But our scale of 
 living has gone up. There are the social ambi- 
 tions ! Before the heart's demand, before the 
 soul's plea, before affection, strengthened and 
 refined by mutual sacrifice before these invisibles, 
 which are nevertheless the beauty and glory of 
 human life, the modern code places as primary 
 the mint, anise, cumin of the dresses one must 
 wear, of the scale of one's housekeeping ! So 
 our young man keeps to his unshared bachelor 
 luxuries ; our maiden waits for the offer of wealth ; 
 and the years pass, until they find the best of life, 
 its highest fruitions gone beyond their reach, 
 beyond recall. Traddles, in " David Copperfield," 
 and his bride, " the dearest girl in the world," in 
 the days of their humble but merry housekeeping 
 in the young barrister's chambers, used, as one of 
 their enjoyments to look in at the West End shop- 
 windows, at all the fine things they could not buy, 
 but were so happy without ! They got them after- 
 wards, but what was the later prosperity compared 
 with that first treasure, the treasure of youth, 
 strength, hope and love !
 
 262 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 Wealth can get to the outskirts of life ; it can 
 never reach its centres. It can feed the lower nature 
 and the middle nature, but never the highest. 
 The startling denunciation of riches which we 
 find in the Fathers, in Basil, in Jerome, in Chrysos- 
 tom proceeded from the sense, not only of the injus- 
 tice which so often accompanied their acquirement 
 and use, but of the obstacle their pursuit 
 offered to the highest bliss of the soul. Laurence 
 Oliphant declares that " moral truth cannot 
 be discovered by a bad man." We may add, 
 " Nor can it be discovered by the mere wealth- 
 hunter." That road misses all the finest prospects. 
 The soul must be on another track to catch 
 sight of these. Judaea knew this thousands of 
 years ago ; so did India, and Persia, and Egypt. 
 They knew, as the Bhagavad Gita has it, " the 
 boundless pleasure which is far more worthy 
 of the understanding than that which ariseth 
 from the senses." They knew, as Porphyry puts 
 it, how " to despise what will not be required 
 when we are rid of the body, and to practise that 
 which will be needed when set free from it." Mam- 
 mon can feed only a bit of a man ; can play upon 
 but one string of his vast instrument, a string 
 which soon wears out and loses tone. 
 
 There are men who think they can buy heaven 
 with their money, and so they endow churches and 
 make huge testamentary donations to missions ! 
 It is our queer modern way. It will be almost 
 worth dying to see the kind of inheritance these 
 capitalists have by such means secured for them- 
 selves in the next world. There are certain curren-
 
 THE UNPURCHASABLES 263 
 
 cies such as Turkish paper money which shrink 
 a good deal in the process of exchange. But this 
 shrinkage will be nothing in comparison with the 
 drop in value which awaits some properties at the 
 exchange bureau of death. Some of us, for our dis- 
 cipline and eternal good, will discover then how 
 woefully we have misunderstood the celestial 
 currency. Wo shall have to begin all over again.
 
 XXIX 
 The Mind's Hospitality 
 
 OF the hospitality in which both mind and body 
 are partakers there surely is no more delightful 
 picture than that with which Plato opens the 
 " Symposium." Here are meats and drinks for 
 the appetite, but so much more ! Observe the 
 courtesy, the good-fellowship, the wit and wisdom 
 of the company. Uninvited guests in the person 
 of Socrates and his friend suddenly appear. How 
 cordially they are welcomed ! The treatment of 
 the servants, too, by their master Agathon is so 
 noteworthy. He will not give them orders. He says, 
 " Imagine that you are our hosts, and that I and 
 the company are guests." Has our civilisation pro- 
 duced anything finer than that, in its gracious 
 delicacy of feeling ? And then the banquet, instead 
 of degenerating into an orgy, as was the beautiful 
 way for so many generations in Christendom, be- 
 comes the scene of a discussion which reaches the 
 highest realms of thought. That, surely, is the 
 ideal hospitality a banquet of the soul. But the 
 minds that enjoy such feasts must first themselves 
 have had a long training in the functions of host 
 and guest. Let us look into this a little. 
 
 264
 
 THE MIND'S HOSPITALITY 265 
 
 The mind of an educated man is the most generous 
 host in the world. The gates of the house are open 
 night and day, and the stream of visitors is incessant. 
 They come from far and near, and are of every 
 kind and quality, and they find permanent lodging. 
 Recent investigation has deepened the conviction, 
 early entertained by philosophy, that in its back 
 chambers the soul retains every impression that has 
 been made upon it, and can reproduce it under cer- 
 tain conditions. What our immediate consciousness 
 seems to have forgotten, a deeper part of us has 
 not forgotten. We may quote here the French 
 psychologist, M. Maxwell : " The personal con- 
 sciousness is only a facet of that more general 
 consciousness existing in us, a consciousness where 
 all antecedent experiences are piled up, where 
 all our sensations are registered, be our personal 
 consciousness aware or unaware of them." The 
 mind staggers at the thought of this countless 
 array of its guests, to whose number fresh myriads 
 are added each day, all permanent forces, all active 
 within us, shaping our personality and our destiny ! 
 
 There are some special aspects of our mind's 
 hospitality which need, above all things, to be 
 understood in our day, so vital is their bearing 
 upon character and life. Every man of us, for 
 instance, has to deal with mental guests of the 
 most opposite character, and the question is, 
 What shall be our reception of them ? As illus- 
 tration of what we mean, here are some of the 
 books which the present writer in the course 
 of his ordinary studies has just gone through. 
 The experience is the more suggestive as it is
 
 266 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 entirely ordinary. The list we find includes : 
 " The Autobiography of George Muller, of Bristol," 
 the Address to the Congregational Union of Dr. 
 Forsyth, the two volumes of Dr. Russel Wallace's 
 " Life," and a re-study of Plato's " Republic." The 
 complete list would be much longer, but let us 
 stop at these. In George Muller we have a saintly 
 man, of extraordinary depth of religious experi- 
 ence, the outcome of which was a public work 
 of incomparable usefulness. Mixed with the faith 
 which wrought these wonders there was, we read, 
 with George Muller a profound belief in the full 
 inspiration and inerrancy of every word of the 
 Bible, the book which he studied to the exclusion, 
 in later years, of almost every other. Dr. Forsyth, 
 in a deliverance of remarkable depth and power, 
 advocates a doctrine of Atonement and of grace 
 which Muller would have been delighted to recog- 
 nise, but combines with it a view of the Scriptures 
 which the Bristol saint would have rejected with 
 horror. In Wallace's life we have the story of a 
 man of genius and of intense sincerity, the intimate of 
 Darwin, of Lyell and of Huxley, who is won from 
 a position of scientific agnosticism to one of religious 
 belief by his investigations in spiritualism. And, 
 finally, Plato offered us for the twentieth time his 
 conception of the perfect life, individual and com- 
 munal, a conception which knows nothing of the 
 Scriptures, of the Atonement, of the doctrine of 
 grace. 
 
 What is to be the attitude of the earnest mind, 
 in its contact with these other minds, all equally in 
 earnest ? How shall we save ourselves from utter
 
 THE MIND'S HOSPITALITY 267 
 
 confusion amid the Babel of opposing authorities ? 
 Of course, there is one way which many excellent 
 people have followed and do follow that of simple 
 exclusion. They read and hear nothing from the 
 contrary side. There are religionists who know 
 nothing of science, and scientific men who know 
 nothing of theology. And it will not do to be too 
 impatient with this attitude. A wide and sym- 
 pathetic study of human nature forces more and 
 more upon us the conviction that the power which 
 is moving humanity to its high destinies has de- 
 liberately, in many instances, formed and used 
 the closed mind for some of the best work. We 
 shall never understand history without recognising 
 the mission of illusion. There are men set to see 
 one side of truth, a side big enough in itself to fill 
 their soul, and to produce in them precisely the 
 force requisite to the doing of their own work in 
 the world. It is when we have properly understood 
 this that we shall avoid the narrowness of calling 
 other men narrow. 
 
