OF T 
 
 GEORGE A.BART
 
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 THE HEART 
 OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO 
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 THE L HEART OF THE 
 CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 M. A., PH. n., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE AND SEMITIC LANGUAGES 
 BRTN MAWR COLLEGE 
 
 NEW EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED 
 
 got* 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 IQI2 
 
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 COPYRIGHT, xgia 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published September, igta
 
 TO 
 THE MEMORY OF 
 
 James OE, 
 
 FIRST PRESIDENT OF BRYN MAWR COLLEGE 
 
 WHO BY VOICE AND LIFE ' 
 WAS A POWERFUL EXPONENT OF 
 
 THE 
 CHRISTIAN MESSAGE
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 
 
 THE lack of symmetry which the first edition 
 exhibited has been corrected by the insertion of a 
 chapter on "the Christian Message according to the 
 Reformers." Slight changes and improvements 
 have also been made throughout the volume, though 
 in all essential features it remains unchanged. 
 
 G. A. B.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE following pages were prepared as a course 
 of Lectures for the Friends' Summer School at 
 Sagamore, Massachusetts, where they were delivered 
 in 1908. They have since appeared as a series of 
 articles in the Friends' Quarterly Examiner. It is 
 hoped that in this more permanent form they may 
 render some helpful service. 
 
 The form and the limits were imposed upon the 
 material by the demands of the occasion. No ex- 
 haustive treatment could be given in so brief a com- 
 pass. All that could be hoped was that the Lectures 
 should suggestively indicate the heart of the Chris- 
 tian Message and the tendencies of Christian history. 
 They were written to help busy men and women 
 who had no access to the extensive literature upon 
 these subjects. It is hoped that they may still 
 render such service. The writer, a specialist in 
 another field, has for years found an inspiring 
 avocation in the field treated below. He is aware 
 that on many of these subjects there are wide differ- 
 ences of opinion, but it is not upon such differences 
 
 ix
 
 X PREFACE 
 
 that the emphasis should be laid. One should rather 
 strive to find the heart of the Christian Message 
 under all its varying forms. That has been the 
 writer's effort ; whether he has succeeded, the reader 
 must judge. 
 
 That in so brief a compass a chapter is given to 
 the Quakers is due to the fact that the Lectures 
 were written for a Friends' School. It is believed, 
 however, that the general reader will find that the 
 Quaker movement illustrates the fundamental ele- 
 ments of the Christian Message as well as any other 
 epoch of the Reformation. 
 
 If these pages shall stimulate any one to more 
 whole-hearted efforts for the establishment of the 
 Kingdom of God, the writer's highest hopes will be 
 realized. 
 
 GEORGE A. BARTON. 
 
 Bryn Mawr, Pa., U.S.A.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST. 
 
 II. THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE ACCORDING 
 
 TO PAUL...... 27 
 
 III. THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE IN THE Jo- 
 
 HANNINE WRITINGS 53 
 
 IV. THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE IN THE 
 
 EASTERN CHURCH 76 
 
 V. THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE IN THE 
 
 WESTERN CHURCH 102 
 
 VI. THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE ACCORDING 
 
 TO THE REFORMERS 129 
 
 VII. THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE ACCORDING 
 
 TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 154 
 
 VIII. THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE FOR THE 
 
 TWENTIETH CENTURY 182 
 
 xi
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 
 
 IN the New Testament four clearly defined 
 periods can be discerned, and in each of these 
 periods the Christian message was presented in 
 different ways. These periods are: (i) Christ's 
 ministry: (2) the primitive Jewish Church: (3) the 
 period of the Apostle Paul; and (4) the period of 
 the Johannine writings. I do not mean to say that 
 it is easy to pigeon-hole all the New Testament 
 writings in these four compartments, for there are, 
 of course, side currents and intermixture. The 
 Apostle Paul, for example, started somewhere near 
 the Jewish standpoint, differing from it mainly in 
 his conception of the abrogation of the Jewish Law 
 by the crucifixion of Christ, and in the Epistles, 
 written during his Roman captivity, had reached a 
 position approaching that of the Johannine writings. 
 The Book of Acts, also, while belonging on the 
 whole to the primitive Jewish type of thought, 
 exhibits elements of kinship to Paul. Again, the
 
 2 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Synoptic Gospels contain the message of Christ, 
 though they contain also elements which came from 
 the Jewish education of their authors. But in spite 
 of all these facts it is possible to distinguish clearly 
 the four well-defined types of New Testament 
 thought indicated above. 
 
 The first of these types, the Message of Christ, 
 is the subject of this chapter. The third and fourth 
 of them (the Pauline and Johannine conceptions 
 of the message) will form the subjects of sub- 
 sequent chapters. The second one (the primitive 
 Jewish-Christian conception) is quite commonly 
 mistaken for New Testament Christianity, and is, 
 accordingly, already in good degree familiar. 
 
 In tracing the teaching of Jesus it is necessary to 
 exercise some discernment. The Master's earliest 
 message is embedded in the Synoptic Gospels, but 
 those Gospels were written by disciples of Jewish 
 training, who did not fully understand His mes- 
 sage. It seems probable that much, if not all, of 
 that teaching which these evangelists attribute to 
 Christ concerning a cataclysmic ending of the age 
 and a coming of Christ to a judgment which shall 
 consign the wicked to flames, is transferred bodily 
 from contemporaneous Jewish expectations such as
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST J 
 
 are expressed in their apocalypses, many of which 
 are now known to us. This teaching is diametri- 
 cally opposed to the teaching of Christ Himself. 1 
 
 1 In books on the Life of Christ which are before the 
 public today five different lines of approach are exhibited. 
 
 1. There is the old uncritical use of the sources, in 
 which everything in the Gospels is harmonized, and the two 
 natures of Christ, the human and Divine, are assumed to be 
 distinct. Such writers as Farrar, Geikie, and Edersheim are 
 exponents of this line of approach. 
 
 2. There is what may be called the critico-psychological 
 line of approach, exhibited in such writers as Baldensperger 
 and Oscar Holtzmann. This school accepts the results of 
 the modern literary study of the Gospels, believes in the 
 reality of the humanity of Christ, finds his Divine nature in 
 the perfection of the human and in Jesus' own consciousness, 
 believes that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, but in a dif- 
 ferent sense than that entertained by the Jews, and explains 
 the presence of large portions of the eschatological material 
 of the Gospels as importations into the account from current 
 Jewish expectations. The members of this school agree that 
 Christ was incarnated as a first century man, but differ as 
 to the extent to which he shared current expectations. 
 Shailer Mathews (The Messianic Hope in the New Testa- 
 ment) and Dobschiits (Eschatology of the Gospels) hold that 
 he shared a considerable portion of the Jewish conceptions; 
 F. E. Scott (The Kingdom and the Messiah) and C. W. 
 Emmet (The Eschatological Question in the Gospels) grant 
 the Master greater independence of them, though they go a 
 considerable distance with the others ; while B. W. Bacon 
 (Jesus, the Son of God), holds that Jesus' conception of Him- 
 self as Messiah was a sort of prophetic elder Brother, whose 
 function was to bring the people to a realization of the 
 fatherhood of God, and that it lacked apocalyptic elements 
 altogether. 
 
 3. There is the eschatological school of Johannes Weiss 
 and Schweitzer, who hold Jesus responsible for all the
 
 4 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 eschatological utterances of the Gospels in their most literal 
 form. According to this school Jesus was wholly a child of 
 his age. He expected when He rode into Jerusalem that the 
 heavens would open and the cataclysm come, and, that it did 
 not come, formed a part of the agony of Gethsemane ! 
 Schweitzer's book, entitled in its English edition, The Quest 
 of the Historical Jesus, places these views within the reach 
 of English readers. 
 
 4. There are writers like Nathaniel Schmidt, who deny 
 that Jesus ever claimed to be the Messiah at all, and to whom 
 Jesus is a mere man, though a twentieth century man, who 
 had little intellectual connection with his age. 
 
 5. There is the mythological school composed of such writ- 
 ers as Jensen, Drews, and W. B. Smith, who declare that Jesus 
 never lived ; that the story of His life is but the revamping 
 of old heathen myths. 
 
 Of these five methods of approach, the first and last are 
 on scholarly grounds impossible. The first ignores the his- 
 torical sifting of sources necessary to a scientific work, the 
 last ignores historical evidence altogether. Its reasonings 
 have been rightly pronounced "elaborate bosh." The third 
 method fails to take into account the certainty that the early 
 Gospel-traditions were to some degree colored by the media 
 through which they passed, and wholly fails to account 
 for the unique influence of Jesus. The fourth method is 
 historically faulty in that it fails to account for the con- 
 nection of a Messianic tradition with Jesus. It as com- 
 pletely cuts Him off from any historical connection with his 
 age, as the third view buries Him under the conceptions of 
 his contemporaries. The one method of approach that at once 
 conserves the demands of historical scholarship and of re- 
 ligion is the second, though in the application of this there 
 are yet many unsettled questions. One of these is the degree 
 to which Jesus, as a first century Jew, could combine current 
 Jewish Messianic expectations with those spiritual views of 
 His which so completely transcended them. This is a point 
 on which opinions will differ for some time to come. To the 
 writer it seems clear that Jesus cannot be held responsible for 
 that material which contradicts the spirit of His teaching. 
 It is characteristic of a religious genius to transcend the
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 5 
 
 thought of his time. In his direct perception of what is 
 consonant with the character of God, he leaps the centuries. 
 This was true of Amos, of Paul, of St. Francis of Assisi, of 
 George Fox. To believe less of Jesus is to think Him less 
 than they. 
 
 In making our estimate of the Master's message, 
 therefore, we shall omit that which has evidently 
 been taken over from Judaism into the Gospels. 
 This is not the place to give detailed reasons for so 
 doing. Such discussion belongs to the threshing- 
 machine of the study or the class-room; we wish 
 reverently to approach the great granary, and, apart 
 from the dust of the critical threshing-machine, 
 to partake of the pure wheat itself. 1 
 
 Jesus Christ brought to the world a new message. 
 Of course it contained elements that had been pro- 
 minent in previous systems elements too that had 
 been prominent in the teachings of the Old Testa- 
 ment prophets, and yet in its selection of these and 
 the elimination of others, in its added spiritual 
 grasp, its insight into the heart of God and man, 
 and the unique whole which was thus produced, it 
 was in an important sense new. 
 
 1 It is enough to say that two, at least, of our first three 
 Gospels were based on previously written documents. Most 
 scholars hold that these documents were two in number. The 
 writer agrees with Professor Burton in holding that there 
 were four (see Decennial Publications of the University of 
 Chicago, First Series, vol. v., pp. 195-264).
 
 6 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 It was, however, related not only to the remote, 
 but to the immediate past, and fitted to the needs of 
 the moment when it was delivered. As a rare com- 
 bination of eternal principles with the demands of 
 the hour the message is also unique. 
 
 This message took shape in the mind of Jesus in 
 a great experience, for He was so much one of us 
 that He "grew in wisdom and stature," and under- 
 went the psychological development of a normal 
 mind. This great experience is worthy of our 
 study, because it reveals to us how His message was 
 related to the thought of His time, how it differed 
 from it, and brings us face to face with some of the 
 new elements of eternal value in it. 
 
 There is reason to believe that Jesus had always 
 possessed an extraordinary consciousness of the 
 Fatherhood of God. This consciousness had as one 
 of its constituent elements a unique sense of moral 
 oneness with the Father. His question, "Did ye 
 not know that I must be in the things of My 
 Father?" as well as the absence of any trace of 
 a consciousness of sin in Him, are proofs of this. 
 But the consciousness of a Messianic mission up to 
 the time of His baptism was not, apparently, a part 
 of His conception of Himself.
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 7 
 
 The Jews of the time were looking for a Messiah 
 who should establish an earthly kingdom. We now 
 know the character of the Messiah of their expecta- 
 tions from many different apocalypses. From these 
 apocalypses we learn that, though the conceptions 
 were not uniform, there was a growing tendency to 
 regard the Messiah as a heavenly being, who had 
 enjoyed a long pre-existence with God. Those who 
 did not hold this view, and who believed the Messiah 
 would be born on the earth, thought that He would 
 be caught up to God to await the proper time of His 
 manifestation. Both classes agreed that He would 
 be revealed from heaven at the proper moment, that 
 He would place Himself at the head of Israel's 
 armies, and with supernatural power overcome her 
 enemies, and make the Jews the masters of the 
 world. 
 
 The Pharisaic circle of sympathisers in Galilee, to 
 which Joseph and Mary belonged, must have been 
 familiar with many of these phases of the Messianic 
 hope of the times. They were a part of the theo- 
 logical atmosphere in which He was reared, and He 
 was no doubt familiar with many of the highly 
 supernatural features of these expectations. And 
 yet His human life was so natural, and His con-
 
 8 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 sciousness of union with the Father so spiritual, 
 that it apparently never occurred to Him during 
 His early years to think of Himself as the expected 
 Messiah. 
 
 This was the situation when He, passing along 
 the Jordan valley, heard the preaching of John the 
 Baptist, and submitted to his baptism. As Mark 
 describes that event he makes it clear to the dis- 
 cerning reader that a new opening came to Jesus 
 then. With many reverent scholars I believe that 
 the voice which said, "Thou art my beloved Son," 
 was a voice in Jesus' own soul. It represents the 
 bursting of the thought upon Him, that He was 
 called to be the Messiah that the meaning of His 
 unbroken relation to God was that it was His 
 privilege to perform for His countrymen the Mes- 
 sianic mission. 
 
 The dawning of this consciousness drove the 
 Saviour into retirement. 1 The call to this new mis- 
 
 1 To those who hare been educated on the old categories of 
 thought, it seems at first like a denial of the Deity of Christ 
 to speak of a growth in His consciousness. A little reflection 
 shows that even on the old categories this is not so. A real 
 incarnation involves a real human psychology ; God incarnate 
 in a human body without a human mind would be God incar- 
 nate in an animal, not in a man. St. Luke saw more clearly. 
 "Jesus grew in wisdom as well as in stature," he tells us. 
 (Luke ii. 52.)
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 9 
 
 sion had to be adjusted to His inner life the mission 
 itself had to be adjusted to what He knew of God. 
 This adjustment was a psychological or spiritual 
 process. The story of it is told in the Gospels in 
 objective terms ; but this is in accord with the cus- 
 toms of Oriental narrative. The narrative is called 
 the account of the Temptation of Christ. 
 
 The heart of these temptations was the decision 
 of what kind of Messiah He would be, and what 
 kind of a Messianic kingdom He would establish. 
 The Jews were expecting a Messiah who would be 
 a supernatural warrior who would sit on an earthly 
 throne triumphant over his enemies, and would rule 
 politically over the bodies of men. As Jesus knew 
 the Father, however, He knew that a kingdom estab- 
 lished by such measures would be out of harmony 
 with God, because out of harmony with the highest 
 ethical and spiritual principles. Such a kingdom 
 was not humanity's greatest need. 
 
 Men needed more than anything to come directly 
 under the rule of God; to know God, not as a ter- 
 rible Ruler but as a loving Father. They needed 
 a kingdom of God, but a kingdom founded not on 
 force but on love a kingdom to which the allegi- 
 ance of loving souls should bind them in response
 
 IO THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 to a revelation of God's character; not a kingdom 
 into which they should be swept by violence, and in 
 which they should be kept by fear. 
 
 From the temptation Jesus emerged with a new 
 conception of the Messianic kingdom the kingdom 
 of God and with a new conception, too, of the 
 mission of the Messiah. The kingdom was to exist 
 first in the spirits of men before it was to have an 
 external organization. It must get into men before 
 men could get into it. Its method of conquest was 
 to be neither arms nor supernatural cataclysms, but 
 loving and unselfish service. The role of the Mes- 
 siah was to be, not that of a political agitator, or a 
 military leader, but that of a teacher, a friend, a 
 neighbour, a physician, a loving companion, a helper, 
 a servant. 1 
 
 There is not time, neither is this the place, to stay 
 to point out the means taken by Jesus to promulgate 
 these views how He chose the term, "Son of 
 Man," at once to conceal and later to reveal his 
 
 1 Some scholars deny the historical character of the tempta- 
 tion of Jesus, and hold also that He did not claim to be the 
 Messiah. So, for example, Schmidt, Prophet of Nazareth, 
 pp. 262 ff. The reasons for denying Schmidt's position, and 
 maintaining the position here set forth, have been stated by the 
 writer in the International Journal of Ethics, vol. xvii. pp. 
 
 1 10-120.
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST II 
 
 Messianic claim. It is our business rather to note 
 the new conception of the kingdom of God here put 
 forth. Jesus took the term out of the realm of 
 politics and transferred it to the realm of religion. 
 He taught by it that it is every man's privilege to 
 come under the direct personal guidance of God, 
 that it is every man's duty to come into intimate 
 personal relations with Him. As the Messiah of 
 such a kingdom He exhibited in His person and 
 experience the ideal of one who enjoyed in their ful- 
 ness personal relations with the Father, and in His 
 work and teaching He revealed in all their beauty 
 the principles and the spirit of the kingdom. 
 
 This teaching concerning the kingdom lifted the 
 kingdom out of the realm of a formal monarchy and 
 translated it into a family. And this fact brings us 
 to the heart of the message of Jesus concerning God. 
 In His teaching God is no longer a far-off ruler, or 
 a stern and terrible judge. God is a loving Father. 
 The parable of the Prodigal Son gives us the heart 
 of His message on this point. The son is thought- 
 less and selfish ; he wanders from the father's house ; 
 he degrades himself with a sinful life in a far 
 country; but the father never forgets him, never 
 hates him, never despairs of him. To the end the
 
 12 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 father scans the homeward way ready to catch the 
 first glimpse of the repentant boy, that he may 
 hasten to welcome him home. 
 
 The heart of the message of Christ is the loving 
 Fatherhood of God. To this He gave a new reality 
 in the minds of men. The early Semites had 
 thought of God as love, but in a gross, physical, 
 sensual way. Hosea had taught that God is a 
 father, but His fatherhood is limited to Israel; In 
 the teaching of Jesus God is the God of the world. 
 His love goes out to all. His kingdom is a large 
 family, in which the Father rules through love. 
 Into this family all are welcomed, as rapidly as they 
 turn from sin and turn their faces with resolution 
 toward the light. 
 
 This attitude of ready forgiveness is further illus- 
 trated in the parable of the Pharisee and the Pub- 
 lican. He who would not so much as lift his eyes 
 up to heaven, but smote his breast, saying, "God, 
 be merciful to me a sinner," went down to his 
 house "justified," because his attitude was one of 
 sincere penitence, and God, as a tender Father, 
 hastens to bestow His forgiveness upon such. 
 
 This idea of the Fatherhood of God runs through 
 all the teaching of Jesus. In speaking of the fowls
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 13 
 
 of the air he reminds his disciples that it is "your 
 Father" that feedeth them. The prayer which He 
 taught his disciples begins: "Our Father." The 
 parental relation lies at the basis of Jesus' concep- 
 tion of the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 Indeed, the whole message of Jesus concerning 
 God is a reversal of the conceptions of Him which 
 were held by many at that time, and have been held 
 by many during the centuries since. It is very 
 natural, in consideration of the ways in which the 
 conception of God has developed, for the many to 
 think of God as a far-off sovereign and as a terrible 
 judge. Jesus, on the other hand, revealed God as a 
 loving friend who, so far from holding the sinner 
 aloof, wins the sinner from wicked ways by trusting 
 him. This is the teaching of the incident of the 
 woman taken in adultery, a passage which, though 
 now found in the Gospel of John, was, as Tischen- 
 dorf saw, not written for the connection where it 
 now stands. It is found in some manuscripts after 
 the 2 ist chapter of Luke, and belongs as much to 
 the Synoptic teaching as to the Gospel of John. 
 
 Men meet the sinner especially the feminine 
 sinner however penitent she may be, with denun- 
 ciation, punishment, and scorn. Jesus met this
 
 14 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE ' 
 
 sinner with trust and kindness, and by these called 
 forth penitence within her. He who worked the 
 works of his Father was not more kind than the 
 Father. He would always teach us that the Father 
 was as kind as He. If Jesus trusted the sinful 
 woman, he would thereby teach us that God trusts 
 the sinner; that in this love the Father's love is 
 manifested. Thus God would win men back to His 
 family, and persuade them to reenter filial relations 
 with Himself. 
 
 This was the heart of Jesus' message concerning 
 God. In speaking of the way God wins men we are 
 naturally led to consider Jesus' view of His own 
 relation to the establishment of the kingdom of 
 heaven, or, in other words, the means of redemption 
 and atonement. 
 
 The forgiveness which Jesus extended to the 
 sinful woman in the incident just discussed was 
 extended without any reference to atonement, and, 
 indeed, without any profession of faith on her part. 
 This attitude is revealed also in an incident in the 
 early ministry of Christ, recorded in Mark ii. 5, 
 Matt. ix. 2, and Luke v. 20, where Jesus said to the 
 man sick of palsy, "thy sins are forgiven thee." It 
 is true that the evangelists say that He said this
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 1 5 
 
 because He saw the faith of those who brought the 
 man, but even so, no statement is made as to the 
 faith of the man himself, and Jesus makes no refer- 
 ence to any means by which forgiveness is to be 
 mediated. 
 
 At the beginning then of Jesus' career He speaks 
 of forgiveness much in the terms of the parable of 
 the Prodigal Son. The conditions of forgiveness 
 are not there set forth. 
 
 It seems possible from this point to trace a devel- 
 opment in the consciousness of Jesus. There is a 
 series of passages in which forgiveness is mediated 
 by His word. One of these is the quotation from 
 Isaiah in Luke iv. 18, 19: 
 
 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, 
 Because He hath anointed Me to preach good tidings to 
 
 the poor: 
 He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and 
 
 recovering of sight to the blind, 
 To set at liberty them that are bruised, 
 And to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." 
 
 Here forgiveness and salvation are mediated by 
 the Master's word. Again, in Matt. xi. 5, the sign 
 of the Messianic age to which the attention of the 
 discouraged Baptist is called is: "The poor have 
 good tidings preached to them." Again, in Luke xi. 
 29-32, Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah,
 
 l6 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 and "behold a greater than Jonah is here" em- 
 phasizes the same means preaching of bringing 
 the world to God. 
 
 The same phase of Christ's teaching appears in 
 the Parable of the Sower (Mark iv. and Matt, xiii.), 
 for in this parable the seed which may be choked, or 
 carried away by the owners of wings, or may perish 
 for lack of depth and moisture, or may bear thirty, 
 sixty, or a hundredfold, is declared by Jesus Him- 
 self to be the Word proclaimed by the Son of Man. 
 
 In another class of passages Jesus expresses the 
 conviction that forgiveness is mediated by His 
 person. One of the most striking of these passages 
 begins at Matt. xi. 25. Although the chronological 
 setting of this passage is now lost, the phrase "at 
 that season," with which it begins, indicates that 
 originally the consciousness that the place of an 
 individual in the higher life was determined by atti- 
 tude towards Christ's person came to Jesus at a 
 definite time. This conviction probably marks a 
 stage in the consciousness of the Master. The 
 struggle of His ministry was becoming more severe. 
 The consciousness itself He expressed in these 
 words: "All things are delivered unto Me of My 
 Father; and no man knoweth the Son but the
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 17 
 
 Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save 
 the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth to reveal 
 Him. Come unto me all ye that labour and are 
 heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My 
 yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and 
 lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest to your souls." 
 
 To the same purpose is Luke xii. 8, 9: "Every 
 one who shall confess Me before men, him shall the 
 Son of Man confess before the angels of God; but 
 he that denieth Me in the presence of men shall be 
 denied in the presence of the angels of God." 
 Similarly, in Matt. xii. 30, we read: "He that is 
 not with Me is against Me, and he that gathereth 
 not with Me scattereth abroad." 
 
 As the ministry of Jesus progressed, then, it 
 appears that He passed from the conviction that the 
 simple proclamation of the message of God would 
 bring in the kingdom, to the conviction that in some 
 way His person had a primary function in medi- 
 ating it. 
 
 From this conviction the thought of Jesus passed 
 on to one other, viz., that somehow the mediation 
 of the kingdom involved His death. This convic- 
 tion seemed to have formed itself clearly in the 
 mind of Jesus towards the close of His ministry,
 
 l8 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 when at Caesarea Philippi He finally drew from the 
 disciples the confession of His Messiahship. Im- 
 mediately afterwards (Mark viii. 31) He "began to 
 teach them that the Son of Man must be rejected by 
 the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and 
 be killed." 
 
 A little later when, on the journey to Jerusalem, 
 the sons of Zebedee made their ambitious request 
 for preferment in the new kingdom, and He had 
 occasion to teach His angry disciples that service, 
 not position, was the great thing in the new realm, 
 He used this comparison (Mark x. 45) : "For verily 
 the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but 
 to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many." 
 This is not the place to rehearse the theories which 
 in the course of the centuries have been built upon 
 these words. It is enough to notice here that the 
 thing in which men are held captive is sin. It is 
 from sinning that Jesus came to redeem men. The 
 giving of His life was the supreme act of the service 
 by which He sought to accomplish that redemption. 
 He probably did not think, then, of giving His life 
 as a ransom to Satan, or as a ransom paid by God's 
 love to God's justice, nor as a vicarious substitution 
 in bearing the death-penalty of the sinner, nor even
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 19 
 
 as an example in order to maintain the government 
 of God. He rather thought of it as the act most 
 likely to produce the experience of repentance in the 
 mind of a sinner, and so, on account of its psycho- 
 logical effect on the unrepentant, a principal means 
 of redemption. 
 
 Then, lastly, there are the words uttered at the 
 Last Supper (Mark xiv. 23, 24; Matt. xxvi. 27, 28; 
 Luke xxii. 18, 19) : "this is My blood of the cove- 
 nant" (many ancient authorities read "new cove- 
 nant") "which is shed for many." The word 
 "covenant" especially if it was "new covenant" 
 carries the thought back at once to the sealing of 
 the covenant at Mount Sinai (Exodus xxiv. i-n). 
 In the case of that covenant the sacrifices simply 
 sealed the contract. They bound God and man 
 together in a solemn covenant. By this reference 
 Jesus suggests that His death seals a new covenant 
 between God and man a covenant which binds the 
 human creature and the Divine Creator together in 
 a higher and better bond. 
 
 Looking at the ministry of Jesus as a whole, then, 
 we find that in all parts of it He expressed God's 
 willingness to forgive sin, but that as His ministry 
 progressed He became increasingly impressed with
 
 2O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 the difficulty of bringing man to realize the need of 
 forgiveness and to accept it. At first He looked to 
 the mere willingness of God to forgive as all-suffi- 
 cient. Then He saw at different periods that this 
 willingness would have to be mediated by His 
 preaching, then by His personal influence, and, 
 lastly, by the eloquent pleading of His death. 
 
 Throughout all this, however, His one message 
 was God's readiness to forgive, and God's anxious 
 longing to welcome sinners home. The different 
 degrees in the means employed only indicate that 
 as the ministry advanced the Master, who shared 
 with us a real human psychology, became increas- 
 ingly conscious that to win men the message must 
 be proclaimed, not in word only but with all the 
 magnetic influence of the Divinest personality, and 
 all the moving eloquence of the sublimest self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 If now we turn from the means by which, in the 
 teaching of Jesus, the work of bringing men into 
 the kingdom was to be accomplished, to the ideal 
 which He set before every man, we find His ideal 
 expressed in these words (Matt. v. 48) : "Ye, there- 
 fore, shall be perfect, even as your Father which is in 
 heaven is perfect." These words, interpreted by
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 21 
 
 their context, mean that men are to love their 
 neighbours ; to be kind, considerate, and unclannish ; 
 N. to be broad in their sympathies, and not vindictive 
 in their attitude to any. They may not equal in the 
 / degree of their perfections those of the Infinite 
 Father, but they may become perfect children as He 
 is a perfect Father. 
 
 This thought of Jesus set before men a loftier 
 V. 
 destiny than they had before dared to dream of. It 
 
 is Hosea's old conception of the sonship of Israel, 
 transfigured by being made ethical, spiritual, and 
 universal. 
 
 The whole message of the kingdom of God in all 
 the aspects in which Jesus proclaimed it presented 
 an inner, spiritual side, and an outer, social side. If 
 it involves the idea of God as Father, it also involves 
 the idea of men as children of God and accordingly 
 brethren. Children of the same perfect Father 
 should dwell in harmony and love. Men cannot 
 pray "Our Father," without thinking of one another 
 as brethren. To think of one another as brethren 
 is to abolish war, whether political or industrial ; to 
 abolish sweat-shops, and other forms of slavery; 
 and to seek to realise the Divine brotherhood in 
 political and social institutions. To seek to be per-
 
 22 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 feet as the Father is perfect is to imitate His attitude 
 of love, of kindliness, and of universal regard for 
 all men. If, then, one starts out simply in his own 
 person to realize the Divine ideal of character as 
 taught by Jesus, it leads to the same end, for this 
 cannot be accomplished without assuming an atti- 
 tude towards others which must inevitably work the 
 spirit of Christ down into the warp and woof of 
 human institutions. 
 
 Approach the problem as we will, therefore from 
 the side of the kingdom of God, from the point of 
 view of the fatherhood of God, or from the point of 
 view of the self-realisation of the individual the 
 teaching of Jesus, if really followed, leads us to the 
 same social goal. It looks not only to the creation 
 of a perfect society in heaven, but also the produc- 
 tion on this earth of a social fabric which shall in its 
 structure reveal and express through a real brother- 
 hood the Divine love which springs from the com- 
 mon Father. 
 
 The teaching of Jesus on this point is very con- 
 crete. He had no faith in the coming of the king- 
 dom of God through sentimental dreams which 
 produced no action. The parable of the Good 
 Samaritan is a case in point. The priest who
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 23 
 
 "passed by on the other side" may have been a very 
 good man. He may have been engaged at the 
 moment in going to bring some money from a 
 Levitical city to expend on the Temple ritual ; or he 
 may have been on his way to one of the cities of the 
 Decapolis to persuade some devout soul to become a 
 Jewish proselyte. Such services would correspond 
 to raising money to pay off church debts, or attend- 
 ing to mission-work, or to holding revival meetings 
 now. He may have been of a kindly disposition, 
 too. Possibly he said : "There is a difficult problem. 
 If I were not so hurried with this important church- 
 work I should like to stop and investigate it" ! Sim- 
 ilarly the Levite may have been engaged in some 
 important religious mission. He may have belonged 
 to the musical division of the Levites, and may have 
 been hurrying to Jerusalem to teach them some new 
 cantillation for the sacred text that was to be read 
 at the next feast. It may not have been entirely 
 due to an exclusive spirit but the pressure of sacred 
 engagements may have led him to "pass by on the 
 other side." It was only the despised Samaritan 
 schismatic or heretic that had leisure enough to 
 stop and give the sufferer personal attention, and 
 humanity enough to perform the simple duties of
 
 24 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 helpfulness which kindness prompted. Does not 
 Jesus teach us here the practical, personal nature 
 of that helpful service which is needed to bring in 
 the kingdom of heaven? 
 
