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 Social Questions from the Point of View of Christian 
 
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 ORDER AND GROWTH 
 
 AS INVOLVED 
 
 IN THE SPIRITUAL CONSTITUTION 
 OF HUMAN SOCIETY 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. J. LLEWELYN DAVIES, M.A., 
 
 CHAPLAIN TO THE QUEEN ; 
 
 rIBRIDGE 
 
 Honlion 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THIS book consists in the main of the 
 Hulsean Lectures delivered at Cambridge 
 in the year 1890. 
 
 If it has the good fortune to prove itself 
 helpful to any readers, it will be, I believe, 
 through the account which it gives of the 
 nature of the Church, and of Justice. The 
 ideas which I have endeavoured to expound 
 on these subjects do not claim to be original, 
 but they are not so familiar to Christians in 
 general as if I am right they ought to be. 
 And there must be many whom the current 
 descriptions both of the Church and of Justice 
 entirely fail to satisfy. 
 
 2017254
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE SOCIAL AND SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENTS 
 
 OF THE TIME REGARDED FROM THE 
 
 CHRISTIAN POINT OF VIEW i 
 
 II. THE IDEAL UNITY OF MANKIND IN THE 
 
 UNIVERSAL CHURCH . . . -39 
 
 III. THE CIVIL ORDER OF HUMAN SOCIETY . 74 
 
 IV. JUSTICE 86 
 
 V. PROGRESS no
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE SOCIAL AND SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENTS OF 
 THE TIME REGARDED FROM THE CHRISTIAN 
 POINT OF VIEW. 
 
 IN studying some of the problems with 
 which the minds of men are occupied at the 
 present moment, I do not profess to take 
 up the position of an unbiassed inquirer. 
 I am convinced that Christianity helps us 
 more effectually than any other creed to 
 face and deal with these problems, and that 
 the new movements and demands which the 
 time is compelling us to study will help our 
 Christianity to become wider and deeper. 
 The task that I am attempting is to vin- 
 dicate the spiritual constitution of human 
 society, and to shew how order and progress 
 alike become more intelligible to us when 
 we invoke a Divine purpose to explain man 
 B
 
 2 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 and the world. To consider the essential 
 constitution of society is to come into close 
 relations with inquiries in which almost all 
 persons are now interested, with the dis- 
 cussions which are kindling the most heat, 
 with the aims which are being prosecuted 
 with the most eager enthusiasm. What is 
 the nature of the ties which bind human 
 beings together ? What is the ultimate 
 authority of the demands and restrictions 
 which law and public opinion take upon 
 them to enforce ? What sort of ideal of 
 human society is it legitimate or reasonable 
 to keep before our minds ? What hopes 
 may we justly entertain with regard to the 
 condition of the masses of mankind in the 
 approaching future ? These are questions 
 to which men are earnestly seeking answers, 
 and to which the Christian theory, as I shall 
 contend, offers more enlightening and satis- 
 fying answers than can be obtained from any 
 other philosophy. 
 
 It will be universally recognised that there 
 are two movements, distinguishable from 
 each other, which are equally characteristic 
 of our time. The one is that of social and 
 political exploration, the other that of scien-
 
 i Socialistic Democracy 3 
 
 tific discovery. The tide of each is felt to 
 be a resistless one, carrying us all with it. 
 Either the agitations of politics, or the 
 researches of science, with the novelty as 
 well as the importance which they may alike 
 undoubtedly claim to possess, may reasonably 
 excite and absorb a susceptible mind. 
 
 I. When we look at the course of 
 political movements in this country and the 
 other leading countries of the world, we see 
 that for many generations preceding our own 
 they have consisted in great part of the 
 struggles of non-privileged against privileged 
 classes, of the many against the few ; through 
 which struggles power has been gradually 
 obtained by the general body of the people. 
 Now that democracy is triumphant in the 
 sphere of legislation and government, it is 
 natural that the many, or those who interest 
 themselves on their behalf, should begin to 
 ask what the people, with their new powers, 
 can do for themselves. Some of the spokes- 
 men of democracy are showing a feverish 
 eagerness to spread all social advantages 
 immediately and by forcible methods over 
 the universal social surface. This could not 
 be said to be the temper of the genera
 