 But all have not this mission, nor this class of 
 mind. The highest and most difficult task in the 
 education of our race falls to those who see not 
 one side, but all sides; who welcome every guest 
 who brings what he holds to be a truth ; who 
 weigh dispassionately each claim, and give it its 
 due place, and who, in their doctrine of life show 
 how these differing voices in their combination 
 make a vaster and deeper harmony. To reach that 
 standpoint is no easy task. It has meant for some 
 of us to journey through a great and terrible wilder- 
 ness, where at times the fainting soul loses all
 
 268 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 expectation of reaching the promised land. He 
 who has known what it is to find his inherited faith 
 shattered by what seemed an irrefutable opposing 
 argument, will understand what we mean. He 
 knows that inward desolation when the heavenly 
 lights which guided him have gone out, and there 
 is without and within a darkness which may be 
 felt. That staggering experience came to the pre- 
 sent writer when, as a raw student, he first read 
 Comte. But these mental phases, we find after- 
 wards, are amongst the best features of our training. 
 They are like the recruit's first battle. He knows 
 now the smell of powder. When the guns 
 go off later on he feels none of the first tremors. 
 We can read a dozen Comtes to-day without turn- 
 ing a hair. We learn by this discipline the true 
 function of the negative. It comes not to destroy, 
 but to widen and purify our positive. The " no " 
 of our opponent makes our " yes " fuller than it 
 used to be, and better worth believing. We dis- 
 cover, in fact, that the " no " is not only in our 
 opponent ; it is in us, and there always to help 
 the inner building, to clear the ground of rubbish. 
 Knowing all this we join heartily with Kipling in 
 those rollicking but deep lines of his : 
 
 Something I owe to the soil that grew, 
 
 More to the life that fed, 
 But most to Allah who gave me two 
 
 Separate sides to my head. 
 I would go without shirts or shoes, 
 
 Friends, tobacco or bread, 
 Sooner than for an instant lose 
 
 Either side of my head.
 
 THE MIND'S HOSPITALITY 269 
 
 In those of us who have reached this point, one 
 irrevocable determination has emerged. It is that 
 of being hospitable to all great thinking and all 
 great living, but to be enslaved by none of it. We 
 are determined on never being tyrannised over by 
 goodness, any more than by badness. To weak 
 minds the reading of religious biography is, in some 
 of its effects, almost as disastrous as dram drinking. 
 The poor souls think they must straightway model 
 their whole selves on this man they read about. 
 They must adopt all his opinions, all his narrow- 
 ness. It is so utterly wrong. The great fact, the 
 great life are there to instruct, to inspire, but 
 never to dominate us. God has made you and me 
 to be a separate thought of His own, not to be a 
 pale reflection of someone else. We welcome 
 our mind's guests, and all they offer us. There 
 shall be a free exchange of courtesies and good 
 offices. The interview leaves us, let us hope, 
 helped and stirred. But heaven help us if it has 
 robbed us of ourselves ! 
 
 This openness of the mind will not be an in- 
 difference to the character of the guests. Far 
 otherwise. To freedom of access will be joined the 
 most rigid discrimination. Into such a soul a 
 truth, though clad in humblest guise, unpopular, 
 scorned and hated, issuing from the most ill- 
 reputed Nazareth, if it prove its claim, will be 
 admitted. On the other hand the fraud, the 
 unfounded assumption, though splendidly apparelled 
 and heralded with utmost pomp, will be quietly 
 but decisively put to the door. 
 
 Finally, the mind's hospitality will have its
 
 270 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 most gracious exercise in the preparation for and 
 reception of the highest guests. And here we are 
 thinking not of the great minds that teach us from 
 all the centuries. For these indeed there is pre- 
 paration needed. The mind must be perpetually 
 enlarged to give them houseroom. But there are 
 greater even than these that come to us. Man is 
 a haunted being. His soul is the playground of 
 spiritual forces beyond his knowing. Behind all 
 our conceptions, our imaginings, is a something 
 unexpressed, deeper than all expression or even 
 comprehension. It is when we turn to this region 
 we understand that " the final mystery is oneself." 
 It is out of its dim shadow-land that all the deepest, 
 newest truth emerges. And it is here, down at 
 the centre, we learn that the secret of life is a 
 spiritual one. Says Emerson, " the foundation of 
 culture as of character is at last moral. If we 
 live truly we shall see truly." It can be put in 
 higher terms than these. The capacity of becom- 
 ing conscious of the Infinite, which Lotze declares 
 to be the speciality of the human mind, is another 
 way of describing the highest of the mind's hospi- 
 talities. For the soul can receive this Infinite. 
 But only in one way. The August Visitant comes 
 to the pure in heart. The blessed are those whose 
 daily vision and whose daily guest is God.
 
 XXX 
 
 Of Religious Union 
 
 RELIGIOUS uoion has a psychology and a history. 
 To see our way into it, to understand the true con- 
 ditions of spiritual association, we need to study 
 both. The psychology of the matter is compara- 
 tively simple. The facts of our nature on which 
 it rests are patent and obvious. The religious 
 feeling, like other feelings, is, as we all speedily 
 discover, subject to enormous augmentation by 
 association and fellowship. A thousand souls 
 thrilled by a common sentiment or emotion become, 
 as it were, an electric power-station, which sends 
 its accumulated force through each component. 
 Each who helps to form the whole receives the full 
 current generated by the whole. The symptoms 
 shown by a crowd would not be felt by the indi- 
 viduals composing it if they stood alone. The in- 
 fluence here is not a merely physical one. When 
 men sing and pray together it is not only the volume 
 of sound that produces the combined effect. The 
 voice of a solitary singer will often thrill an audience 
 more than the thunder of the chorus. The aug- 
 mented feeling results most of all from a fusion of 
 soul. The one utterance has set a thousand in- 
 
 271
 
 272 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 terior organs throbbing, whose unseen vibrations 
 fill the atmosphere, stirring it into psychic waves 
 which roll with cumulative effect upon each separate 
 mind and heart. 
 
 We have here a natural cause of religious union, 
 inherent in the human constitution, and which 
 we find at work, producing similar results, throughout 
 the whole period of history. Next comes the tribal 
 system, derived originally, some sociologists think, 
 from the herd organisation of animals. Each 
 tribe, with its totem symbol, had its religion, and 
 modern researchers trace the peculiar intensity 
 of the odium theologicum, of religious intolerance, 
 to the fact that in primitive times for a 
 man to disavow the ancestral faith was the 
 same thing as to break with his tribal fealty, 
 to them the first and fundamental law of the 
 social life. 
 
 To come now to what concerns us more closely, 
 religious union as related to Christianity. We 
 have here an extraordinary history, crowded with 
 enigmas, which we have by no means solved as yet. 
 Christianity began as a break-off from the religious 
 unity of the nation in which it was born, and the 
 formation of a new centre of fellowship. This 
 centre was a Person, and the principle of union 
 was attachment to that Person. The whole genius 
 of Christianity as a new spiritual departure lay 
 in that fact. Had the Church in later ages cor- 
 rectly interpreted it, what troubles, what cruelties, 
 what unspeakable miseries had been spared the 
 world ! (^The Christianity of the group that gathered 
 | round Jesus was a Christianity of admiration and
 
 OF RELIGIOUS UNION 273 
 
 love. It was an immense feeling, as yet undefined. 
 Imagine the astonishment of these peasants had 
 an Athanasian Creed or a Westminster Catechism' 
 been offered them as a correct exposition of their 
 Galilean faith ! The thing that dominated them, 
 that held them together, was what Renan has 
 called "the Divine lovableness " of their Master. 
 
 And that, aft.p.r a.Il r js the true Chqatiaft bond. It 
 
 is the tie of a subtle, untranslatable spiritual affinity. 
 Christ was the new term in religious evolution 
 round which the higher life of the world instinctively 
 gathered. His voice woke a hitherto unheard 
 music in the soul. Christ still creates that music. 
 The present writer remembers, as if it were yester- 
 day, and will remember to his dying day, the 
 thrill which passed through his being when, as 
 a mere boy, he realised that the Sermon on 
 the Mount was addressed to him, that of this /' 
 spiritual feast he was invited to partake ! What 
 were all the books of evidences, all the theological 
 arguments, as instruments of conviction, com- 
 pared with that stir of the deepest nature ! It 
 is that same thrill, that inmost essence of the 
 heart of Jesus, as it exhales in word and touch 
 and deed, that ever since has been converting the 
 world. 
 