 Several books have been written in recent years 
 on the social teaching of Jesus. No writer has 
 shown more convincingly than Dr. Peabody that in 
 the spirit which Jesus inculcates the social and 
 industrial problems of our time find their solution. 
 In the pages of his book 1 it is made clear that no 
 artificial distribution of property will bring in the 
 Millennium; that no industrial legislation will 
 bring about ideal conditions. With broad induc- 
 tion and adequate learning he has convincingly 
 shown that it is only as the spirit of brotherhood 
 as taught by Christ is realized, and employer and 
 employee each become able to look at the other 
 as a brother should, that social and industrial prob- 
 lems can fye solved. It is not a change in the 
 machinery of production, nor an alteration in the 
 methods of distribution, nor the levelling of social 
 inequalities by artificial flatirons that will achieve 
 the goal, but change in human nature itself the 
 replacing of the selfish by the unselfish spirit 
 
 1 Jesus Christ and the Social Question.
 
 THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST 2$ 
 
 the spirit of the animal by the spirit of Christ 
 The Message of Christ was a most comprehensive 
 message. It brought to the world a new revelation 
 of God's attitude to man, a new and spiritual con- 
 ception of the kingdom of God a conception which 
 translated it into a family of which God is the 
 Father and all men are brethren. It held before 
 the individual as an ideal the realisation in his 
 human life of the spirit and character of the Father, 
 and it looked to the realisation in earthly society of 
 a real human brotherhood. 
 
 The Message of Christ is unique in the way in 
 which it combines the loftiest spiritual experiences 
 
 with the homeliest human duties. At the end of his 
 book, Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, Pro- 
 fessor Peabody has a chapter entitled "The Ascent 
 of Ethics," in which he shows that in the teaching 
 of Jesus there is no duty however humble, no 
 service however insignificant, that does not rest in 
 the last analysis upon a foundation of the sublimest 
 Taith. This chapter is followed by another, entitled 
 "The Descent of Faith," the burden of which is 
 that in the Master's teaching there is no faith so 
 sublime and spiritual that it does not descend to 
 link itself to the homeliest duties.
 
 2,6 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 In the Fatherhood of God, mediated by the teach- 
 ing, the person, and the sufferings of Christ, this 
 sublime faith is begotten. In the "Descent of 
 Faith" and the "Ascent of Ethics," so that the 
 former finds adequate expression in the latter, the 
 individual is to realise his destiny by the revelation 
 in himself of the Divine image; industrial problems 
 are to be solved and social ills are to be righted, and 
 the kingdom, already potential in the experience of 
 individuals, is to come in an earthly society.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 
 
 THE Apostle Paul holds a unique place in early 
 Christianity. After the earthly life of Jesus had 
 terminated, the Twelve and the other disciples con- 
 tinued the work of the Master, but they continued 
 it as though it were designed especially for the Jews. 
 Christianity became a Jewish sect. It accepted the 
 validity of the Jewish law, and cherished all the 
 hopes of Jewish eschatology. Its moral life may 
 have been a little more noble than that of contem- 
 porary Judaism, but otherwise it differed from 
 Judaism only in its belief that Jesus was the Mes- 
 siah. He had been caught up to heaven, only that, 
 in accordance with the expectations of the apoc- 
 alyptists, he might, when the age was ripe for the 
 final cataclysm, be revealed again. The Gospel 
 was preached to none but Jews, and no one (except, 
 possibly, Stephen) had an idea that a Gentile could 
 become a Christian without first becoming a Jew. 
 
 The man who changed all this and started Chris- 
 27
 
 28 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 tianity on its career as a universal religion was the 
 Apostle Paul. 
 
 St. Paul was a many-sided man. He was at once 
 a Rabbi and a mystic; a man of affairs and an 
 independent thinker; a master of men and a re- 
 ligious devotee. Moreover, in his long life he under- 
 went a marked development in his spiritual thought ; 
 'his grasp of the significance of Christ and his 
 understanding of his mission steadily increasing to 
 the end. Although his writings have influenced 
 Christian theology more than those of any other 
 man, Paul has been so misunderstood by those whom 
 he has influenced that his impress as stamped upon 
 Christian theology is in reality a caricature of his 
 real thought. 
 
 I shall try to set forth, as I understand it, his 
 real thought as he himself shows that it developed 
 in his mind, and we shall thus be able to see the 
 'form which the Christian message, as uttered by 
 him, assumed. 
 
 The phases of St. Paul's character which had 
 most to do with making him a Christian and in 
 shaping his Christian message were his Rabbinism 
 and his mysticism. His Rabbinism was misunder- 
 stood by Augustine and other theologians, and was
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 2O, 
 
 mistaken for his real message, whereas it was not 
 the message but only its husk. 
 
 We shall find how the two intermingled in his 
 mind, if we trace first the mental processes of his 
 conversion, and then something of the growth of his 
 thought as a Christian. 
 
 The key to St. Paul's conversion is found in 
 Gal. iii. 13: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of 
 the law, having become a curse for us; as it is 
 written, 'Cursed is every one that hangeth on a 
 tree.' " "As it is written" is a phrase by which the 
 Old Testament is quoted. If we turn back to the Old 
 Testament we find that Paul has quoted Deut. xxi. 
 22, 23, a passage which provides that a man who is 
 hanged shall be taken down before nightfall. The 
 reason given for this is, "For he that is hanged is ac- 
 cursed of God ; that thou defile not thy land." The 
 point of this Deuteronomic law is just this: God's 
 curse rests upon every man who is hanged; that 
 curse is contagious, and the land must not be exposed 
 to its contagion during the night, or it will be infected 
 thereby. This is a primitive and, if you please, a 
 half-superstitious point of view ; but even so I could 
 prove, if time permitted, that it was held by both 
 Jews and Christians until after the time of Paul.
 
 3O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Stated in a different way this view of the law 
 seems more reasonable. All the law is from God; 
 it is accordingly all sacred and all equally binding. 
 To make a distinction between the ritualistic and 
 the moral laws would be rationalism it would be 
 to intrude the human judgment into a region into 
 which it has no right to enter. 
 
 This was the point of view of Paul. The Jews 
 who became Christians before him were less logical 
 than he ; but to his mind the law's curse rested upon 
 Jesus because he had been crucified, or hanged on a 
 tree. As he saw Christians multiplying, and in- 
 creasingly large numbers of Jews swept into the 
 Church, it appeared to him that the contagion of 
 the curse of a hanged man, which the law feared 
 might spread over the land, was actually spreading 
 among the people. For this reason he exerted all 
 his force of character, influence, and industry, to 
 stamp out the curse. 
 
 Meantime another influence was at work in Paul's 
 life which made him dissatisfied with the law at the 
 very moment when he so strenuously sought to 
 serve it. There was one law in the Decalogue 
 which Paul could not keep. It was the command, 
 "Thou shalt not covet." The external commands
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 3! 
 
 he could fulfil, but the wanderings of desire he 
 could not control. Now Paul was a most earnest 
 man. He was thorough in all his thought, and not 
 one to consciously tolerate a sham. The struggle 
 which this failure to keep the command against 
 coveting cost him is vividly portrayed in the seventh 
 chapter of Romans. 
 
 Intensely zealous for the extermination of the 
 Christians in order to vindicate the law, and crying 
 out inwardly, "Oh wretched man that I am ! Who 
 shall deliver me out of the body of this death?" 
 because the law failed to satisfy his inner nature, 
 Saul of Tarsus approached Damascus. Before he 
 reached the city Christ appeared to him in that 
 memorable vision a vision which convinced him 
 that Jesus was risen from the dead. This vision 
 changed his whole life. 
 
 Why Paul's life was changed by this vision we can 
 now understand, thanks to the research of recent 
 years. In common with other ancient peoples 
 Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans the 
 Hebrews believed that all the dead went down to a 
 cavern under the earth. They called this "Sheol" 
 (see Isaiah xiv. 9, Ezekiel xxxii. 21-31). In the 
 earlier times the Hebrews had believed in no resur-
 
 32 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 rection, but by the time of Paul a section of them, 
 including the Pharisees, to which party Paul be- 
 longed, looked forward to a resurrection at a great 
 day of judgment which was impending at some 
 time in the future. In all history only two men 
 had, they thought, escaped from Sheol in advance 
 of this resurrection and gone direct to God. These 
 were Enoch and Elijah. Among the Greeks and 
 Babylonians, when mortals escaped the under- 
 world they were thought to become gods. To the 
 monotheistic Hebrews this was impossible; but 
 they did the next best thing. Enoch was made an 
 angel; the very process by which it was done is 
 described to us in one of the apocalypses (Sclav. 
 Enoch, xxii.). Elijah meantime had become a 
 kind of heavenly patron saint, whose revelations 
 and mediation accomplished the most marvellous 
 wonders (cf. Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. v. I24.fi.). 
 
 When, therefore, Paul's vision convinced him that 
 God had honoured Jesus as He had honoured Enoch 
 and Elijah, in spite of the fact that the curse of the 
 law rested upon Him in consequence of His cruci- 
 fixion, his whole education had prepared him as 
 naturally for the revulsion which followed as it had 
 prepared him to be a persecutor. God could not
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 33 
 
 have honoured one whose life had been a lie ; there- 
 fore Jesus must be the Messiah, as He had claimed. 
 The Messiah was a heavenly being closely associated 
 with God (Eth. Enoch, 48-51) ; Jesus must accord- 
 ingly be such a being. This was to him proof that 
 Jesus was Divine (Rom. i. 4). Paul therefore 
 became an ardent disciple of Him whom he had just 
 now persecuted. This had a remarkable effect upon 
 his inner life, the results of which we shall trace in a 
 few moments. 
 
 This vision of Paul's, which had convinced him of 
 the Messiahship of Jesus, had also a revolutionary 
 effect upon his estimate of the Jewish law. That 
 law had pronounced Jesus accursed because of His 
 crucifixion; God, on the other hand, had honoured 
 Jesus as in all the history of the world he had 
 honoured only Enoch and Elijah, and by so honour- 
 ing Him had vindicated the Messianic claim of Jesus 
 and His righteousness. The law could not there- 
 fore be, as Paul had thought, of universal applica- 
 tion. There must be a region the region in which 
 Jesus dwelt in which it was not in force. As Paul 
 had previously reasoned that Christians shared the 
 curse of the crucified, so now he reasoned that they 
 shared with Jesus his exemption from the law, and 
 3
 
 34 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 shared also His righteousness. It was because of 
 this line of thought that Paul could say, "I through 
 the law died to the law that I might live unto God" 
 (Gal. ii. 19). It was possible for a man to be justi- 
 fied now i. e., pronounced righteous apart from 
 the works of the law. God had revealed "a right- 
 eousness apart from the law" (Rom. iii. 21). It 
 was in this way that Paul saw that when a Jew 
 became a Christian he need no longer keep the Jew- 
 ish law. Similarly, he saw that if a Gentile became 
 a Christian, he too could find access to God, apart 
 from the law. To the Pharisee it was impossible 
 for a Gentile to approach God without becoming a 
 proselyte and keeping the law. The law was to the 
 Pharisee the one avenue of approach to God, and 
 through it both Jew and Gentile must walk, if they 
 would come near to Him. Paul now saw a path of 
 approach to God for the Gentiles apart from the 
 law, if Gentiles identified themselves with Jesus. 
 Gentiles even could share the favour God bestowed 
 on Jesus, in spite of the curse of the law. The bond 
 written in ordinances that is, the requirements of 
 the Jewish law which was contrary to us which 
 was a middle wall of partition between Jew and 
 Gentile Jesus has taken out of the way, Paul
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 35 
 
 declares, nailing it to His cross (Col. ii. 13, 14). It 
 was thus that Paul obtained his Gospel for the Gen- 
 tiles, and became the Apostle to the Gentiles. It 
 was for this reason that go where he would, let him 
 but preach to the Jews and sooner or later a mob 
 drove him away. His message was subversive of 
 fundamental Jewish institutions. 
 
 We have thus briefly traced from Paul's Rabbini- 
 cal training the rise of his Rabbinical philosophy. 1 
 It was to him as real as the doctrine of decrees to a 
 Calvinist, or the doctrine of evolution to a thinker 
 of the present day. It was the Jewish philosophy 
 of the time, and it could but have a fundamental 
 influence upon him. It is, as I shall show in a 
 moment, but half his thought, or not even that. It 
 made him a persecutor, however ; it helped to make 
 him a Christian; it made him the Apostle to the 
 Gentiles. 
 
 When Paul speaks of the death of Christ he has, 
 except in a few rare instances, this philosophy in 
 mind. Christ died but once, and that was on the 
 cross; His blood was shed but once, and that was 
 on the cross. Whether he speaks of the death of 
 
 1 For fuller statements, see C. C. Everett's Gospel of Paul, 
 Houghton Mifflin, 1903, and the writer's "Spiritual Develop- 
 ment of Paul" in the Neva World, viii. pp. 111-124.
 
 36 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Christ, the shedding of the blood of Christ, or the 
 crucifixion of Christ, he always has this Rabbinic 
 sort of a philosophy in mind. Men ignorant of this 
 philosophy have thought they found in Paul a doc- 
 trine of vicarious substitution, and have proclaimed 
 this as the heart of Paul's Christian message. In 
 reality the doctrine of vicarious substitution is as 
 foreign to Paul as the doctrine of evolution is. The 
 Rabbinic philosophy which has been mistaken for 
 substitution is not even the heart of Paul's message. 
 It was only the axe which cleared away the forests 
 of Jewish particularism, that the seed of the king- 
 dom might find a lodgment. 
 
 The real gospel of Paul his powerful conception 
 of the Christian message which enabled him to do 
 his work was his doctrine of the mystic union of 
 Christ and the believer. Indeed with Paul this was 
 more than a doctrine; it was a living experience. 
 The recognition of this brings us to another aspect 
 of Paul's vision near Damascus. We have traced 
 its influence on his thought, but it had also a crea- 
 tive effect on his heart-life. 
 
 We know that this is true from the way in which 
 Paul always referred to this experience. He speaks 
 of it in Gal. i. 16 as God revealing his Son in me.
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 37 
 
 In Rom. vii. and viii. he contrasts the old life tinder 
 the law with the fact that "the law of the Spirit of 
 life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law 
 of sin and death." In Gal. ii. 20 he declares "It is 
 no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me." 
 
 In this experience Paul's thirst for righteousness 
 found satisfaction. The control of his desires which 
 he was unable to accomplish alone, and which made 
 him cry out so pathetically, "Who shall deliver me 
 out of the body of this death?" was now accom- 
 plished by union with the indwelling Christ, so that 
 he could sing, "There is therefore now no condem- 
 nation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who walk 
 not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." This 
 mystic union with Christ, which had given his own 
 life such emancipation, such poise and power, was 
 the heart of his Christian message. 
 
 Before endeavouring to study in detail Paul's 
 doctrine of union with Christ, let us glance at his 
 conception of Christ Himself. His doctrine of 
 Christ was not a fixed quantity, but came to matu- 
 rity through development It is a progressive, not 
 a static doctrine. 
 
 We have already noted how at his conversion 
 Paul accepted Jesus as the Messiah. From the
 
 38 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 background of his thought which we gather from 
 Jewish apocalypses, we know that he, from that 
 moment, regarded Christ as a heavenly being closely 
 associated with God. When Paul wrote his Thessa- 
 lonian letters fifteen to twenty years later, his 
 thought of Christ, in so far at least as it is revealed 
 in what he says, had not progressed beyond this 
 point. 
 
 Christ is the Son of God ( I Thess. i. 10 ; I Thess. 
 ii. i), and is associated with the Father in the 
 administration of Divine Providence (i Thess. iii. 
 n). Whether this is a position higher than that 
 ascribed to the Messiah in pre-Christian apocalypses 
 is disputed. Possibly it is slightly in advance of 
 contemporary Jewish positions. But the role as- 
 signed to the Messiah in these epistles is thoroughly 
 Jewish, as is the whole conception of the world and 
 its fortunes. Sheol is a cavern under the earth; 
 the dead are sleeping there, awaiting a general resur- 
 rection which will take place when Christ descends 
 from heaven (i Thess. iv. 13-18). Christ has 
 ascended to heaven, but it is the chief business of 
 the believer to await His return ( i Thess. i. 9, 10) . 
 When He comes He will destroy the wicked by the 
 breath of His mouth (2 Thess. ii. 8) . The whole of
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 39 
 
 the religious philosophy revealed in these two 
 epistles is Jewish. Paul differed from the Jews at 
 this period only in his belief that Jesus was the 
 Messiah, and that His crucifixion had for the Chris- 
 tian abolished the law. In his next great group of 
 epistles, written in the years 55-58, he was passing 
 through great struggles. He had, too, been for a 
 longer time employed in the endeavour to extend 
 Christianity to the world in which Greek ideas 
 reigned. Both these facts helped, no doubt, to 
 work changes in his thought. 
 
 Christ is now to him more than the Messiah; he 
 is the "image of God" (2 Cor. iv. 4), "wisdom from 
 God" (i Cor. i. 30), the mirror in which we with 
 unveiled face see God reflected (2 Cor. iii. 18). He 
 is also the perfect or typical man, the norm of the 
 redeemed race (Rom. v. 12-21; i Cor. xv. 45-49). 
 As his conception of Christ becomes in these 
 epistles more spiritual and vital, his Jewish concep- 
 tions of death and the last things fade from his 
 mind. Thus it happens that we find him in 2 Cor. 
 v. emancipated from the Jewish conception of the 
 long sleep in Sheol which he had held when he wrote 
 to the Thessalonians. He here conceives the alter- 
 native to "being in the body" "departing to be with
 
 4O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Christ." The necessity of waiting- for Christ to 
 descend from heaven he no longer believes; the 
 believer goes to be with Christ instead. Some 
 scholars have, it is true, doubted the reality of this 
 change of thought, because Paul, like others who 
 reach important and epoch-making changes com- 
 paratively late in life, never altogether adjusted his 
 vocabulary to the change. Of the change itself, it 
 seems to me, however, there can be no doubt. 
 
 In his third group of epistles those written dur- 
 ing the Roman captivity we find Paul's ripest 
 thought. Under the pressure of incipient Gnostic 
 thought he had undergone still further development. 
 Christ was now to him not the localized Jewish 
 Messiah, but the world-Spirit, the world-Soul, the 
 embodiment of the creative energy of God by which 
 the world was created and by which it is held to- 
 gether (Col. i. 13-17), the embodiment in flesh of 
 the Divine image and energy (Phil. ii. 6-n). He 
 here anticipated in principle many features of the 
 Logos-doctrine of the Gospel of John. 
 
 Christ as the world-Soul the vitalizing energy 
 which holds the world together is quite a different 
 conception from the localized and anthropomorphic 
 Jewish Messiah. For such a Christ to need to come
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 4! 
 
 from a distant heaven would be a contradiction in 
 terms. Could this development in Paul's thought 
 from the Jewish to the cosmic Christ have been 
 appreciated, how many Second Adventist vagaries 
 the Church might have been spared! 
 
 It is no accident that Paul's expressions about 
 union with Christ are found in his second and third 
 groups of epistles, for it is in these groups that he 
 reveals his conception of the spiritual and cosmic 
 Christ. A mystic union with a spiritual Christ was 
 now possible, such as was at least difficult with a 
 Jewish Messiah who had withdrawn to the distant 
 heavens. 
 
 The first thing we notice in connection with 
 Paul's mysticism is that it affords a counterpart in 
 experience to the Rabbinical outline of the Apostle's 
 thought which we have already traced. The death 
 on the cross by which Christ had incurred the curse 
 of the law, and the resurrection by which God had 
 proved that He honoured Christ in spite of the 
 curse of the law, as we have seen, emancipated all 
 who identified themselves with Christ from the 
 demands of the Old Testament law, according to 
 Paul's view, but its effect did not end there. It 
 afforded a parallel to the inner experience of the
 
 42 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Christian. As Christ was crucified, so the Chris- 
 tian must be crucified to sin. As Christ went down 
 into death, so must the believer die to his old self. 
 As Christ was raised to a life of glory with God 
 a life superior to all the limitations of his earthly 
 career so the Christian is raised to a new life. All 
 this Paul believed went on in the soul of the be- 
 liever here and now. It was not a felicity for which 
 one must wait till the gates of death are passed. 
 Thus, in writing to the Romans he says (vi. 3-11), 
 "Are ye ignorant that all who were baptized into 
 Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We 
 were buried, therefore, with him through baptism 
 into death; that like as Christ was raised from the 
 dead through the glory of the Father, so we also 
 might walk in newness of life. For if we have 
 become united to Him in the likeness of His death, 
 we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection; 
 knowing this that our old man was crucified with 
 Him, that the body of sin might be done away, that 
 so we should no longer be in bondage to sin; for 
 he that hath died is justified from sin. But if we 
 died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live 
 with Him; knowing that Christ being raised from 
 the dead dieth no more ; death hath no more domin-
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 43 
 
 ion over Him. For the death that He died He died 
 unto sin once : but the life that he liveth, he liveth 
 unto God. Even so reckon ye also yourselves to be 
 dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God in Christ 
 Jesus." 
 
 The analogy between the death and resurrection 
 of Christ and the inner experiences of the Christian 
 which is here drawn out at such length, had been 
 more briefly expressed in the Epistle to the Gala- 
 tians as the apostle's own experience. He says 
 (ii. 20), "I have been crucified with Christ, and it 
 is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me : and 
 that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, 
 the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me 
 and gave Himself up for me." 
 
 It is clear then that Paul believed that the death 
 and resurrection of Christ were mystically lived 
 over in inner experience by every Christian. It 
 was this which made him a Christian. The pas- 
 sage from Galatians just quoted carries us, however, 
 a step further into Paul's mystical conception, for it 
 makes it clear that he believed that Christ Himself 
 actually lived in one who had died to sin and entered 
 into this resurrection life. "It is no longer I that 
 live, but Christ liveth in me," implies complete union
 
 44 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 with Christ, so that what I do Christ does; what I 
 suffer He suffers ; my triumphs are His triumphs. 
 
 Of similar meaning are the following passages: 
 "As many of you as were baptized into Christ did 
 put on Christ" (Gal. iii. 27) ; "My little children, 
 of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed 
 in you" (Gal. iv. 19) ; "There is no condemnation 
 to them that are in Christ Jesus" (Rom. viii. i) ; 
 "In whom ye also are builded together for a habita- 
 tion of God in the Spirit" (Eph. ii. 22) ; "That 
 Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, to the end 
 that ye being rooted and grounded in love, may be 
 strong to apprehend with all saints what is the 
 breadth, and length, and height, and depth, and to 
 know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, 
 that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God" 
 (Eph. iii. 17-19) ; "God was pleased to make known 
 the riches of His glory among the Gentiles, which 
 is Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. i. 27) ; 
 "For ye died that your life might be hid with Christ 
 in God" (Col. iii. 3). 
 
 That Paul believed in a real union of the believer 
 with Christ there can be no doubt. His conviction 
 is expressed in accordance with his habit in many 
 ways and with great variety of metaphor. At times
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 45 
 
 Christ is in the believer, and at times the believer is 
 in Christ. At times the believer lives by faith, and 
 at times he does not live at all, but only Christ lives 
 in him. But, however he expresses it, there can be 
 no doubt of his meaning. 
 
 The result of this union is that the Christian is 
 no longer fleshly but spiritual; he leads no longer 
 an earthly but a heavenly life. This is the meaning 
 of such utterances as the following: "The law of 
 the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free 
 from the law of sin and death" (Rom. viii. 2) ; 
 "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long- 
 suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meek- 
 ness, self-control; against such there is no law. 
 And they that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the 
 flesh with the passions and lusts thereof" (Gal. v. 
 22-24) 5 "For we are His workmanship, created in 
 Christ Jesus for good works" (Ephes. ii. 10) ; "The 
 fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteous- 
 ness and truth" (Ephes. v. 9) ; "It is God who 
 worketh in you both to will and to work for His 
 good pleasure" (Phil. ii. 13) ; "We all with unveiled 
 face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord 
 are transformed into the same image from glory to 
 glory" (2 Cor. iii. 18).
 
 46 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Again, this spiritual and perfectly ethical life 
 made the Christian, so Paul believed, absolutely free. 
 No law of any sort longer had dominion over him. 
 A man so divine, so united to Christ, was in the 
 possession of the completest ethical liberty, because, 
 being spiritual and divine, his nature is its own law 
 and needs no other. "Where the Spirit of the 
 Lord is, there is liberty," Paul exclaims (2 Cor. 
 iii. 17). This is also shown in his treatment in 
 I Corinthians of a case of social immorality. The 
 easy way would have been to say, "this is contrary 
 to the moral law to the Pentateuch." Paul, how- 
 ever, does not take the easy way. He is true to his 
 principles, declaring, "All things are lawful for me, 
 but all things are not expedient. All things are 
 lawful, but I will not be brought under the power 
 of any" ( I Cor. vi. 12) . He flees from fornication, 
 not because it violates a Decalogue, but because it 
 destroys his Christian liberty by bringing him under 
 the power of a harmful habit. If the Christian lives 
 according to his own inner nature, he cannot pursue 
 a course of sin which would destroy that nature. 
 In this very connection he asserts again the real 
 union of the Christian with Christ, declaring "He 
 that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit" (v. 17).
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 47 
 
 What a noble conception of a Christian life ! How 
 different a world it would be if Christians had 
 enough of the Divine Spirit to live the ideal life, not 
 because of external rules, but because of the com- 
 pulsion of their inner beings! 
 
 This ideal life, in Paul's view, made one a sharer 
 of Christ's work and Christ's sufferings. A part of 
 the mystic experience was, as Paul conceived it, 
 "To know Him, and the power of His resurrection, 
 and the fellowship of His sufferings" (Phil. iii. 10). 
 This desire to enter into fellowship with the suffer- 
 ings of Christ was on the part of the great Apostle 
 no morbid brooding over the death of Jesus, nor an 
 ascetic mortification of the body because its death 
 would be an end in itself; it was rather a desire to 
 complete the work which Christ's sufferings had 
 begun, for in Col. i. 24 he says, "Now I rejoice in 
 my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my part 
 that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in 
 my flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church." 
 Fellowship with Christ's sufferings meant that 
 Christ's work could in that way be made effective 
 to more of those whom Christ would win. It was 
 an expression of this same thought when Paul wrote, 
 "I am a debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians,
 
 48 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 both to the wise and to the foolish. So as much as 
 in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you 
 also that are in Rome" (Rom. i. 14, 15). Again, in 
 writing to the Corinthians (i Cor. ix. 16), he says, 
 "Necessity is laid upon me; for woe is me if I 
 preach not the gospel." 1 
 
 The living out of this Divine life which made one 
 free from the law would, if the inner impulse found 
 real expression, lead to participation in the work of 
 Christ to active labour for the spread of His King- 
 dom. The mysticism of Paul was of a thoroughly 
 healthy type. It meant no impractical absorption 
 into the ineffable, but inspiration for the most self- 
 sacrificing toil. 
 
 There can be no doubt that Paul believed in a 
 real union of the believer with Christ a union 
 which made the believer's life a divine life. And 
 yet he never went to the extreme of some modern 
 fanatics and lost his Christian modesty. He speaks 
 of Christians as perfect, it is true "Let us, there- 
 fore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded" (Phil, 
 iii. 15), meaning by the expression that they have all 
 
 1 The author desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to an 
 article by Professor McGiffert on "Mysticism in the Early 
 Church," in the American Journal of Theology, vol. xi. pp. 
 407-427.
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 49 
 
 the elements of life now that this Divine element 
 is present in them, but in the same connection he 
 makes it clear that, though he had been a Christian ' 
 for many years, he found the life with Christ so 
 infinite that he had not grasped it all. The goal had 
 been in part experienced, but it was a flying goal. 
 Thus he says (Phil. iii. 8 ff.), "Yea, verily, and I 
 count all things to be loss for the excellency of the 
 knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I 
 suffer the loss of all things, and do count them but 
 refuse that I may gain Christ, and be found in Him, 
 not having a righteousness of mine own, even that 
 which is of the law, but that which is through faith 
 in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by 
 faith : that I may know him and the power of His 
 resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, 
 becoming conformed unto His death; if by any 
 means I might attain unto the resurrection of the 
 dead. Not that I have already obtained, or am 
 made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may 
 lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold on by 
 Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself yet to 
 have laid hold: but this one thing I do, forgetting 
 the things which are behind, and stretching forward 
 to the things which are before, I press on toward 
 4
 
 5O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in 
 Christ Jesus." 
 
 If then the thoroughgoing mysticism of Paul at 
 times almost takes our breath away, we must admit 
 that it is a thoroughly practical and sane mysticism. 
 While he taught the identification of the believer 
 with Christ until the two were one, he taught also 
 that it was an identity effected for service and 
 through service, and held it in such sanity as to 
 keep the believer humbled with a sense of his own 
 incompleteness in comparison with the infinite per- 
 fectness of God. 
 
 In brief, then, the Christian message as it was 
 conceived by Paul presented a twofold aspect. It 
 declared to the Jew that if he would but unite 
 himself to Christ, all the onerous burdens of the 
 ritual law were abolished. It declared to the Gen- 
 tile that on similar conditions all ritual was abol- 
 ished for him. These conclusions were reached by 
 Paul and were advocated through the agency of a 
 Rabbinic reasoning, which, while thoroughly in 
 harmony with the Judaism of the period, is mean- 
 ingless now. This aspect of Paul's message was 
 temporary. It was incidental to the period; it 
 served to give his message a hearing at the time,
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO PAUL 51 
 
 but it was not that which gave his message its 
 power. The heart of his message that which 
 brought thousands to Christ as the result of his 
 labours was the union with Christ, the escape 
 from sin, the entrance into the Divine life, and the 
 joy, not only of living, but of service, which that 
 union offered. God had shown Himself in Christ 
 to be not the God of the Jew only, but of all the 
 world. Any member of the human race might come 
 into real and vital union with Him in Christ. Dis- 
 tinctions as between Jew and Gentile, Greek and 
 Barbarian, slave or free man, man or woman, all 
 disappeared. All were welcome through Christ to 
 God; and all were dignified by being given, if they 
 accepted the welcome, a share in Christ's life, 
 Christ's suffering, Christ's work, Christ's purity, 
 Christ's joy, and Christ's glory. Such was the 
 Christian message on the lips of Paul. 
 
 He found Christianity a Jewish sect; he left it a 
 universal religion. At first his conception of it 
 differed from that of the other Apostles chiefly in 
 his conception of the abolition of the law by the 
 crucifixion and resurrection of Christ : but by steady 
 progress of thought, brought about by the advance 
 in experience of Christ while labouring in the multi-
 
 52 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 farious conditions of a polyglot world and contend- 
 ing with the eddies and whirlpools of the world's 
 many-sided thought, he passed from the conception 
 of Christ as the Jewish Messiah to Christ as the 
 creative world-Spirit, who, laying aside voluntarily 
 His glory and heavenly dignity, out of love for men 
 humbled Himself to the death on the cross. Paul in 
 this picture of Christ anticipated the method by 
 which the Johannine writer adapted the Christian 
 message to the thinking world at the end of the 
 century. On the road between the two points indi- 
 cated he had cast his Jewish notions of eschatology 
 to the winds. 
 