 4 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 working-class population of this country : 
 our people are for the most part sober 
 enough, and slow to take up revolutionary 
 schemes ; but the idea that democratic 
 government ought in some way to bring 
 substantial advantage to the class which has 
 the ultimate political power is undoubtedly 
 permeating the popular mind. To get this 
 desired improvement of the condition of the 
 many accomplished, there must be more or 
 less of change ; there is sure to be some 
 change no one can pretend to foresee how 
 much in the laws relating to ownership, in 
 the incidence of taxation, in the action and 
 enterprise of the State. The prospect thus 
 opened out is a stimulating one. It invites 
 every poor man to hope that before long 
 things may be made better, the chances may 
 be rendered more favourable, for himself and 
 his family. Some would say that the invita- 
 tion is an appeal to individual covetousness ; 
 but the force of this covetousness, if it were 
 more reprehensible than any one can think 
 it to be, is weak compared with the force 
 of the sympathy and philanthropy which 
 the prospect awakens. The strength of 
 socialistic agitation is not covetousness, but
 
 i Socialistic Democracy 5 
 
 compassion for the poor. Who can be 
 closely acquainted with the circumstances in 
 which the poorest classes live, not only in 
 crowded cities but in country districts also, 
 without being moved by the current of this 
 sympathy ? Who would not be constrained 
 to admit that almost any interference with 
 the superior advantages of the well-to-do 
 would be excusable, if it were certain that 
 by such interference the miseries of extreme 
 destitution might be banished from the land ? 
 The most ardent advocates of changes which 
 are to benefit the poor are not those who 
 suffer most from poverty themselves, but 
 men to whose personal lot the changes for 
 which they agitate would make little, if any, 
 difference. I am not saying that all those 
 who urge that something should be taken 
 from the rich and given to the poor are 
 animated by compassion only ; but that this 
 compassion is the primary and strongest 
 force of their agitation. We are in presence 
 of a popular movement which is partly in- 
 spired by the Christian feeling of pity for 
 the poor, which is sustained by the belief 
 that the power of the many may rightly be 
 used for the advantage of the many, and
 
 6 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 which is sure to make resolute efforts to 
 improve by economical changes the relative 
 position of the working classes, at the 
 expense, if necessary, of their employers. 
 This movement inevitably raises questions, 
 not only as to possibilities and methods, but 
 also as to rights and justice ; and these 
 questions, it is soon perceived, are by no 
 means easy to answer. 
 
 II. We are in presence also of new scien- 
 tific researches and conclusions, which happen 
 to affect most closely the constitution of 
 society. The science which is represented 
 by the great names of Charles Darwin and 
 Herbert Spencer undertakes to show that 
 men have come to be in all respects what 
 they are by natural and necessary processes 
 of development. This doctrine confronts 
 frigidly and firmly facts of history and life 
 from which our Christianity let it be ad- 
 mitted would like to avert its eyes. It has 
 one postulate, a universal animal craving for 
 what is pleasant. Moved by this desire so 
 the science of evolution teaches every 
 animal tries to get as much as it can of what 
 it likes. The early creature struggled for 
 itself without caring what injury it might do
 
 i Anthropology 7 
 
 to others. But animals found out by degrees 
 how much individuals may gain by associa- 
 tion. They may defend themselves more 
 successfully by combining for defence ; they 
 may get more for each of what they all want 
 by working together. Through this experi- 
 ence the whole complex organisation of 
 society has grown into existence. Human 
 beings now sacrifice themselves for others, 
 because they are overmastered by a dominant 
 habit, the product of countless generations of 
 animal life, which has for its sole origin and 
 sole reason the instinctive passion of self-love. 
 This is the great paradox of the history of 
 human nature as the theory of evolution reads 
 it. Self-love works and works till it turns 
 out to have generated self-sacrifice. All 
 interpretations of life, the Christian amongst 
 the rest, have paradoxes ; this one, without 
 caring whether it excites surprise or not, 
 offers itself as simply registering the process 
 of actual observed growth. The doctrine of 
 evolution chiefly looks back, and describes 
 growth as it has been. If it looks forward, 
 it gives what may be described as a com- 
 forting forecast. It sees in the future the 
 advantages of association commending them-
 
 8 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 selves as much as ever to the individual 
 mind ; and it predicts, therefore, that there 
 will be continued progress in the future along 
 the lines of the past. But compassion, 
 benevolence, sense of duty, forethought, 
 hope, are forms of feeling under which this 
 doctrine detects the single desire of what is 
 agreeable to the individual, the struggle for 
 a pleasant existence. In the eyes of the 
 evolutionist philosophy all the ties of society, 
 all the relations of human beings to each 
 other, are natural products evolved out of the 
 single original impulse or nisus of the uni- 
 versal creation. 
 