 This, we say, was the Church's first bond of 
 union. But it did not last long. In the first 
 century of our era there were other things in the 
 world besides the new Gospel things full grown 
 and mighty, which, as events showed, were to play 
 a huge and sinister part in the Church's evolution. 
 And the greatest of these was the Roman dominion, 
 
 18
 
 274 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 with its military power and its perfect organisation. 
 We talk often of Christianity as conquering the 
 Roman Empire. Let us not forget the extent to 
 which, in return, the Roman Empire conquered 
 Christianity. Nothing, to the student of the human 
 movement, is more instructive than to see the way 
 in which in those early centuries the original Gospel 
 energy was captured by the old Roman military 
 idea, and turned into its moulds. The Catholic 
 Church of the early and middle centuries was the 
 old Empire reappearing under an ecclesiastical 
 form. The Roman bishop was its Pontifex Maxi- 
 mus ; the dioceses, with their spiritual heads, re- 
 produced the ancient provinces with their prefects ; 
 jtnonks and priests were the new style of legionaries. 
 The imperial idea of unity maintained by force 
 was carried over undiminished to the Christian 
 society. Augustine frankly taught it ; and the 
 popes, with an ever-increasing severity, applied 
 his teaching. Gregory the Great, one of the noblest 
 of them, writing to his agent in Sicily, tells him 
 " he will allow no Manichaeans on the Church 
 estates " ; he is "to persecute them and reclaim 
 them^to the Catholic faith." How the Church 
 proceeded to " reclaim " heretics is seen in 
 a course during which, in Lecky's words, ("She 
 shed more innocent blood than any other 
 institution that has ever existed among mankind.'/* 
 The greatest saints were amongst the greatest 
 persecutors. Fenelon approved the Dragonnades ; 
 St. Charles Borromeo recommended the murder 
 of Protestants. 
 
 .The great break-up of the Reformation brought
 
 OF RELIGIOUS UNION 275 
 
 many changes and many improvements, but it 
 made small advance towards a true theory of 
 religious union. Force, exerted this way or that, 
 was regarded by Protestants as a legitimate instru- 
 ment for its promotion. Calvin allowed Servetus 
 to be burned, though he by no means deserves the 
 greatest blame attaching to that transaction. 
 Luther would have no terms with Zwingli for his 
 difference on the sacraments. The smaller sects 
 were as bad. The Minister Anabaptists did not 
 hesitate to put to death any who did not agree with 
 their views. It is, strangely enough, from Catho- 
 licism that we obtain in that time the suggestion for 
 a better way. " I would not make violence and 
 bloodshed my means to assert the Gospel," says 
 Erasmus. And what a really wonderful thing, 
 considering the time and all the circumstances, 
 is that utterance of Catholic Sir Thomas More, 
 where in the " Utopia," written, remember, under 
 the nose of Henry VIII., he declares, " This 
 should surely be thought a very unmeet and 
 foolish thing, and a point of arrogant presumption, 
 to compel all others by violence and threaten- 
 ing to agree to the same that thou believest 
 to be true ! " But these men were before their 
 time. The real basis of fellowship had still to wait 
 its hour. 
 
 What has helped towards the true solution 
 has been science rather than theology. A new 
 cosmic conception has dawned upon the human 
 mind, which throws everything, Church and 
 theology included, into a fresh perspective. We 
 discover that there is a biology of the sects as well
 
 276 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 as an ecclesiology, and that the former is likely to 
 chase the latter out of the field. In this view the 
 differences which have exasperated theology and 
 lit its persecuting fires are seen to be nature's 
 effort after variety and individuality. She flatly 
 refused, at Church or any other bidding, to be 
 shut up to one type or species of religious man. 
 She went out of her way to produce fresh specimens 
 and to secure their perpetuation. We are beginning 
 now to see the futility of crossing her great design. 
 We no longer propose to stay the ocean with the mop 
 of Mrs. Partington. 
 
 The religious union of the future it all comes to 
 this will have to recognise to the full the rights of 
 individual liberty and development, including the 
 right of difference. Spiritual association will be a 
 fellowship of faith, love and service. But the faith 
 will be an instinct rather than a definition. /Its in- 
 quisition will be a judgment faculty in the ulterior 
 of each man's soul, not an institution for the ex- 
 communication of his brother man. Its union 
 will be for help and cheer, not for coercion and 
 bondagej> It will include all who seek truth and 
 yearn for goodness. Its forces will be precisely 
 those which filled the first disciples the forces of a 
 great love and an immortal hope. This union, 
 in its largeness and freedom, will not impoverish 
 theology. It will enrich it. Precisely as our in- 
 struments of observation and of measurement 
 become more penetrating and more accurate, will 
 be the range of the spiritual realm they discover, 
 and the quantity and value of the products they 
 draw from it. With the higher life of this
 
 OF RELIGIOUS UNION 277 
 
 society will come the forms which best express 
 it. Its level will be the high-water mark of 
 humanity, its growth the highest human pro- 
 gress. And the relation of each to all in it will 
 be that of the noble apostolic word : " Not as 
 having dominion over your faith, but as helpers 
 of your joy."
 
 XXXI 
 
 Of Inner Discipline 
 
 THE Lenten discipline which, through long centuries, 
 has been recognised in the Roman and allied Churches 
 reaches its height in the days that immediately 
 precede the anniversary of the Passion. In what 
 may be called the inner circles of devotion in 
 monasteries, in sisterhoods, amongst the clergy 
 we hear of fastings, of penances, of vigils, carried 
 often to the utmost verge of physical and mental 
 endurance. At the spectacle thus presented the 
 outside world looks on with a mixed feeling. The 
 mind of the age, working with a freedom unknown to 
 earlier times, is observing this side of religion from 
 a new standpoint. It is by no means unsympa- 
 thetic. It believes in inner discipline, realising 
 its immense import for life. But it demands a 
 basis for it which shall be more than traditional 
 which shall also be rational. It will, one may 
 hope, be helpful if we look now a little into this 
 subject, as it opens in the light of the modern 
 consciousness. 
 
 The world, we say, knows this theme as a great 
 one. Indeed, incomparably the greatest of all 
 man's histories is the history of his fight with 
 
 ?78
 
 OF INNER DISCIPLINE 279 
 
 himself. Amiel speaks of our chief function in 
 life as that of tamers of wild beasts. Plato, ages 
 before, had said the same thing. We remember 
 the vivid passage in the " Republic " where he 
 describes that " wild beast in our nature which, 
 gorged with meat and drink, starts up and leaps 
 about and seeks to satisfy his desires, under whose 
 power there is no conceivable folly or crime, how- 
 ever shameless or unnatural, of which a man may 
 not believe himself capable." A" Continental philo- 
 sophy of our day, conceived apparently on the 
 principle of running amok among all the deepest 
 experiences of the race, has ridiculed this whole 
 business of interior taming and subduing. Accord- 
 ing to Nietzsche, man's prime blunder has been the 
 fight against his animalism. It is an infinite pity 
 that he ever thought of turning the forces which 
 aforetime he used for war, capture and sensual 
 gratification, in upon himself for an unnatural 
 campaign against the primal desires and passions. 
 Nietzsche will have no terms with " this secret 
 self- violation, this burning into oneself a criticism, 
 an opposition, a contempt, a * No ' ; this dismal 
 work of a voluntarily divided soul which because it 
 delights to make suffer, makes itself suffer." Paul, 
 the apostle of inwardness, is to him " the much 
 tortured, the much to be pitied man," for whom 
 he has no good word. This kind of talk has had its 
 vogue in circles which pride themselves on " origi- 
 nality in morals." But it is shallow enough. 
 The verdict of humanity is against it. The human 
 evolution has made no such blunder as is here sug- 
 gested. Man, on his way to be super-man, on his
 
 280 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 way from brutal to spiritual, could travel by no 
 other route than this. The " internalisation," 
 the turning of life's fight inward, against which our 
 philosopher exclaims, is the fact which, above 
 all others, suggests at once the greatness and the 
 uniqueness of man's destiny. 
 
 This is not to say that in the details of the process 
 there have not been mistakes and perversions. 
 There has been enough of them. It is, indeed, 
 precisely upon this point that the saner criticism 
 of to-day is turning itself. It would fain sift 
 out, from the confused jumble of theory and experi- 
 ence which the past has bequeathed to us, the good 
 from the bad, the elements that make for the 
 proper conduct of life from those which are only 
 the deposits of ignorance and misunderstanding. 
 We have reached here some principles which earlier 
 times failed to discern. We have ceased, for 
 instance, to believe in asceticism ; in privation and 
 starvation for their own sake. We find no inherent 
 virtue in privation. The notion of shutting the 
 eye to the world's beauty, of banning the develop- 
 ment of its inner wealth, is to us a barbarism. 
 When St. Bernard, writing to Abbot William 
 against ornaments in churches, says : " We monks 
 who have reputed as filth all that shines bright, 
 or sounds sweet to the ear, what fruit do we expect 
 from such things ? " we regard his mental condition 
 as, in this respect, a pitiable one. Sir Thomas 
 More, Catholic though he was, gives the coup de 
 grace to asceticism in that fine passage of the 
 " Utopia " where he argues that, if a joyful life is in 
 itself an evil, then we ought to refrain from all
 
 OP INNER DISCIPLINE 281 
 
 that increases the joy of others. But if it is a 
 good to others, then it must be good for our- 
 selves. 
 