 To no person in history, except Christ Himself, 
 does Christianity owe more than to Paul.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE 
 WRITINGS 
 
 FOR our present purpose we shall confine our 
 attention to the Gospel of John and the First Epistle 
 of John. Let it not be understood that by so doing 
 we undervalue the other writings which are con- 
 nected with the name of John. We do this because 
 the Second and Third Epistles of John are too 
 personal and private in their nature to illustrate so 
 well the great principles which shine forth in the 
 Gospel and First Epistle, and because the message 
 of the Book of Revelation is too manifold, and is 
 involved in too many critical questions, even if it 
 were John's (which is in doubt), to be presented in 
 one lecture. 
 
 The Book of Revelation belongs to the class of 
 apocalypses of which the Jews produced many. 
 Apocalypses fulfilled a useful purpose in times of 
 distress, but their thought was clearly transitory. 
 The primary conception of Revelation, that the 
 
 53
 
 54 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Second Coming of Christ is to occur in a cataclysm, 
 is not entertained by the Gospel of John, which 
 regards the coming of the Spirit as the Second 
 Coming of Christ (chapters xv., xvi.). Present-day 
 criticism is agreed that the Book of Revelation was 
 in part compiled from Jewish sources. 1 
 
 The Gospel and First Epistle of John are, how- 
 ever, in a different class. It is the unanimous 
 verdict of scholars that they are the work of the 
 same author. Their purpose is the same. Though 
 the circumstances which called them forth may have 
 been slightly different, the message of the one is in 
 spirit identical with that of the other, and in form 
 the complement of it. 
 
 These books were written, either in the last decade 
 of the first century, or the first decade of the second, 
 in Asia Minor. They were both written to meet 
 certain phases of Gnosticism, and for that purpose 
 they present the Christian message in a form adapted 
 to that end. 
 
 The author of these books is shrouded in mystery. 
 There are still able scholars who hold that he was 
 John the son of Zebedee, though there is a growing 
 
 1 See an article by the writer : "The Apocalypse and Recent 
 Criticism," In the American Journal of Theology, vol. ii., pp. 
 776-801.
 
 MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 55 
 
 conviction in the minds of many scholars that the 
 author cannot have been he. In one important 
 respect, however, scholars are coming to an agree- 
 ment: both schools admit that whoever was the 
 author, there is in the Gospel an ideal element 
 that things did not always happen just as they are 
 portrayed here, 1 but that mingled with a tradition 
 of our Saviour more or less genuine are the author's 
 ideals and conceptions. 
 
 This point needs, perhaps, a little illustration. In 
 the Synoptic Gospels Jesus does not announce Him- 
 self at first as the Messiah; He assumes a title 
 which we can see had a Messianic significance (I 
 mean the title "Son of Man"), but which the dis- 
 ciples did not recognize as such until the ministry 
 was nearly ended, when at Caesarea Philippi he 
 drew forth from Peter the confession: "Thou art 
 the Christ, the Son of the living God." In other 
 words, the first three Gospels portray a historical 
 development, picturing the growth of the Messianic 
 consciousness in the mind of Jesus Himself, show- 
 ing how, as a great teacher, He attracted the notice, 
 won the confidence, and gained the love of the 
 disciples, and after months of companionship dis- 
 
 1 So Sanday, Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 179, ff.
 
 56 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 closed to them His Messianic consciousness and 
 Messianic claim. All this is not only asserted by 
 our earliest Gospels, but is in accord with all that we 
 know of the psychological development of the soul, 
 and of tactful, pedagogical method. It is probably 
 the true historical picture. 
 
 The Gospel of John presents a very different pic- 
 ture. In it Jesus, instead of announcing His Mes- 
 siahship to a select few after months of preparation, 
 makes it known in the first chapter to Nathaniel, a 
 comparative stranger. Instead of speaking of it 
 quietly to a few disciples in retirement, this Gospel 
 represents Him as arguing it throughout His min- 
 istry, often publicly and in the spirit of a dogmatic 
 theologian, with the Pharisees. We are compelled 
 to confess that the author has in this portrayal lost 
 the historical perspective and introduced an ideal 
 element of his own. We must not, however, judge 
 him too harshly for this. Irenaeus long ago told 
 the world that this Gospel was written .to oppose 
 the errors of Cerinthus, a Gnostic Jew, who held a 
 position intermediate between the Gnostics, the Jews, 
 and the Christians. Cerinthus distinguished the 
 Maker of the world from God, and held peculiar 
 notions about the Messiahship of Jesus, contending
 
 MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 57 
 
 that it began at the time of His baptism. The argu- 
 ment of the Gospel was directed, in part at least, 
 against these heresies. The author declares that 
 his purpose in writing was (xx. 31) : "That ye may 
 believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; 
 and that believing ye may have life in His name," 
 but it is evident that, as he endeavoured to confirm 
 faith, he also tried to correct error. The errors 
 which this writer sought to correct were in reality 
 largely Gnostic. Gnosticism was a syncretistic and 
 eclectic system of thought. Its most fundamental 
 conception that there were two gods, one evil and 
 one good, and that the evil god created matter 
 was of Persian origin, though slightly modified. 
 Gnosticism also contained many elements from 
 many different sources. As a philosophy it was an 
 endeavour to solve the problem of the world and of 
 life; as embodied in organization it presented a 
 variety of schools or sects. Gnosticism represented 
 the world-thought of the period. 1 
 
 In his endeavour to meet this world-thought the 
 writer of the Gospel was led to give an interpreta- 
 tion of the person of Christ, to lift Him out of His 
 narrow Jewish environment, and to estimate His 
 
 1 See E. F. Scott, The Fourth Gospel.
 
 58 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 racial and cosmic significance. It is this part of the 
 Fourth Gospel which constitutes one of its most 
 valuable features a feature of permanent import- 
 ance to Christianity. The Gospel of Mark had pre- 
 sented Christ as a remarkable teacher amid a circle 
 of friends a wonder-worker amid the sick and suf- 
 fering. It had represented God as shining through 
 this man, but it left Jesus as a local figure in history, 
 with His relations to the world beyond the bounds 
 of Judaism almost entirely undefined. The Gospel 
 of John, on the other hand, lifts the Saviour out of 
 the narrow bounds of the circle of Jewish disciples 
 and enemies, and seeks to give Him His proper 
 perspective in relation to the universe. 
 
 This endeavour of the writer of the Gospel was 
 not the first of the kind. Paul had, in his third 
 group of Epistles, notably in Philippians and Colos- 
 sians, begun this work on the very plan which this 
 Gospel follows. In this Gospel, however, the great 
 thoughts involved are expressed with a simplicity 
 and a beauty, and, in accord with the Hellenistic- 
 Jewish doctrines of the time, developed to a logical 
 completeness, which are unique in the New Testa- 
 ment. 
 
 Let us see what the message of this Gospel is in
 
 MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 59 
 
 regard to Christ We are all familiar with its open- 
 ing words: "In the beginning was the Word, and 
 the Word was with God, and the Word was divine. 1 
 All things were made by Him. . . . And the Word 
 became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we be- 
 held His glory. . . . No man hath ever seen God, 
 the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the 
 Father, he hath interpreted Him." 
 
 It is perhaps difficult for us to grasp all that this 
 evangelist intended to denote by the term "Word." 
 The term had descended through two long lines of 
 ancestry, the one Greek, where through six hundred 
 years of history, from Heraclitus to John, it had 
 played a prominent part; the other Hebrew, where 
 the Divine Word had often been so personified that 
 it could at times be represented as sent on missions 
 by itself. Philo, an Alexandrian Jewish philosopher 
 (20 B.C. 40 A.D.), had fused the two, making the 
 word a Divine entity, sometimes almost identical 
 with God Himself. Modifying and improving 
 Philo's conception, this evangelist seems to use the 
 term to represent God's self-revealing power. That 
 part of God's nature or activity by which He made 
 
 1 The verse does not say the Word was the Absolute God 
 , but that it belonged to the God-class (&<>?).
 
 60 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 the world and created all living things (thus reveal- 
 ing His skill and His power) became incarnate, he 
 tells us, in Jesus Christ. The Divine-human person- 
 ality of the Saviour thus becomes a higher, a more 
 articulate, and a more intelligible revelation of God 
 than any that had been made before. 
 
 Whatever we may be compelled to think about 
 the historical perspective of the Gospel of John, and 
 whatever our age, or succeeding ages, may think of 
 the Hellenistic philosophy which moulded its ex- 
 pressions, the message of this book regarding 
 Christ can never be out-dated. In that matchless 
 personality, of spotless character, possessing a 
 unique consciousness of God's fatherhood, a char- 
 acter of unparalleled unselfishness and beneficence, 
 and a power which the death of the body enhanced 
 rather than quenched, men from age to age turn 
 for their highest revelation of God. By whatever 
 theory we may explain the relation of Jesus of 
 Nazareth to the preexistent Son of God, no Chris- 
 tianity long retains its power which does not gain 
 its inspiration from the central thought of this 
 Gospel that God was in Christ, that God through 
 the personality of Jesus speaks to us of love, of 
 forgiveness, of hope, of power, in a way unique in
 
 MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 6l 
 
 the annals of human history. God incarnate the 
 infinite personality interpreted through the one ideal 
 man whom our planet has known such is Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 The effort of the Fourth Gospel to prove the 
 Messiahship of Jesus is a recognition of the fact 
 that the coming of the supreme revelation of God 
 constituted the culmination of a long process of 
 Jiistory. It did not drop from heaven full-flowered, 
 without warning or preparation, but followed those 
 laws of Divine development so abundantly revealed 
 in the world about us, which Jesus in His parable 
 so happily and succinctly characterized: "First the 
 blade, then the ear, and afterward the full corn in 
 the ear." In a generation such as ours, this recog- 
 nition of historic connections and perspective should 
 be appreciated. 
 
 The point just touched upon is not peculiar to the 
 Gospel of John, since the other Gospels also insist 
 upon it when they teach that Jesus is the Messiah. 
 In its conception of Messianic work the Gospel of 
 John is, however, unique. According to the Syn- 
 optics the glory of the Messianic work is to be 
 manifested in a cataclysmic coming of the kingdom 
 of God, when the Son of Man shall appear on the
 
 62 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 clouds of heaven, and the glory of God shall be 
 revealed. John, on the other hand, conceives the 
 earthly life of Jesus, even before His crucifixion, to 
 have revealed or manifested the glory of God. He 
 tells us that Jesus said in His great prayer : "I have 
 glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished the work 
 that Thou gavest Me to do. . . ." And, again : "I 
 have manifested Thy name to the men whom Thou 
 gavest Me out of the world; Thine they were and 
 Thou gavest them to Me, and they have kept Thy 
 word." It is true that in the view of this evangelist 
 miracles were "signs" by which the Messiah mani- 
 fested His glory, but it is also true that he saw in 
 the personality of Jesus, with its spotless purity, its 
 matchless symmetry, its radiant helpfulness and 
 unequalled power, a revelation of God. 
 
 In this thought the evangelist caught the true 
 point of view of his Master: glory is service; true 
 exaltation is found in living nobly the common life ; 
 the glory of God is manifested in character, healing 
 strength, self-sacrifice and love. 
 
 The most significant thing about the message 
 of this Gospel concerning Christ is, however, the 
 fact that all this leads up to the message of the Gos- 
 pel concerning God. We all recall the touching
 
 MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 63 
 
 scene portrayed in ch. xiv. The disciples are sad 
 because Jesus is to be taken from them, and Philip, 
 seeking for some solace to the general sorrow, 
 sighed as many a soul in its sorrow and hunger has 
 sighed: "Show us the Father and it sufficeth us." 
 The answer of Jesus is most memorable: "Have I 
 been so long time with you and yet hast thou not 
 known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath 
 seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the 
 Father?" Here we are specifically taught the 
 Christ-likeness of God. Would we know what God 
 
 is like, look at Jesus Christ. No part of the Gospel 
 message is more simple, more sublime, or more 
 fundamental than this. 
 
 The ethics of every man breathe forth his con- 
 ception of God. If, like the ancient Assyrians, one 
 believes that his god is simply one among many, 
 and that his god is striving for the mastery, a man 
 will necessarily hold that the devotees of the super- 
 natural enemies of his god possess no rights which 
 he is bound to respect, and when he conquers them 
 will have no hesitation in flaying his victims alive, 
 or cutting out their tongues. If, like Cromwell, his 
 God is the God of the Book of Judges, he will be 
 hard, ruthless and savage in his treatment of ene-
 
 64 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 mies; religion will consist largely of creed and the 
 winning love which melts the heart when revealed 
 through kindly deed will find little place. If, like 
 the author of Ecclesiastes, one thinks of God as an 
 unfeeling, inescapable, all-powerful Fate one who 
 capriciously rewards the evil man with blessings 
 and the good man with misfortunes; one whose pur- 
 poses and principles of action we cannot hope to 
 understand; one must either commit suicide, or 
 adopt the oft-repeated strain of Qoheleth, "There is 
 nothing better for a man than that he should eat 
 and drink, and make his soul enjoy good in his 
 labour. . . . This is vanity," i. ., this quickly passes 
 away. Make the most of the little chance for such 
 comforts as this life affords, and they are, for the 
 most part, physical comforts, for this is our only 
 chance such is the Gospel of Ecclesiastes. Such a 
 gospel springs naturally out of Qoheleth's concep- 
 tion of God. It is a gospel which makes of man 
 only a higher animal. He may be a beastly and 
 gluttonous, or a learned and pedantic, animal, but 
 he is still only an animal. 
 
 How different is the life of one who accepts the 
 message of the Fourth Gospel hardly needs to be 
 portrayed. God is like Christ not a blind, unfeel-
 
 MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 65 
 
 ing, inexorable, incomprehensible Fate, but, like 
 Jesus, loving, gentle, helpful, self-sacrificing; one 
 to whom no cry is put up in vain, one who does not 
 let even an insignificant sparrow fall to the ground 
 without His sympathetic care and tender help. If 
 this be true, how different is the universe of him 
 who knows it from the universe of one who knows 
 it not! Not greater is the contrast between day 
 and night, between a healthful, joyous life and slow 
 perpetual torture. 
 
 In this message of the Gospel of John a perennial 
 need of human nature is supplied. God is like Christ 
 as sensitive to our woes as Jesus was to the suffer- 
 ings of agonizing men and women, as ready to for- 
 give our sins as was He who cried from a Roman 
 cross, "Father, forgive them !" as ready to enable us 
 to overcome our weaknesses and temptations as was 
 the great Teacher of Nazareth to transform an im- 
 pulsive and wayward Peter into a dauntless apostle ; 
 a doubting Thomas into a man of triumphant 
 faith; or a son of thunder into an apostle of love. 
 
 All that makes Christianity a more excellent 
 religion than Judaism, Buddhism, or Mohammed- 
 anism goes back ultimately to this fundamental 
 message the Christ-likeness of God. 
 5
 
 66 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 This supreme revelation, of the essential moral 
 and religious nature of God finds its complement in 
 this evangelist's metaphysical definition of God, viz. : 
 "God is spirit." This thought, too, was funda- 
 mental and epoch-making. If God is spirit, He does 
 not need the food offered in animal sacrifices. If 
 He is spirit, He is not confined to one locality, 
 whether that locality be Zion or Gerizim, Gothic 
 cathedral or Quaker meeting-house. "They that 
 worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in 
 truth." Wherever this truth is really apprehended, 
 the relation of individual souls to God will be trans- 
 formed, for "spirit with spirit can meet," and all 
 expressions of public worship will be simplified and 
 ennobled. 
 
 Great as is the message of this Gospel with regard 
 to Christ great as it is with regard to God it is 
 equally great in its declaration of the exalted privi- 
 leges and destiny of mankind. Christ was the only 
 begotten son of God, but "to as many as received 
 Him, to them gave He the right to become sons of 
 God." The purpose of the coming of the Son of 
 God into the world was to make sons of God of us. 
 God became incarnate in Him, that through Him 
 He might become incarnate in us all; such is the
 
 MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 67 
 
 simple, sublime, dazzling message of this Gospel. 
 This message does not rest upon one text, but 
 crops up again and again. "I in them and thou 
 in Me, that they may be perfected into one," is, 
 according to this Gospel, Christ's own ideal as 
 expressed in His prayer. A vital mystic union 
 with Christ and God, so that we share the life, 
 the impulses, the purposes, and the love of both; 
 it is this, according to the Gospel of John, to be 
 a Christian. 
 
 But this is not all the message. Christians may 
 not only share God's life, but they are in the world 
 to do His work. "As Thou didst send Me into the 
 world, even so sent I them into the world," says the 
 Saviour. Sent into the world as Christ was sent 
 into the world! Sent to reveal the character of 
 God! Sent to be a christ wherever one may live. 
 What a responsibility! What a privilege! We 
 hesitate to believe this message, our lives are so poor 
 and mean and our faith so weak. If our modern 
 science teaches us anything, it teaches that the^full 
 powers of a life can never be enjoyed by an organ- 
 ism which refuses to perform all the functions of its 
 
 ^ K ^ MiMB ^ MHM>l>MM ^MMV^*2"JQ|MBMMHIHBiV* MM V* M> * MMNa ^ ni ^" > '' Aa ' ^B 
 
 life. Until we really abandon ourselves to be like 
 Christ and to do His work we shall never know what
 
 68 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 it is to be united in one spirit of love and power with 
 Him and with God. 
 
 It often happens that a writer is profoundly in- 
 fluenced by systems of thought which he rejects. 
 Apocalyptic Judaism had given up hope that the 
 world-order could be redeemed; it was to be de- 
 stroyed in a great cataclysmic upheaval. Gnosti- 
 cism, too, regarded the world as the work of an evil 
 god and as hopelessly corrupt. The author of this 
 Gospel, while rejecting both Judaism and Gnosti- 
 cism, like them had no hope for the redemption of 
 the world. He represents Christ as saying: "I pray 
 not for the world, but for those whom Thou hast 
 given Me" (xvii. 9) ; the world passeth away and 
 the lust thereof (i Jno. ii. 17). He thus placed on 
 the Gospel a serious limitation, making it apply to 
 an elect number only. This limitation is a serious 
 defect in the author's presentation of the Christian 
 message, though in reality it affected the writer only 
 in certain moods. Sometimes he rises to a fine 
 universalism and declares God's love for the world 
 (iii. 16). 
 
 We turn now to the First Epistle of John, an 
 epistle which was evidently called forth by teachers 
 who were Docetists, i. e., they taught that Jesus was
 
 MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 69 
 
 not really the Christ He only seemed to be. They 
 were also libertines they held that a Christian man 
 is bound by no law, and that he is under no obliga- 
 tion to observe the commands of God, since he is 
 above all law; that no sin is possible to him, even 
 though he live in disregard of all precepts, human 
 and Divine. 
 
 In opposition to this the author of this Epistle 
 teaches that it is a prime condition, both of the 
 knowledge and the love of God, that we keep His 
 commandments. He makes it clear by statements 
 both positive and negative that Christianity has in 
 it no place for antinomianism. "This is the love of 
 God, that we keep His commandments," he declares 
 (v. 3) ; again, "He that saith, I know Him, and 
 keepeth not His commandments, is a liar, and the 
 truth is not in him" (ii. 4). "He that saith he 
 abideth in Him, ought himself also to walk even as 
 He walked" (ii. 6). "Whosoever abideth in Him 
 sinneth not : whosoever sinneth hath not seen Him, 
 neither known Him" (iii. 6). 
 
 In the view of this writer, then, the Christian 
 religion is bound up with the moral law. No one 
 can know so much of God that he is emancipated 
 from the necessity of personal purity, self-control,
 
 7O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 common honesty, and the duties of common kindli- 
 ness and humanity. 
 
 Such errors in the theory of conduct are in the 
 writer's view closely bound up with errors of theo- 
 logy. The men who deny that Jesus has come in 
 the flesh as the Messiah, deny the Father as well 
 as the Son he declares (ii. 22, 23). He means that 
 these men have entirely misconceived the nature of 
 God. They have thought of Him as a Being far 
 away, too holy to come into contact with corrupt 
 matter ; too superior to be touched with any feeling 
 for human infirmity. They have missed altogether 
 the fundamental fact of the Christ-likeness of God. 
 Their views of life were false because their views 
 of God were wrong. 
 
 The necessities of the situation led this great 
 thinker to assert the necessity of belief in the Mes- 
 siahship of Jesus that Jesus is the Christ ; for one 
 cannot believe in the Christ-likeness of God the 
 goodness and kindness of God unless he believes 
 in the intimate relation of Jesus to God, and accepts 
 Christ as the revelation of the Father. If God is 
 not manifested in Jesus, the supreme character of 
 the race, we know nothing of His nature. The 
 \author's position, then, is: right conduct is abso-
 
 MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS Jl 
 
 lutely essential, but right conduct is impossible with- 
 out right views of God, and right views of God are 
 impossible apart from the revelation of His character 
 made in Christ. 
 
 The Epistle was, however, not only written to 
 oppose error but to set forth an alluring truth a 
 truth strong enough to overcome the seemingly un- 
 conquerable obstacle which stands in the way of 
 everyone. 
 
 This obstacle is the necessity of keeping God's 
 law. That law is pure, holy, incomparably high. 
 We are weak, imperfect, prone to sin. How can 
 we keep the law ? When we would do good, evil is 
 present with us, as St. Paul said. 
 
 The alluring truth which this Epistle opposes to 
 these hard facts is the truth already set forth in the 
 Gospel, that God invites man to enter into a fellow- 
 ship with Him in Jesus Christ a fellowship which 
 binds man to God in such a real union of life and 
 of power that the demands of the highest law can 
 be met and kept. "Behold what manner of love the 
 Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be 
 called children of God" (iii. i). "Ye know that 
 He [Christ] was manifested to take away our sins, 
 and in Him is no sin" (iii. 5). "Whosoever abideth
 
 72 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 in Him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not 
 seen Him, neither known Him" (iii. 6). "God is 
 light, and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say 
 that we have fellowship with Him and walk in 
 darkness, we lie, and do not the truth : but if we 
 walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fel- 
 lowship one with another (ii. 5, ff.). "God is love 
 and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God 
 in him" (iv. 16). "The world passeth away, and 
 the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God 
 abideth forever" (ii. 17). 
 
 In such passages as these this great writer 
 sets forth the perfect character of God. Light 
 and darkness are in his vocabulary moral 
 terms. "God is light" is an assertion of His 
 moral perfectness. "God is love" asserts His 
 social and religious perfection. "If we walk in 
 the light as He is in the light, we have fel- 
 lowship," affords the key to the great secret 
 of fulfilling the law. "He that abides in 
 love abides in God" approaches the same great 
 secret from the side of religion. Fellowship with 
 God, union with Him in life, in love, in moral 
 purpose, and in moral triumph thus abiding 
 in God and so gaining eternal life such is
 
 MESSAGE IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 73 
 
 the Christian message as voiced in this Epistle. 1 
 I have already indicated how the message of this 
 Epistle is in reality the message of the Gospel put 
 in another way. When the two are taken together, 
 these writings present a sublime theology, as well 
 as (if we disregard the limitation noted above) the 
 most exalted theory of human destiny. 
 
 "God is spirit," "God is light," and "God is love" 
 God perfect metaphysically, bright and illumin- 
 ating morally, fundamentally social and religious in 
 His nature where shall we look for a theology 
 more satisfying to the intellect, or which appeals 
 more to the soul ? If we ask for fuller definition of 
 God's love, if we would have it described or exem- 
 plified, we are pointed to Jesus Christ. God is like 
 Him. Love was never more sublimely revealed 
 than in Jesus. His love is in reality God's love. 2 
 
 These conceptions are not only beautiful and 
 satisfying, but they are ultimate. So far as we can 
 
 1 The writer acknowledges his indebtedness to the treatment 
 of this subject by Professor McGiffert, both in his Apostolic 
 Age and his article, "Mysticism in the Early Church," in the 
 American Journal of Theology, vol. xi. pp. 407-457. 
 
 * It is my conviction that this picture of God really goes 
 back to Jesus Himself. It is here called the Johannine con- 
 ception of God, because it first found literary expression in 
 the work of this writer.
 
 74 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 at present see, no higher idea of God can be formed 
 until man shall develop some higher powers than 
 those which he now possesses. 
 
 "Immortal love, forever full, 
 
 Forever flowing free, 
 Forever shared, forever whole, 
 A never-ebbing sea." 
 
 One hardly needs to point out that the Johannine 
 message to man is the supreme message of the 
 mystics union with God. Sin is to be overcome 
 in the Divine fellowship; conformity to the highest 
 and most rigorous law is achieved through the 
 Divine power; human destiny is to be realised in 
 the Divine sonship; an anointing or a Christening 
 (the reception of a portion of the real Christ spirit) 
 is to be received which will teach and guide one; 
 the individual is to become one with Christ and the 
 Father; is to abide in God; is to be sent forth as 
 a christ into the world (i. e. as an interpreter of 
 God), and because united with God, though "the 
 world pass away" and all its pursuits, the believer 
 "shall abide forever." 
 
 This exalted message of human privilege and 
 triumph is the complement of the exalted Johannine 
 message concerning God. So far as I can see, it is 
 as final as the other. Men need some new faculties
 
 75 
 before they can appreciate the privileges of any 
 
 BM>M * M * I>HIB *MVM 
 
 higher destiny. When this Johannine message is 
 experienced by the Church and translated into life, 
 the Kingdom of God will have come
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 
 
 To do justice to the Christian message of a single 
 great man in a few pages i.e. to present it in a 
 fully rounded outline is impossible. Much more 
 impossible is it to present adequately in a chapter 
 the Christian thought of a great section of the 
 Church through eighteen hundred years. 
 
 While we cannot do this adequately, there are, 
 nevertheless, certain instructive outlines which we 
 may even in this brief compass follow, and if we 
 bear in mind that in each generation streams of 
 Christian experience and devotion, deep and rich, 
 have been constantly flowing in spite of all theology, 
 we shall not even in this hasty glance do injustice 
 to the continuous Christian life. 
 
 I have called this chapter the "Christian Message 
 in the Eastern Church." By the Eastern Church 
 we mean the Church in Asia, in the Nile Valley, 
 and in Europe as far West as Greece. In this 
 division Italy belongs to the West as does Carthage 
 
 76
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 77 
 
 in North Africa. Greece, however, faced to the 
 Eastward. Her racial connections were with Asia 
 Minor, and her tendencies of thought in the period 
 before us were with that East which through the 
 influence of Alexander the Great and his successors 
 she had in part Hellenized. Some things which 
 we have to say of the Eastern Church in the early 
 centuries apply also to the West. While there were 
 certain marked differences of tendency in the two 
 sections even in the second century, the real division 
 between the two did not come till later. 
 
 In passing from the New Testament to the writ- 
 ings of the Apostolic Fathers, one feels as though he 
 had passed from the fertile Tropics far toward the 
 sterile country of the Poles, so arid and uninspiring 
 are the writings of these men in comparison with 
 Paul and the Johannine Books. As, however, Pro- 
 fessor Dobschiitz has shown in his great book, 
 Christian Life in the Primitive Church, the life of 
 the Churches maintained for centuries a purity, an 
 elevation and an unselfishness which attracted mil- 
 lions to her. It was this lofty impulse^to Christian 
 living an impulse which did not spend itself for 
 some centuries which after more than two cen- 
 turies of persecution finally compelled a Roman
 
 78 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 emperor to make Christianity the legal religion of 
 the Empire. If then we confine our attention to 
 other things, it must not be thought that we ignore 
 or undervalue the noble life of the early Christians, 
 in which was powerfully voiced to the world in a 
 practical and convincing way the Fatherhood of 
 God and the brotherhood of man. 
 
 The message of Christianity in this ancient 
 Church was shaped by conflict with the seething 
 thought of the world. This thought affected Chris- 
 tians here and there as it mingled with their Chris- 
 tianity, producing variations from the received type 
 of Christian thinking. Such variations were called 
 "heresies," i.e. private "choices." In struggling 
 with these "choices" or "heresies" the Church her- 
 self underwent gigantic transformations in organ- 
 ization and in the conception of what her message 
 was and is. 
 
 The earliest of these heresies were those of the 
 Gnostic group, the beginnings of which we have 
 traced in Colossae as early as the days of Paul. Its 
 elements, as Bousset and Gunkel have shown, 
 existed already in pre-Christian Judaism, where 
 Judaism had been exposed to Persian and other 
 Oriental influences. How Gnosticism had shaped
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 79 
 
 the Christian message in the Epistles of Paul's 
 Roman captivity and in the Johannine writings has 
 been shown in the last two chapters, but the influ- 
 ence of Gnosticism by no means ended there. 
 
 Gnostic opinions were hydra-headed, and Gnostic 
 sects as numerous and variable as those of modern 
 Protestantism. The significant ideas of Gnosticism 
 came from Persia. Gnostics, like Zoroastrians, be- 
 lieved that there were two gods a god of good 
 and a god of evil. These gods were not superior 
 one to the other, but divided the universe between 
 them, struggling with one another for the possession 
 of debatable portions. The evil god had made the 
 world. Matter was accordingly intrinsically cor- 
 rupt. The soul was a spark from the god of good, 
 so that Redemption was a process of delivering the 
 pure soul from corrupt matter. The pure god did 
 not come into contact with the impure world him- 
 self, but through a series of agencies, each a little 
 less pure than himself. To these agencies, or aeons, 
 high-sounding names were given, such as Logos, 
 Aeon, Bathmos, Pleuramos, Sophia, Gnosis, etc. 
 Redemption was with the Gnostics accomplished by 
 knowledge, not by faith. The belief that matter 
 was impure led some of them, like the Docetists, to
 
 8O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 deny the reality of the Incarnation, as we saw in 
 the last chapter ; it led some to asceticism, and some 
 to libertinism. 
 
 It was in her struggles with Gnosticism that the 
 Church developed her form of government by 
 bishops, selected and defined her canon of New 
 Testament Scripture, and formulated her creeds. 
 Indeed, she did more than formulate creeds ; she lost 
 in this struggle the conception that faith is an atti- 
 tude of soul toward God, and thought of it more 
 and more as a body of doctrine expressed in a form 
 of words. Faith thus was conceived not as the out- 
 going of the soul in response to God's call, but as a 
 body of doctrine external to the believer, to be 
 accepted by him. Thus the test question came to 
 be: "What think ye of Christ?" rather than: "What 
 have you experienced of Christ?" 
 
 This change began even before the close of the 
 New Testament. In the Epistles to Timothy and 
 Titus, which are now pretty clearly proved to be for 
 the most part from a later writer than Paul, we find 
 two elements of this change in process. The Church 
 is in these Epistles no longer the mystic body of 
 Christ (as in Rom. xii. and I Cor. xii.), but it is an 
 external organization, which must be kept in worthy
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 8l 
 
 form. The officers of this organization have as- 
 sumed great importance, and much space is devoted 
 to detailing the qualifications of bishops and dea- 
 cons. More significant than this is, however, the 
 lapse which these Epistles reveal from the Pauline 
 conception of faith. In Paul, faith is a kind of 
 sanctified and transfigured love; here it is an objec- 
 tive body of doctrine such as was later called a 
 "deposit" which has been received from the first 
 teachers of Christianity, and which must be kept 
 intact and handed on (see I Tim. iv. I, 6, 16; v. 8; 
 2 Tim. i. 13; iii. 14; iv. 7). 
 