 There are some affinities between this 
 latest science and socialistic democracy, but 
 on the whole their voices are not in harmony. 
 To quote from Hackel, one of the most 
 advanced of the disciples of Darwin : " If a 
 definite political tendency be attributed to 
 Darwinism, this tendency can only be aristo- 
 cratic, certainly not democratic, and least of 
 all socialistic. The theory of selection 
 teaches us that in human life, exactly as in 
 animal and plant life, at each place and time 
 only a small privileged minority can continue 
 to exist and flourish ; the great mass must
 
 i This World and the Other 9 
 
 starve and more or less prematurely perish 
 in misery. . . . We may deeply mourn this 
 tragic fact, but we cannot deny or alter it. 
 ' Many are called, but few are chosen ! ' >fl 
 It might be urged, no doubt, in reply to this 
 judgment of Hackel's, that in human history 
 one great effect of evolution has been to 
 develop the habits of association, and so to 
 modify largely the simple competition of 
 individuals. But the ordinary assumptions 
 of socialistic democracy would be pronounced 
 by the naturalist philosopher to be sentimental 
 and fanciful ; and Mr. Huxley has practised 
 his dialectical skill in tearing these assump- 
 tions to pieces. 
 
 This, however, the socialistic agitation 
 has in common with the theories of the 
 science of nature, that it confines its view 
 and its aims to this visible world. To some 
 of its leaders this world is all ; they declare 
 that they see and know nothing above or 
 beyond it. Others are earnest Christians ; 
 but, as social reformers, their professed aim 
 is to improve the material condition of the 
 many ; and it satisfies their religious feeling 
 
 1 Hackel, Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre, p. 73.
 
 i o Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 to know that the honouring of men as men, 
 and care for the weak, are Christian prin- 
 ciples, and that they are doing nothing 
 inconsistent with their Christianity in assert- 
 ing them and carrying them out. It should 
 be ungrudgingly recognised that some of 
 those who are most enthusiastic in advocating 
 economical changes in the interest of the 
 many have in view better moral relations 
 and a more truly human social life than the 
 best which the present state of things as to 
 rights and ownership allows, in their judg- 
 ment, to be realised. And all democratic 
 reformers appeal with great confidence to 
 justice as the support of their movement, 
 though they are not able to say what justice 
 is, or whence it derives its authority ; and 
 they may therefore be said to plant their 
 lever in an unknown world. But when these 
 admissions have been made, it remains true 
 that the social movement professedly and 
 sometimes defiantly limits its scope to the 
 visible world, and makes a more equal 
 division of the good things of this life its 
 primary object. 
 
 Is not this pursuit of material well-being 
 even the pursuit of it on behalf of others,
 
 i This World and the Other 1 1 
 
 which must be allowed to be a different thing 
 morally from the pursuit of it for oneself a 
 lower and poorer aim than that which makes 
 spiritual well-being its object ? Is it capable 
 of waking up that which is noblest and best 
 in a man, of sustaining him against disap- 
 pointment, of conquering inertia, of enlisting 
 the imagination, of kindling the purest and 
 most inextinguishable fire of the soul, in 
 comparison with the contemplation of the 
 will of a perfect Creator, the consciousness of 
 being employed by him in accomplishing 
 his will in the world, the recognition of a 
 duty which urges from behind whilst the 
 divine glory attracts from before, the delight 
 of helping to make brother- men better 
 children of God and better members one of 
 another ? Only one answer can rise within 
 us. It would seem hardly worth while to 
 put the question, but that there are persons 
 who, whilst they thrust aside with scorn all 
 that they call theology, will refer us triumph- 
 antly to marvellous examples of enthusiasm 
 and self-sacrifice in men and women who 
 with them know nothing of a God or a 
 Divine kingdom. To take the most tragical 
 of instances : we have been bidden to look at
 
 1 2 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 the Russian revolutionists who have been 
 ready not only to die, but also what often 
 requires much greater courage to kill in 
 cold blood, for the sake of throwing their 
 country into a state of disorder out of which 
 a more equal distribution of the things of 
 this life, together with any contingent moral 
 results, may be won by the emancipated 
 masses. In Russia, undeniably, and in a 
 less striking degree in other countries, minds 
 have been set on flame and made capable of 
 any sacrifice by a passion for the removal 
 of outward restrictions and the material im- 
 provement of the condition of the many. 
 Whatever be the explanation of this zeal, 
 there is no ground for detracting from its 
 sincerity. But, for ourselves, we can judge 
 by our inward consciousness of the compara- 
 tive force of spiritual and temporal things on 
 our minds, for drawing out and nourishing 
 that which is best in them. A conviction or 
 hope or aim which descends from heaven to 
 lay hold of us will have more authority and 
 more inspiration for us than anything which 
 is only of earth can have. 
 