 These legacies of the past in the matter of inner 
 discipline contain indeed a vast amount of rubbish 
 which it were well to have incontinently swept 
 away. In this category comes the monkish notion 
 of a whole fraternity being drilled and patterned 
 upon one minutely detailed scheme of living. The 
 endeavour to make men by machinery can have 
 only one result that of making them machines. 
 Ecclesiasticism, in striving for uniformity, is going 
 clean contrary to Nature's whole way of develop- 
 ment, which is rather to create variety and 
 spontaneity. The allied notion of monkery, of 
 crushing the individual will and reducing all 
 to one level of passive obedience, is another of the 
 deadly cosmic heresies. What is wanted in the 
 individual is not less will, but more and ever more 
 of it. /There is no character in subjection. It is 
 in vofition, the subtlest, mightiest, most wonderful 
 thing in the universe, in the fullest, freest, most 
 reasoned exercise of it, that man's value really 
 consists. /It is to an ill-instructed past also we 
 owe the religion of solemnity and severity, as 
 though these in themselves were of the essence of 
 virtue and holiness. In a period when the world 
 was conceived to be under a terrorism ; when 
 cruelty was deified ; when men, with Tertullian 
 and Aquinas, could picture the sufferings of tortured 
 souls as adding to the pleasures of heaven, such 
 a view was consistent enough. But we are emerg- 
 ing from this darkness. We are asking about the
 
 282 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 theologic significance of laughter as well as of tears. 
 And by aid of this better conception we are depriv- 
 ing gloom and sourness of their ancient religious 
 vogue. We are with La Rochefoucauld in defining 
 the gravity of certain people as " un mystere du 
 corps, invents pour cacher les defauts de V esprit" 
 
 But the modern consciousness, in shaking itself 
 loose from ideas of this kind, is, we have said, not 
 less emphatic than was antiquity about the necessity 
 of an inner discipline. But observe the difference 
 of outlook ! Not from the terror of vengeful 
 powers, not from a despairing sense of the essential 
 evil of the world ; but, on the contrary, from a feel- 
 ing of the entire good of things, of the glorious 
 possibilities of life, of the limitless destinies of the 
 human spirit, do we to-day find our reason for 
 inward government, for the daily drill and regimen 
 of the soul. Religion and science are one in recog- 
 nising that the goal to be aimed at, the principle 
 which is to give law to conduct, is the fulness and 
 furtherance of life. And for this fulness and 
 furtherance we perceive that the upper must ever 
 govern the lower. The body in its very con- 
 figuration is here the image of the mind. The 
 head towers above the stomach, the upper nerve- 
 centres control the reflex action of the lower and 
 local ones. The body here is, we say, the soul's 
 parable. And thoughtful men, of every shade of 
 theologic and anti-theologic thinking, perceive 
 the fact. Maeterlinck, occupying the extremest 
 left of the sceptical movement, insists with the 
 most orthodox that " sterile pleasures of the body 
 must be sacrificed ; all that is not in absolute
 
 OP INNER DISCIPLINE 283 
 
 harmony with a larger, more durable energy of 
 thought." He insists on a reform of our eating and 
 drinking as a necessity of spiritual advance. And 
 assuredly not without reason. In one department 
 here we have made, it is true, a great move forward 
 upon the habits of our fathers. What a condition 
 of things do records like the Greville Memoirs 
 and the Creevey Papers reveal in the early nineteenth 
 century, and that amongst the most eminent 
 public men ! " Lord Grey came in drunk from 
 the Duke of York's, where he had been dining." 
 * ' Old Sidmouth was never sober." Brougham, 
 speaking in the House of Commons hi 1827, " was 
 so very tipsy that for some time he did not know 
 what he said." Lamb's half -humorous, half -bitter, 
 
 " D n temperance and he that first invented it 
 
 some anti-Noahite ! " represents pretty much the 
 feeling of the time. We are a clear step beyond that. 
 But what of our eating ? The fare offered you at a 
 modern hotel for breakfast, luncheon and dinner 
 represents the average feeding of comfortable 
 Society ; and in flesh food alone, as science is now 
 loudly telling us, the menu contains three times 
 more than we have any business to swallow. When 
 shall we attain to an hotel that will feed us rationally ? 
 Here is a reform for which we must look, not to the 
 House of Commons, but to a clearer knowledge 
 amongst men, and rich men especially, of the 
 essential laws of life. 
 
 In connection with bodily habit, as related to 
 inner discipline, a cardinal principle should be the 
 maintenance and daily assertion of the supremacy 
 pf the instructed will over all custom and usage.
 
 284 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 It is well to try a fall with our habits now and then, 
 if only to see how we stand to them. When the 
 smoker is reduced to despair by a week's deprivation 
 of tobacco, it is time for him to give up his pipe. If 
 our faith in God and man depends on so many 
 hours in bed, it were well to straightway revise 
 our time-table. Whether the Chinese in South 
 Africa are slaves or not may be a moot point, but 
 there is no doubt there are abundance of slaves } 
 well-to-do and well-fed, in England, and it is 
 time they shook off their chains. At all costs let us 
 carry in us a free and independent soul. 
 
 Thus of the outer, but there is also the inner. 
 That is an admirable definition of fasting which 
 Clement of Alexandria gives us in the " Stromata " : 
 " Now fastings signify abstinence from all evils 
 whatsoever, both in action and in word, and in 
 thought itself." " In thought itself !" Our religion 
 has done nothing for us unless it has given us an 
 easy control here. It is in this realm, indeed, 
 that its whole triumph lies. Its grandest product is 
 the entire and joyful acquiescence in whatsoever 
 befalls us. The notion of religion as an assurance 
 against calamities is too na'ive. It is rather a 
 preparation for them and a state of soul for meeting 
 them. Circumstance may play its worst trick 
 upon us ; it may reduce us in a moment from 
 wealth to poverty, from strength and activity to 
 the extremity of weakness. The soul, disciplined 
 by faith, will meet that extremity and not be cowed 
 by it. It will realise with Vauvenargues that 
 " despair is the worst of our errors." Its whole 
 development will have taught it to accept life,
 
 OF INNER DISCIPLINE 285 
 
 in whatsoever strange and repelling form it for the 
 moment offers itself, as a present good and the 
 promise of an infinite better. It is a great thing 
 to be taught our utter nothingness. After we 
 have tasted that sensation we are ready for what 
 generally comes next, the sense of the Divine 
 sufficiency. We rest in a system of things which 
 is too vast for our comprehension, but which we feel 
 to be good. We know ourselves as in an orderly 
 universe with Infinite Perfection at its centre. 
 
 It is by such inner discipline, and by no other 
 process, that we arrive at the perception of the 
 higher truths. Good comes first, truth afterwards. 
 Les grandes pensees viennent du cosur. The 
 heart knows truths which the reason cannot 
 formulate. We require a certain inner height to 
 discern life's greatest secret. It is given alone to 
 the pure in heart to see God.
 
 XXXII 
 On Being Worldly 
 
 ST. JOHN'S text, " Love not the world," is one of 
 those master words which are at once an interpreta- 
 tion of life and a direction of it. That such a 
 word should ever have been uttered by a man to 
 men is in itself a portent. It reveals humanity 
 as something greater, stranger, than the wisest of 
 us can understand. The appeal is to something 
 beyond the senses, beyond the cold reason. The 
 soul in its inmost depths recognises the word as a 
 true one, answering to something essential to its 
 own life and progress. That it was uttered, and 
 
 I with such prodigious effect, is only intelligible on the 
 supposition that man is, as Lamennais puts it, 
 " torn asunder between two worlds . . . that 
 
 \ he has one foot in the finite and the other in the 
 infinite." It is in proportion as men are cultivated, 
 as they understand life, as they live it to the broadest 
 and fullest, that they catch the apostolic meaning 
 here, and give to its injunction their fullest weight 
 of endorsement. 
 