 Some twenty years later (about 112-115 A.D.) we 
 find both of these tendencies heightened in the 
 Epistles of Ignatius of Antioch, who sought to cor- 
 rect the errors of the Docetists in Asia Minor, 
 against whom the First Epistle of John had been 
 directed. In order that it might be clear to any 
 puzzled soul where the Church is and what it is, 
 Ignatius exalts the Bishop. In a lesser degree he 
 exalts the other officers Presbyters and Deacons 
 but the bishops most of all. In his Epistle to the 
 Ephesians, he says men are joined to the bishop as 
 to Jesus Christ. Men must be careful not to set 
 themselves against the bishop lest they set them-
 
 82 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 selves against God (Ephesians iv. 5 and 6). Simi- 
 larly in his letter to the Philippians iii. and iv. he 
 says : "As many as are of God and Jesus Christ are 
 also with the bishop. There is but one Eucharist 
 and that is at the altar where the bishop is." 
 
 Thus was set the pattern of Church organization 
 which was destined to prevail for centuries. The 
 emphasis laid by Ignatius on the episcopate was 
 somewhat in advance of his time, but, as the cen- 
 turies passed, it was everywhere accepted. The 
 conflict with Gnosticism had given the Church her 
 government. 
 
 In asserting against the Docetists the reality of 
 the facts of Christ's life, Ignatius almost anticipates 
 the words of that Creed which was afterwards 
 called by the name of the Apostles. Thus in his 
 Epistle to the Trallians (chap, ix.) he says: "Stop 
 your ears, therefore, when any one speaks to you at 
 variance with Jesus Christ, who was descended 
 from David and was also of Mary: who also was 
 truly born and did eat and drink. He was truly 
 persecuted under Pontius Pilate ; he was truly cruci- 
 fied and truly died in the sight of beings in heaven 
 and on earth and under the earth ; he also was truly 
 raised from the dead, his Father quickening him,
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 83 
 
 -4> 
 
 even as after the same manner his Father will so 
 raise us up who believe in him by Jesus Christ, apart 
 from whom we do not have real life." 
 
 Thus in the writings of Ignatius years before the 
 formation of any of the creeds which have survived, 
 we see a Christian in repelling Gnosticism instinc- 
 tively resorting to such assertions as shaped the 
 creeds. 
 
 A few years later we can trace the same tendency 
 in Rome. Marcion, whose conception of God was 
 closely akin to the Gnostic, had about 140 A.D. set 
 up a congregation of his own in Rome, and, to make 
 sure that none of her members were infected with 
 his notions, the Roman congregation adopted by the 
 middle of the second century a form of baptismal 
 confession, which she required of her members. It 
 ran as follows: "I believe in God the Father 
 Almighty and in Christ Jesus his son, who was born 
 of Mary the Virgin, was crucified under Pontius 
 Pilate and buried, on the third day he arose from 
 the dead, ascended into Heaven, sitteth on the right 
 hand of the Father, from whence he cometh to judge 
 quick and dead; in the Holy Spirit, and resurrec- 
 tion of the flesh." 
 
 By about 400 A.D. this confession had been elab-
 
 84 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 4 
 
 orated into that which we know as the Apostles 
 Creed, and the legend that each of the Apostles had 
 contributed a sentence to it had been born. 
 
 Again, the Gnostics, Basilides, and Valentinus, 
 were the first to appeal to Apostolic writings in 
 support of their views, and Marcion about 140 A.D. 
 actually formed a New Testament canon, taking 
 the Gospel of Luke and revising it as the one 
 gospel of his canon, and admitting ten Epistles of 
 Paul. The Epistles to Timothy and Titus he, like 
 modern scholars, regarded as un-Pauline. It thus 
 became necessary for the Church to define her 
 canon, and by about 170 A.D. we find an authorita- 
 tive list of New Testament books. It thus hap- 
 pened that at the close of the second century the 
 Church emerged from her first fierce conflict with 
 the seething thought of the world, equipped with 
 an episcopal government, a confession of faith, and 
 a well-defined list of authoritative books all of 
 which this conflict had given her. 
 
 Of these three results the second is the most 
 important, for when faith was conceived as more a 
 form of sound words than as an attitude of soul to 
 God, or a spiritual experience to be expressed in a 
 life, a long step had been taken away from genuine
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 85 
 
 Christianity, and a long step toward those religious 
 quarrels, heresy trials and wars, which have been 
 the curse of Christian history. 
 
 The immediate effect of the adoption of this form 
 of confession an effect which has gone on with 
 increasing momentum as the centuries have passed 
 was to accomplish the excommunication and the 
 anathematizing of all who differed. 
 
 Undoubtedly the easy way to deal with heretics is 
 to put them up against the yard-stick of a creed and 
 if their measurements are not right to "deliver 
 them over to Satan." Fortunately for Christianity 
 in the East, faith in truth and in the power of truth 
 did not immediately die. There were those who for 
 a time overcame error, no^bj^coj^gnma^tion^ but by 
 teaching truth more fully. 
 
 Such in some measure was Justin Martyr, who 
 had been a philosopher before he had become a 
 Christian. Such in larger measure were Pantaenus, 
 Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. The last three 
 were successively the heads of a school in Alexan- 
 dria, at the end of the second and beginning of the 
 third centuries, and gave for a time to the Chris- 
 tianity of that city a breadth of outlook and a beauty 
 of spirit which are to this day unique.
 
 86 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 The most attractive thinker among these a man 
 whose great soul was a worthy successor to Paul 
 and the author of the Fourth Gospel was Cement 
 of Alexandria. Cement believed not in a God who 
 dwells in some remote corner of His universe, but 
 in a God who is present in His world. Language 
 seems poor and inadequate as Clement seeks to 
 assert and illustrate the workings of the immanent 
 God. Because deity indwells in humanity Cement 
 saw no distinction between revelation and the high- 
 est products of the human reason. What God re- 
 veals and man discovers, is all one. Greek phil- ~~ 
 osophy was as much a divine revelation as Hebrew 
 prophecy. Man was made in the image of God. 
 When that image was defaced by sin, God sent 
 Christ, the incarnate Logos, to reveal again and 
 perfectly the divine image. Christ, not Adam, was 
 to Clement the normal man. The history of man's 
 redemption became to Clement the education of the 
 human race under the instruction of the indwelling 
 deity. As the Logos he had always been leading 
 men the essential Christ had always been among 
 them. The redemptive work of Christ was to 
 Cement the revelation of the normal relation to 
 God in its perfect manifestation, rather than the
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 87 
 
 restoration of a broken relationship long ago lost. 
 This revelation was in Clement's view accomplished 
 by the incarnation rather than by the death of the 
 Saviour. Faith to Clement was the inward response 
 of a soul constituted for the truth ; it is the spiritual 
 vision by which spiritual things are discerned. It 
 corresponds in the realm of the spirit to the eye 
 by which things in the material realm are perceived. 
 
 Holding such views as these, Clement did not 
 treat the heretics as did others. Surrounded as he 
 was by the worst of heresies, he boldly urges upon 
 the heretics a deeper study of the truth as the one 
 remedy for false opinions. 
 
 The ideal attitude of Clement was, however, too 
 noble, too intellectual, too spiritual for most of the 
 world. The trend of the age was toward a faith 
 expressed in definite formulae, and toward the pro- 
 scription of any who could not accept the orthodox 
 shibboleth. The spirit of Clement lingered on, 
 nevertheless, and manifested itself in lesser measure 
 in a few choice souls, one of whom was Athanasius, 
 who lived a century later. 
 
 By the beginning of the fourth century Gnosti- 
 cism had practically spent its force, so far as the 
 Church was concerned. The three measures of
 
 88 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 organization which the Church had taken in self- 
 defence the episcopal government, the well-defined 
 New Testament canon, and, above all, the efficient 
 weapon of a definite confession of faith had ex- 
 cluded the Gnostics. It often happens, however, 
 that those who reject an idea are profoundly af- 
 fected by it ; and this was the case with Christianity. 
 The Church had energetically repudiated the con- 
 ception that there were two gods, one good and the 
 other evil, and that the world was made by the evil 
 god; but she had nevertheless widely accepted the 
 corollary of that belief, viz. that matter is inherently 
 sinful, and that he who would deliver his soul in 
 purity from the present evil world of matter must 
 withdraw from the ordinary occupations of life. 
 Undoubtedly, one influence which helped to render 
 this view attractive was the social corruption which 
 the cults of Astarte and Aphrodite had caused to 
 permeate the social fabric of the ancient world. 
 
 Thus, about 200 A.D., men began, especially in 
 Egypt, to withdraw from ordinary active life and to 
 flee to the desert. They did it at first, it is true, 
 sometimes to escape personal danger, but the idea 
 that marriage was an occasion to the flesh, and that 
 he was holier who was free from the entanglements
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 89 
 
 of this life, appears to have influenced many during 
 the century before the time of Constantine. The 
 full development of this movement as monasticism 
 did not occur, however, till a later period, and was 
 hastened by other influences, though it began as an 
 illogical acceptance by the orthodox of Gnostic 
 principles. 
 
 Then came, early in the fourth century, the recog- 
 nition of the Christian Church by Constantine. 
 This shrewd statesman saw in the Church an organi- 
 zation which permeated his empire. Whatever truth 
 there may be in the legend that he saw in a vision 
 a cross in the sky inscribed with the words, "By 
 this sign conquer," it is clear that he saw in the 
 Church an instrument of which he hoped to make 
 powerful political capital. It is no wonder that 
 short-sighted human beings who had recently been 
 persecuted to the death should have been wild with 
 joy when Christianity became the legitimate religion 
 of the empire, but we who look back upon the event 
 and perceive the secularization and degradation of 
 Christianity which followed feel more like weeping 
 than rejoicing. 
 
 It was not many years before some, even in the 
 Church of that day, entertained similar feelings.
 
 9O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Many not only did not feel at home in a secularized 
 Church, but they had so long suffered persecution 
 that they could not believe that they were really 
 Christians when they were free from torture, hence 
 they withdrew from the cities, especially in Egypt, 
 and largely swelled the ranks of the ascetics out of 
 which the monks were afterwards organized, inflict- 
 ing upon themselves in the scorching deserts, 
 through hunger and thirst, the tortures which a 
 Christian Government refused to inflict upon them. 
 No doubt they found in these painful exercises a 
 grim comfort, and possibly a deep joy, but by their 
 withdrawal from the activities of the world they 
 declared that for them Christianity had no message 
 for the common, laborious, and domestic life of man. 
 In any sketch of the Christian message in the 
 Eastern Church, considerable space must be given 
 to its tendency to form creeds. We have already 
 traced the beginnings of the so-called Apostles 
 Creed. That beginning served as a basis for all 
 future definitions of doctrine. Gnosticism, which 
 was largely Oriental in its kinship, had called that 
 Roman formula into existence, and it had been con- 
 structed in days when most Christians were un- 
 speculative and were satisfied with assertions in the
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH QI 
 
 language of Scripture. It had, however, laid _the 
 stress on what the Christian thinks of Christ, and 
 as time rolled on and learning increased, the Greek 
 speculative and dogmatic habit prevailed, so that 
 what one thought about some of the more difficult 
 matters connected with Christ became of prime 
 importance. Antioch, like Alexandria, was a centre 
 of learning. At Antioch they emphasized the aloof- 
 ness of God from the world; at Alexandria His 
 nearness. At Antioch they taught that Christ was 
 not begotten of God, but created by Him; that He 
 is not of the same substance as God, but of like 
 substance. Arius, about 318 A.D., went from An- 
 tioch to Alexandria with such teaching and was 
 deposed from his functions as a Christian deacon. 
 Immediately all the East was aflame. A traveller 
 relates that the discussions of this matter took such 
 hold of the popular heart that, if one asked a boat- 
 man the fare across a river, he would answer with 
 assertions of the created or uncreated character of 
 the Son. All this occurred just at the beginning of 
 the fourth century. It happened, therefore, that at 
 the moment when Constantine hoped to make the 
 Church an instrument to cement his dominions to- 
 gether he found her rent with dissension. Like a
 
 92 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 practical statesman he called a council of all the 
 bishops in his dominions to settle the controversy. 
 This council assembled in 325 A.D., at Nicea, in 
 Asia, not far from Constantinople. Thus the first 
 great (Ecumenical Council was called into being. 
 After long deliberation this council issued an 
 elaborated confession of faith known as the Nicene 
 Creed. This creed differs from the earlier creed 
 chiefly in its fuller definition of the Person of 
 Christ. As against Arianism Christ was declared 
 to be "begotten of the Father, the only begotten 
 that is of the essence of the Father, God of 
 God, Light of Light, very God of very God, be- 
 gotten not made, being of one substance with the 
 Father, who for us men was incarnate and made 
 man." 
 
 In the Nicene definition of Christ, which finally 
 prevailed in consequence of the labours and ability 
 of Athanasius, Clement's principle that God had 
 actually revealed in Christ His presence in the world 
 triumphed. This was the meaning of the phrase 
 "of one substance with the Father." It was, how- 
 ever, in a way, a sad triumph, for it was now only 
 a principle involved in a creed, to be accepted as 
 having once taken place, rather than a warm
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 93 
 
 experience of Goffs presence induced by the fad: of 
 
 Christ's incarnation. 
 
 Although the Nicene Fathers condemned to per- 
 dition in vigorous language all who did not believe 
 this creed, the controversy raged hotly for the next 
 fifty years. Nearly half of the empire was Arian, 
 and about half of the time during that century an 
 Arian emperor occupied the throne. The bitter 
 struggle of these years enhanced in men's minds the 
 necessity of orthodox belief, and called their atten- 
 tion further and further away from living expe- 
 rience. 
 
 Finally, in the year 381, Theodosius I. (the 
 Great) called another council the First Council 
 of Constantinople which reaffirmed the Nicene 
 definition of Christ's nature, and defined the source 
 and functions of the Holy Spirit, declaring that He 
 proceeded from the Father. 
 
 At last Arianism spent itself, and the orthodox 
 view prevailed. The Nicene Creed had asserted 
 both the human and divine natures of Christ, and 
 Christian speculation which, alas! usually means 
 Christian controversy, next turned its attention to 
 the relation of these natures to each other. This 
 gave rise to what is called the Monophysite (i.e. the
 
 94 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 one-nature) controversy. To some the divine na- 
 ture seemed the more important, and in their eyes 
 it eclipsed the other. These called Mary the 
 Mother of God. Others, of whom the name of 
 Nestorius is best known, denounced this phrase and 
 proposed the term "Mother of Christ." A council 
 called to determine this matter met at Ephesus in 
 the year 431, but the pearl of Christian charity had 
 so dissolved in the acid of doctrine that the dissent- 
 ing Fathers first fell violently foul of one another, 
 then split into two councils, each of which anathe- 
 matized the other. 
 
 The Council of Chalcedon, called in 451 to settle 
 the matter, endeavored to define the indefinable by 
 declaring that Christ possessed both a human and 
 a divine nature, which are not converted the one 
 into the other, and are not confused the one with 
 the other ; and that in spite of this duality of nature 
 Christ's person is a unity. Like many a Christian 
 since, they held that the human and divine are dis- 
 tinct and incompatible. They felt sure, too, that 
 they could define the limits of the two, and so fell 
 into contradictions. 
 
 Naturally, this decree was never accepted by the 
 Monophysite or the Nestorian Churches. This
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 95 
 
 creed, instead of uniting, for ever divided the 
 Church. The Armenians, most of the Syrians, the 
 Egyptians, and the Abyssinians, never accepted it, 
 and were thus for ever separated from the rest of 
 the Church. These Christians, widely separated in 
 territory and divided by language, have developed 
 differently. Their Churches, like that of England, 
 have each a national colouring and an independent 
 development. 
 
 After this separation the Greek Church, as that 
 of the Byzantine Empire is called, continued her 
 natural course. At a second Council of Constan- 
 tinople, in 553, the teachings of Theodore of 
 Mopsuestia, the real thinker of the two-nature party, 
 were condemned, and at a third Council of Con- 
 stantinople, in 680, the logical consequences of the 
 Council of Chalcedon, which had asserted that 
 Christ had two natures, were accepted, and it was 
 asserted that He possessed two wills, one human 
 and one divine. Finally, a second Council of Nicea, 
 in 787, sanctioned images or pictures in the 
 churches. 
 
 Hand in hand with the movement which brought 
 the use of images into the churches had come the 
 belief in the efficacy of the invocation of saints. In
 
 96 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 all parts of Christendom heathen deities, baptized 
 as Christian saints, continued to be invoked. As in 
 western Europe one finds many a Teutonic deity 
 wearing the cloak of a saint, so in Palestine and 
 Syria many a Semitic Baal turns up as St. George 
 or some other saint. At the same spot these old 
 Baals are often worshipped by Mohammedans as 
 wells or intercessors. So all over Christendom old 
 ideas continued under Christian names. 
 
 In the history of creed-making we see the ten- 
 dency to lay stress on opinion rather than on life 
 and character, which began in the early controversy 
 : with the Gnostics, carried to its logical issue. As 
 the centuries passed, the emphasis on correctness of 
 
 *l*IMMMMHMHHHgMB 
 
 belief increased, and was accompanied by a corre- 
 sponding emphasis on correctness of ritual. As the 
 estimate of these things increased, the conscious- 
 ness of the presence of God as a living Being, 
 speaking to His Church now, was lost. The East- 
 ern Christians believe in the divine nature of Christ. 
 They accept the inspiration of the holy apostles; 
 they even believe that God inspired the Fathers of 
 Nicea, and the Greeks, those of Chalcedon; but 
 that He can inspire now, they do not believe. Men, 
 if they would be saved, must accept the old dogmas,
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 97 
 
 and worship in the ways prescribed by the old ritual. 
 The living Voice which once spoke is silent, and to 
 depart from the commands it once gave is death. 
 
 One may ask how it has been possible for a 
 Church that produced a Clement and an Athanasius 
 to become so dead. It must be remembered that 
 even in the best of communities it is easy to hoard 
 our faith 
 
 "In mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee 
 The rude grasp of that great impulse" 
 
 which drove our ancestors to heroic deeds and to 
 sublime experience. The hardest of all things to 
 perpetuate is a living experience of God. This is 
 doubly true of a community whose civilization is 
 steadily declining, as was the case with the Eastern 
 Empire. By the fourth century the creative vitality 
 of the Roman genius was already spent, and al- 
 though the Eastern Empire survived the shock of 
 the barbarian hordes in the fifth century under which 
 the Western Empire went down, its creative genius 
 did not survive. It is true that in the sixth century 
 the age of Justinian was outwardly a flourishing 
 period, but it was not a creative one, and in the next 
 century Mohammedanism swept over the territories 
 of most of the Monophysite Churches, and robbed 
 7
 
 98 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 even the Greek Church of all her Syrian territory. 
 For a time the Arab, eager for knowledge, out- 
 stripped the citizens of the Eastern Empire in 
 learning and civilization, but this creative period, 
 depressing to the Christians while it lasted, soon 
 waned, and left this section of the Church exposed 
 to the barbarous bigotry of unenlightened Islam. 
 The Eastern Empire held out against Mohammed- 
 anism until 1453, but during all these centuries it 
 had only vitality enough to resist disintegration. 
 Spiritually it was living on the heritage of the past. 
 No new spiritual impulse was felt. Ignorance set- 
 tled down over priesthood and people. Superstition 
 degraded faith. As in the West, the theory of 
 Transubstantiation, i.e., the theory that the bread 
 and wine are actually turned into the body and 
 blood of Christ, was accepted. The ceremonies of 
 the Church were thought to be efficacious by a kind 
 of higher magic, and Christianity gradually became 
 only less unintelligent than Mohammedanism. One 
 sees the effect of all this today in that seething hot- 
 bed of zeal which is not according to knowledge 
 the modern Jerusalem where Greek Christians, 
 Armenian, Coptic (Egyptian), Abyssinian, and Syr- 
 ian Christians, together with eighteen orders of
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH 99 
 
 Roman Catholics not altogether friendly to one 
 another, as well as many cranky Protestants, form 
 with Jews and Mohammedans the most religious 
 mass of unregenerate people on the face of the 
 earth. Religion as ceremony and ritual, as tithing 
 mint, anise, and cummin, as visiting and kissing 
 places where the feet of men in whom the Holy 
 Spirit really dwelt, once trod, flourishes with all 
 that vigour which competition begets. In no place 
 in the world are knees more often bent, or prayers 
 more often repeated; but probably in no place in 
 the world is there less of that broad Christian 
 charity and gentle goodness which we instinctively 
 associate with the name of Christ. In its place one 
 finds a hatred fostered by ecclesiastical rivalry which 
 not infrequently results in fighting and sometimes 
 in murder. 
 
 I do not mean to say that there have not been 
 many pure and holy lives in all these churches 
 throughout the centuries; nor would I imply that 
 there are not many such in them now, even in Jeru- 
 salem. In all Christian history there has been, as 
 David Scull puts it, 1 an experience of the nearness 
 of God in the soul, together with a belief in the far- 
 1 Union with God, pp. 28, 99.
 
 IOO THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 offness of God in the mind. This experience has 
 kept the Christian life real. The modern Russian 
 peasant is an example of this. I do not mean, 
 accordingly, to imply that even in Abyssinia the 
 people are not the better for having the form of 
 Christianity which prevails there than they would 
 be without any ; but I do mean to say that the East- 
 ern Church as a whole is a sad object-lesson as to 
 what any Christianity will become which loses faith 
 in the continual presence of the living voice of God, 
 or that makes the mistake of laying more stress on 
 orthodoxy of opinion than upon actual Christian 
 experience and a Christlike life. The Eastern 
 Church is but the fossil of a once living giant. Its 
 passion of experience has passed; it has cooled into 
 mere formalism. Its face is set toward the past, 
 and the hand of that past rests upon it. It makes 
 no provision, as even the Roman Church does, for 
 hearing the voice of God in the present. Conse- 
 quently the fires have gone out ; only here and there 
 a few embers are smouldering. As one walks its 
 aisles he treads as about the crater of an extinct 
 volcano. He remembers the fires which burned in 
 such souls as those of Ignatius, the Montanists 
 Clement, Origen, Athanasius, the Gregories, Basil,
 
 MESSAGE IN THE EASTERN CHURCH IOI 
 
 and Chrysostom indeed, the lava which once came 
 hot from such fires he sees cooled and hardened 
 into the rock of ancient custom all about him. Its 
 theology receives no enlargement from present 
 experience. 
 
 Or to change the figure, the Eastern Church is 
 like some Oriental rivers, which spring glorious 
 and free from a mountain spring and flow out into 
 the desert, receiving no tributaries except near the 
 source. These rivers soon become turbid as they 
 flow through the sands; they grow smaller and 
 smaller as their waters are absorbed by the thirsty 
 soil until they disappear altogether. Any Chris- 
 tianity that is to be kept alive must receive new 
 accessions of the Water of Life from the Heavenly 
 Source with each passing year; its fields must be 
 continually fructified from above. It must live in 
 constant realization of the promise : "Lo, I am with 
 you alway," or it may soon be said of it: "Thou 
 hast a name that thou livest, but art dead."
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH 
 
 THE conflict with heresy, especially with Gnostic 
 heresy, which, as noted above, produced such im- 
 portant effects upon the Eastern Church, affected 
 the Western Church in like manner. During the 
 centuries before the Council of Chalcedon, the two 
 sections of Christendom waged the war against 
 heresy as a united army, and were not conscious 
 of fundamental separation. Indeed, at Chalcedon, 
 in 451, the Roman P'ope or Bishop exerted a para- 
 mount influence in the wording of the decree of 
 the Council. 
 
 Notwithstanding this external unity there were, 
 even in the early days, fundamental differences of 
 tendency in the two sections which ultimately trans- 
 formed the churches of these respective parts of the 
 world into separate organizations, whose aims and 
 ideals were not in all respects identical. The East 
 was given more to speculation, the West to organi- 
 zation. In the East conformity to abstract princi- 
 102
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH IO3 
 
 pies possessed for all minds a great charm ; in the 
 West the paramount interest was in practical ad- 
 ministration. Indeed, such practical administration 
 as the Eastern Church exhibited in dealing with the 
 Gnostics she appeared to have obtained, in impulse 
 at least, from the West, for it was at Rome that the 
 earliest confession of faith which we can trace was 
 adopted. This was the formula which afterwards 
 developed into the Apostles' Creed, and which, as 
 we noted in the last chapter, was the beginning of 
 this administrative method of dealing with heresy, 
 and was the basis upon which the creeds of the 
 councils were erected. 
 
 The writer who first formulated the ideas which 
 were destined to prevail in the West was Irenaeus 
 (d. 202). Unlike Clement of Alexandria, his con- 
 temporary, Irenaeus had no use for philosophy. He 
 saw no divine revelation except that recorded in the 
 Scriptures. 
 
 The thought which Irenaeus made fundamental 
 was thedoctrine of the^ "deposit/" or the doctrine of 
 "Tradition" (cf.. Her. iii. 3). In substance the doc- 
 trine is this: Christ delivered to His Apostles cer- 
 tain doctrines; they in turn delivered them to the 
 bishops of the churches which they founded ; these
 
 IO4 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 bishops have in turn delivered them to their suc- 
 cessors down to the present time. In the great 
 churches of the principal cities of the Empire, where 
 the succession from the Apostles has been contin- 
 uous, and where any deviation from the primitive 
 standard would, on account of the prominent posi- 
 tion of the Church, be more quickly observed than 
 in an obscure out-of-the-way congregation, the 
 genuine form of Christianity may be found. This 
 line of reasoning, Irenaeus urged, made it clear that 
 the normative form of Christianity would be found 
 in the church at Rome, for that church had been 
 founded by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter 
 and Paul, and as Rome was the capital of the world, 
 Christians from all parts of the world often met 
 there, and any deviation from the correct standard 
 would be more readily detected and corrected there 
 than elsewhere. Other churches are, then, in pos- 
 session of the true faith in so far as they are in 
 agreement with the Church of Rome. This doc- 
 trine of Irenaeus was epoch-making; it swayed the 
 whole future. 
 
 In reality it was simply a development by a 
 practical administrator of the doctrine which we 
 previously noted in the Epistles to Timothy, that
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH IO5 
 
 the "faith is to be kept," and that which has been 
 "received" is to be "committed to faithful men." 
 Thinking, as Irenaeus did, that these epistles were 
 from St. Paul, he had good precedent for his doc- 
 trine of tradition. 
 
 The theological defence of this doctrine of tradi- 
 tion should have been the belief that God is remote 
 from the world; that Christ, Who has ascended to 
 Him, is also now far away; and that the only 
 authoritative voice which can reach the Christian is 
 the distant echo, through tradition, of the voice of 
 the once present Christ. But, strange to say, 
 Irenaeus did not hold this view of God. He is 
 on this point in general harmony with Clement 
 of Alexandria, and when he is called upon to 
 give a reason for the Incarnation, he declared it 
 to be "that we might become gods" an answer 
 that would place him in the front rank of the 
 mystics. The successors of Irenaeus in the West 
 were constitutionally predisposed to be inoculated 
 with the germ of his doctrine of tradition, while 
 to the germ of his mystical thought they were 
 immune. 
 
 Tertullian (d. 230) of Carthage, a younger con- 
 temporary of Irenaeus, in his book, The Prescription
 
 106 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 of Heresy, elaborated and made more forcible 
 Irenseus's doctrine of tradition. Tertullian was a 
 lawyer of eminence, and treats the matter as a 
 problem of law. 
 
 The Apostles, he claimed, handed on what Christ 
 taught, keeping back nothing. They delivered the 
 entire "deposit" to their successors. Heretics could 
 not claim, therefore, that there had come to them 
 any part of the Apostolic "deposit" which had not 
 come to the orthodox bishop. This "deposit" of 
 doctrine is the Church's property. Her title to it 
 is secure because of the Apostolic deed of gift, and 
 because of long possession. The heretics are tres- 
 passers on the Church's domain. They have no 
 right there. Heresy is self-will instigated by philo- 
 sophy. Athens, declared Tertullian, had nothing to 
 do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the Church, 
 or heretics with Christians. These trespassers the 
 Church has a right to eject. 
 
 Later in life Tertullian, in spite of his argument, 
 became a heretic himself. When the Montanists 
 were struggling against an official ministry for the 
 old liberty of "prophesying," he sided with the 
 Montanists. He had in this book, however, spoken 
 so in accord with the genius of the Western Church,
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH IO7 
 
 that, although that Church repudiated the author, 
 she continued to regard his book as one of the great 
 buttresses of her charter. 
 
 The next great statesman of the Western Church 
 was Cyprian (d. 258). Cyprian lived through the 
 Decian persecution of the years 250-251. That 
 persecution was the fiercest through which the 
 Church had ever passed. The Emperor set himself 
 to stamp out Christianity throughout his dominions, 
 and compelled all his subjects or at least any who 
 were suspected of being Christians to prove that 
 they were not by going before a magistrate and se- 
 curing a certificate that the magistrate had seen them 
 offer incense to the statue of the emperor. In many 
 districts martyrdom was the alternative. While 
 many Christians suffered martyrdom, many offered 
 the incense and secured the certificates. Decius, in 
 251, fell in a battle with the Goths, and his suc- 
 cessor did not continue the persecution. Afterwards 
 hosts of the "lapsed," as those who had obtained 
 the certificates were called, wished to come back into 
 the Church, and great was the difference of opinion 
 as to whether they should be received. Cyprian 
 had himself withdrawn from Carthage and gone 
 into hiding during the persecution, and was severely
 
 IO8 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 criticised by some of his presbyters for so doing. 
 The differences between Cyprian and his congre- 
 gation and elders over these matters led him to 
 entertain in the end some views of the Christian 
 ministry which were as much in accord with the 
 genius of Latin Christianity as Irenaeus's doctrine 
 of the "deposit" had been, and these views ulti- 
 mately transformed the Christian ministry into a 
 priesthood. Cyprian's views, as they finally took 
 shape were, briefly, as follows: 
 
 "The. bishop is the representative of Christ in the com- 
 munity over which he rules. He has accordingly, over 
 that single congregation, the authority which Christ pos- 
 sesses over the Church Universal. He is the viceroy over 
 that portion of God's heritage. But Christ holds this 
 position of authority because He represents His people in 
 the presence of God; because He is their high priest; be- 
 cause He has offered for them His own body and blood. 
 The bishop, therefore, as the representative of Christ, is 
 the priest of God, who in the Eucharist offers to God 
 the Lord's passion, and truly discharges the office of 
 Christ . . . Above all, the bishop is the representative of 
 Christ because he is the judge- to whom belongs the power 
 of punishing or remitting sins . . . They only who are 
 set over the Church . . . can remit sins." 
 
 So declared Cyprian. Of course this doctrine was 
 not accepted by all the Church during Cyprian's 
 lifetime, but in the course of a century or two it be- 
 came the conception of the Church at large, and
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH IOO, 
 
 transformed the simple Christian ministry into a 
 veritable priesthood. 1 
 
 The greatest organizer of the system of thought 
 in the Western Church was, however, Augustine, 
 Bishop of Hippo, in North Africa (d. 430 A.D.). We 
 cannot stop to review Augustine's interesting bio- 
 graphy. His Christian mother, his youth capti- 
 vated by sensually immoral pleasure and varied by 
 the trial of many philosophies, his failure as a 
 teacher of rhetoric in Rome, and his most successful 
 career at Milan, and conversion under the preach- 
 ing of Ambrose, are all known. In character and 
 thought Augustine exerts upon a modern man the 
 most opposite influences. His Confessions are a 
 unique and attractive picture of himself, in spite of 
 their theological bias; they reveal piety of unusual 
 genuineness, devotion of unalloyed excellence, and 
 a mysticism which links us to him in heart. On 
 the other hand, his final system of thought is the 
 Magna Charta of Catholicism, and is all that a 
 modern Protestant abhors. 
 