 However that may be, the Christian has
 
 i Christian Views of Human Nature 1 3 
 
 received, in that revelation or Gospel which 
 makes him a Christian, a scheme of human 
 existence which claims his reverent belief. 
 To us Christians, man, whatever he may be 
 to others, is a spiritual being, and human 
 society a structure explained by its relations 
 with an unseen world. We hold ourselves to 
 be creatures not of the earth or of nature, but 
 of God ; that is, of the incomprehensible 
 Being who has made himself in some real 
 manner, and in some adequate degree, know- 
 able to us through Jesus Christ. We are in 
 this world, but not of it. Looking back over 
 past history we see, in the evolution of which 
 science traces the method and stages, the 
 working out of a spiritual purpose, the pro- 
 cess of a spiritual discipline. Before us 
 shines an ideal, which we do not feel com- 
 pelled to regard as created by our own 
 imaginations, but which we believe to have 
 been manifested to us as the Creator's design. 
 We hold that each person is not even at 
 liberty to do as he likes, still less that he is 
 the necessary slave of impulses and desires 
 which drive him ; but that he has conduct 
 prepared for him which he is bound by his 
 relation to his Maker to follow, and that this
 
 1 4 Order and Growth CHAP 
 
 conduct is suggested and denned by the 
 relations in which he perceives himself to be 
 placed towards his fellow-men. We hold, 
 further, that it belongs to the spiritual training 
 of mankind and of each man, that we should 
 study these relations with reverence and 
 interest, because they are living and growing 
 products of the Creative Mind, and that thus 
 we should find out from hour to hour, from 
 age to age, what the conduct is which the 
 relations demand. We look for hopeful and 
 energetic effort on the part of men, in pro- 
 portion as the glory of the future attracts 
 their desires, and the good and acceptable 
 and perfect will of the Maker reveals itself to 
 them and makes them its willing instruments. 
 These, I think I may say, are the views 
 of the Christian faith. I take it to be im- 
 possible for a convinced Christian not to 
 bring these principles to bear, in his own 
 mind, upon all the movements and conflicts 
 and problems by which he is environed. 
 That is to say, he has in his Christian belief 
 the guiding principles of an ethical science 
 and of a science of society. The statements 
 I have just made are either elements of the 
 simplest Christian faith or immediate deduc-
 
 i Must Social Ethics be Secular ? 1 5 
 
 tions from it ; and they are obviously funda- 
 mental in their nature, and have reference 
 both to the whole life of the individual man 
 and to the associated lives of men in society. 
 The Christian seems to have no alternative, 
 so long as he holds the belief of a Christian, 
 but to think of himself and of mankind in 
 accordance with those principles. 
 
 It has been generally assumed, however, 
 that Christians ought to have a theory or 
 science of ethics, and political and economic 
 views, independent of their religious creed. 
 Many of the leading writers on ethics and 
 the laws of society have been Christians ; but 
 in their treatises on these subjects they have, 
 for the most part, hardly allowed their 
 theological views to appear. Perhaps the 
 most real cause of this traditional exclusion 
 of theology from morals and politics has been 
 the fact that noble speculations on these 
 subjects, full of interest, richly instructive, 
 entitled by universal consent to be still 
 admired and studied, have come down to us 
 from pre-Christian times. Our students of 
 duty and society enter upon a field which was 
 long ago occupied by Plato and Aristotle and
 
 1 6 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 the Stoics. Christian philosophers who have 
 upheld high and exacting principles of mor- 
 ality have been glad to claim for their 
 doctrines the support which they have found 
 in the Ethics of Aristotle or the Republic of 
 Plato, or the meditations of Epictetus and 
 Marcus Aurelius. They have shrunk from 
 beginning with assumptions which would 
 seem to make these venerated authorities of 
 no account. But they have had another 
 feeling also : they have regarded it as 
 important that they should take ground on 
 which they could meet philosophers of their 
 own time who are not ready to adopt the 
 Christian assumptions. They have feared 
 that there would be loss rather than gain, in 
 what concerns the higher life of the world, 
 if they should decline to know ethical and 
 political science except in the form of deduc- 
 tions from the Christian revelation. This 
 fear may well be stronger in the present day 
 than ever before. A Christian investigator 
 of moral and social questions can hardly help 
 saying to himself: "The followers of Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer will not look at anything I 
 may write if I make my conclusions depend 
 in any way on the Gospel of Christ. Such a
 