 It takes, we say, a highly-developed nature to 
 catch the real flavour of this utterance. That is 
 the reason why raw and untrained minds have made 
 
 286
 
 ON BEING WORLDLY 287 
 
 such ludicrous travesties of it. In the_entire wide 
 region of religious aberration there is no more 
 curious spectacle than the fantasies which the 
 rendering of this text has produced. Men have 
 fled from worldliness, banned it, exorcised it, 
 without stopping to ask first what worldliness 
 means. They have abandoned cities and dwelt in 
 the wilderness under the notion that they were 
 escaping the world. With the same idea people 
 have worn uniforms, eschewed amusements, drawn) 
 a line between themselves and outsiders, abandoned , 
 politics, abandoned business, shut themselves up 
 in monasteries and nunneries,' The world to b 
 shunned was to them the world of average human 
 society and of the average human activity. 
 
 Perhaps the oddest phase of supposed unworldli- 
 ness one which has still a wide enough vogue 
 is that which may be described as future-worldli- 
 ness. Its condition of mind is one of desire for all 
 the good things going, but with a postponement 
 of their enjoyment to a later date and another sphere. 
 We see this disposition in full swing in the Jewish 
 community of the first Christian century. Their 
 national hopes were at zero. Israel was oppressed 
 under a foreign yoke, and the only escape from a 
 world that had become intolerable seemed to lie 
 in a supernatural interposition in which their 
 promised Messiah should appear, overwhelming 
 their enemies, and securing to them the power 
 and splendour for which they thirsted. We have 
 here the origin of that voluminous apocalyptic 
 literature with which the time abounded. This 
 spirit has lingered into our own days. There are
 
 288 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 people who, Bible in hand, declare the world a 
 bad world, close to a bad end. They anticipate 
 a catastrophe for most of us, and a reign of splendour 
 for the saints. Their heaven is as material a one 
 as Park Lane, the only difference being one of 
 time and place. The habit of mind here of keeping 
 aloof from the visible prosperities of to-day in 
 anticipation of bigger ones of the same order 
 to-morrow reminds one of nothing so much as 
 of a Temperance association reported of amongst 
 some Northern miners, who practised total abstin- 
 ence for a certain period in order with the money 
 thus saved to have a sustained orgie later on/ 
 /" The notion of worldliness, or its opposite, as 
 having anything to do with time or place is a 
 primitive one, outgrown by all but primitive minds. 
 Eternity, with all that belongs to it, is now if ever. 
 Cataclysms and so-called world-endings have nothing 
 to do with morality. And the material world is 
 not likely to end yet. Modern science, which traces 
 the history of our planetary system back through 
 immeasurable aeons to the time when it was a 
 nebula, a fiery mist and forward through uncounted 
 millions of years to the time when the dead sun and 
 planets will become a nebula again gives us an 
 outlook which differs considerably from these 
 naive Jewish conceptions./ The spiritual life belongs 
 to another sphere from that of big happenings, 
 stunning to the senses, and of dates in the almanac. > 
 What, then, is it to be worldly ? It assuredly 
 does not mean loving the world we open our eyes 
 on of a morning. If that were worldliness, then 
 Jesus was the greatest of worldlings. How He loved
 
 ON BEING WORLDLY. 289 
 
 this world ! Never^ in any human soul did its 
 beauty strike a deeper chord. The deep blue sky 
 of Galilee, the flowers by its lake, the gambols of 
 the children, the homely business, the simple 
 social intercourse of the countryside all this 
 mirrored itself on that clear spiritual surface as 
 an image of delight. It was the Father's world, 
 and it was good. Assuredly the man who talks 
 pessimism is not thereby proclaiming himself un- 
 worldly. Voltaire's, " Apres tout c'est un monde 
 passable" and Lamb's " I assure you I find this 
 world a very pretty place," are good, honest 
 utterances. The man who can find no good in this 
 world is not likely to find it in any other. 
 
 The real worldliness, that against which the 
 apostolic word and all the soul's highest instincts 
 warn us, is that of /a^disposition without faith and 
 without love. It is the absence, or the fatal over- 
 laying, of the spiritual instinct. The great scientist 
 Pasteur, in a striking passage, speaks of the double / 
 mail in Us, the one taking note of all that appeals/" 
 to the senses, and the other feeling an appeal 
 from something, somewhere beyond sense, and* 
 vibrating in response to that mystic note,/ All 
 the best minds of humanity have felt that appeal. 
 It is repeated by the Indian sages, by the great 
 Greek teachers, most impressively of all by the 
 Christian Gospel. When Plato in the " Phaedo " 
 and in the " Gorgias " declares for a world of 
 divine ideas, beyond sense, in which is the one 
 Reality, and where the soul finds its home, he 
 forecasts the result of the best science and philosophy 
 of our time. Modern metaphysic by a pitiless 
 
 19
 
 
 290 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 analysis has shattered every supposition of material- 
 ism, and shown us that if there be a Reality it lies 
 not there. The latest science echoes that word. 
 To Sir Oliver Lodge life appears " as something 
 whose full significance lies in another scheme of 
 things." Science is thus leading to something 
 beyond science as alone supplying the solution of 
 the world's riddle. 
 
 The unworldly man, then, is he who, by whatsoever 
 path he has reached it, has arrived at a full sense 
 and conviction of this invisible scheme, this spiritual 
 , order of the universe. /The highest intuitions of 
 his nature, the voices within that speak of love, 
 duty, purity, sacrifice as the absolutely vital things, 
 are by him accepted as the final authority. To 
 obey these voices is to be religious, to disobey them 
 is to be infidel. Every heroic life is built on these 
 suppositions y/Wherever you see a man taking 
 his life in his hands at the call of duty, stripping 
 himself of present ease or goods that he may serve 
 his neighbour, you see a believer, whatever the name 
 he calls himself. Such a man does not despise the 
 visible. Why should he ? It is God's artistry. 
 The beauty of sound, of sight, of odour is treasure 
 poured out of God's soul. But the beauty of the 
 visible has its chief appeal to him as an image and 
 emblem of a diviner beauty still, which not eye 
 hath seen nor ear heard./ 
 
 By this standard we can measure the worldlings. 
 There are people who have absolutely no sense of 
 all this. So far as we can see they are born without 
 it. It is like being without _an-ear for music. They 
 are in all classes, and some of them are highly 
 
 7
 
 ON BEING WORLDLY 291 
 
 educated. You may meet them in social inter- 
 course for years, and amidst all their sayings, 
 witty, sparkling, full of knowledge of the world, 
 you shall never, by any chaoce, catch an inspiring 
 utterance, a word that expresses remotest suspicion 
 of aught higher, better than they see. It is not 
 in them, and you cannot get blood out of a post. 
 All one can say is that, as related to the highest 
 development, they are sub-human. Poor creatures ! 
 God suffers them, and therefore we must. 
 
 By the side of this race of the sniritu^ycolour- 
 blind, we find a great class of the dun -sigEted ; 
 or perhaps, shall we say, of the near-sighted. Their 
 retina receives a very clear vision of the world 
 they touch, but only confused and feeble rays 
 from the other. Duty means something to them, 
 but interest so much more. And so their aims, 
 instead of curving upward till they meet in God, 
 curve downward to find their end in self. A Seneca, 
 whom Carlyle describes as " the father of all such 
 as wear shovel hats," trying at the same tune 
 to stand well with truth and with Nero, is their 
 type among philosophers. He certainly was of 
 the race represented by the philosopher, who, ! 
 when asked by his king " why sages were seen 
 at the doors of kings, but not kings at the, 
 doors of sages," replied, " Because sages knew what 
 was good for them and kings did not." Of all 
 worldlings of this species the ecclesiastical worldling 
 is the strangest and most sinister specimen. It is 
 the singular danger of professional religion that 
 it tends to atrophy the very instincts which it is 
 set apart to serve. The ecclesiastic studies human
 
 192 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 nature until the temptation comes to him to study 
 its weak points, its errors, its credulities, in order 
 to profit by them. To use spiritual means for the 
 promotion of personal ends is the damnable infidelity 
 to which the devil draws him. It is thus that the 
 worldly-minded ecclesiastic becomes the most 
 dangerous of men. When faith dies in a nation it 
 s the Churchman who kills it. France to-day is 
 
 j in search of a religion. Her succession of ecclesi- 
 astical rulers and politicians a Richelieu, a Mazarin, 
 
 S a Talleyrand succeeded to-day by the priests who 
 engineered the Dreyfus business, have nearly finished 
 the old one. 
 