 This system of thought was developed dur- 
 ing Augustine's struggles with three heresies 
 
 1 See, for more details, Lindsay, The Church and the Min- 
 istry in the Early Christian Centuries, pp. 290-319.
 
 I IO THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 the Manichaeans, the Donatists, and the Pelagians. 
 
 Manichaeism was founded by a Persian named 
 Mani, who was born a little more than a hundred 
 years before Augustine, and taught at Babylon. 
 Mani endeavoured to found a new creed which 
 should combine the best in the religious systems 
 with which he was acquainted. He adopted the 
 Zoroastrian conception of two gods, the Hindoo 
 belief in the transmigration of souls, the Jewish 
 belief in angels and demons, and the Christian 
 doctrine of the Trinity. His religion spread as far 
 east as China, and west to the Roman Empire. 
 Augustine before his conversion had at one time 
 been a Manichaean, and in some important respects 
 never shook off its doctrines. Clearly Manichseism 
 contained elements which were not in primitive 
 Christianity. It denied that the Church was the 
 sole depository of the truth. 
 
 In opposition to the Manichaeans Augustine 
 revived and extended Irenaeus's doctrine of tradi- 
 tion. Truth is a deposit entrusted to the Episco- 
 pate so Augustine argued. It is found only in the 
 Church. To the sanction of the Church even Scrip- 
 ture owes its authority. The Church for which 
 Augustine claimed so much was not the consentient
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH III 
 
 reason of those who are enlightened by the Divine 
 Teacher speaking within their souls ; it was the insti- 
 tution of which the Episcopate holds the charter. 
 This institution was entrusted by a power external 
 to itself with a "deposit" which was the only authori- 
 tative source of truth. The "notes" or signs by 
 which this Church may be known are, as Augustine 
 pictured it to the Manichaeans, its power, its splen- 
 dour, its miraculous gifts, its vast extent, and its 
 long succession of bishops extending from the See 
 of Peter. 
 
 This idea of the Church is further developed in 
 his controversy with the Donatists. The Donatists 
 as a party had emerged in the controversy over the 
 "lapsed," and took their name from a bishop of 
 Carthage. They held that the Church consisted 
 only of those known or believed to be faithful. As 
 the Church at large received again into its fold those 
 of the "lapsed" who were penitent, the Donatists 
 separated themselves from the rest and claimed that 
 they were the only true Church. Augustine found 
 many of them in his diocese, and they were natu- 
 rally obnoxious to him as the practical administrator 
 of a See. 
 
 In opposition to these Augustine asserted that the
 
 112 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Church by its very nature must include the unfaith- 
 ful and the wicked that the tares must grow with 
 the wheat. The Church was God's instrument for 
 ruling the world, and It was the divine will that all 
 should come into it; if they would not come of them- 
 selves, they must be forced to come; if the Church 
 had not the power to do this, then the State should 
 come to her aid. 
 
 There underlay this position the thought that God 
 is far from His world, and that He is, through the 
 Church, as a vicegerent, ruling the world as a 
 distant province of His dominions. Augustine had 
 accepted, too, the dictum of Cyprian, that he who 
 had not the Church for his mother could not have 
 God for his Father, but he had modified it, for, 
 according to Augustine, not every one who has the 
 Church for his mother has God for his Father. 
 Final salvation is in the hands of God, and can be 
 known only at the last day. Even of those within 
 the Church only the elect will then be saved. 
 
 Before the Donatist controversy was ended, Pela- 
 gius, a monk born in Britain, then the extreme west 
 of the civilized world, went to Africa, and Augustine 
 had the Pelagian controversy on his hands. Pela- 
 gius denied that all men had sinned in Adam; de-
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH 113 
 
 clared that Adam's sin affected Adam alone; that 
 children came into the world in the same condition 
 that Adam was before his fall; that unbaptized 
 children were saved; and that the human will had 
 power to turn away from evil and follow righteous- 
 ness, or, if necessary, God would grant His especial 
 aid to its assistance. Such views robbed a church 
 such as Augustine had come to believe in of all 
 excuse for existence. 
 
 It was this teaching that called forth Augustine's 
 doctrine of Original Sin. Not that this doctrine 
 was entertained by him now for the first time, but it 
 was now heightened and given vehement expression. 
 According to this dogma humanity is absolutely 
 separated from God by Adam's sin. The whole 
 human race was implicated in that sin, has in con- 
 sequence fallen under the wrath of God, and is 
 destined to endless woe. Humanity has not been 
 redeemed by Christ, only the elect have been re- 
 deemed. Sin utterly destroyed the divine image in 
 man; only a creative act of grace can renew it. 
 This creative act takes place in the elect at the time 
 of baptism, and by it the divine image is restored. 
 Without baptism man is only a highly gifted animal. 
 This doctrine of baptismal regeneration was an inno-
 
 114 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 vation, and though it ultimately prevailed because 
 so much in harmony with the genius of Latin 
 Christianity, it found in some quarters strenuous 
 opponents. 
 
 In Augustine's view Christ had come to the world 
 to establish the Church, and by His death had re- 
 deemed the elect. He had now gone to the distant 
 heaven where God dwelt, and had left His work to 
 the Church. Humanity must be swept into that 
 Church, or it had no hope. Within the Church an 
 impalpable substance called "grace" gave repen- 
 tance and brought salvation to the elect. The rest 
 of humanity was given over to a future punishment, 
 which, in Augustine's view, was more horrible, if 
 possible, than that conceived by Mohammed. 1 
 
 In Augustine the Christian message in the West- 
 ern Church received the form which it was to hold 
 for a thousand years, and which it holds in much of 
 Christendom till the present day. 
 
 After Augustine there settled over the Western 
 world an increasing cloud of ignorance. Hordes of 
 barbarians overran the land, sweeping before them 
 what little culture there was. At the Council of 
 
 i For greater detail, see Allen, Continuity of Christian 
 Thought, pp. 143-172.
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH 
 
 Toledo, in Spain, in 587, the creed of the First 
 Council of Constantinople was modified, so as to 
 declare that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Son 
 as well as from the Father. The Church held her 
 charter from the Son, and thus all gifts of the Spirit 
 were brought under the Church's control. The 
 Greek Church never accepted this addition. 
 
 During these centuries, too, there developed the 
 doctrine of Purgatory. Everybody held still the old 
 notion that the dead passed the time till a general 
 resurrection in the under-world, and gradually the 
 idea grew up that that time might be made profitable 
 for the purification of imperfect souls. The priests 
 were quick to see that this could be turned to the 
 advantage of the Church, and persuaded the people 
 that the purifying tortures of this subterranean 
 sojourn might be shortened by gifts to the Church. 
 Thus the organization which Augustine had done 
 so much to erect added to its domain the power of 
 the world to come. 
 
 Another step in the realization of Augustine's idea 
 of a Church was taken in the year 800, when Pope 
 Leo III. placed the crown of a so-called Roman 
 Empire on the head of Charlemagne, and thus as- 
 serted the superiority of the Church over the State.
 
 Il6 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 As the ignorance of the age increased, Radbertus, 
 a monk, proposed in the ninth century the doctrine 
 of Transubstantiation, i.e., that the bread and wine 
 become when consecrated the actual body and blood 
 of Christ. The alchemists of the period believed it 
 possible to turn lead into gold, although they did 
 not succeed in doing it, and it was accordingly easy 
 to believe that bread and wine could be turned into 
 flesh and blood. So this view was generally ac- 
 cepted after a short time, and completed Cyprian's 
 theory that in the Eucharist the priest actually 
 offered a sacrifice. 
 
 Even from this imperfect sketch it will be seen 
 that from Irenseus onward the constant tendency 
 had been to make the Christian message the charter 
 of the Church as an institution, and to herald to 
 men the fact that here only was salvation to be 
 found. And yet until the approach of the year 1000 
 the Church failed to captivate the imagination of 
 Western Christendom. Until then the European 
 world was too prosperous to come under priestly 
 sway. The Church was supported and tolerated, 
 but the iron of -her slavery had not entered into 
 men's souls. 
 
 The ninth and tenth centuries changed all this.
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH 1 1/ 
 
 There were fresh migrations of barbarians, which 
 caused untold sufferings. The Huns appeared in 
 renewed numbers and overran the Prankish country 
 to the sea. The Northmen came down upon France 
 and Spain, and sweeping through the Mediterranean, 
 took possession of Italy. The Danes invaded and 
 conquered England. The Saracens crossed from 
 North Africa, conquered Sicily, and appeared be- 
 fore the gates of Rome. As the year 1000 ap- 
 proached millenarian theories .prevailed. It was 
 widely believed that the world would end with that 
 year. The sufferings caused by the barbarians were 
 thought to be the signs which portended the end. 
 As the dread year approached, men deeded their 
 property to the Church, thinking to gain some 
 favour with God by giving Him those material 
 things which they themselves must soon lose. An 
 Italian scholar, a friend of mine, tells me that he 
 has seen one of these original deeds of gift made 
 at this time. 
 
 The year 1000 passed, and the world still went 
 on, but it was a different, a more religious world. 
 Its conscience had been awakened ; it began to build 
 those fascinatingly beautiful and solemn cathedrals 
 which still delight and allure us.
 
 Il8 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 When civilization, which the barbarians had for 
 a time crushed, began once more to flourish, the 
 awakened mind became an ally of the Church, and 
 entered the service of religion. Its first task wasjto 
 justify the dogmas of the Church to the reason. The 
 first to enter this field was Anselm (1038-1109), an 
 Italian by birth, who, late in life, became Archbishop 
 of Canterbury. 
 
 Anselm set himself to explain the Incarnation in 
 his epoch-making work, Cur Deus Homo, and in 
 doing so gave Christendom for the first time a 
 rational theory of the Atonement. For a thousand 
 years the Church had got on without any theory. 
 If any of the Fathers mentioned the subject (and 
 some of them did), they had taken Christ's illustra- 
 tion of the ransom literally, and claimed that God 
 delivered Christ to Satan in order to purchase the 
 i release of men whom Satan had captured. An- 
 selm's theory was based on feudal law. Man was 
 God's vassal. He owed God perfect fealty, which 
 he had failed to pay. As God was infinite, the debt 
 owed for this failure was infinite. Man could not 
 pay it, for he was finite ; only God could pay it. But 
 man must pay it, for it was man, not God, who 
 owed the fealty. If the debt were not paid, man
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH 119 
 
 must eternally perish. God's justice demanded this. 
 If he perished, God's love would be thwarted. Ac- 
 cordingly God became incarnate in Christ, so that 
 the conditions of the problem could be satisfied. 
 God and man thus both paid the debt, and God's 
 love gave Christ as a sacrifice to God's justice. Thus 
 the doctrine of the Atonement as a great legal or 
 governmental problem was brought into the Chris- 
 tian message, and, whether, as in the theory of 
 Calvin, it has been thought that Christ actually bore 
 our punishment rather than paid our debt, or, 
 whether, as in the theory of Grotius, Christ was 
 believed to bear just enough of God's wrath to 
 deter other provinces of God's dominions from 
 rebelling, the doctrine of the Atonement, rather than 
 the Incarnation, has to the present hour been 
 thought by the majority of the Christians of the 
 West to be the heart of the Christian message. 
 
 Anselm, however, did not array this doctrine 
 against Augustine's doctrine of the Church, for he 
 taught that the whole matter had been turned over 
 to the Church to administer. He had spoken, too, 
 of the Atonement as having infinite value, and as 
 being more than an equivalent for the sins of man- 
 kind. This surplus merit the Church in after days 

 
 I2O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 believed had been turned over to her to administer, 
 and it was made the basis of the sale of Indulgences. 
 
 Although the work of Anselm strengthened the 
 Church, it did not make its position intellectually 
 secure, as the career and work of Abelard soon 
 showed. This task of completing the subjugation 
 of the mind of man to the Church was left to Thomas 
 Aquinas (1227-1274). For some three centuries, 
 from the time of John Scotus Erigena, the learned 
 Irish monk, who knew Greek, and who made known 
 to the West something of the Platonic thought as 
 contained in the works of the pseudo-Dionysius, the 
 Schoolmen had had some conception of Platonic 
 ideas. They had, however, been ignorant of Aris- 
 totle until just before the time of Aquinas. Ibn 
 Roshd (Averroes), an Arab philosopher of Spain, 
 had translated the works of the great Greek into 
 Arabic, and Alexander of Hales and Albertus 
 Magnus had turned them from Arabic into Latin. 
 
 With a true instinct for practical utility, Aquinas 
 made Aristotle a kind of pope in the scientific world, 
 and floated his famous theory of a kingdom of 
 nature and a kingdom of grace. The theory was 
 really original with Albertus Magnus, the teacher 
 of Aquinas, but it was Aquinas who gave it its
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH 121 
 
 importance to the religious world. Interrogating 
 nature through the eyes of Aristotle, these School- 
 men conceived nature to be a sort of hierarchy, ris- 
 ing in regular gradation from the lowest orders of 
 life till it reached its culmination in man. Above 
 this kingdom, and rising on it as the spirit depends 
 on the body, towered the kingdom of grace, of which 
 the Church was the external embodiment. The 
 Church arose as a hierarchy through the various 
 orders of clergy to the Pope, the Vicar of God on 
 earth, and was continued by the angels and arch- 
 angels, finding its culmination in the throne of God. 
 These two kingdoms were believed everywhere to 
 be distinct from one another. The lower does not 
 pass over into the higher ; it is separated from it as 
 though its outer vestibule. The only door opening 
 from one to the other is the Sacrament of Baptism, 
 by which one who has natural life receives a super- 
 natural gift. These two kingdoms were thought to 
 correspond to the Empire and the Church. There 
 was a natural theology, consisting of such religious 
 truths as could be inferred from nature, and there 
 was a revealed theology which the natural man 
 could never have found out without divine aid. The 
 latter was not contrary to reason, but simply above
 
 122 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 it. This theory, leaving open as it did a field for 
 the human mind to legitimately work in, and claim- 
 ing that what was beyond was likewise justified in 
 the perfect reason of God, gave the Church her 
 intellectual fortress, and the work of Aquinas is 
 the approved philosophy of the Roman Church to 
 the present hour. 
 
 Rapidly and imperfectly we have now traced the 
 main outline of the form which the Christian mes- 
 sage took in the West. We have seen how the 
 practical workings of the Western mind with the 
 genius for organization inherited from those old 
 Romans who built the empire, constructed the 
 Church, making it a strong organization. This 
 organization, inheriting the task of the empire, 
 should, they thought, still rule the world from the 
 banks of the Tiber. This was not done all at once, 
 but the drift was altogether that way, even from the 
 start, although those who took the early steps prob- 
 ably had no vision of the goal towards which they 
 were tending. Notwithstanding this, the progress 
 was steadily in this direction. We have only 
 touched upon a few of the mountain-peaks of that 
 great range of Fathers who form the watershed of 
 this great area, but we have seen that Irenaeus,
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH 123 
 
 Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, Radbertus, Leo III., 
 Anselm, and Aquinas, all belong to the same great 
 range, and to these, had time permitted, many 
 others might have been added. 
 
 The substance of the Christian message as it 
 prevailed in the West was, then, this : Adam had by 
 sin utterly lost all connection with God his Creator. 
 All his descendants are held by God morally respon- 
 sible for Adam's sin, and are doomed to the most 
 hopeless torment. In order that a few who are 
 elect, and are known only to God, might be saved, 
 God sent His Son into the world to die. After 
 Christ's death He went back to the distant God 
 from whence He came. Before He went away He 
 organized the Church and made her head, the 
 bishop of Rome, His Vicar on the earth. To this 
 Church is given the duty of ruling the world and 
 of administering the salvation of the elect. No 
 salvation can be had outside of her. She represents 
 the kingdom of grace on the earth, which can be 
 entered only through baptism. In other words, the 
 Christian message in the Latin Church is: God is 
 far away, but long ago He came into the world for 
 a few years, organized the Church, gave her the 
 administration of His Spirit and all things spiritual ;
 
 124 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 it is His will that all come into her. Such a mes- 
 sage is better than no message, and it has been 
 blest to many millions. 
 
 The Church in the West, through the supremacy 
 of the Roman bishop and the conceptions of the 
 right of Rome to rule, which were inherited from 
 the empire, has been preserved from such complete 
 crystallization as was suffered by the Church of the 
 East. She has always maintained that God could 
 still speak to some one, and the doctrine of Papal 
 Infallibility, formulated within the memory of some 
 of us, is an assertion of the right of the Pope to 
 free himself from the fetters of the dead past in 
 obedience to the living voice of the Spirit. The 
 'Eastern Church represents utterly immobile con- 
 servatism. Its whole gaze is turned towards the 
 past. In contrast, the Roman Church has at least 
 the possibility of one eye (however near-sighted 
 and blinded by cataract that eye may be) open to 
 the future ; one heart open to the voice of the Spirit 
 now. 
 
 The message of Western Christendom as out- 
 lined in the Church of the Middle Age has remained 
 essentially unchanged as to its most important 
 features, even in Protestantism. Protestantism, it
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH 125 
 
 is true, asserted the right of private judgment, and 
 so greatly modified the conception of the Church. 
 Calvin, too, reversed the relative position of the 
 Church and the Bible. According to Roman doc- 
 trine, the Church is God's infallible representative, 
 and Scripture owes to the Church its sanction ; ac- 
 cording to Calvin and it has been accepted by 
 most Protestants the Scriptures are God's infal- 
 lible representative, and the Church owes to them 
 her authority. 
 
 This is no doubt an important difference, but it 
 is not so fundamental as it at first appears. Both 
 systems presuppose that God is far removed from 
 the world and from His people; that all authorita- 
 tive communion with Him long ago ceased; that a 
 standard of authority external to the conscience is 
 necessary; and whether that standard is a book or 
 an organization, however important within limits 
 the question may be, is beside this more fundamental 
 question a minor detail. 
 
 In Calvinism and Calvinism has until within a 
 comparatively few years ruled by far the larger 
 portion of the Protestant world the election of a 
 few and the damnation of the many has been 
 preached in true Augustinian fashion. In all of
 
 126 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Protestantism, almost to the present hour, the 
 central theme of the Gospel message has been held 
 to be a theory of the Atonement based on a legal 
 scheme of debt, penalty, or government a scheme 
 which has drawn attention away from the unalloyed 
 love of God, and His direct means and methods in 
 Christ and by direct spiritual contact of reaching 
 and moving the souls of His children. Probably, 
 however, the Christian message in this form was 
 best adapted to the majority, and certain it is that 
 it has proved the power of God unto salvation. 
 
 In tracing, as I have done, the general trend of 
 the Christian message in the West in this brief 
 compass, it has been necessary to pass by many 
 exceptions to this general trend. I have not had 
 time to mention important organized protests against 
 the prevailing theology protests which were also 
 assertions of the nearness of God and His willing- 
 ness still to inspire the individual. I have said 
 nothing of the Montanists in the second century, 
 who, though they began in Phrygia, spread to North 
 Africa, and who stoutly asserted that God still 
 inspired them to prophesy as He did the prophets 
 of old. I have said nothing of the Cathari and the 
 sect of the Holy Spirit of the twelfth century, nor
 
 MESSAGE IN THE WESTERN CHURCH 127 
 
 of the German Mystics of the thirteenth and four- 
 teenth centuries. Time has failed me to speak of 
 St. Francis of Assisi, of Abelard, John Ruysbroek, 
 of Tauler, of Eckhardt, of Jacob Boehme, of Huss 
 and Wyckliffe, of Luther and of Zwingli, of Menno 
 and Savonarola, of Arminius and of Schwenk- 
 feld, who, denying in different ways parts of the 
 prevailing theology, through their faith wrought 
 righteousness, and some of them subdued kingdoms. 
 Such as these are proof that in every generation 
 there was, as George Fox would say, a righteous 
 seed, or, to use the words of Paul, "God left not 
 Himself without a witness." 
 
 Had we had time for all these exceptions, how- 
 ever, they would have served but to show that the 
 history of the Western Church is not an arid prairie, 
 but has many diversifying features. And, on the 
 whole, the consideration of these features would 
 not change our summary of the form of the Chris- 
 tian message in the Western Church. These 
 preachers scarcely made themselves heard as com- 
 pared with the great multitude who voiced as with 
 a great shout the gospel of an absentee God, of an 
 infallible organization, or of an infallible book as 
 His representative, and an artificial scheme to bring
 
 128 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 men into harmony with God. On the whole, this 
 was the form the Christian message took in the 
 West for a thousand years the form, indeed, in 
 which, over large areas, it is still proclaimed. And 
 yet, as in the East, there was also in the West a 
 sense in the feelings of the nearness of God at the 
 very time that men held with their minds the theory 
 of His far-offness. This, in spite of the prevailing 
 theology, has kept Christianity alive, and enabled it 
 to bear fruit.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE causes which produced the Protestant Re- 
 formation were manifold, and numerous were the 
 men who helped to give shape to the Christian 
 message in Protestantism. Three among these stand 
 out prominently. On account of their pioneer 
 work and their commanding influence, he who 
 would become familiar with the underlying prin- 
 ciples of the Protestant Reformation must study 
 especially the work of Martin Luther, Huldreich 
 Zwingli, and John Calvin. 
 
 Luther, the pioneer of the movement, was a man 
 of rich and commanding personality, but was pos- 
 sessed of no great power of systematic thought. 
 Of peasant stock, Luther's attitude to the universe 
 was thoroughly religious and practical. Although 
 educated at the University of Erfurt, one of the 
 centres of the new humanistic culture, he was sing- 
 ularly untouched by the currents of new thought. 
 9 129
 
 T3O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Even the better side of the theology of the Catholic 
 Church seems to have been unknown to him. At 
 least, if he knew it, it did not control his thinking. 
 
 The peasantry of the time, like the peasantry of 
 any age, conceived of religion in an objective and 
 crass way. God was regarded as a terrible and an 
 angry judge ; the one thing needful in religion was 
 to escape his wrath. With this desire Luther 
 entered a monastery, but in the life of its secluded 
 brotherhood he found no assurance that he had 
 escaped the wrath of God. It was in this mood 
 that he made his great discovery as he was study- 
 ing Rom. i :i/, which reads in the Latin Vulgate 
 "For the justice of God is revealed in him from 
 ; faith unto faith." At first he hated the expression, 
 feeling that, already damned on account of original 
 sin and overwhelmed with calamities by the decrees 
 of the decalogue, it was too much that God should 
 further threaten man in his gospel. At last he 
 perceived that the justice of God is that whereby 
 the just man lives, even faith, and from that time 
 the doctrine of justification by faith became the 
 cardinal doctrine of his gospel. 
 
 Luther's doctrine of justification was shaped by 
 his previous conception of God. He had been
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 13! 
 
 actuated by a religious, not by a moral yearning. 
 It was not so much to be like God, but to escape 
 God's wrath to be on good terms with Him that 
 had been the passion of Luther's soul. He con- 
 ceived justification, accordingly, as a means of gain- 
 ing God's favour rather than a means of becoming 
 godlike. Luther pretended to have no merit of his 
 own; God averted his wrath by attributing to the 
 faithful penitent Christ's righteousness. In Luther's 
 view, then, salvation consists, not in moral trans- 
 formation, but in escaping God's wrath. To be- 
 lieve that one could obtain this reconciliation with 
 God by a personal experience, in which the soul 
 comes directly to God by faith, pleading the merits 
 of Christ, without any of the penances established 
 by the church and without priestly intervention, 
 was a bold step forward. It signified an important 
 break in thought with the established methods of 
 the Roman hierarchy. When, therefore, Tetzel later 
 came into Germany selling indulgences, Luther's 
 personal experience had prepared him to break with 
 such a Christianity. 
 
 But this new experience of Luther's led him to 
 break with the Roman church in other points as 
 well. Luther came to believe that the man who
 
 132 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 had thus by faith gained the favour of God was a 
 free man free to live out the results of his faith 
 without the guidance of rules and priests. As the 
 Christian was already a saved man, his life here on 
 earth is, Luther taught, as sacred as his life in 
 heaven will be. In this life he may as truly express 
 his Christian character here as there. To do this 
 he must not withdraw from the common duties and 
 the common relationships to a monastery, but must 
 do the common tasks, live the family life and! 
 conquer the common temptations. These views at 
 once cut away the authority of the clergy and 
 destroyed the motive for the ascetic life of celibacy 
 which had created the great religious orders. More 
 than this, if Luther's teaching was true, the old dis- 
 tinction between clergy and laity broke down. The 
 service of a cobbler was as truly religious service 
 as that of a bishop. In the course of the centuries 
 the hierarchy had become the real church; Luther's 
 teaching restored the priesthood of believers. Re- 
 ligion is a thing of the people. The clergy are the 
 representatives of the people; it is the people who 
 rule. From the extreme application of this prin- 
 ciple in a real democracy Luther shrank, but the 
 principle was involved nevertheless in his recogni-
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 133 
 
 tion of the sacredness of the common life of man. 
 
 Luther's teachings ennobled for the Christian all 
 right work. For a maid to cook and clean and do 
 other housework was divine service because it ful- 
 filled God's command in helping to care for the 
 home. Into all such service Luther urged men to 
 put a truly Christian spirit. He would have men 
 work for the good of others and thus show forth 
 the love of God. It is men, not God, who need our 
 service, and whoever turns good works to his own 
 advantage does no good work. He set forth in his 
 sermons in great detail what love to one's fellow 
 means, describing how it should enter into all 
 the relationships of life. He even ventured into 
 finance, to show how it should be applied to busi- 
 ness. Christian love, expressing itself in social 
 service, has never been more persuasively urged. 
 Luther's views of the Christian life led him to dis- 
 card the Catholic conception of the offices of the 
 clergy and of the church as a sacramental institution. 
 Believers gained their salvation by a direct expe- 
 rience from God ; the church consisted of the com- 
 munity of such believers. One gained admission 
 to the church, he believed, by faith, not, as other 
 reformers held, by election. Nevertheless he held
 
 134 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 the church to be an indispensable means of salva- 
 tion. To it those should go who would know some- 
 thing of Christ, and not attempt to build bridges 
 into heaven by their own reason. Outside the 
 Christian church there was, he held, no truth, no 
 Christ, no salvation. This did not mean, as with 
 Rome, that salvation was confined to the members 
 of one particular organization; it meant that the 
 knowledge of the forgiving love of God in Christ 
 comes to men through Christian believers. In his 
 view the church was the means of salvation because 
 it teaches the gospel, not because it conveys a 
 grace. Luther was led to take these new positions 
 in consequence of his own personal experience of 
 salvation. In the sixteenth century they seemed 
 very radical, and were thought to threaten an over- 
 throw of the fundamental institutions of society. 
 In reality they but touched the surface of the 
 religious life. They were not a complete and well 
 rounded system of doctrines, for on most of the 
 fundamental theological conceptions Luther stood 
 in full agreement with the Latin church. Like 
 some of the great theologians of that church he 
 regarded God as an angry and terrible judge, whose 
 fearful wrath avenges sin and permits no guilty
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 135 
 
 man to escape. Notwithstanding his conception of 
 the forgiving love of God in Christ, the anger of 
 God formed the background of all Luther's think- 
 ing. It was only in Christ and to the Christian 
 believer that God was thought to disclose his love 
 as a Father. For all others he had only vengeance 
 and wrath. Luther was also in accord with the 
 mediaeval theologians in his estimate of human 
 nature. The conception that the natural man is 
 depraved and helpless was as fundamental to 
 Luther's thought as was the wrath of God. This 
 view was no accidental survival; it was confirmed 
 by all Luther's own experience. His treatise on the 
 "Bondage of the Will" exhibits his permanent con- 
 viction on this point. He believed that to throw 
 any doubt upon human guilt, or to hint at the pos- 
 sibility of the existence of human virtue, was to 
 belittle the grace of God. In his thinking man 
 must be degraded in order that God may stand out 
 in his inherent exaltation. 
 
 Luther's conception of the Atonement was shaped 
 by his views of God and man. Christ, he declared, 
 bore the anger of God itself the eternal anger 
 which our sins deserved. It was this Divine anger 
 which constituted the inner sufferings of Jesus.
 
 136 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 God, seeing men overwhelmed by the curse of the 
 law, laid, Luther thought, upon Christ the sins of 
 each individual man, saying, "Be thou Peter, that 
 denier; Paul, that persecutor, blasphemer and cruel 
 oppressor; David, that adulterer; that sinner which 
 did eat the apple in Paradise; that thief which 
 hanged on the cross; and briefly be Thou the per- 
 son which hath committed the sins of all men. See, 
 therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them." 
 Christ had, then, suffered the full penalty for 
 human sin. He had also rendered full and perfect 
 obedience. The merit of this obedience could be 
 imputed to the believer. As it was only thus that 
 Luther could justify his faith in the forgiving love 
 of God, the doctrine of the Atonement assumed in 
 his thinking a prominence even greater than in that 
 of Anselm, and through the influence of Luther 
 came to hold a more fundamental place in Christian 
 thought. 
 
 Luther's faith in the value of the Atonement 
 depended upon another article of belief which he 
 held in common with the Catholic church, viz. : the 
 deity of Christ. It is, according to Luther, only 
 in Christ that God is known as a gracious Father. 
 Apart from this revelation He is wholly a God
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 137 
 
 of wrath. The stress which Luther gave to the 
 Atonement thus gave to the Deity of Christ an 
 added emphasis. Luther's inconsistency as a thinker 
 is especially manifest in his theory of the sacra- 
 ments. To be consistent with his theory that sal- 
 vation comes by the forgiving love of God in 
 Christ alone, Luther held in theory that the sacra- 
 ments were nothing else than signs. Nevertheless, 
 so comforting was the thought of the real presence 
 of Christ in the elements of the Lord's supper, that 
 Luther could not give it up. True, he no longer 
 interpreted the significance of the real presence in 
 the terms of sacramental theology; the body and 
 blood of Christ were regarded as an irrefragable 
 proof of the death of Christ for the sinner, not as 
 the nourishment of his spiritual life. Luther's be- 
 lief in the real presence is not, therefore necessarily 
 inconsistent with his theological position. The 
 incongruity between the new cloth and the old gar- 
 ment is much more conspicuous in his retention of 
 the rite of infant baptism. This rite Luther not 
 only retained, but accepted with it the traditional 
 doctrine of baptismal regeneration. In his general 
 theological scheme Luther did not believe in regen- 
 eration at all. The saved man did not, in his view,
 
 138 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 experience a moral transformation, he simply, by 
 being forgiven, escaped the wrath of God. In order 
 to make infant baptism fit into this system Luther 
 was led to declare that in the act of baptism faith 
 is directly bestowed upon the infant, so that he 
 can obtain forgiveness. Baptism thus became a 
 channel of faith as it had been to the Catholics a 
 channel of grace. In reality the rite was thoroughly 
 inconsistent with Luther's position, and it was due 
 to custom and long association that he was unable 
 to discard it. 
 