 i Must Social Ethics be Secular ? 1 7 
 
 feature of an exposition would be enough to 
 warn them off at once. The only chance of 
 winning consideration in this field is to 
 occupy common ground with rivals and 
 opponents and allies to whom traditional 
 Christianity is obsolete. It is open to a 
 Christian to refer incidentally to Christ as 
 the interesting author of the paradoxical 
 precepts collected in the Sermon on the 
 Mount ; but he must take care not to assume 
 that Christ and what has been revealed in 
 him are to suggest and govern our specula- 
 tions about history and duty." 
 
 I admit the weight of these considerations. 
 Especially can I see it to be desirable in 
 these days that as many as possible of those 
 who on whatever grounds believe in a 
 morality which has authority over men, and 
 not merely in habits which grow out of men's 
 likings, should stand side by side as sup- 
 porters of a common cause. But I return to 
 what appears to me incontrovertible. To a 
 Christian's own mind, neither can human life, 
 whether in the individual consciousness or in 
 the societies of men, present itself apart from 
 Christ ; nor can Christianity present itself 
 apart from the whole of human life. It is 
 c
 
 1 8 Order and GroiutJi CHAP. 
 
 quite true that there are large branches of 
 human knowledge to which it will make no 
 apparent difference whether they are joined 
 with or separated from Christianity and theo- 
 logy. The Gospel has no direct contact with 
 mathematics, and it can hardly affect the con- 
 clusions of the mathematician so far as the 
 matter of his studies is concerned whether 
 or in what manner he believes in a God. If 
 the New Testament be looked through, no 
 allusion to the science of numbers will be 
 found in it. But human life and motives are 
 precisely what the Gospel of Christ claims 
 for its own. If any one fancies for a moment 
 that Christianity has no more than an arbi- 
 trary connection with conduct and economics 
 and politics, he proves that the Christianity 
 which he has in view is not the Christianity 
 of Christ or the Apostles or Christendom. 
 
 It is a vital question for Christians, whether 
 Christ is or is not a light enabling us to 
 understand ourselves and the world better. 
 It is not unreasonable that a man engaged 
 in scientific investigation should resent the 
 importing of arbitrary theological dogmas 
 into what is a work of inquiry into facts. If 
 Christianity presents itself to him as a system
 
 i Must Social Ethics be Secular ? 1 9 
 
 of arbitrary theological dogmas, he will natur- 
 ally regard it as an intruder, and claim that 
 he shall be allowed to co-ordinate his facts 
 and constitute his laws without reference to 
 it. But Christianity, in its original and 
 essential form of a Gospel concerning God 
 and his relations to men, professes to disclose 
 facts which without it would be hidden, to 
 explain to man the state in which he finds 
 himself and the feelings of which he is con- 
 scious, and to show him, through the dis- 
 closing of the spiritual environment and 
 foundations of his life, how he may rise into 
 a better state. To hold that the Gospel 
 treats men as individuals only, and has to do 
 with the solitary interests of the individual 
 conscience, and therefore that religion, from 
 the Christian point of view, is an affair of 
 each single man privately in relation to the 
 God in whom he has been induced to believe, 
 seems so complete and so wanton a misinter- 
 pretation of the New Testament and of the 
 history of Christendom, that it is difficult to 
 imagine how any one caring at all for Chris- 
 tianity could fall into such an error. It is 
 common enough for those who wish to keep 
 Christianity at arm's length to see it under
 
 2O Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 any perverted forms which may best suit 
 their purposes, and there are many persons 
 of various opinions who find it convenient to 
 assume that the law of Christ has no direct 
 authority over the public social life of men. 
 But that Christians, for the sake of avoiding 
 some troublesome problems, or of making all 
 religious societies self-governing and inde- 
 pendent of the civil power, should be seduced 
 into adopting this maxim, would be incredible, 
 if there were not actual instances of it. 
 