 Modern society in all departments of its life can 
 only be saved by its unworldly men. We want 
 politicians and statesmen of this breed. Plato's 
 cry for philosophers as State rulers meant that the 
 only men for such posts were such as were rooted 
 
 /in the Eternal. Happily there were and are such. 
 Oeighton's remark about Hildebrand's monk- 
 popes, who ruled the world while renouncing it, 
 suggests the high road here. A man may be in 
 the foremost place and keep the heart of a child. 
 He will keep it by abiding in God, ready to rule or to 
 serve, to be at top or bottom if only it be His will. 
 At present politics are an ugly scramble, and Church 
 life is little better. When Lord Grey resigned in 
 1834 he told Creevey that he had 300 applications 
 for peerages and a perfectly endless number for 
 baronetcies ./Tn the Church, of all denominations, 
 the rush for front places is just as fierce and as 
 ruthless. JVten will talk angelically on a public 
 platforHl about humility and self-renunciation, their
 
 ON BEING WORLDLY 293 
 
 chief thought being meanwhile to get their name 
 advertised and their address published. The spiri- 
 tual education, both of the world and of the Church, 
 is as yet clearly only at its beginning. We see our) 
 nobler, inner world but dimly, " as through a glassf 
 darkly." We need all of us to get our vision purged.) 
 The reform of the soul is a more urgent need than 
 the reform of Parliament. When we are at last 
 fairly in love with that highest world the world 
 opened to us in the New Testament, which Jesus 
 lived in, and where all the noblest aspirations have 
 their springs we shall be fit for whatever post or 
 work is assigned us, and carry a clean soul through 
 it all.
 
 XXXIII 
 Of Self-Creation 
 
 ' You are a poem, though your poem's naught," 
 cries Browning in one of his verses. We might go 
 further and say of every man that he is not only 
 poem but poet. He is so in the old Greek sense, 
 where the word " poet " stands first of all for the 
 doer, the maker. That is man's title on this planet, 
 the maker one might in a sense say, the creator. 
 The animals, in their countless generations, leave 
 the world very much as they find it. But this 
 other animal, on his way through, shapes a thousand 
 monuments of himself. He breathes his thought 
 upon wood and stone and iron, and they stand 
 henceforth as forms of his imagination. He flings 
 his will outward, and it cuts its way through moun- 
 tain and forest, making a new thing of the ancient 
 earth. He weds the invisibles of his soul to the 
 solid material he finds without, by processes which 
 become ever more complicated, ever more daring, 
 until the prospect opens of his bringing into sub- 
 jection every element, every cosmic force. Indeed 
 is he the poet, the " maker." 
 
 But all this mastery outside is but a small jfcirt 
 of man's creative function. Its most wonderful 
 
 294
 
 OF SELF-CREATION 295 
 
 feature is exhibited in the action of it upon himself. 
 To make railways and steam-engines and ships and 
 palaces is no small thing. But all this becomes 
 insignificant in comparison with another work on 
 which he is engaged that of remaking himself. 
 Man has to-day a competitor who will in the end 
 beat him out of the field.J It is that other man, 
 the man that is to be, whom he is creating. Man 
 is king now over all he sees, but he works incessantly 
 for his own deposition. As surely as the child dies 
 into the man, so surely will our present manhood 
 die into a better. Of all his cunning processes, 
 the magic of his looms, of his retorts, this is the 
 crowning work, incessantly, silently going on, the 
 weaving, to wit, of new brain and heart, the sketch- 
 ing of a vaster human structure of which future ages 
 will witness the great completion. 
 
 Our business, however, in the present article is not 
 with the age-long movement of our race as a whole. 
 We are contributing to that, but in the meantime 
 there is a business closer home. It is that of the 
 creation of ourselves as individuals. The world 
 process is being repeated in you and me. In our 
 several callings we are making a thousand thjngs 
 boots, buildings, leading articles, what not. ^Beyond 
 that we are at this moment, as in every past moment, 
 engaged in the work of making ourselves./ There 
 is, we are aware, a modern school that denies this, 
 and holds that what goes on within us is as mechanical 
 and inevitable as the revolution of the planet or 
 the wash of the wave on the shore. Physiologists, 
 like Bichat, argue that character is unchangeable, 
 depending on the organic structure and functions.
 
 296 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 To which it is enough for us to reply, with Dr. 
 Johnson, " all theory is against the freedom of the 
 will, all experience for it." The logic of life is 
 deeper than the logic of the schools, and we have only 
 to examine what passes in our own interior to 
 realise the immense extent to which we have been 
 put in trust with this business. It is not what I 
 am but what I can be, not the actual but the im- 
 mense possible, that gives life its finest inspiration. 
 .Let us examine the ground a little here. 
 
 There are two factors that are incessantly weav- 
 ing man ; the one is his faculty of reception, the 
 other his volition. As to the former, one notes a 
 i striking recent suggestion of Sir Oliver Lodge : 
 v* That the whole of us may not be incarnated in our 
 present selves. What the rest of me may be doing 
 for these few years while I am here I do not know ; 
 perhaps it is asleep." It might, we think, be put 
 more simply and yet more impressively than that. 
 Is it not that the whole universe is the unincar- 
 nated part of us ? We are related to it all, and 
 have incessant commerce with all its parts. The 
 light from its farthest star falls on our retina, the 
 forces that move Sinus work on our nerves. So far 
 as we can see there are none of its resources we may 
 not absorb, none of its wealth by which we may 
 not enrich ourselves. We are the meeting-point 
 of the Cosmos, the playground of its forces, the 
 clearing-house of its treasure. Year by year, 
 century by century, man is becoming immeasur- 
 ably mightier by his growing intimacy with his 
 universe. 
 
 The other factor in man's self -creation is, we
 
 1 ^ OF SELF-CREATION 297 
 
 have said, his power of volition. The question 
 of the will has, in latter-day philosophy, been 
 thrown into some strangely new aspects. Schopen- 
 hauer, in his " Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," 
 gives us will as something before intellect, before 
 consciousness, as the prime motor of the universe, the 
 ultimate cause. It is not necessary to follow the 
 German philosopher into these conclusions to esti- 
 mate to the full the tremendous power of the 
 faculty which, under the name of the will, we find 
 lodged within us, In its operations we see creation 
 if we see it anywhere. The roar of avalanches, 
 the rush of Niagaras, are not to compare, in the 
 mystery of their power, with the silent move- 
 ment which we call a volition. Niagara could 
 sweep ten thousand men down its gulf without feel- 
 ing it ; but the idea beating in the brain of one of 
 those ten thousand may suffice to chain Niagara 
 and to make bond slaves of its powers. 
 
 We want, however, now to observe the action of 
 will upon character, its action as self-creator. 
 What takes place here reminds us of nothing so 
 much as that play of radiant matter of which Sir 
 William Crookes has given us such amazing revela- 
 tions. In a closed tube, where almost a vacuum 
 is made to exist, we have a rush of invisible 
 molecules of such rapidity and force that a mass 
 of metal under their impact becomes red-hot, and 
 will even melt if the attack is prolonged. These 
 molecules, we say, so minute yet so mighty, remind 
 us of the impact upon the personality of those 
 mysterious will-impulses which in a strong character, 
 streaming from the centre, are necessarily working
 
 298 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE,' { 
 
 upon and transforming the entire moral structure. 
 Poor are we indeed in inner resource if we have 
 not experienced the power of this working. 
 
 Take, for instance, the question of temperament. 
 Is it possible to recreate one's temperament ? It 
 is easy to put the matter to proof. There are 
 men who carry in them a tendency to melancholy. 
 Poor poet Gray, himself a victim, has described it 
 for us. " But there is another sort, black indeed, 
 that has something in it like Tertullian's rule of 
 faith. Credo quid impossibile est. For it believes, 
 nay, is sure of, everything that is unlikely, so it be 
 but frightful ; and on the other hand excludes 
 and shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, 
 and everything that is pleasureable." But the 
 melancholy man has his remedy. It lies in the 
 daily energy of his will. When the black thoughts 
 come, a strong volition, like a breeze from the 
 north, will sweep away the clouds. We can will 
 the thoughts which are to come to us, the memories 
 on which to feed, the prospects for the mind to 
 gaze upon. Our world will change for us by the 
 constant repetition of this process. The mind will 
 act here as the body acts. When we first learn to 
 walk our every step demands a separate volition. 
 After the process has been kept up through the days 
 and weeks the action that required these studied 
 efforts becomes automatic, and we walk easily 
 without thinking about it. And the will which 
 does this for the body will do it also for the mind. 
 If we will to be cheerful, to banish the unwhole- 
 some fancies, the brooding resentments, the sense 
 of slights and injuries, and instead to summon
 
 OF SELF-CREATION 299 
 
 to our thought the causes of gratitude, the sense of 
 the good in life, the reasons for aspiration and hope, 
 we can do it. The lapses from all this may be 
 frequent, as an infant's falls are frequent ; but 
 let us after each stumble pick ourselves up and 
 move on, and in time the joy-sense will become a 
 habit, and we shall wake up daily in clear weather. 
 