 Another point in which Luther's thought re- 
 vealed an inharmonious blending of the old and 
 new was his idea of Biblical authority. In reality 
 his authority for his system of doctrine was his own 
 experience. He believed these things because he 
 had tried them in the laboratory of his own life and 
 proved their worth. Accordingly he judged the 
 books of the Bible by the same criterion. The 
 Epistles of Paul, he declared, are higher in author- 
 ity than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The Gospel of 
 John was to him the unique, tender, true Gospel, 
 while the Epistle of James was an epistle of straw. 
 Similar judgments upon other books were freely 
 expressed.
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 139 
 
 In controversy, however, he felt the need of some 
 external authority to set over against the authority 
 of the church. It was natural, therefore, that he 
 should appeal to the Scriptures as to a divinely 
 inspired and infallible collection of books, which 
 since the second century had been everywhere 
 received. This course brought confusion into his 
 theological thinking. 
 
 In the course of his controversies with the Re- 
 formers in Switzerland Luther was led into an 
 inconsistent position as to the relation of the state 
 to the church. He insisted that the civil govern- 
 ment should see that sound teaching was maintained 
 in the churches. He had taught that the Christian 
 man was free to live out his Christian life. His 
 theory of the duty of government could be recon- 
 ciled with his earlier views only on the supposition 
 that those alone who agreed with Luther were 
 Christian, and that these had the burden of ruling 
 the world laid upon them. 
 
 Such in brief was the thought of the man who 
 laid the foundations of the Reformation. He did 
 yeoman service in helping men to see that religion 
 was to be experienced in the soul, that it was not a 
 matter of ritual. His courageous stand, taken at
 
 I4O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 personal risk, heartened others, and won the earlier 
 battles for freedom of conscience. In reality, how- 
 ever, Luther had broken with the past at a few 
 superficial points only, and had stepped but a very 
 little way out from the deep shadows of the Latin 
 theology. 
 
 The principal figure in the pioneer work of the 
 Reformation in Switzerland was Huldreich Zwingli. 
 He was a man of different temperament and train- 
 ing from Luther, and was in a good degree in- 
 dependent of the great German Reformer. His 
 teaching was accordingly radically different from 
 Luther's. Zwingli, when quite young, came under 
 the influence of the humanistic learning, to which 
 the revival of Greek studies had given rise. He 
 belonged, accordingly, to that school, of which 
 Erasmus was the most distinguished member. 
 Zwingli had been dedicated by his parents to the 
 priesthood, and the profession seems not to have 
 been uncongenial to him. It afforded leisure for 
 the pursuit of humanistic studies, and opportunities 
 to influence young men in the same direction. Be- 
 ginning his duties as a parish priest at the age of 
 twenty-two, he soon became deeply interested in 
 the social conditions of the people among whom he
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 14! 
 
 worked. These were first the people of Glarus, 
 then those of Einsiedeln, whither he went in 1516. 
 These social conditions convinced Zwingli that a 
 reformation was sorely needed. In 1519 he was 
 transferred to the principal parish church of Zurich, 
 where he continued to labour in the interests of 
 reform, though still remaining within the pale of 
 the church. 
 
 Zwingli had never passed through a religious 
 crisis such as Luther had experienced. He had 
 undergone the less emotional religious development 
 of a cooler temperament and a scholarly thinker. 
 His thought was always of a less personal character 
 than that of the German. As Zwingli, during his 
 early pastoral labours, had sought to bring the hu- 
 manistic philosophy to bear upon social and relig- 
 ious conditions, the fundamental ideas of his system 
 of thought were formed his conception of God, 
 his view of the Bible as the basis of authority. 
 Shortly before his removal to Zurich, Zwingli be- 
 came familiar with Luther's teaching concerning 
 salvation by faith alone through grace and not 
 through works. He was at once convinced of the 
 Biblical character of this doctrine, and saw that it 
 supplied to his own system a needed element which
 
 142 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 would make it adequate to meet the situation which 
 faced him. Zwingli's open break with the Catholic 
 church came in 1523. Although Zwingli assim- 
 ilated this one doctrine of his great contemporary 
 his system of thought as a whole was radically dif- 
 ferent. He was too much of a humanist to think 
 of the goodness of God as so exclusively bound up 
 with the work of Jesus Christ. His broad concep- 
 tion of nature led him to recognize to a limited 
 degree, but still far more than his contemporaries 
 did, the immanence of God in the world. He held 
 that the creation had been called into existence by 
 God's love ; all grades and ranges of existences were 
 so many revelations of the Divine existence. They 
 had been created that they might rejoice in God; 
 He operates in and through them. God's action in 
 the world is immediate, even miracles are not inter- 
 ruptions of law, but happen in accordance with law. 
 In accord with his wider conception of the good- 
 ness of God, Zwingli held that many of the best 
 among the heathen, such as Heracles, Theseus, 
 Socrates, Aristides, Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, 
 the Catos, and Scipios, had been saved. Such a 
 view was to many of his contemporaries shocking 
 in the extreme. Zwingli regarded Christianity, not
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 143 
 
 as God's only revelation of himself, but as the 
 supreme revelation. The Bible was taken as the 
 authority in religious life because it revealed God's 
 will. 
 
 Zwingli accepted, as did Luther, the doctrine of 
 the trinity, but his broader system of thought laid 
 less stress upon the Deity of Christ. Like Luther 
 he taught the depravity of human nature, although 
 he explained differently the consequences of the 
 fall. While, therefore, he proclaimed with Luther 
 the gospel of salvation by faith, the doctrine fitted 
 into a very different whole. Luther conceived sal- 
 vation as an escape from the wrath of God ; Zwingli 
 as ability to do the will of God. To the former, 
 there was no true religion except Christianity; to 
 the latter Christianity was the highest and best of 
 the religions the fullest revelation of the will of 
 God. To the former Christ revealed God's redeem- 
 ing love; to the latter he revealed God's will. 
 Luther thought of faith as the acceptance of God's 
 forgiving love in Christ ; Zwingli, as the acceptance 
 both of this and of God's providential love revealed 
 in all his works. The former found in the bread 
 and wine the real presence of Christ ; the latter saw 
 in them a memorial of the death of Christ. To
 
 144 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 deny the real presence in the eucharist, seemed to 
 Luther to rob the world itself of such a presence, 
 but Zwingli saw no need to confine to the eucharist 
 a presence of which the world was full.. 
 
 The phase of Zwingli's teaching which most pro- 
 foundly influenced Protestantism was his doctrine 
 of God. He did not, like Luther, think of God so 
 much in personal terms as 1 a Creator and Father, but 
 in abstract terms, as an omniscient, omnipresent, 
 all-powerful Being. In time he came to regard 
 God as practically the only active being in the 
 universe; not merely the first cause, but the only 
 cause. His power is unlimited ; evil as well as good 
 , is His work. He is above all law, so that, though 
 all the actions of men are His, He can do no wrong. 
 He determines not only the fate of men, but their 
 deeds. He predestines some to eternal life, others 
 to eternal death, that in the former He may show 
 forth His mercy; in the latter, His justice. The 
 ground of salvation, then, is not faith, but election. 
 It proceeds from nothing in man, but solely from 
 the will of God. 
 
 On this view the church became, not a commun- 
 ity of believers, but a community of the elect It 
 included all these whatever their condition, whether
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 145 
 
 Christian or -heathen, believers or unbelievers, in- 
 fants or adults, the dead as well as the living. 
 
 It was this doctrine of election, taken up by John 
 Calvin, which was to shape the type of Protestan- 
 tism that was to be most influential for the next 
 three hundred years. As a thinker Zwingli occupies 
 in the history of Protestant thought a much more 
 important place than Calvin, for it is to Zwingli 
 rather than to Calvin that this doctrine is due. 
 Zwingli appears here as the originator, Calvin as 
 the follower, though it is hardly possible that 
 Zwingli should not have been influenced by Augus- 
 tine. 
 
 John Calvin, the third of our reformers, was a 
 Frenchman by birth. Born in 1509, the work of 
 reformation had been in progress for a generation 
 before he participated in it. During this generation 
 much had happened. Changes of conception with 
 reference to the foundations of religion and morality 
 are always attended with unsettlement and danger. 
 The unsettlement resulting from the teachings of 
 the reformers had taken in Germany the form of a 
 peasant's war. As the new teachings seemed to turn 
 things upside down, many were ready to compro- 
 mise truth in the interest of stability and order. In 
 10
 
 146 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 1534, two years before Calvin published the first 
 edition of his Institutes, the Society of Jesus had 
 been organized to promote a counter reformation. 
 The Jesuits presented to the perplexed age a definite 
 and tangible authority and guide in religion an 
 infallible church. If Protestantism was to succeed 
 it must have an authority equally definite to offer 
 and an equally tangible working system. The man 
 who gave her these was John Calvin. 
 
 As Calvin had moved to Switzerland before he 
 began his work as a Protestant, he came under the 
 influence of the writings of Zwingli, by whom he 
 was profoundly influenced. This influence was not 
 direct, but reached Calvin through the writings of 
 Martin Bucer. 1 Under this influence Calvin shaped 
 his doctrine of God and was led to adopt the doc- 
 trine of election. Calvin's doctrine of God was, 
 however, much less philosophical than that of 
 Zwingii. Zwingli's conception of God rested on a 
 basis of reason; Calvin's on a basis of theological 
 authority. 
 
 To Calvin God was a personal Being, whose will 
 controls the universe, Calvin professed to derive 
 
 *See A. C McGiffert's Protestant TkovgMt Before Kant, 
 p. 86.
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 147 
 
 all his knowledge of God from the Scriptures; in 
 reality he selected those passages from the Bible 
 which taught the kind of God which Calvin regarded 
 as theologically necessary, and ignored others which 
 were inconsistent with his views. To Calvin God 
 is the absolute sovereign of the worlds. The Cath- 
 olic counter-reformation was insisting upon the 
 authority of kings in matters political; Calvin in- 
 sisted upon the sovereignty of God in every depart- 
 ment of life, political as well as religious. Calvin's 
 God was, moreover, the God of a Deist. He was 
 thoroughly distinct from the world and separate 
 from nature. God's only connection with nature, 
 since it left His hands as a finished creation, was 
 by the intervention of miracle. Angels and demons 
 were the intermediaries between God and man. 
 Satan himself is but God's agent for the accomplish- 
 ment of eviL This distant God, Calvin believed, 
 had revealed Himself through the Scriptures of the 
 Old and New Testaments. No other revelation of 
 God's will had been made. The Scriptures do not 
 reveal the inmost nature of Deity, but only what man 
 needs to know and practice. In this practical realm 
 the Scriptures are supreme. It was thus in the 
 clash with Catholicism that Calvin found a logical
 
 148 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 basis of authority as objective and definite as theirs. 
 To the dogma of an infallible church, he opposed 
 the dogma of an infallible Bible. Luther and Zwin- 
 gli had both held in different ways to the authority 
 of Scripture; Calvin hardened this authority into 
 that dogma, which has made it so hard for Protest- 
 ants to accept the results of modern investigation. 
 The tendency of his doctrine of Scripture was to 
 exalt every part of the Bible to an equality with 
 every other part. For the time the dogma sup- 
 plied a useful and needed weapon of defense, but 
 in the end it introduced endless perplexities into 
 Protestant thought. 
 
 Zwingli's doctrine of election, as it had been 
 elaborated by Bucer, was accepted by Calvin and 
 given a central place in his system. It formed a 
 natural corollary to Calvin's conception of the sov- 
 ereignty of God. It was inconceivable to him that 
 any finite will should thwart the decrees of the In- 
 finite. God predestined from the beginning some 
 to everlasting life, others to everlasting death. The 
 fall of Adam had not been an unforeseen catas- 
 trophe ; it had been decreed by God before the foun- 
 dation of the world. 
 
 Intimately connected with the doctrine of election
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 149 
 
 is Calvin's conception of human nature. This he 
 believed to be wholly depraved. God had decreed 
 that Adam's sin should be imputed to his entire 
 posterity. All men were accordingly born under the 
 condemnation of God. A few are elected to salva- 
 tion, but God leaves the vast majority to the con- 
 demnation which they so richly deserve. The elect 
 are not chosen on account of their goodness, but by 
 the act of God's sovereign will. Deeply ingrained 
 in all Calvin's thinking was a profound distrust of 
 human nature. While he has in the Institutes a 
 section on liberty, he accorded to man no real 
 liberty. Liberty to him was but freedom from the 
 necessity of obeying the ceremonial law. 
 
 In his conception of the Atonement Calvin took 
 a position similar to that of Luther, insisting that 
 Christ had been a substitute for humanity, and had 
 borne the actual penalty that men should have 
 borne. Man deserved eternal death ; Christ accord- 
 ingly suffered eternal death. It is no wonder, said 
 Calvin, that He is said to have descended into hell, 
 since He suffered that death which the wrath of 
 God inflicts upon all transgressors. He suffered 
 in His soul the dreadful torments of a soul con- 
 demned and irretrievably lost. There were not
 
 I5O THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 wanting those who regarded this as a new and 
 unheard-of heresy, but it was the view which on the 
 whole prevailed. Thus the Anselmic doctrine of 
 satisfaction was transformed to a doctrine of actual 
 substitution. 
 
 Calvin's conception of the Christian life was 
 extremely rigorous. The Christian should live for 
 the other world, and must eschew the pleasures and 
 frivolities of this world. He thought no middle 
 position possible. The earth must either be vile in 
 our estimation, or retain our immoderate love. 
 This Puritanic conception of the Christian life he 
 applied in great detail, and in his rule in the city of 
 Geneva endeavoured to enforce it. 
 
 Like Zwingli, Calvin defined the Church as the 
 totality of the elect, but he insisted, as Zwingli had 
 not, upon the functions and authority of the visible 
 church. Where the word is truly taught and the 
 sacraments rightly administered there, he believed, 
 was the visible church, and outside of its pale there 
 was ordinarily no salvation. In Calvin's concep- 
 tion of the church the clergy played a conspicuous 
 part. In the place assigned to them Calvin's 
 system approaches the Roman. The clergy, the 
 interpreters of the Divine word, are the delegates
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 151 
 
 of the remote sovereign ; they are separate from the 
 people and are empowered by the Holy Spirit for 
 their high office. Thus the Reformed clergy were 
 intended to take the place of the Roman hierarchy 
 and to have power over the congregations. In his 
 conception of the relations of church and state, 
 Calvin approached much more nearly than Luther 
 the Roman conception. He agreed with the earlier 
 Reformer that it was the duty of the state to 
 cherish the worship of God, preserve pure doctrine, 
 and defend the constitution of the church, but, 
 whereas Luther had left it to civil governors to 
 determine what true religion is, Calvin regarded 
 the state as but the handmaid of the church. It 
 is the function, he held, of the clergy to determine 
 God's will and truth; the obligation to act accord- 
 ingly rests upon the civil authority. 
 
 Calvin at Geneva became the most influential of 
 the reformers. Young men flocked thither, learned 
 his system and went back to introduce it into their 
 own lands. John Knox thus conquered Scotland 
 for Calvin, and Calvinism became the prevailing 
 type of Protestantism in France and the Low Coun- 
 tries. Calvin's theology was far more widely ac- 
 cepted than his church government. It was, for
 
 152 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 example, accepted by the Independents in England. 
 This theology, so logically consistent to one who 
 accepted its fundamental assumptions, became in 
 the centuries which followed the most influential 
 system in Protestantism. Even the Lutheran and 
 Anglican communions were profoundly influenced 
 by it. 
 
 As we look back upon the three great religious 
 teachers here studied, it is clear that the Protestant 
 world owes them a great debt. They broke for 
 millions of men the bonds of Rome; they shaped 
 Protestant thought to fight and to survive in an 
 age of stress. Knowledge, though then rapidly in- 
 creasing, was fragmentary and partial as compared 
 with the knowledge of the present time ; these men 
 adapted the Christian message to the knowledge 
 of their time in a way that made it grip men's 
 hearts and demand the consecration of their wills. 
 
 If, however, we put the Christian message as these 
 men conceived it in comparison with either of the 
 creative forms of that message which we find in 
 the New Testament, it is clear that the message of 
 the Reformers lacked most of the elements which 
 had made the Christian message powerful in the 
 first century. In Luther only do we find any real
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE REFORMERS 153 
 
 appreciation of the possibility and value of a per- 
 sonal experience of God, and Luther's view of this 
 is so veiled under a misapprehension of the Christ- 
 like nature of God, that the experience appears in 
 an altogether different perspective. In the system 
 of Calvin no real and vital experience of God by 
 the Christian is recognized. The whole is almost 
 as formal as the system of Rome, and is much 
 more cold, since it lacks far fewer elements which 
 appeal to the imagination. 
 
 Out of Calvinism there have come much good 
 and much harm. Calvin's doctrine of the sover- 
 eignty of God has had much to do in overthrowing 
 the tyranny of kings and establishing republics. 
 On the other hand his identification of the letter of 
 the Bible with the will of God has been responsible 
 in recent centuries for much religious coldness, 
 doubt, and even atheism. It is evident as the years 
 roll by that the Christian message as interpreted 
 by the Reformers is neither a complete nor a final 
 form of the Gospel of God to man.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY 
 FRIENDS 
 
 THE movement which we call the Reformation 
 was not a unit. It was like an incoming tide ; some 
 of its earlier waves lapped and gently disturbed 
 the inert seaweed of the marshy shore ; other waves 
 submerged this weed altogether, and raised the 
 surface to heights which had not for a long time 
 been reached; while still other and later waves 
 formed a kind of spring-tide, and rose to heights 
 that had not been attained since the far-off spring- 
 time of Christianity, sweeping away many an ec- 
 clesiastical hut and fishing camp which had been 
 built along the shore. The Reformation in Eng- 
 land, which was at first a political movement, was 
 the earlier wave. It disturbed the seaweed of 
 Popery, baptismal regeneration, works of super- 
 erogation, and reduced the Sacraments from seven 
 to two. The Protestant Reformation on the Con- 
 tinent is comparable to the second wave, for it 
 iS4
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 155 
 
 swept so high that it submerged the episcopacy and 
 endeavoured to take the Church in its organization 
 back to the beginning of the second century, to a 
 time when all presbyters were equal, and no mon- 
 archical bishop had robbed them of their power. 
 The Quaker Reformation, inaugurated by George 
 Fox, was the highest wave of the Reformation 
 its spring-tide sweeping as it did the presbyters 
 themselves away, and endeavouring to carry the 
 organization back in form to primitive Apostolic 
 days. All outward Sacraments, even the two re- 
 tained by most other Protestants, were also swept 
 away, as were all forms of priesthood. 
 
 If we ask why these early Friends were so radical 
 in their reformation, the only adequate answer is 
 that they had made a new discovery of the meaning 
 of the old Gospel. They had ascertained by actual 
 experience that God is among men ; that He quick- 
 ens every penitent heart; that He makes the soul 
 of the common Christian His dwelling-place; and 
 that He gives His spiritual gifts regardless of cul- 
 ture and social standing. 
 
 In other words, just as both Catholicism and 
 Calvinism were based on the supposition that God 
 once visited this world, but has now retreated into
 
 1 56 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 the far-off heavens, leaving a Church or a Book to 
 represent Him, Quakerism was based on the cer- 
 tainty that God is still in His world, that now, as of 
 old, He reveals Himself to consecrated souls, that 
 it is the privilege of the organized Church and of 
 each member to be guided by His living voice now, 
 and that the Church ought to be so organized as 
 to make this possible privilege an actual reality. 
 It was thus that the early Friends proposed a new 
 basis of authority in religion. Rome said : The 
 supreme authority is the Church. Protestantism 
 said, even in its episcopal form in England: The 
 supreme authority is the Scriptures. The Friends 
 said: The supreme authority is the ..Spirit^ 
 
 The long struggle for peace through which 
 George Fox went before he reached this new ground 
 has been so often recounted that it is unnecessary 
 for me to repeat it here. It is no doubt well known 
 to you all. The story of his agony and of the voice 
 that came to him as he walked in the fields, "There 
 is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy con- 
 dition," is the stock-in-trade of all lecturers on early 
 Quakerism, and, indeed, of most Quaker preachers. 
 It is not perhaps so well known that before this 
 "opening" came to him, giving George Fox peace,
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 1 57 
 
 the great fact that God is in His world and dwells 
 with His people was borne in upon him. He says : 
 
 "At another time it was opened in me that God, who 
 made the world, did not dwell in temples made with hands. 
 This at first seemed a strange word, because both priests 
 and people used to call their temples or churches dread- 
 ful places, holy ground and the temples of God. But the 
 Lord showed me clearly that He did not dwell in these 
 temples which men had commanded and set up, but in 
 people's hearts ; for both Stephen and the Apostle Paul bore 
 testimony that He did not dwell in temples made with 
 hands, not even in that which He had once commanded to 
 be built, since He put an end to it; but that His people 
 were His temple, and He dwelt in them." 1 
 
 The practical use which he made of this great 
 truth is indicated in another passage in his Journal, 
 where he says: 
 
 "I was sent to turn people from darkness to the Light, 
 that they might receive Christ Jesus; for to as many as 
 should receive Him in His light, I saw He would give power 
 to become the sons of God; which power I had obtained 
 by receiving Christ. I was to direct people to the Spirit 
 that gave forth the Scriptures, by which they might be led 
 into all truth, and up to Christ and God, as those had 
 been who gave them forth." 2 
 
 Many other passages might be quoted to show 
 that the indwelling presence of God was the main- 
 spring of all George Fox's gospel. The same is 
 
 1 R. M. Jones, Autobiography of George Fox, i. p. 76. 
 * Ibid., i. p. 103.
 
 158 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 true of all the real mystics of the movement. I 
 will quote a bit from another of the real mystics, 
 Isaac Pennington, whose writings are not now so 
 widely read as those of George Fox. In speaking 
 of his conversion Isaac Pennington says : 
 
 "Yes, indeed, I am satisfied at my very heart. Truly 
 my heart is united to Him, whom I longed after, in an 
 everlasting covenant of pure life and peace. . . . The Lord 
 opened my spirit, the Lord gave me the certain and sen- 
 sible feeling of the pure seed [so the early Friends fre- 
 quently called God in the soul] which had been with me 
 from the beginning; the Lord caused His power to fall 
 upon me, and gave me such an inward demonstration and 
 feeling of the seed of life that I cried out in my spirit: 
 This is He; this is He; there is not another, there never 
 was another. He was always near me though I knew it 
 not. ... I gave up to be instructed, exercised, and led by 
 Him, in the waiting for and feeling of His holy seed, that 
 all might be wrought out of me which could not live with 
 the seed." 1 
 
 The practical theological use to which Isaac 
 Pennington put this experience of the indwelling 
 God is less technically expressed: 
 
 "Learn then [he says] and know in thyself that Spirit 
 of prophecy which spoke in all the martyrs. Hear that, 
 come to that, keep to that. Feel the union, the fellowship, 
 the spreading of that in thee. When that bids thee go, go ; 
 when that bids thee come, come; when that bids thee do 
 this, do it." 2 
 
 Again, he says : 
 
 "Indeed, a Christian is nothing, and can do nothing, 
 1 Works, ed. 1761, ii. p. 52. "Ibid., i. pp. 32 ff.
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 150 
 
 without the power and presence of the Spirit of God in 
 him. . . . So, then the Spirit is the first thing to be looked 
 after by him who would be truly and well-groundedly re- 
 ligious." * 
 
 Isaac Pennington's conception of the relation of 
 such impulses of the Spirit to the authority of 
 Scripture is expressed in another place, in which 
 he is explaining (Rev. xxii. 18, 19) the passage 
 about adding to or diminishing from the things 
 which are written in this book. Pennington says : 
 
 "He that giveth any other meaning of any Scripture 
 other than what is the true meaning thereof, he addeth and 
 diminisheth; he taketh away the true sense, he addeth a 
 sense not true. The Spirit of the Lord is the true exposi- 
 tor of Scriptures ; He never addeth or diminisheth : but man 
 being without that Spirit doth but guess, doth but imagine, 
 doth but study or invent a meaning, and so he is ever add- 
 ing or diminishing. This is the sense, saith one; this is 
 the sense, saith another; this is the sense, saith a third; 
 this, saith a fourth; another, that is witty and large in his 
 comprehension, he says they will all stand ; another, perhaps 
 more witty than he, says none of them will stand, and he 
 invents a meaning different from them all. And then, when 
 they are thus expounding them, they will say, take the 
 sense thus, it will yield this observation or take it thus, and 
 it will afford this observation. Doth not this plainly show 
 that he who thus saith hath not the Spirit of the Lord to 
 open Scripture unto him, and manifest which is the true 
 sense, but is working in the ministry of darkness? . . . 
 But if the Spirit of the Lord immediately open anything to 
 a son or daughter, he cries, this is an adding to the word. 
 The Scripture is written; there are no more revelations to 
 
 1 Ibid., i. p. 36.
 
 l6o THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 be expected now ; the curse saith he is to them that add. . . . 
 Having judged his own darkness to be light, he must needs 
 judge the true light to be darkness." 1 
 
 In still another passage Pennington says : 
 
 "In the light I meet with infallibility. The light of 
 God's Spirit is a certain and infallible rule, and the eye 
 that sees it is a certain eye."* 
 
 And again: 
 
 "Every man may err in his interpretation of the Scrip- 
 tures further than he hath a certain and infallible opening 
 of them to his Spirit, by that Spirit which gave them 
 forth." 8 
 
 These passages clearly show how the real mystics 
 regarded the Spirit as the final authority. He 
 interpreted for them the Scriptures, and gave them 
 revelations which they regarded as of equal author- 
 ity with the Scriptures. It was this practical con- 
 sciousness of the presence of God with them that 
 gave the early Friends their power. I am not 
 defending the way Isaac Pennington puts the mat- 
 ter. No modern scholar with present-day knowl- 
 edge could do that. I will point out a little later 
 wherein he was mistaken. In the fundamental fact 
 of direct access to God, however, he was right. 
 
 Robert Barclay, who set himself to defend the 
 
 1 Works, i. p. 197. 
 
 2 Quoted by R. M. Jones in Social Law, p. 179. 
 
 3 Works, i. p. 239.
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS l6l 
 
 Quaker position from an England steeped in Pres- 
 byterianism, really gave away the strength of the 
 Quaker stronghold. He said: 
 
 "We do look upon them [the Scriptures] as the only 
 outward judge of controversies among Christians; and that 
 whatever is contrary to their testimony is to be rejected 
 as false." 1 
 
 Perhaps the idea in his mind was something like 
 the sound modern principle, that the impression of 
 the individual should be judged by the best in the 
 universal Christian consciousness. Such an im- 
 pression would have been conveyed had he said: 
 "Whatever is contrary to the best spirit revealed in 
 the Scriptures may be rejected as false," for the New 
 Testament contains the best the Christian conscious- 
 ness has ever known. His concession, as it was 
 worded, however, practically made the Scriptures 
 the standard again, and gave away the vantage 
 ground of the position of Fox and Pennington, 
 Barclay's phrase, "Whatever is contrary to their 
 testimony," was so understood as to make the letter 
 of every portion of Scripture supreme, however 
 transitory or accidental the form of that letter 
 might be. 
 
 It is because of this that in our own time so many 
 
 1 Apology f Pref. p. 6. 
 II
 
 1 62 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Friends hold the Calvinistic view with reference to 
 the Bible, and have discarded the very thing toward 
 which the thought of our time is driving everybody 
 else, and which Fox and Pennington held more 
 than two hundred years ago. Had Barclay only 
 known his Bible as men know it today, he would 
 have known that the Spirit as represented by 
 Scripture is not in details consistent, but declared, 
 for example, by Isaiah that the temple at Jerusalem 
 was necessary to Jehovah, and by Jeremiah that it 
 was not, and that both were true for the time when 
 they were uttered. 
 
 The heart of the Quaker message of the seven- 
 teenth century was this rediscovery of the direct 
 access of every soul to God. How thirsty the age 
 was for such a message the thousands who enthu- 
 siastically welcomed it by joining Friends is elo- 
 quent testimony 
 
 This Quaker Reformation differed from other 
 forms of the Reformation in that it was a move- 
 ment of the common people. Most of the religious 
 movements during Christian history have originated 
 with scholarly or university men. So true is this 
 that a distinguished author and preacher recently 
 declared in my hearing that all such movements
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 163 
 
 movements originating as the result of new vision 
 came from scholars. He overlooked George Fox, 
 however. Fox was no scholar. He knew his 
 Bible, but all between him and Biblical times was to 
 him almost a blank. He knew just enough of it to 
 regard it as a long-continued apostasy. Other 
 mystics had borne in substance before him much 
 the same message as Fox. Such were Ruysbroek, 
 Eckhardt, and Jacob Boehme, but he did not know 
 it. In an indirect way he was, probably, uncon- 
 sciously indebted to at least one of these, but his 
 message had grown out of his own experience, and 
 was as original as that of an Old Testament prophet. 
 
 Perhaps it was in part because George Fox was 
 of the people that they heard him so gladly. But, 
 at all events, the enthusiasm of the throngs that 
 listened was equalled by the courage and energy of 
 the early preachers, and before the end of Fox's 
 life this message had been carried all over the 
 British Isles, to several countries of Continental 
 Europe, to the Barbary States, to Turkey, and to 
 many parts of the New World. 
 
 The real reason, however, why the early Friends 
 gained such a hearing was that they brought a 
 message for which men were hungry the message
 
 164 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 of the nearness of God and His accessibility to all. 
 This message was practically new to the Anglo- 
 Saxon world, notwithstanding that in the previous 
 century it had been proclaimed in part by the 
 "Family of Love." Men with needy souls were 
 no longer pointed simply to a Book, or directed to 
 submit themselves to the guidance of a church; 
 they were neither told that a far-off God, who had 
 once visited the world, had instituted an organiza- 
 tion for their torture, miscalled by the name of 
 guidance; nor advised that this same far-off God 
 had written a Book for their instruction, which 
 told of religious experiences which they themselves 
 might not hope to attain. They were rather told 
 to look within their own hearts, to expect the 
 Divine voice to speak there, to heed its faintest 
 whisper, that by accustoming themselves to its 
 accents larger messages might be heard more dis- 
 tinctly; they were directed to read the Biblical 
 record of God's dealings with the men of old that 
 they might know what to expect God to do in their 
 own lives, and as needy souls listened and obeyed, 
 they were enchanted to find themselves in actual 
 communion with God. 
 
 George Fox called Quakerism primitive Christi-
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS l$ 
 
 anity revived; and it would indeed be difficult, short 
 of the Apostolic time, to find such thoroughgoing 
 mysticism so widely proclaimed and so gladly 
 accepted. 
 
 The consciousness of the indwelling presence of 
 God gave the early Friends a new sense of the 
 importance of Christian living. If God dwelt in 
 man, man must walk worthily of God; if the be- 
 liever were a temple of the Holy Ghost, he must 
 bring forth the fruits of the Spirit. This was 
 manifested in all their life, and was the mainspring 
 of the characteristic simplicity and sobriety of 
 Quaker living, as well as of that uprightness which 
 has made the name Quaker a guarantee for honesty. 
 It was also this principle which led Friends to 
 abandon judicial oaths; they saw that it is in- 
 consistent for a Christian to have two standards ; 
 of truth to tell the truth more exactly when 
 he has especially prayed God to damn him if he 
 does not, than he would upon ordinary occasions. 
 This refusal caused them much suffering, which 
 was bravely borne. Their contemporaries did 
 not understand their attitude, and many Friends 
 submitted to imprisonment for their refusal, but 
 their persistence won in the end a freedom of con-
 
 l66 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 science on this point for the Anglo-Saxon world. 
 