 There could not be a more striking ex- 
 ample of such seduction than that which is 
 to be found in a treatise l on Christianity and 
 Civil Society by the late Bishop Harris of 
 Michigan. The author, a man of whom the 
 American Church is justly proud, was an 
 enthusiastic citizen of the United States, to 
 whom the institutions of his country were 
 ideally perfect. This generous patriotism, 
 joined with a natural courage and thorough- 
 ness, led him to adopt the principle of the 
 separateness of Church and State with all its 
 consequences in its extremest form. He 
 held that God made the Church, and man 
 
 1 The Relation of Christianity to Civil Society: the 
 Bohlen Lectures, 1882. New York, 1888.
 
 i Must Social Ethics be Secular ? 21 
 
 made the State ; that man's highest relations 
 to God are those of an individual ; that indi- 
 viduals form themselves into societies, and 
 that the authority of civil society is derived 
 solely from the consent of the individuals who 
 compose it ; that the State will be the better 
 in its own non-spiritual sphere if the men 
 who associate themselves together are good 
 Christian men, and that civil life may thus be 
 affected by Christianity ; but that civil society 
 has nothing to do with God but through the 
 characters humane and just, or otherwise of 
 its constituent members. It is impossible not 
 to admire the fearlessness with which Bishop 
 Harris maintained these principles. Let me 
 quote a few sentences from his book. " Here 
 are our two terms of relation, a theocratic 
 Church which is wholly non- political, and a 
 social-compact State which is wholly secular. 
 The authority upon which the one rests is 
 the enactment and institution of a divine 
 founder. The authority upon which the 
 other rests is the will of the people. The 
 point of contact between the two is the 
 individual man " (p. 32). The Gospel " com- 
 pletely changed the recognised basis of 
 authority in civil society. . . . The Church
 
 2 2 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 was a pure theocracy, under which men 
 were emancipated into the freedom, the 
 dignity, the responsibility, of individuality. 
 From this new standpoint civil society was 
 seen to be wholly distinct from the Church, 
 and to have no other basis than the consent 
 of the people" (p. 58). The writer of the 
 Declaration of Rights, "a devout communi- 
 cant of the Church . . . had come to under- 
 stand that the State is purely secular, while 
 the Church is altogether spiritual ; that the 
 State is altogether human, and the Church 
 altogether divine" (p. 104). "The Church 
 is theocratic, the State is democratic or popu- 
 lar. The State derives it real authority from 
 beneath, the Church from above. The State 
 is of this world, the Church is not of this 
 world. . . . The object of the State is the 
 maintenance of external order ; the object of 
 the Church is the establishment of truth. 
 The State has to do with those matters of 
 expediency and propriety which are com- 
 mitted to it ; the Church has to do with the 
 eternal things which concern the souls of 
 men, and which each must face and deal with 
 in his own personality " (p. 202). I should 
 have thought that those to whom the stern
 
 i Must Social Ethics be Secular ? 23 
 
 subjugation of the Southern States was the 
 great event of their lives must have lost faith 
 in the doctrine that the authority of civil 
 society rests entirely upon the consent of 
 those who make the social compact ; and 
 that the religious fervour of the Civil War 
 would have forbidden to an American patriot 
 the language of Bishop Harris with regard 
 to the State and its basis and its province. 
 Could men kill and die by millions for 
 " matters of expediency and propriety " ? 
 
 Churchmen who have to content them- 
 selves with the relations of Church and State in 
 the United States or the British Colonies are 
 in the same sort of position in which the good 
 Christians of a modern community find them- 
 selves with regard to general State schools. 
 These latter are compelled to acquiesce, either 
 in carefully generalised religious teaching 
 which they must regard as defective, or in a 
 completely secular education. But they do not 
 try to persuade themselves that either form 
 of instruction is ideally the best. The neces- 
 sity of a compromise arises from the absence 
 of theological agreement amongst the mem- 
 bers of a community. If all were of one 
 Church, it is certain that the doctrine of that
 
 24 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 Church would be taught in the public schools ; 
 and in the same case it is equally certain that 
 the Church would not be separate from the 
 State. Where division exists, we have to 
 make the best of it ; and those who try to do 
 so will find, as in all actual states, that there 
 are some advantages in it, and that much 
 may be done to neutralise its disadvantages. 
 There are difficulties everywhere in hold- 
 ing and acting upon the belief that the one 
 Creator is the God of the State as well as of 
 the Church, the Ordainer of civil as well as 
 of ecclesiastical society. But the God who 
 is known only as the God of the Church will 
 be a limited and private Divinity, very differ- 
 ent in majesty and mystery of nature from 
 him whom we worship as the God of man- 
 kind. And I think there can be no doubt 
 that the God to whom the Scriptures and the 
 Church Catholic bear witness is the Being 
 from whom all order, physical and human, 
 proceeds. The Old Testament may be given 
 up by those whose God is the God of the 
 Church only, on the ground that Christ 
 revealed, as a new and revolutionary truth, 
 the earthliness of civil society. But Gospels, 
 Epistles, Liturgies, Church History, all testify
 
 i Must Social Ethics be Secular ? 25 
 
 against this imaginary revelation. The few 
 sayings of Christ which have appeared to 
 imply that the civil order and the kingdom 
 of Christ are independent of each other may 
 be shewn to have no such meaning. Let me 
 briefly note them. 
 