 It is in this way that men create their world, and 
 make a good one or a bad one of it, apart from all 
 considerations of external fortune. They have 
 made it by making themselves. Seneca observes 
 of Diogenes that " he kept himself outside the 
 fortuitous. It is as if he had said, ' Do your 
 business fortune : you have nothing to do with 
 Diogenes.' ' Mr. Moncure Conway, in his auto- 
 biography, speaks of a negro woman he knew in 
 his youth as the happiest person he ever met. 
 " Her quick intelligence, her humour, her humility 
 and simplicity, and indefinable qualities that I never 
 knew in any white person made her to me a reve- 
 lation." Here was happiness achieved against 
 perhaps the heaviest handicap that modern life 
 offers. The powerlessness of fortune as compared 
 with will in the making of character is vividly 
 illustrated in the case of the two great moralists 
 Vauvenargues and La Rochefoucauld. Of the two 
 a French critic observes : " La Rochefoucauld, 
 born into the first rank, dowered with great fortune, 
 loved with the most passionate love in his youth, 
 surrounded by illustrious and exquisite friendship 
 in old age, overwhelmed as it seemed with all 
 fortune's favours, brings from the voyage of life 
 only a bitter experience, and from the spectacle
 
 300 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 of humanity a disdainful pessimism. Vauvenargues, 
 on the contrary, poor, always suffering, unfortunate 
 in all his enterprises, preserves the serenity of his 
 soul and the equity of his judgment, proclaiming 
 man's capacity of goodness, disinterestedness and 
 love." We repeat, the will is omnipotent in this 
 sphere if we will only use it. We may not, perhaps, 
 achieve wealth or empire. But if we do not reach 
 this brightness of inner temper the fault is not 
 God's or the world's ; it is our own. 
 
 But self-creation does not end here. It extends 
 not only over temperament, but also over the 
 whole of our mental life. Our mind at the begin- 
 ning is an acorn which, according as we will, may or 
 may not become an oak. We do not know our brain 
 capacity until we have put it to the utmost test 
 of our will capacity. Whether or no you read 
 trashy books in one language, or read the world's 
 best books in half a dozen languages, is an affair of 
 your own choice. To learn is as easy as to eat, 
 if we give ourselves to it. And talking of eating, 
 it may be well to remind ourselves of that saying 
 of Plato in the " Protagoras," about the right food 
 for the soul. We can, says he, when we buy pro- 
 vision for the body in the market, take it away 
 with us, store it, and use it or not use it, as we 
 think fit. But the soul's food, the doctrine we get 
 from books or from teachers, enters at once directly 
 into us, and we cannot escape its effects for good 
 or ill. And so we need here with the greater care 
 to choose our food. That choice, again, is an 
 affair of the will. What mental company are we 
 keeping ? Do we live habitually with the great souls,
 
 OF SELF-CREATION 301 
 
 forming ourselves on their noble ideals, drawing 
 into us the sap of their strength, breathing the divine 
 air they live in ? Or are we content with the 
 garbage and the loathsome fog-atmosphere of the 
 world's literary slums ? 
 
 In closing, let it be observed that there is an 
 all-important side of this question, a religious 
 side, which we have not touched. We have let it alone 
 in order to emphasize a feature in self-creation 
 which religious teachers are apt to neglect. We 
 agree with them fully in their main assertion that 
 man's re-creation is ultimately a Divine business. 
 The receptive capacity on which our highest hopes 
 depend is before all things a capacity to receive the 
 power from above, the secret, silent energy of the 
 Spirit. But the tendency of the hour in many 
 religious circles is to keep man on the move by 
 outside pressures, the emotionalism of revival 
 meetings, the dram-drinking of high-wrought 
 excitements. Whereas what we want above all 
 things to-day is a machinery that works from 
 within. Says a French writer, " Aujourd'hui 
 rhomme desire immensement, mais il veut faible- 
 ment" The need of our time is great willing. 
 Here, in the deeps of us, let us in the strength of 
 God weave the garment of our manhood, our 
 vesture of eternity.
 
 XXXIV 
 The Farther Side 
 
 HAVE any of our readers been through the 
 clouds and seen them from their upper side ? 
 It is a marvellous experience, of which the balloonist 
 has not the entire monopoly. The spectacle is 
 granted sometimes to the mountaineer. The present 
 writer has vivid remembrance of a dull November 
 afternoon in the Jura, when, plunging into the 
 heavy cloud which all day had hid sun and sky, 
 he toiled upwards, till suddenly, in one dazzling 
 moment, he found himself outside and above it all. 
 He was in a realm of glorious sunshine. Above was 
 the dazzling blue ; away to his right lay a rolling sea 
 of magnificent cloud colours ; at the far side of 
 this sea, gleaming in the white radiance of their 
 snow raiment, rose the whole mighty range of the 
 Alps. What a scene, and what a parable ! This 
 same cloud, which, from one side and in one aspect, 
 glowered over the world as the image of all that 
 was gloomy and forbidding, required only another 
 view-point to stand revealed as in itself beautiful 
 beyond imagination, while serving as the foundation 
 of the sublimest of world-pictures. 
 Herein, we say, is a parable, but we have to 
 
 302
 
 THE FARTHER SIDE 303 
 
 take care that we do not press it too far. It is 
 not always by any means that " the farther side " 
 yields a result of this kind. The topic, indeed, 
 might as easily be handled by the pessimist as by 
 the optimist. The one as well as the other would 
 find abundant material if he sought for it. Let us, 
 divesting ourselves as far as may be of existing 
 prepossessions, try impartially to examine the 
 ground for ourselves, and see what we find there. 
 To begin with, we have to note that every ex- 
 perience of life has its farther side, a side which 
 invariably differs radically and essentially from 
 the nearer one. Life, as Heraclitus long ago taught 
 us, " is an eternal flux." When people complain of 
 the changefulness, the restlessness of the world, 
 they forget that this is the very condition of its 
 existence. If change ceased, we should cease ; 
 for life, whether of the separate germ-cell or of the 
 entire organism of the universe, is movement 
 first and last. We can never keep a sensation 
 or an experience in one stay. Each has its be- 
 ginning, its culmination, its end. What finally re- 
 mains of them is a deposit, and it is out of these 
 deposits that our soul is built. And as it is with a 
 single sensation felt in our own mind, so is it on an 
 ever-widening scale with all that takes place in 
 history and the corporate life of humanity. Our 
 race, we discover, has conditions of feeling, epochs 
 of ideas, which may last for centuries or millenniums, 
 but which, nevertheless, are always moving. They 
 all partake of the inevitable process ; they have 
 their rise, their culmination, their decay. In their 
 extinction these also leave their deposit, to be
 
 304 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 taken up into new births of the world's life. Man 
 has by now had a tolerably wide experience of this 
 movement, and it is time we had learned some 
 lessons from it. Let us see, in some particulars, 
 how the matter stands. 
 
 Youth has at once the advantage and disadvan- 
 tage of beginning on the near side of everything. 
 It is not.tall enough to see over the wall, and knows 
 only~*6f that side by report. And commonly it 
 takes the report somewhat cheaply. ; ' Youth," 
 says Turgeneff, " imagines life to be an affair of 
 gilt gingerbread. It will be glad afterwards if it 
 finds dry bread to eat." In those charmed hours the 
 great pleasure-sensations, the intoxications of eye, 
 ear and touch, the raptures of satisfied desire, seem 
 everything. They show their front view, and the 
 view is full of charm. But " Onward ! " is the 
 life watchword. To every this a that ; to every act 
 a consequence ; to every experience " the moment 
 after." There is one judgment of life while the 
 draught is being drunk ; there is that other of the 
 lendemain de fete when the cup is drained. Have 
 we been able to assimilate these two things and 
 draw from their union some wholesome result ? 
 