 There had been mystics before George Fox, but 
 no one since the early Christian days had given 
 such practical expression as he and those whom he 
 called about him to their faith in God's presence. 
 It was this which led to the form of worship which 
 they instituted. If the people were to be taught, 
 God must teach them. If He did not do it by in- 
 spiring some one to speak, He might be doing it 
 directly by His Spirit. At all events, it was of little 
 worth for man to speak if he were not inspired. 
 Indeed, it was worse than useless, for he might 
 prevent some one from hearing the voice of God 
 speaking in the heart. Hence it was that they gave 
 practical expression to their faith in God's presence 
 with them by meeting in silence, but accorded the 
 widest liberty for vocal exercises on the part of a 
 member of the congregation, if moved thereto by 
 the Spirit. 
 
 The same idea underlay their conception of the 
 ministry. The one qualification for it was to have 
 a Divine anointing that is, to receive a portion of 
 the Spirit of Christ into one's soul, to enlighten him 
 and to teach him what to say. This was the posi- 
 tive side of George Fox's great opening, that being
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 167 
 
 bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not sufficient to 
 make a man a minister of Christ It was not only 
 the belief that one must have a special anointing 
 with the Spirit of Christ in order to make him a 
 minister in the first place, but he must receive a 
 few fresh drops of the holy oil, so to speak, for each 
 occasion. This was in course of time interpreted 
 to mean that the Spirit could illuminate a man only 
 at the hour of meeting, so that all possible prepara- 
 tion was excluded. It was also held by Friends 
 almost from the start that the Divine voice speaks 
 more surely through the feelings than through the 
 mind, so that as time passed the mind was sadly 
 undervalued and the quality of the ministry suf- 
 fered accordingly; but in spite of all this the 
 organization of early Quaker worship and of early 
 Quaker ministry was a magnificent practical demon- 
 stration of faith in the actual guidance of God in 
 all that pertains to the religious life, such as the 
 world had not seen since the days of the Montanists. 
 It was this same faith in the actual presence of 
 God in the soul which led to the discarding of the 
 ordinances. Real baptism is by the Spirit only. 
 What does 'he who has that need of a watery sign ? 
 Nay, does not practical experience teach that one
 
 168 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 who submits to the rite with water often has the 
 attention so fastened upon that that he misses the 
 importance of the real thing ? There is likewise no 
 feeding 1 of the soul in communion except upon the 
 Bread of Life Himself. The outward symbol of 
 bread and wine frequently, like other outward sym- 
 bols, comes to conceal rather than to reveal the 
 thing signified. Hence the outward rites were cast 
 aside, and Friends became the most radical of 
 reformers. True, some others, like the Schwenk- 
 felders, had gone a little way in this direction, but 
 none were so thoroughgoing as the Friends. In 
 the Roman and Greek Churches there are seven 
 Sacraments; Protestants had reduced these to two; 
 Friends reduced them to zero. Or rather we ought, 
 in Lowell's phrase, to say they tried to "make each 
 meal a sacrament." 
 
 From their doctrine of the nearness of God these 
 early Friends gained a new sense of the value of 
 man, and hence gained a new doctrine of man. If 
 each soul was visited by God was a temple of God 
 each soul was of infinite value. If God would 
 visit the soul of a cobbler as quickly as the soul of a 
 king, all distinctions of class rested upon an unreal 
 foundation. While their doctrine was in reality an
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 169 
 
 exaltation of man, it often appeared to their con- 
 temporaries to be a humbling- of the great. This 
 doctrine led them to see that women were on an 
 equality with men. God as often visited women 
 and endowed them with spiritual gifts as He did 
 men; so, far in advance of the rest of the world, 
 they accorded woman her true position, believing 
 with Paul that in Christ Jesus there is neither male 
 nor female, but all are one. This sense of the 
 value of every man led them to see that war, which 
 is but wholesale murder, is absolutely wrong, being 
 both inhuman and contrary to the Spirit of Christ. 
 Far in advance of others, they urged international 
 arbitration, and William Penn laid down a plan for 
 European peace which the Hague Conference is but 
 just realizing. 1 
 
 This sense of human equality, arising from the 
 new appreciation of the value of human nature, led 
 incidentally to some queer customs, which are but 
 just dying out. Englishmen had up to this time 
 always worn their bonnets, and the hats which suc- 
 
 1 See his Essay toward the Present and Future Peace of 
 Europe. So able an authority as William C. Dennis, Ph.D., 
 LL.D., Assistant Solicitor of the Department of State at 
 Washington, in an address delivered at Providence, R. I., in 
 June, 1908, clearly demonstrated this point.
 
 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 ceeded them, in the house, as the Turk still always 
 wears his fez. In their homes they kept their hats 
 on, even at table. The Englishman had developed 
 one deviation from this custom, which the Turk has 
 not; he removed his hat when prayer was offered, 
 as a sign of reverence to God. Otherwise they wore 
 their hats even in church, and Puritan ministers 
 preached with their hats on. By an innovation in 
 English custom men were expected now to remove 
 their hats in the presence of the King or of his 
 officials. When Cromwell was Lord Protector, he 
 and his officials demanded the same honour. This 
 the Friends refused to give, on the ground that it 
 was offering to some men the same homage as to 
 God. In reality, it was a refusal to recognize that 
 any man could be appreciably exalted above any 
 other man, and was an expression of their apprecia- 
 tion of the value and dignity of the common man. 
 
 In Fox's time the pronoun "you" was still always 
 a plural, though the custom of saying "you" 
 to a superior while "thou" was still used to an 
 equal or an inferior existed. Underlying the inno- 
 vation was the subtle flattery that the person ad- 
 dressed as "you" equalled in value several ordinary 
 persons. Again, the sense of all human worth, as
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 171 
 
 they perceived it, forbade the Friends to follow this 
 custom. In the sight of God one pure soul was as 
 good as another, and their burning sincerity made 
 such flattery odious to them. They accordingly 
 addressed every man, however exalted, by means of 
 the same "thou" which was addressed to the 
 humblest menial. Religious conservatism has, as 
 so often in religious history, perpetuated these 
 customs of the hat and the plain language long 
 after their meaning has vanished, but we, who today 
 are discarding them, ought to know the past well 
 enough to appreciate the sturdy testimony to equal- 
 ity and brotherhood which these "testimonies" 
 originally expressed. In the eighteenth century 
 this sense of the worth of every man began to im- 
 press Friends, far in advance of others, with the 
 wickedness of slavery, and they became the earliest 
 advocates of the abolition of the slave. 
 
 Fired with no less a message than the nearness of 
 God and His willingness to forgive nay, His actual 
 presence already in every soul a message, too, 
 which infinitely exalted every human being as it 
 revealed the fact that God regards that being as 
 His temple, is it any wonder that the Friends were 
 gladly heard? When they saw how blind the
 
 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Church at large was to this message, is it any 
 wonder that they travelled everywhere, preaching 
 it with surpassing zeal? This thought that God 
 actually visits every soul, so far from cutting for the 
 early Friends the nerve of missionary effort, was the 
 chief motive which sent them forth. They gave 
 their message with confidence, assured that God 
 had visited the soul in advance to prepare the way 
 for His truth. The word of God to Pascal, "Thou 
 wouldst not seek Me, if thou hadst not already found 
 Me," was in substance their philosophy of the con- 
 version of any person. 
 
 We make a great mistake if we think these eariy 
 Friends pointed men to look within to some abstract 
 Divine principle which they would find in themselves. 
 We are sometimes misled, because in the obsolete 
 language of the seventeenth century they used the 
 words "principle," "seed," etc. They did believe 
 that every soul possesses a capacity for God, that 
 the Spirit visits every one, that unless a man finds 
 God in his own soul he will not find Him anywhere, 
 but they by no means undervalued the objective 
 revelation of God's goodness and redeeming love in 
 Jesus Christ. The preaching and writings of all 
 these sturdy Quaker apostles is witness to their
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 1/3 
 
 sincere belief that the voice of God within man 
 needs to be quickened by a vivid appreciation of the 
 infinite love of the Father as manifested in the life 
 and death of Jesus Christ. Their mysticism was no 
 mere moonshine ; it was true to the facts of history 
 and of experience. Their gospel was not the vague 
 and vain pointing of men to an impalpable principle 
 within; it was the vigorous presentation of the 
 revelation of the love of God in Jesus Christ, and 
 a call to every man to find the motive for yielding 
 to that love not only in the Divine story enshrined 
 in a Book, but on account of the confirmation of 
 that story written by God's own Spirit, first in the 
 structure and needs of their own hearts, and then in 
 an actual experience of its power in themselves. It 
 was a great message; it was grandly conceived; it 
 was heroically delivered. 
 
 And yet there came a time in the eighteenth 
 century when this message, delivered by the second 
 generation of Quakers, began to fail to gain a hear- 
 ing. As we look back now to the literature which 
 it called forth, we find the message itself put in 
 phrases so bizarre and obsolete that it fails to grip 
 the hearts even of those of us who have grown up in 
 a traditional reverence for its value. Why is this?
 
 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 The answer is no doubt manifold; but it lies in 
 part in the fact that the early Friends interpreted 
 their message, both as to its vocabulary and its 
 thought forms, in the concepts of their century. 
 They reached men in the seventeenth century be- 
 cause they spoke the language of that century. The 
 eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries have 
 all been different, their religious atmosphere is in 
 each case peculiar to itself; we have failed to con- 
 tinue the work of the early Friends because we have 
 continued to repeat their phrases instead of trans- 
 lating their central truth into the language of each 
 successive century. 
 
 While the early Friends put their message in the 
 best form for the seventeenth century, it was a form 
 which, judged by our present knowledge, had some 
 grave defects. Robert Barclay, the theologian of 
 the movement, was under the direct influence of the 
 philosopher Descartes, as one of our young Friends 
 has proved in a doctor's dissertation written during 
 last year. The form in which the Friends put their 
 doctrine of the inner Light was influenced by this 
 Cartesian philosophy. Descartes taught that man 
 is given certain innate ideas by his Creator; they 
 are Divine ideas, though apparently inborn in the
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 175 
 
 man; but they are no more related to the man's 
 human nature than the cartridge is related to the 
 gun; they are put there by One who is foreign to 
 the soul, and belong to Him. Barclay's exposition 
 of the inner Light is clearly founded on this philo- 
 sophy, and I suspect that it was the same philosophy 
 which caused the frequent use of "seed" and similar 
 terms when speaking of the inner Light. Every 
 well-informed man now knows that the Cartesian 
 psychology was mistaken and false. If accordingly 
 we continue to teach the great truth of God's visita- 
 tion of every soul in the language of Barclay, we 
 shall "make their truth our falsehood," to borrow 
 another phrase from Lowell. 
 
 Another point, in which we now see that the 
 thought of the early Friends was from the modern 
 standpoint wrong, was their conception of the con- 
 trast between the human and the Divine, and the 
 chasm which, in their view, yawned between the 
 two. It is not strange that they thought as they 
 did about this, for their view was the commonly 
 accepted belief from the earliest days of Christen- 
 dom onward, and was peculiarly emphasized in the 
 Cartesian philosophy. Christians had long thought 
 that a definite line determined where the human
 
 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 leaves off and the Divine begins, that the boundary 
 between the natural and the supernatural is a well- 
 defined and knowable limit. The Fathers of the 
 Council of Chalcedon, for example, believed it. The 
 Friends not only believed this, but they shared with 
 the Calvinists of their time a distrust of all things 
 human. Somehow Adam's sin, or everybody's sin, 
 had made human nature worthless. God would 
 visit it; indeed, He had put these Divine cartridge- 
 like ideas into every man; but the human by itself 
 was to be distrusted. It was this view which led to 
 the disuse of the reason in worship. Instead of re- 
 garding the human mind as, when consecrated and 
 sanctified, the fittest of all instruments known to 
 earth for the expression of the Divine, they regarded 
 it as an absolute hindrance to such expression. 
 Whittier has voiced their fundamental position on 
 this point in a line of his otherwise beautiful poem, 
 "The Meeting" : 
 
 "God should be most where man is least." 
 This incongruity between the human and the 
 Divine is to present-day thought an exploded idea. 
 The ancestry of this idea really goes back through 
 Calvin, Augustine, and Mani to the non-Christian 
 Zoroaster and his earlier heathen ancestors. The
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 177 
 
 best thought now holds that we are akin to God. 
 To take an illustration from the dog and good 
 men may learn some of their best lessons from the 
 dog I recognize in my dogs a reasoning power 
 akin to that in me. The two differ in degree rather 
 than in kind, and yet the intellect of man so far 
 surpasses that of the dog in degree that it amounts 
 to a difference in kind. Somehow thus are the 
 human and the Divine conceived today. They are 
 seen to be akin, to be related. They are not identi- 
 cal, but they overlap; there is no. chasm between 
 them. The natural is a part of the Divine. The 
 emphasis which the early Friends put upon this non- 
 existent contrast makes their message seem to a 
 modern man distorted. 
 
 Another conception shared by the early Friends 
 with all former folk, from the primitive savage to 
 the modern revivalist, as Davenport has shown in 
 his book, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, 
 was the idea that abnormal states bordering upon 
 the trance, when the mind is inactive and the feelings 
 predominant, or when words are uttered without the 
 action of the mind, is an especial manifestation of 
 the power of the Spirit. We now know that this is 
 
 not so; we know that such states are induced by a 
 12
 
 178 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 nervous excitement, which inhibits the action of the 
 highest powers of the individual. It accordingly 
 seems to the intelligent modern mind that far too 
 much emphasis was laid by Friends on feelings 
 and phenomena that bordered upon this unhealthy 
 excitement. But if they counted this nervous ex- 
 citement a Divine manifestation, again they erred 
 with all the world, and are not to be blamed. All 
 the mystics had held the same view. It was this 
 belief which kept mysticism alive, although now 
 mysticism has to be disinfected from its microbe. 
 
 Another vital weakness in the presentation of 
 early Quakerism a weakness which grew directly 
 out of the two mistaken conceptions last considered 
 was the undervaluation of the function of the 
 mind in religion. This undervaluation had become 
 so prominent in the second generation that it began 
 a kind of dry rot in the whole organization. The 
 mind was regarded as man's most undivine posses- 
 sion, excepting, perhaps, his animal passions. There 
 was no hint that it could be made the instrument of 
 the Spirit; that was the function of the feelings. 
 George Fox apparently did not share fully this point 
 of view, for he had "openings," which imply some 
 grasp of intellect; but "openings" soon gave way
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS 179 
 
 to "feelings" or "draughts," as one Journal quaintly 
 calls them, and the way was thus opened for religion 
 to become, at least in the outward expression of it, 
 inane and mawkish. 
 
 One other mistake of the early Quaker movement 
 a mistake that has in some quarters borne curious 
 fruit was that they took the impressions of their 
 own individual minds as the guarantee of ultimate 
 truth. This is really the position taken by Isaac 
 Pennington in the passage cited above. One's indi- 
 vidual impression, on the contrary, must be cor- 
 rected by comparison with the whole Christian 
 consciousness, or as much of it as is within one's 
 reach, before it affords firm standing ground. If it 
 be in accord with the best that that consciousness 
 reveals, then it may be taken as assured authority 
 for the time being. It is thus that the Scriptures 
 gain their rightful authority. Their best is the best 
 that the religious consciousness of man knows, and 
 accordingly that best has normative value. 
 
 Do not misunderstand me. I am passing on the 
 early Friends no criticism, except such as I hope a 
 future generation will pass upon us. My criticism 
 is in reality praise, for it is testimony that they spoke 
 their message in the terms of the thought of their
 
 l8o THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 age. That it was which, next to the Divine char- 
 acter of the message itself, gave them their power. 
 The thought of that age was imperfect and tem- 
 porary, just as the thought of our age is. If we 
 succeed in interpreting the great Quaker message 
 the vital message of religion to the twentieth cen- 
 tury, the men of the twenty-second century with a 
 better knowledge of the universe than even our 
 evolutionary doctrine and our pragmatism afford 
 will, I hope, be able to point out our errors, just as I 
 have today pointed out some of those of the early 
 Friends. Will they find as much of consecration, 
 of insight, of moral heroism, of the power of God 
 in us to admire as we find in the early Friends ? If 
 they do, we shall have soon to experience a great 
 awakening ! 
 
 The fact is, we admire the early Friends for their 
 revival of the early Christian message of Paul and 
 John the great truth that man may be united to 
 God in one community of life, so that what the man 
 does, in a real sense God does. The message is 
 permanent; its form changes. Paul gave it one 
 form for the middle of the first century; the great 
 author of the Johannine writings, another for the 
 end of that century ; Clement of Alexandria, another
 
 MESSAGE ACCORDING TO THE EARLY FRIENDS l8l 
 
 for the end of the second century; St. Francis of 
 Assisi, another for the thirteenth; the German 
 mystics, another for the fourteenth; George Fox, 
 another for the seventeenth century; and John 
 Wesley, another for the eighteenth. Can it be given 
 a form for the twentieth century? That is the 
 problem to which we must next address ourselves.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH 
 CENTURY 
 
 IT is far easier to be a fairly successful historian 
 than an indifferent prophet ; yet he who would out- 
 line the Christian Message as it must be put so as to 
 satisfy the longings and kindle the ideals of the 
 people of the present and the immediate future must 
 be a prophet indeed. I make no pretence to that 
 high office, and at the most can give but a few 
 hints of what the message should be. 
 
 Some one is, perhaps, ready to ask, Why does the 
 present need any different message from that pro- 
 claimed in the past? It does not need a different 
 message, but rather the old message grounded on a 
 foundation the validity of which men of the present 
 will recognize, and freed from implications which 
 are now seen to be mistaken and false. 
 
 Since John Fiske some years since called atten- 
 tion to the fact, 1 it has become a commonplace to 
 
 1 See his Idea of God, pp. 46-61. 
 182
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 183 
 
 assert that, within the last seventy or one hundred 
 years, the knowledge of man has increased more 
 than during all other periods of his history com- 
 bined. It is unnecessary now to remind us that 
 practically all our sciences have been born in this 
 period, and that scientific methods have been applied 
 to all departments of knowledge. The change in 
 the material side of life represented by railway, 
 steamship, telegraph, telephone, and phonograph, 
 has been accompanied by an equally radical change 
 and equally significant progress in all departments 
 of knowledge. These changes have created what is 
 practically a new intellectual world for man. There 
 is only time here to note two or three characteristics 
 of the thought of this new intellectual world which 
 bear especially upon the topic in hand. 
 
 In the first place, there is a strong sweep in the 
 thought of the present day toward a monistic philo- 
 sophy of the universe. The distinction between 
 God and nature, even the distinction between God 
 and matter, is difficult to maintain. What we used 
 to count as solid atoms are now seen to be rapidly 
 revolving rings of gas or ether, and some substances, 
 as radium, tend to an activity which entirely dissi- 
 pates them. It now seems probable that matter it-
 
 184 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 self is but a form of the divine activity. If this be 
 true, the old Persian dualism becomes for ever 
 impossible. We can never think again of matter 
 as corrupt ; nor can we imagine that it is the work 
 of an evil deity. 
 
 Although the philosophy of our time is sweeping 
 strongly and inevitably towards monism, it is not 
 easy on its basis to solve all the problems of life. 
 The difficulties are, however, infinitely less than the 
 difficulties of dualism. In dualism, even as baptised 
 by St. Augustine with a Christian baptism, mono- 
 theism is in reality sacrificed, and life for all but a 
 select few becomes a counsel of despair. The diffi- 
 culties of monism are at the opposite extreme. The 
 dangers are that men will think that the visible 
 universe exhausts all God's activities ; that they will 
 in their recognition of the important truth that God 
 is immanent in His world deny the fact of His 
 transcendence; that in recognizing a revelation of 
 Him in nature and in man they will lose faith in 
 His personality; that as they realize that neither 
 nature nor man accomplishes the least thing apart 
 from God, they will lose their sense of the reality 
 and heinousness of sin. 
 
 All these are dangers dangers which are very
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 185 
 
 real and which must be met. We may confess that 
 they have not yet been met adequately, even to the 
 satisfaction of any number of the modern thinkers 
 themselves, but that does not mean that they are 
 insuperable. Nothing is to be gained by scolding at 
 the trend of the philosophy of our age; it cannot 
 help sweeping toward the monistic standpoint any 
 more than one can help believing that two and two 
 make four. We must go whither the evidence 
 takes us. 1 
 
 I am not a philosopher, and if I were, this is not 
 the place to discuss these abstruse questions* I 
 may only say in passing that I have faith that the 
 thought of our time will be saved from thinking 
 that nature exhausts God's expression of Himself; 
 that it will be saved from denying His personality; 
 and that it will hold to His transcendence as well as 
 to His immanence as it learns more and more of 
 Him through the study of His highest handiwork 
 human personality. I also myself believe that in 
 the fact of the freedom of the will, the necessity 
 of this freedom to character, and in the fact that 
 real freedom involves the power to do wrong as well 
 
 1 The statement is true of the trend of the thought of the 
 time, in spite of Professor William James's plea for "plural- 
 ism." See the Hibbert Journal, vol. vi. July, 1908, pp. 721-728.
 
 186 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 as right, together with the fact that the animal in- 
 heritance of appetite entices towards the selfish 
 choice, will be found a satisfactory explanation of 
 the origin of sin quite in harmony with a monistic 
 philosophy, when some philosopher gains the insight 
 necessary to write a complete intellectual justifica- 
 tion of it. 
 
 Whether, however, this age-long philosophical 
 puzzle is or is not approaching a satisfactory solu- 
 tion in our time, two things are clear: The con- 
 science of our age is keener than that of preceding 
 ages in recognizing the heinousness of sins in the 
 concrete; and the thought of the age has for ever 
 made it impossible to think of God as separated 
 from nature, in the sense in which the builder of a 
 dynamo is separated from the dynamo, or to think 
 of Him as ever far removed from the world or from 
 men. 
 
 This fact has created a conception of the universe 
 the antithesis of that in which Christianity was 
 born. In the first century of our era, not only was 
 science yet unknown, but there existed in Palestine 
 no adequate conception of nature as such. What 
 we call the "laws of nature" were not conceived. 
 Men lived in an Arabian Nights world. Anything
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 187 
 
 could be done, they believed, if one could only ob- 
 tain control of a spirit powerful enough to control 
 the spirit which was acting. Good deeds proceeded 
 from a seemingly good spirit (it might not really 
 be so) ; evil deeds from a seemingly evil spirit. In- 
 sanity was not known to result from disordered 
 nerves or a disordered brain, but was thought to 
 result from demoniacal possession. To cure it a 
 good spirit sufficiently powerful to cast out the 
 demon must be present. No wonder that in such 
 an age stories of marvels abounded! Christianity, 
 and indeed all other religions, were born in this 
 intellectual atmosphere. 
 
 Later centuries reduced these conceptions to 
 something like order. After a more adequate con- 
 ception of nature had been obtained, Thomas 
 Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, put forth his 
 famous theory of a kingdom of nature and a king- 
 dom of grace. The former was controlled by laws 
 which we can observe ; the latter was made known 
 by incomprehensible miracles. The modern re- 
 ligious world is the heir of this conception, and has 
 been taught that miracles are the necessary attesta- 
 tion of Christianity, until many regard adherence 
 to the world-view, in which accounts of miracles
 
 l88 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 naturally had their birth, as a part of faith in the 
 Gospel. 
 
 Meantime a new world-conception has come to 
 stay in scientific circles. Not only does God work 
 in nature by law, but wherever we find Him work- 
 ing, even in the realm of the soul, it is by law also. 
 What a few years ago would have been regarded as 
 most wonderful miracles such as taking photo- 
 graphs through opaque substances are now mat- 
 ters of commonplace science. We do not regard a 
 new experience as a miracle, but as something 
 capable of being understood, and as we seek to 
 understand it, it reveals in part at least its laws. 
 This leads men to believe that what is beyond, and 
 is at present incomprehensible, is controlled by law 
 also that law is God's way of acting and revealing 
 Himself. As a result it is a part of the world-con- 
 ception of our time that He is actually revealed in 
 nature. More and more men are coming to believe 
 that there is no distinction or chasm between the 
 natural and supernatural that one is a part of the 
 other. Such distinction as there is, is believed to be 
 analogous to that between the material and the 
 spiritual. Both material and spiritual are seen, 
 however, to be forms of divine activity and to reveal
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 189 
 
 the nearness of God, though the spiritual is a higher 
 form of activity than the material. 
 
 This recognition of the nearness of God has swept 
 away for ever from people who coordinate their 
 knowledge some ideas which have played an im- 
 portant part sometimes beneficent and sometimes 
 horrible in the history of Christianity. The idea 
 of an infallible Church, like that of an infallible 
 Bible, 1 has for such people gone for ever. It is 
 unthinkable, to one who lives in the thought of the 
 present, that God was ever far enough from men 
 
 1 It hurts some good souls to have the Bible thus spoken of. 
 If by the term "infallible" it was meant that the Bible "infal- 
 libly leads to God," as a prominent preacher has recently put 
 it, there might be less reason to object to the phrase, though 
 observation teaches that even this is not true for all cases. 
 "Infallible" has, however, been taken, even by^ the Church 
 itself, to mean that the Bible contains no errors in any of its 
 statements concerning science or history, and that the ethics 
 of the Old Testament are still patterns for us. Modern study 
 has shown not only that this is untrue, but that often different 
 Biblical writers give mutually exclusive representations, which 
 cannot both be true (as for example in 2 Samuel xxiv. and 
 i Chronicles xxi.). All this is harmonized with the Bible's 
 matchless ethical and spiritual teaching by the view that the 
 Bible records a progressive revelation, and that each writer 
 expressed his sublime message through the medium of his 
 own intellectual outlook. The times demand that, at the risk 
 of grieving some devout souls whose salvation is secure, 
 Christians should, for the sake of intelligent, perplexed doubt- 
 ers, show their devotion to and faith in the God of truth by 
 leading the van in proclaiming the plain, unequivocal facts 
 about this matter.
 
 IQO THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 to make either an institution or a book His vicar. 
 If He was ever present in His world, He is present 
 now. If men ever had access to Him, they may 
 have access to Him now. It is also unthinkable, 
 to one who grasps the significance of the knowledge 
 of the present, that ever in this world either a man 
 or a book should be infallible. 2 
 
 This being the case, Christian workers are asking, 
 sometimes with hopeful interest, sometimes in blank 
 despair, Have we then any secure basis? Is there 
 no authority to which we can point inquiring souls ? 
 Has the Bible no value ? Is appeal never to be made 
 to the authority of the Church? These are im- 
 portant practical questions. A right answer to 
 them is vital to every one who would in this gen- 
 eration undertake the cure of souls. The answer 
 
 *It has been frequently pointed out (see, for example, 
 Edward Grubb's Authority and the Light Within, p. 30) that 
 the assumption that our Bible is an infallible guide involves 
 not only the infallibility of God, but four separate human in- 
 fallibilities, all impossible: (i) That God's truth was infal- 
 libly apprehended by the Biblical writers ; (2) that they infal- 
 libly expressed it in human language ; (3) that what they 
 wrote has been infallibly transmitted to us ; and (4) that we 
 can infallibly interpret their expressions. Infallibility in all 
 things implies omniscience, and the Gospels, as the holders of 
 the kenosis doctrine all recognize, tell us that even Jesus 
 shared our human ignorance on some points (see Luke ii. 52, 
 and Matthew xxiv. 36; also cf. above, chapter I. the third 
 note).
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IQI 
 
 attempted here has grown out of personal experience 
 as a working Christian. My answer may not be a 
 final one, but it is one which in theory looks, I 
 believe, in the right direction, and which in prac- 
 tice has, in cases which could be named, proved its 
 value as a curative in the clinic where souls seek 
 healing through the aid of their fellows. 
 
 A soul distressed by the loss of childhood's faith 
 comes and asks, How do you know that the unfold- 
 ing of God in nature does not exhaust Him ? How 
 do you know that He has personality? How do 
 you know that it is possible for men to hold com- 
 munion with Him? 
 
 The answer is : knowledge of this is based on the 
 fact that men practically everywhere have had faith 
 that they can have, and have had, communion with 
 God. In other words, the ground of faith that God 
 is personal and that communion with God is possi- 
 ble is the universal consciousness of mankind. On 
 this consciousness all the religions of the world 
 have been built, and in one way or another most 
 individuals of the race have had conscious commu- 
 nion with or communications from God or a god. 
 Just as the testimony of all men that they see the 
 sun confirms faith in the existence of the sun, so the
 
 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 testimony of all men that they can hold communion 
 with God affords a similarly secure basis for faith in 
 God's existence and personality. If but one man 
 saw the sun, we should conclude that he was de- 
 ceived; so if but one man had communion with 
 God, we should justly conclude that his testimony 
 might be the wanderings of a disordered mind. Men 
 have held childish notions, mythological notions 
 about the sun; they have held childish and mytho- 
 logical notions about God; but in neither case does 
 this invalidate their testimony to the main fact. In 
 many cases appeal can be made to the inquirer's 
 own experience. Perhaps he has seen moments 
 when he at least thought that God spoke to him or 
 he had communion with God. In the light of the 
 universal testimony of mankind, his own experience 
 may rekindle his faith. 
 
 Every life, then, becomes a little laboratory where 
 God may be discovered and where His existence 
 may be proved. How are scientific discoveries 
 made in a modern laboratory? A scientist puts 
 materials together in some new combination and 
 experiments with them; he observes the effect of 
 his new combination and announces the result ; im- 
 mediately, in other laboratories in all parts of the
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 193 
 
 world, the experiment is tried over again. If no 
 one else can obtain similar results, the supposed dis- 
 covery is discarded as a mistake. If a large num- 
 ber of observers do obtain the same results, a new 
 fact is added to science. If there are a few excep- 
 tions among those who try these experiments, i.e. 
 if a few fail to obtain the desired results, but nearly 
 all investigators do obtain them, the few failures do 
 not invalidate the discovery. The failures are to be 
 explained by some imperfection of material or 
 method ; by the temperature of the laboratory or the 
 qualifications of the experimenter. Not otherwise 
 is it in the laboratory of the soul. New knowledge 
 of God is not obtained as the result of one observa- 
 tion, unless other seekers find the experiment veri- 
 fied in the laboratories of their own experience. 
 On the other hand, a few failures do not invalidate 
 the general result. They are accounted for by some 
 spiritual colour-blindness on the part of the observ- 
 ers who give a negative report. 
 
 The knowledge of God, then, rests on a basis 
 similar to that of any other kind of knowledge 
 possessed by men ; it rests upon first-hand observa- 
 tion and experience; it is the result of millions of 
 observations and experiments in all parts of the 
 13
 
 194 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 world extending through many centuries. If whole 
 nations of men have theorized for long periods on 
 these experiences and observations in ways that are 
 now seen to be mistaken, religious knowledge in 
 this respect but shares the fate of scientific knowl- 
 edge, for again and again has this occurred in the 
 realm of science. 
 