 In answer to Pilate's question, "Art thou 
 the king of the Jews ? " our Lord said, " My 
 kingdom is not of (or from) this world ; . . . 
 is not from hence" (John xviii. 36). This is 
 understood by some to imply that Christ's 
 kingdom claims no authority over this world, 
 has nothing to do with it. But that is not 
 what Jesus said. He meant that his king- 
 dom was from above, that it had not an 
 earthly origin. So he had said to his 
 Jewish enemies, " Ye are from beneath ; I 
 am from above : ye are of this world ; I am 
 not of this world " (John viii. 23). Yet Jesus 
 had come into the world, as to his own pro- 
 perty ; he had come to save the world. It 
 is because Christ's kingdom is not from this 
 world, not from beneath, but from above, 
 that all the civil order in the world is to 
 acknowledge him as its head. When he 
 was asked about the payment of the tribute- 
 money, Jesus enjoined, " Render to Caesar
 
 26 Order and GrowtJi CHAP. 
 
 the things that are Caesar's " ; and he might 
 have stopped there. No question had been 
 raised about ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The 
 notion that our Lord would have claimed for 
 the Sanhedrim or the High Priest the homage 
 due to God is almost a ludicrous one. But 
 the payment of tribute called up the thought 
 of rightful sovereignty. And Jesus took occa- 
 sion to drive home a reproach to the con- 
 sciences of the hypocrites who were seeking 
 to ensnare him, by reminding them of the 
 Sovereign Lord to whom another kind of 
 tribute was due : " Render to God the 
 homage which is his due, that service of 
 heart and life which you know you are with- 
 holding from him ; render your very selves 
 to God." The claims of ecclesiastical, as dis- 
 tinguished from civil, authority, are entirely 
 foreign to this lesson. Equally illegitimate 
 is it to build the doctrine which I am combat- 
 ing on our Lord's remonstrance, " Man, who 
 made me a judge or a divider over you ? " 
 One out of the multitude had said to him, 
 " Master, bid my brother divide the inherit- 
 ance with me." Jesus was angry at what he 
 perceived to be the attempt of a covetous 
 man to make use of him. He openly stig-
 
 i Must Social Ethics be Secular ? 27 
 
 matised the man as covetous by saying to 
 those who were present, " Take heed, and 
 keep yourselves from all covetousness." We 
 may almost assume that the man had tried 
 the ordinary law in vain, or knew that it 
 would not help him. Jesus repels the offen- 
 sive attempt by intimating to the offender 
 that he had come to the wrong quarter for 
 the prosecution of a pecuniary claim. To 
 infer from the indignant rebuff thus given 
 to an indecent covetousness that judges are 
 not to regard themselves as God's ministers, 
 but as only appointed " from beneath," is 
 more than unwarranted, it is almost con- 
 trary to what Christ implies. There is really 
 nothing in any saying of Christ or of his 
 Apostles to be set against the doctrine that 
 the civil order is directly of God, and that the 
 loyalty to be rendered to it is loyalty to God, 
 as implied in statements of this kind : " Thou 
 (Pilate) wouldest have no power (or authority) 
 against me, except it were given thee from 
 above " ; " there is no power (or authority) 
 but of God, and the powers that be are 
 ordained of God. . . . The ruler is a minister 
 of God to thee for good. . . . For this cause 
 ye pay tribute also, for they are ministers
 
 28 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 of God's service." To distinguish between 
 God's creation and man's creation, as Bishop 
 Harris has done, is to fall into an error like 
 that of our poet -recluse who wrote, "God 
 made the country and man made the town." 
 God made the town even more than he 
 made the country, because man and his civil- 
 isation are higher works of God, and nearer 
 to himself, than mountains and rivers and 
 trees ; and if God did not make the State 
 more than he made the Church, he has 
 made "the State," or the civil relations of 
 human society, for countless millions for 
 whom he has not yet made the Church. 
 