 The world has now, through many thousands of 
 years, been grinding its lesson into our race, and 
 there is no mistake about the trend of its teaching. 
 Our philosophies and theologies offer us endless 
 puzzles, but on the essential things we have, out 
 of the heart of life itself, the simplest and clearest of 
 messages. Life gives us its own gospel of the 
 farther side. If we would find it a good side we 
 must approach it in one way. You must enter our
 
 THE FARTHER SIDE 305 
 
 cloud from the lower, the sombre end of it. It is a 
 climb. Nature always starts her chosen ones 
 upon drudgery. Literature begins upon them 
 with grammars and dictionaries. Music is a pound- 
 ing of scales, long hours of weary repetitions. 
 There is no royal road. The cloud is before us to 
 trudge through. But if we do manfully trudge 
 through we find always at the end the white moun- 
 tains and the blue sky. Through drudgery, incessant 
 self-discipline, we come to our power, to our wealth 
 of acquisition, to our sources of high-enduring 
 enjoyment. The lesson is so plain that one is 
 amazed that people anywhere fail to see it. The 
 best, men of every age and creed always have seen v 
 it. Marcus Aurelius, in reckoning up his supreme 
 advantages, does not speak of his accession to / 
 wealth and empire, but of the fact that as a youth 
 he was taught to endure hardness, to work with i 
 his hands and to mind his own business. 
 
 With the same deadly certainty does the nature 
 of things express the other half of its doctrine here. 
 It lias put up its strait gate and narrow way, and 
 shows no mercy to trespassers or those who would 
 " climb up some other way." It knows the skulker 
 by sight, and has its own manner of treating him. 
 Calvinism used to talk of the eternal decrees, and 
 there certainly are some. The decree of the farther 
 side to toil and self-restraint is one ; the decree of 
 the farther side to laziness and indulgence is 
 another. Some of the present generation appear 
 to proceed on the supposition that this decree has 
 recently been annulled. They will discover in due 
 time that it is still in full force, and that there 
 
 20
 
 306 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 is no remotest corner of the universe where it fails 
 to operate. 
 
 But this is a road already trodden hard by the 
 moralists. Life offers us some more complex pro- 
 blems than that of the issues of hardwork and 
 high aims versus idleness and sensualism. The 
 high aims themselves have their far side, which 
 is not always roseate. The middle-aged man of 
 our generation looks back on a dozen enthusiasms 
 and beliefs of his youth which, in the backward 
 glance, wear a quite different aspect now from 
 then. If he were now to write the history of them 
 he would write largely as an outsider. He has 
 come to understand that pregnant saying of Carlyle : 
 " A man, I think, is ready to write on a thing 
 when he perceives he has got above it, that he has 
 shaken it off from him, and can survey it with- 
 out egoism, spleen, exaggeration, or other per- 
 version." How absolute we were in those days 
 in our judgment of men and things ! How sure 
 of our own side ! We took all our teachers told 
 us for gospel. We accepted their reading of 
 history. The men of our party were heroes, opposed 
 to them were the powers of darkness. To-day we 
 are less sure of our good and bad. We discover 
 that our side, as well as the other, is, and has been, 
 so very human ! We find with Baxter that the 
 good men are not so good as we thought them, 
 nor the bad so ill. We say with Johnson : "As 
 I know more of mankind I expect less of them, 
 and am ready now to call a man a good man on 
 easier terms than formerly." 
 
 But to a properly-developed soul the view from
 
 THE FARTHER SIDE 307 
 
 the farther side, while inducing scepticism about 
 many things, will bring no scepticism about life 
 itself. We may grow doubtful about this or 
 that patent scheme of reform. We may, to quote 
 Johnson again, go so far as to say with him, " Why, 
 sir, most schemes of political improvement are very 
 laughable things." Ballot Acts, Franchise Acts, 
 the upsetting of this Government and the setting 
 up of that ; we have lived through so much of this, 
 to discover how different are the results from what 
 was hoped for. And yet do we despair of politics ? 
 Not at all. Reform will go on in that sphere, 
 though not by the clash of parties. It is and has 
 ever been by a spiritual process. Socrates utters 
 the secret of it when, in the " Gorgias," he de- 
 clares that he is the only politician in Athens, 
 for while others intrigue and seek for votes he 
 seeks to improve the State by improving the souls 
 of the citizens. 
 
 In the long run, when we have got to the 
 farther side of all our experiments, we shall dis- 
 cover that this is the only way. And it is the way 
 which the world will assuredly reach in the end. 
 Is it not a wonderful thing that, whatever new road 
 man breaks open for himself, if he follow it far 
 enough, it always leads him out at the farther side 
 to a spiritual result ? A generation ago it seemed 
 as though we were being engulfed in materialism. 
 The prophets of science were proclaiming it as the 
 latest news of the universe. Moleschott's aphorism, 
 " no thought without phosphorus," was solemnly 
 repeated ^as though it settled everything. But 
 to-day science, not by backing out of its tunnel, but
 
 308 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 by going forward in it, by becoming more scientific 
 still, finds itself emerging at the farther end once 
 more into full daylight. From the scientists we 
 are obtaining, bit by bit, a conception of matter, of 
 man and of the universe which will become the 
 surest foundation of the theology of the future. 
 
 It is, as we have said, not by running away 
 from investigation, but by going forward in it, 
 that faith, however seemingly shaken and dis- 
 lodged for a time, comes eventually again into its 
 kingdom. The farther side is always its side. 
 Nothing is more common, for instance, than for 
 people to be thrown off their religious balance by 
 FO -called " explanations " of the things they have 
 believed. Some one writes a history of God 
 a history, that is, of the human theistic belief 
 and imagines that in this way he has extinguished 
 theism. One might as well propose to extin- 
 guish the universe by tracing the evolution of the 
 eye that sees it. We forget how very small the 
 distance is over which our " explanations " carry 
 us ; how vast the background behind. Just now 
 some psychologists are explaining for us the phe- 
 nomena of revivals. They are an affair of psychic 
 force and of the subtle interaction of crowds. Each 
 individual is a magnet, a centre of odic powers. 
 Under certain conditions these emanations are 
 even visible. When a multitude of persons are 
 together, all governed by the same fixed ideas, 
 and stirred to a given condition of feeling, the 
 fused, subliminal consciousness of the company 
 develops abnormal powers sufficient to account for 
 all the phenomena. But what then ! When we
 
 THE FARTHER SIDE 309 
 
 have accepted all this are we at the end of our 
 fact ; have we done away with our revival ? We 
 talk of our " fixed ideas " ; where did they come 
 from ? We speak of " the subliminal conscious- 
 ness " ; what has moved it in this particular direc- 
 tion ? Why, we still ask, are men, under the 
 action of this consciousness, breaking from their 
 old sins and leading a new life ? To give us the 
 " subliminal consciousness " as the substitute here 
 for God is as though one should offer an account 
 of the keyboard and wires of a piano as accounting, 
 without Beethoven, for the " Moonlight Sonata." 
 
 After finding ourselves at the far side successively 
 of innumerable early emotions, enthusiasms, de- 
 lusions, we wake up to the feeling that we are getting 
 towards the far side of life itself. It is a reg'on 
 which, to traverse successfully, requires abundant 
 preparation. If we are to escape the " trixtis 
 senectus " of which Virgil, in some memorable lines, 
 complains so bitterly, we must begin the prepara- 
 tion early. As we approach the region we ex- 
 perience some new, singular sensations. One of 
 the strongest of them, with pome of us, is that of 
 the immense, ever increasing value of time. Our 
 account in years is diminishing so rapidly. We 
 feel with Seneca " how many people have been 
 allowed to pillage your life while you were not even 
 aware you were being robbed ! " We realise how 
 much has gone on the mere apparatus of living, 
 instead of being devoted to life itself, the highest 
 life ! There must be no more waste. What re- 
 mains of time must be concentrated on the best 
 things. This " farther side " is clearly the place
 
 310 RELIGION AND EXPERIENCE 
 
 for faith, for the clearer vision. We draw near the 
 lower edge of the cloud, which, when it finally 
 enfolds us, will shut out the view of all this under 
 world. But we shall enter it with a good 
 heart, knowing as we do of that upper side, where 
 stand the white mountains overarched by the 
 cloudless blue.
 
 W. SPEA1OHT AND SONS, 
 
 PKISTEKS, 
 FETTEU LAKE, LONDON, B.C.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LJBHABY FACILITY 
 
 A 000 752 389 7