 The basis of our religious knowledge is, then, the 
 religious consciousness of man man's first-hand 
 knowledge of God knowledge based on millions of 
 observations and corrected by frequent conferences 
 among the observers, and constantly renewed exper- 
 iment. The inquirer may test it in his own labora- 
 tory; if he will. Having laid this broad foundation, 
 \ we may go a step further. Our scientific knowl- 
 edge rests upon simple observations, many of which 
 any person can test, but, nevertheless, we are not 
 all scientists. In every home there are one or two 
 persons who know enough to do the cooking and 
 feed the family. In most civilized neighborhoods 
 there are one or more apothecaries, who know just 
 enough of science to mix medicines for the cure of 
 diseases. In such communities there are also a few 
 men who know enough of science to tell the apothe- 
 caries how to mix the medicine for each specific
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
 disease. There are very few who know enough to 
 make discoveries in science. These few push on 
 into paths before untrodden; they grasp new truth, 
 and, teaching it to other men, lead the doctors, the 
 apothecaries, and even the cooks, out into new paths. 
 Even the common man knows enough of the funda- 
 mental facts and axioms on which science rests to 
 give him confidence in the results of those who ex- 
 plore in regions into which he cannot follow. The 
 investigator thus becomes the teacher of all ; others 
 test the fringe of a new discovery, doing over what 
 the investigator tells them to do, and lo ! they obtain, 
 at least in part, the same results. 
 
 It is not otherwise in religion. Some few of us 
 have just about a cook's knowledge of religious 
 things; we can get nourishment; though most of 
 us here have to depend largely upon other people's 
 cooking. There are fewer still who have knowl- 
 edge enough to heal those who are sick in soul, but 
 still we have our spiritual physicians, and on the 
 whole they are very successful. Far fewer are 
 those who, working out from the common religious 
 knowledge, have penetrated into the hitherto un- 
 known and have made religious discovery. Thank 
 God! there have been such as these. They have
 
 196 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 been the prophets and religious teachers of the race. 
 They have not been infallible, but they have been 
 rightly the religious authorities of mankind. The 
 common people have known enough of the implica- 
 tions on which their new experiences rested to fol- 
 low their teachings, and prove their value. Such 
 discoverers were Confucius, and Buddha, and Mo- 
 hammed, and Socrates; here we place the Great 
 Prophets Moses, Elijah, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
 and the rest. Here, too, we put Paul and the 
 author of the Johannine writings, St. Augustine, St. 
 Francis, Luther, Zwingli, George Fox, and others. 
 These gain their authority on the same ground that 
 the man of science gains his authority. It is just 
 as right and just as valid. Their authority differs 
 with the clearness of the vision of each and the 
 permanence of the value of that which he has added 
 to religious knowledge. We yield them obedience, 
 not because they possessed a faculty of, revelation 
 which has been lost, but because in experience we 
 can test the validity of their religious discoveries 
 and find them true. The forces which gave them 
 their greater religious knowledge are still at work, 
 but long testing of their results, as compared with 
 the results of lesser geniuses in the religious sphere,
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 197 
 
 has proved the value of the vision of the greatest 
 seers and given them an authority, so that, as in 
 science we have sat at the feet of Copernicus and 
 Kepler, of Galileo and Newton, of Lyell and Dar- 
 win, of Champollion and Rawlinson, in religion we 
 sit at the feet of Isaiah and Jeremiah, of Paul and 
 John, or whatever the author of the Fourth Gospel 
 may have been called. 
 
 It thus comes about that we are led to a recogni- 
 tion of the supreme religious authority of Jesus 
 
 Christ, for, among all the religious seers of the race, 
 He stands supreme. His teachings, tested in the 
 laboratory of experience, are found to be the truest 
 yet given to the world. He saw more deeply than 
 any other into the heart of God, and life, and duty. 
 Compared with Him, Buddha and Socrates, the 
 best of the non- Jewish pre-Christian seers, groped 
 in the twilight. Although it is clear that the 
 roots of His nature struck deep into the divine 
 nature far beyond those of others, He lived a 
 human life, He shared our sufferings, He spoke 
 our human language. The consensus of the world's 
 best religious judgment accords Him a supreme 
 place, because He speaks to the deep needs of 
 humanity as no other has spoken. His voice wakens
 
 198 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 echoes within the soul that are awakened by no 
 other voice; He touches chords which vibrate to 
 no other touch. His word as to God's Father- 
 hood is the most satisfying thought yet uttered; 
 His teachings as to human duties are seen to be 
 incomparably above all others. Even a present- 
 day Socialist, as he denounces the Church as the 
 club of a privileged class, reverences Jesus Christ, 
 declaring that Christianity has never been really 
 tried. 
 
 In the light which comes from Jesus Christ we 
 look back again over the seers of the race, and we 
 conclude that those who came of His people and 
 prepared the way for Him, and those who fol- 
 lowed as His successors, when judged with severe 
 fairness, grasped a message of more living and 
 permanent significance than those who were of 
 other religious pedigrees. It is not merely that we 
 are more familiar with them that the words of 
 Hosea, Isaiah, Paul, and John search us with a 
 power which those of Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, 
 and Mohammed do not. The enlightened soul 
 finds in the Biblical seers a different quality. In 
 the end, then, the modern Christian comes back 
 to a point where he acknowledges the authority of
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
 
 Christ as supreme. He can say with Whittier: 
 
 "O Lord and Master of us all! 
 Whate'er our name or sign, 
 We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call, 
 We test our lives by Thine." 
 
 But some one is, perhaps, asking, If there is no 
 real distinction between the natural and the super- 
 natural, what becomes of the divinity of Christ? 
 If God is in nature and in man, so that nature and 
 man are divine, is Christ Divine in any sense in 
 which these are not? Yes: He is. The emphasis 
 which we are placing on the testimony of conscious- 
 ness brings to light the proof that He is. He only, 
 of all men of our race, has been conscious of com- 
 plete moral union with God. That consciousness, 
 combined with His sane life and matchless teaching, 
 is proof that He enjoyed a higher, a more complete, 
 a more unique Sonship than any other has known. 
 His nature sent its roots more deeply into the 
 Divine Personality than any other, so that He is 
 not only Master but in a unique sense the Son of 
 God. No form of faith long retains its power to 
 move men unless it recognizes this. No mere 
 philosophy or ethical culture alone will long prove 
 a satisfying message to large numbers of men in 
 this century any more than in any preceding. The
 
 2OO THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 essential element of power in the Gospel Message of 
 the twentieth century, as of other centuries, is that 
 "God was in Christ." As in other centuries, so 
 now, the Gospel which loses the Divine uniqueness 
 of Christ loses its power. It may be intellectual 
 and aesthetic, but it will prove to be no Gospel. The 
 modern Christian, too, values the Bible and the 
 Church. He has swept away, it is true, some 
 ancient fictions regarding them. The notions of 
 science which ancient saints entertained in their 
 respective generations he casts aside. Their crude 
 morality is for him no longer a pattern ; but wher- 
 ever a noble soul has grasped more of God than his 
 fellows, and added a permanent contribution to 
 man's knowledge of God, or wherever a group of 
 saints have lived the truth in effective reality, the 
 man of today is ready to sit at their feet in things 
 spiritual, that he may learn the secret of their power. 
 We therefore accord to Church, to Bible, and to 
 Christ the real and right authority which each has 
 ever possessed (although we do not permit that 
 " authority to nullify the divine Voice which still 
 speaks in the souls of Christians), because we find 
 in Church, in the Bible, and in Christ notable ex- 
 amples, in varying degrees of clearness, of the fact
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 2OI 
 
 that God and man meet in the human spirit. On 
 
 flMWMHM0* 0HMU *** aM ^^^^^^ 
 
 the whole, we have in the religious teachers thus 
 represented the most notable examples of religious 
 discovery in the history of the race, and Christ is 
 the Master of them all. In other words, wereach 
 
 ^^^^^^ 
 
 our recognition of authority by way of the religious 
 consciousness of man. We thus ground authority 
 upon a secure basis, place its different exponents in 
 proper perspective, and put it in a form to com- 
 mend it to the twentieth century. 
 
 Having led our inquirer to recognize that the 
 claims of Christ as supreme Teacher and Son of 
 God rest on a basis as solid as that of any great con- 
 temporary scientific leader, we must next try to 
 make clear to him Christ's message concerning God 
 and man. 
 
 The supreme message of Christ about God is that 
 God is Love God is a Father God is Christ-like.. 
 The human heart in the midst of a universe of 
 cosmic forces longs for love. Many a modern cul- 
 tured man as he looks at the tremendous sweep of 
 nature and her forces inwardly cries out, as he 
 realizes the yearnings of his heart and his own 
 insignificance, 
 
 ".What does the cosmic vastness care 1"
 
 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 Chris a^Js tha^jpdcares. The one heart 
 
 among all the men of our racethat knew God best 
 declares that God is not a cosmic vastness, hat a 
 tender personality; that He is not an unfeeling 
 force, hot a Christ-like friend; that He does not 
 hold Himself immeasurably above us as the Abso- 
 lute and Unknowable, but that in spite of all our 
 MB*MM. and sin He is fotgit lag ; that He invites 
 us to His fellowship; that He needs our lives for 
 the completion of His purposes, as much as we need 
 Him for the whining of our own personalities. 
 
 The message of Christ invites man into personal 
 social relations with God. John Caird 1 and George 
 A. Gordon 1 have taught us that the doctrine of the 
 Trinity a doctrine which seems to many modern 
 men unreal and remote has always stood for the 
 social nature of God. The heart of all social qual- 
 ities is love. Because God is eternally social He 
 is eternally loving. This love is so all-embracing 
 that it is satisfied only as it finds such a response 
 in the hearts of His children that each one is united 
 with Him in a life of affection and moral purpose. 
 As Srfuftgr IMS said, "Man is incurably religious," 
 Idtus of Ckristiamty, Glasgow, 1899, Lee- 
 
 Hi. 
 
 *Utiim**Comc*ptumof t*e Fat**, Boston, 1903, pp. 370 ff.
 
 MESSAGE FOB THE TWENTIETH CESTOBY 2O3 
 
 and to such a message, if properly presented, men 
 win respond. In the midst of our social travail and 
 longing and aspirations the reality which lies behind 
 the formal doctrine of the Trinity the fact that 
 God represents in Himself society; that He is, 
 accordingly, eternally intelligent and loving; that 
 the eternal -forces of the universe are fighting: < 
 die side of love and goodness and the highest social 
 jf^Kti^ and longings comes as a balm and an 
 inspiration. This elenient b to play an increasingly 
 large part in the Christian Message of the twentieth 
 century* 
 
 God is eternally social. He invites men to His 
 fellowship. He would make each man a member of 
 His family. Yes, more than tins, He would make 
 each fife a temple of His He would fin it with 
 Himself. God has made every man hungry for 
 God; in the historic Christ He has supplied objec- 
 tively the knowledge about Himself that was neces- 
 sary in order that man might find God and have his 
 hunger tkfed, To profit br the knowledge one 
 must put it into practice. "He mat wiHem to da 
 His win shan know of the teaching." Here men 
 are anew invited to apply me ffirifirtfnc mediod of 
 which our grurtjUnu is so fond, and to try in the
 
 2O4 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 laboratory of experience the validity of the instruc- 
 
 
 
 tion of the supreme Teacher. 
 
 Or, to put the Christian Message in a slightly 
 different way, all men are God's children, but they 
 have most of them never really enjoyed the priv- 
 ileges of their sonship. Jesus Christ, whose claims 
 to a unique Sonship rest upon the solid foundation 
 which we have sketched, came to help all men to 
 realize the full joys of their sonship. If again we 
 endeavour to state the Christian Message biolog- 
 ically, it would be something like this : God, by the 
 process of physical evolution, completed man's body 
 long ago; He is now engaged in completing the 
 inner life of man. The inner, spiritual life cannot 
 be perfected by blind forces pushing from behind, 
 such as perfected the human body ; it must be per- 
 fected by a powerful ideal alluring from before. It 
 must be stimulated by social union with the highest 
 personality, God. In Christ, God revealed the allur- 
 ing ideal; in Christ, He opened the way for this 
 fellowship with Himself by revealing His heart of 
 love. He extended by word the invitation to come 
 into close fellowship with God, He interpreted it 
 through a self-sacrificing life of service, He voiced 
 it by giving Himself to death. God in Him appeals
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 2O5 
 
 to the deepest instincts of man, and to the strongest 
 motives latent in human personality. He offers us 
 the satisfaction of our strongest social instincts. 
 
 The Christian Message has for centuries been 
 conceived as the payment of an infinite debt, or the 
 bearing of an infinite penalty. This legal con- 
 ception has made much of sin as an offence against 
 a Sovereign of infinite majesty. On the biological 
 view, which is today prevailing more and more, sin 
 is wilful immaturity or wilful disease. The work of 
 Christ is accordingly more and more seen to be God's 
 means of awakening the soul to its needs, and of 
 bringing it into fellowship with Himself. It is at 
 once the cure for man's deadly sickness, and the 
 means of bringing him to maturity. 
 
 In this work of awakening men, the life, the 
 teaching, and the character of Christ must in the 
 twentieth century take a more prominent place in 
 the proclamation of the Gospel than ever before, 
 but His suffering for men will, as in the past, con- 
 tinue to be the most appealing part of his work. 
 He gave Himself unselfishly to the horrible death 
 of the cross, to reveal to the uttermost His love and 
 God's love. This fact will continue to touch the 
 springs of feeling with unique power, and to move
 
 2O6 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 wills to consecration and endeavour. As men realize 
 that this suffering was not directed toward God to 
 influence Him, but toward man for his awakening, 
 and that it was not a part of an artificial legal 
 scheme, but the natural outgoing of the divinest 
 love for the accomplishment of its holy ends, men 
 will look through the sufferings of Christ into the 
 heart of God as through a window, and be moved 
 to all that is noble by the depths of the unselfish and 
 agonizing love which they behold there. 1 
 
 It is this last thought which, when grasped, is 
 most powerful to persuade. If Christ's suffering 
 reveals the suffering of God, that suffering was 
 not done once for all, but is still in progress. No 
 life is ruined by sin without wringing His heart; 
 no individual refuses to make real the divine ideal 
 for his life without bringing to an end in his per- 
 son a long line of influences for the regeneration of 
 the world, which should have been passed on with 
 accelerated power. He thus thwarts the divine 
 purpose, retards the coming of the kingdom, and 
 thereby extends the age-long agony of the loving 
 Father. Could any other thought so powerfully 
 
 1 For more extensive treatment of this point, see the writer's 
 Roots of Christian Teaching as found in the Old Testament, 
 chapters xiii., xiv.
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 2O/ 
 
 dissuade from sin? No man suffers in the strife 
 with sin, but God suffers with him. The suffering 
 of Jesus Christ is witness to the fact that God suf- 
 fers with all the sufferings of His children as they 
 fight for the elimination of the slum, for purity in 
 politics, as they carry the Gospel to the heathen, or 
 in any field by loving service take up the redemp- 
 tive work of the Son of Man. Could any other 
 thought so nerve the worker to noble and Christ-like 
 endeavour? Love involves suffering. Love is the 
 highest fruit of the social life. The atoning suffer- 
 ing is the inevitable corollary of the eternally social 
 nature of God. 
 
 MWi^ 
 
 Interpreted in this way, the Gospel gains in power 
 and in clearness. It meets men's needs as they are 
 understood in the light of the evolutionary science 
 of today, and it meets the situation much more 
 vitally than it was formerly thought to do. Inter- 
 preted as the payment of a debt, or as the bearing 
 of a judicial penalty, or as a governmental measure 
 to prevent further rebellion, the work of Christ 
 appears artificial and unreal; interpreted as God 
 working on sound psychological and biological 
 principles for the completion of the creation of man, 
 it is unrivalled in vital power and in moral beauty.
 
 2C)8 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 .But the significance of this message, as we must 
 present it to the men of today, lies in the fact that 
 it introduces them to a first-hand experience of God. 
 Of this we must not lose sight. Christianity lived 
 on faith in the experience of others has proved itself 
 a poor thing. Men desire reality now, and God 
 means that they shall have it. It was this first-hand 
 experience which made the Apostolic age so power- 
 ful. It is our duty now to go to every man and 
 say : Christ does not ask you to submit to authority ; 
 He invites you to come and know God for your- 
 selves ; if you will, you may share in the experiences 
 which made the world's heroes happy, heroic, and 
 triumphant 
 
 But here we shall be met by a difficulty. God is 
 most often known in the soul through mystic ex- 
 periences through experiences which, however in- 
 tellectual they may be, are characterized by a stir- 
 ring of the emotions an exalted, sublime feeling 
 which warms the soul and makes it conscious of 
 the stirrings of a higher life within us. I have two 
 friends who say that they have never experienced 
 this mystic emotion. They are both Christian men, 
 but they declare that for them such feeling is im- 
 possible. I have heard one of them declare, with
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 2CK) 
 
 tears in his eyes, that he would give anything to 
 enjoy the satisfaction of such emotion, and I have 
 heard the other one say that if such feelings are 
 necessary to a Christian, he can never be one, for 
 they are, on account of his peculiar temperament, 
 impossible to him. He would substitute for such 
 mystic experiences a satisfaction of mind, and the 
 strengthening of the ethical elements of the will, as 
 the channels through which one may know God. 
 
 In the past we have been too narrow in this 
 respect. We have based first-hand knowledge of 
 God too exclusively on the feelings. It is the "up- 
 right who shall see God," and noble living is one 
 important channel of knowledge of Him. But to 
 most of those who live nobly sooner or later some 
 witness of emotion comes. Most people behold the 
 light with eyes, but those whose eyes are sightless 
 learn through the warmth of the sun that the great 
 source of light exists. We may be grateful that it 
 is possible for men to know God through the mental 
 satisfaction that comes to them as they endeavour 
 to do right that they know Him through the moral 
 satisfaction which the ethical will gives, but we may 
 be more grateful that God does not relegate us all to 
 such cold satisfaction. To the great majority God 
 14
 
 2IO THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 will continue to make Himself known by touching 
 the springs of feeling, although feeling is refined 
 and exalted by training of the mind. Through 
 this sublimated feeling God will continue in most 
 men to reach the will. But the one thing on which 
 we insist is that -every man, each in his own way, 
 may know God, may have personal access to Him, 
 and personal experience of Him, whether in some 
 the intellectual element, or in others the emotional, 
 be the stronger. This is an indispensable element 
 of the Christian Message of today. 
 
 But in large part the Christian Message should 
 be addressed to Christians. Christians do not begin 
 to realize the obligations which this Apostolic, 
 modern Christian Message imposes upon them. If 
 we are temples of God, "what manner of persons 
 ought we to be in all manner of holy conversation 
 and godliness?" I do not mean that we should 
 withdraw from the world, or talk "cant," or wear a 
 peculiar dress, but God should so shine in our 
 characters and deeds that life would have a new 
 smell, to borrow George Fox's phrase, to all whom 
 we could influence. Our lives, because of their high 
 ethical quality and spirit, should be a meeting-place 
 where other men may find God.
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 211 
 
 Such was the case in the early centuries. The 
 author of the Epistle to Diogtietus, and Aristides in 
 his Apology, tell of the life of the early Christians. 
 They wore the same dress as the people about them, 
 they spoke the language of other people, but they 
 were pervaded by a different spirit, and a different 
 type of unselfish ethics prevailed among them. 
 Professor Dobschiitz, in his book on the life of the 
 early Christians, 1 has, as noted in a former chapter, 
 shown by indisputable proof that in the early Church 
 the consciousness that men came into direct contact 
 with God, and lived in fellowship with Him, created 
 a new type of individual and of society. The same 
 thing happened again in the time of St. Francis of 
 Assisi, and made the Franciscan movement the 
 sensation of the thirteenth century. How this same 
 belief in direct communion with God led George 
 Fox and his followers to a new and higher standard 
 of Christian living a standard which has made the 
 name Quaker a synonym of trustworthiness is well 
 known. If the heart of the twentieth-century 
 Christian Message is the Gospel of personal union 
 with God, it must be proclaimed through lives which 
 evince the fruits of such divine indwelling. These 
 
 1 Christian Life in the Primitive Church.
 
 212 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 fruits must be exhibited in even greater quantity, 
 and, if possible, in finer quality, than ever before, 
 for now it is on such fruits alone, and not on super- 
 natural sanctions, that the Gospel must depend for 
 its credentials. For good or for ill the supernatural, 
 as formerly understood, has lost hold on our age. 
 Many who do not deny miracles find them most 
 difficult of belief. Christianity may help men to 
 belief in a new supernatural, called, perhaps, by 
 some more appropriate name, but the old super- 
 natural will never again help men who live in 
 the present intellectual movement to believe in 
 Christianity. 
 
 This call to high Christian living and new Chris- 
 tian ethics applies with supreme force to the indi- 
 vidual, demanding in each one purity, unselfishness, 
 joy, and self-sacrificing service; but it applies as 
 never before to Christian society as a whole. There 
 are problems of social and industrial organization 
 which Christianity has never solved. These are 
 confronting the twentieth century. Unless Chris- 
 tianity, as it is embodied in us and men and women 
 like us, has a practical message concerning these 
 things, it will seem to an increasing number of the 
 people an idle tale. The world is demanding, not
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 213 
 
 only personal righteousness but social righteousness. 
 Men are not asking for charity but for industrial 
 and social justice. They are demanding an organi- 
 zation of our outward life that shall give every man 
 a chance, and that shall fairly distribute the products 
 of the complex labour of modern society. What 
 they are really demanding, though they do not 
 know it, is that the spirit of Jesus Christ shall be 
 embodied, not only in our characters but in our 
 institutions; that it shall rule in the Church, where 
 at most its manifestations have hitherto been spo- 
 radic only; that it shall rule in our politics, which 
 are as yet practically untouched by it; that it shall 
 prevail in our corporations and in our trade unions, 
 and teach "every man to look not only on his own 
 things, but also on the things of others," not as 
 men now fulfil this injunction of St. Paul, with 
 eyes of covetousness, but with the eyes of brotherly 
 consideration. This can never be till Christian life 
 reaches a higher level than it has ever yet reached, 
 unless it was in Christianity's earliest dawn. How 
 far beyond our present poor conceptions of Chris- 
 tian living must we not go, in order to make our 
 city governments pure, to wipe out the slum, to make 
 the submerged tenth respectable members of society,
 
 214 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 to cure the social evil, to make our corporations deal 
 with their employees as with Christian brothers, and 
 our organized labour deal with employers as Christ 
 would deal with them, to abolish war and substitute 
 arbitral justice, to carry education, civilization, and 
 Christ to the dark parts of Asia and Africa, until 
 the United States of the World shall not only be an 
 accomplished fact, but shall be a veritable Kingdom 
 of Christ! These are some of the tasks awaiting 
 the Church of Christ. Men think to accomplish 
 these things by social panaceas, or by changing the 
 methods of distribution ; but no method of distribu- 
 tion or of social organization, useful as these may 
 be, will produce the desired result. Human nature 
 must be changed; the animal spirit eradicated; the 
 Christ spirit substituted. God only can do this; 
 the message of Christ inviting man to a life with 
 God is the means by which He would accomplish it. 
 The message for the present is, then, the great 
 privilege of personal union with God first-hand 
 experience of Him an experience which is the one 
 pathway to the highest personal development and 
 salvation, but which also involves, on the one hand, 
 the necessity of sharing the self-sacrificing life of 
 God as that life is revealed in Christ, in a sense in
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 215 
 
 which His Church has not yet shared it, and, on 
 the other, the unspeakable privilege of becoming a 
 fellow-worker with God in completing the evolu- 
 tion of humanity by wiping out the slum, redeeming 
 society, Christianizing the world, and making it one 
 family. 
 
 On this side the work should appeal to every 
 gallant young soul. We are as yet but just in the 
 morning of time. The beginnings of civilization in 
 its earliest centres occurred only some seven thou- 
 sand years ago. The late Professor Shaler, of 
 Harvard, in his last book 1 declared that, so far as 
 any scientist can see, the earth may still go on with 
 man living upon it for one hundred millions of years 
 into the future. We cannot imagine such a stretch 
 of time ! It is like an eternity to us ! However 
 this opinion may be corrected in the future, it is 
 more nearly true than the old Apocalyptic visions 
 of the end of the world. To the old motive of sav- 
 ing souls for eternity there is now added the motive 
 of building a perfect society upon the earth for what, 
 to our human imaginations, is almost an eternity. 
 With God in us, and such duties and privileges 
 about us, "what manner of persons ought we to be 
 
 1 Man and the Earth, 1905, cf. pp. 161, 217, 224, and 226.
 
 2l6 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 in all holy living 1 and godliness!" Gallant service 
 full of danger, with possible glory at the end, has 
 always appealed to the young. I feel confident 
 that if the opportunities and difficulties of the pres- 
 ent situation, together with a real vision of God as 
 He is revealed in Christ, could be grasped by the 
 young men and women of our time, there would 
 be such a Christian revival, such a wave of conse- 
 cration, as we have not yet seen. 
 
 A young poet, in a poem published in the Inde- 
 pendent, July 2, 1908, has happily expressed, in 
 speaking of another theme, what I would say of 
 this 
 
 "Meseems it renders God great joy to see 
 Hands striving after His creatively, 
 Yea, that He even left a part undone 
 That we might finish that by Him begun 
 And help Him with our efforts to erect 
 His house, as masons help an architect. 
 
 If this be true, that He of us hath need, 
 Oh, then are we the sons of God, indeed !" 
 
 Do you ask me whether all the world is ready for 
 the Christian Message as I have tried to set it forth 
 today? I answer, God did not cease to make fishes 
 when He began to make quadrupeds, nor did He 
 cease to make quadrupeds when He began to make 
 men. Each new form of life has added to the
 
 MESSAGE FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 21 7 
 
 complexity of the life of the world. Similarly, 
 there are people still living in the thought of the 
 thirteenth century. These regard Protestantism 
 as infidelity. To such the Church of Rome still has 
 a mission. Others have not parsed beyond the 
 thought of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. 
 These regard the new theology as infidelity. To 
 these a legal or governmental interpretation of the 
 Atonement still has value. It would be a great mis- 
 fortune if either the teachings of the Church of 
 Rome or of the older Protestant theologians should 
 cease at once. But some of us have learned through 
 bitter struggle that to insist on the eternal validity 
 of some teachings of the past makes a Christian 
 life impossible for the twentieth-century man. We 
 have learned, too, through surprisingly joyous ex- 
 perience, that a religious life, nurtured by Christ as 
 He is interpreted through the new forms of thought, 
 is as much richer than the religious life nurtured 
 on the teachings of John Calvin, as the religious life 
 of the Puritan was deeper, richer, and more real 
 than that of the Romanist. To the great mass of 
 intelligent readers in our modern world, such as 
 are every year entering active life from our col- 
 leges, the line of appeal must be something like that
 
 2l8 THE HEART OF THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE 
 
 which I have here endeavored to outline a knowl- 
 edge of God scientifically grounded on a broad 
 basis of universal experience, but finding its supreme 
 revelation in Christ, a first-hand personal experience 
 of God, and a heroic life which shall reveal God 
 to other people, with the added privilege of becom- 
 ing helpers of God at this creative epoch of the 
 world's history in completing the creation of the 
 world and of man. This privilege can only be fully 
 entered upon by those who so love God, and who 
 so share in His love for men, that they are ready 
 to participate also in God's sufferings. 
 
 The world does not need a new Gospel, but the 
 old Gospel told and lived in such a way that it will 
 be possible for men to believe it true so lived and 
 told that the Gospel will be seen to be the one 
 indispensable help to the completion of life. It 
 needs the Gospel so presented through holy lives, 
 and so worked into the warp and woof of daily 
 existence that it will be seen to have a social and 
 economic value beyond all earthly things for the 
 life that now is, as well as to be the beginning of 
 the life which is to come.
 
 ''I ""HE following pages contain advertisements of 
 * books by the same author or on kindred subjects.
 
 A Sketch of Semitic Origins, Social and Religious 
 
 BY GEORGE AARON BARTON, A.M., PH.D. 
 
 Professor of Biblical Literature and Semitic Languages in Bryn Mawr 
 
 College 
 
 Cloth, 8vo, 34.2 pages, $3.00 net 
 
 Dr. Barton vividly traces the course of Semitic evolution through 
 the weary centuries which lead from savagery to civilization. The 
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 important and scholarly contribution to our knowledge of those 
 vague periods. 
 
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 An Introduction to the History of Religion 
 
 Third Edition. Cloth, 8vo, 415 pages, $2.50 net; by mail, $2.62 
 
 The history of early religion is here investigated on the principles 
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 ing the whole into a connected history of early religion. 
 
 A Psychological Study of Religion 
 
 BY JAMES H. LEUBA 
 Professor of Psychology in Bryn Mawr College 
 
 Cloth, 8vo, $2.00 net 
 
 Here, Professor Leuba, who has written a great many articles upon 
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 on the religion of the future. 
 
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 The Bible for Home and School 
 
 Edited by SHAILER MATHEWS, D.D., Dean of the Divinity 
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 the University of Chicago, Editor of the Series of" New Testament 
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 THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 
 
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 Patristic Greek in the University of Chicago. 
 
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 " It is scholarly and modern, yet simple, a truly interpretive commentary, 
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 Being the second volume of Luke's work on the Beginnings of 
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 By GEORGE HOLLEY GILBERT, Ph.D., D.D. 
 
 Cloth, 267 pages. Price, 75 cents net ; by mail, 81 cents 
 
 " Dr. Mathews and his fellow-editors are performing a task for the Church 
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 GENESIS 
 
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 of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis in Boston University. 
 
 Cloth, 377 fages. Price, go cents net ; by mail, 97 cents 
 
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 New Testament Criticism and Exegesis in Yale University. 
 
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 DEUTERONOMY 
 
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 ISAIAH 
 
 By JOHN E. McFADYEN, Professor of Old Testament Literature 
 and Exegesis in Knox College, Toronto. 
 
 Price, go cents net 
 
 JOB 
 
 By GEORGE A. BARTON, A.M.. Ph.D., Professor of Biblical 
 Literature and Semitic Languages in Bryn Mawr College. 
 
 Price, 90 cents net 
 
 The commentary differs from the large majority of commentaries on Job, in 
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 By E. L. CURTIS. 
 
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 In general style this addition to the " Bible for Home and School" follows 
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 disposal of the general reader the results of the best modern Biblical scholar- 
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 The Empire of Christ 
 
 A STUDY OF THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE IN 
 THE LIGHT OF MODERN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 
 
 BY BERNARD LUCAS 
 
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 An attempt to re-state in terms which are in harmony with 
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 BY W. H. P. FAUNCE 
 
 President of Brown University 
 
 The Educational Ideal in the Ministry 
 
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 BY THE REV. R. J. CAMPBELL 
 
 Minister of the City Temple, London 
 
 The New Theology 
 
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 the day." Congregationalist. 
 
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 A SELECTION OF THE SERMONS PREACHED IN THE CITY 
 
 TEMPLE, LONDON 
 
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 THE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
 NOV7 1989 
 
 
 Series 9482
 
 3 1205 00232 7284 
 
 A 000 894 024 9