 It is superfluous to argue at any length 
 that the Christianity of the New Testament 
 expressly deals with man as a social being, 
 and takes him as a whole. The Gospel 
 addresses men as involved in all sorts of 
 relations with their fellow-men, as constantly 
 failing in the fulfilment of those relations, 
 as not understanding them thoroughly, as 
 having something perverse in their minds 
 which rebels against them, as walking in a 
 troublesome darkness and smitten with a 
 harassing incapacity ; in revealing Christ as 
 their Friend and Head, and God as their
 
 i Christianity to be Tried 29 
 
 Father, it offers them an explanation of their 
 condition, and a power to live in accordance 
 with that which is appointed for them ; and 
 it presents to the imagination ideals which 
 always imply harmonious and happy fulfil- 
 ment of ordered mutual duties. How is it 
 possible to leave any part of human life 
 outside of such ideals ? Man cannot know 
 himself, and Christianity does not know him, 
 except as a member of the social body to 
 which he is related. The Gospel as declared 
 by the Apostles called on men to wake up, 
 to look around them, to accept the light 
 which dawned and shone upon them, and to 
 put all their strength with hopeful effort 
 into the aim of conforming to the laws of 
 which they were enabled now to see the 
 reality and authority. 
 
 It seems to me, therefore, to be un- 
 reasonable that Christians should not prove 
 their Christianity to the utmost in deal- 
 ing with the problems of human life. To 
 forbear to do so is like refusing a light 
 that is offered you for exploring a dim and 
 intricate limestone cave because there are 
 others groping in it without a light. It is
 
 30 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 a foolish as well as a disloyal policy to put 
 our Christianity behind us, and to beg our 
 non-Christian fellow -workers not to mind 
 it, for that it is really very innocent and 
 does not mean much, and will not be allowed 
 to be intrusive. If we are candid and 
 courageous, we shall acknowledge that we 
 have our Christianity on our hands, with all 
 its pretensions and claims, and that it must 
 submit to be tried by its power to do what 
 it professes that it was meant to do. If 
 there is truth in it, if the Father of Jesus 
 Christ is really the Father of men, if Christ 
 is really the Light of the world, I do not 
 say that Christianity will give us solutions 
 of all problems and answers to all questions, 
 and will save mankind the trouble of further 
 search and the discomfort of continued 
 ignorance and doubt : but not less than this 
 must be said, that it will guide us on the 
 right course ; that, if we let the Gospel teach 
 us, we shall be made aware of hidden realities 
 to which disordered appearances are point- 
 ing, and through relation to which those 
 appearances might be brought into harmony ; 
 that we shall be working and striving with 
 light from on high shedding sunbeams
 
 i Christianity to be Tried 3 1 
 
 around us, with light far in front of us 
 drawing us continually onwards. We shall 
 not be prevented from discussing duties with 
 those who cannot tell why they are duties, 
 if with us they acknowledge them to be 
 duties ; or just relations with those who do 
 not know why justice is binding on men, so 
 long as they have some notion of what 
 practical justice is, and feel its authority ; 
 or freedom with those who are only acquainted 
 with its lower forms but can honour as much 
 as they see of it ; or good things, and ideals 
 to be pursued, with those who can say no 
 more than that they like them, if they are 
 willing to like the things which are revealed 
 to us as good and to desire the things which 
 our God promises. We shall be in a rivalry 
 with them, for which if we are right we 
 have great advantages over them. 
 
 And while we shall want success to justify 
 us in bringing our theology to bear upon 
 social relations and duties, success the 
 power, I mean, to explain the actual world 
 and to show the best way of dealing with it 
 will abundantly justify us. The world is 
 before us, with its changing conditions. 
 Never was there freer scope for all who
 
 32 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 have either philosophies or remedies to try 
 upon the life of mankind. Words still have 
 power, but it is upon the condition that 
 effects shall follow them. " Thoughts are 
 but dreams," as Shakespeare has said, " till 
 their effects be tried." And it might not be 
 a bad thing if Christians were to lay aside 
 argumentative defence and assaults upon the 
 weak places of rival systems, and to resolve 
 to put their whole apologetic force into 
 practical guidance and construction. It 
 seems clear that such a course would be in 
 harmony with the original work of the 
 envoys of Christ in publishing the Gospel 
 and founding the Church. The aim of the 
 Apostles was to bring men out of darkness 
 into light, and to build up pure and happy 
 and progressive societies. And we, like 
 the Apostles, are worshippers of him who 
 shews to men that are in error the light of 
 his truth, to the intent that they may return 
 into the way of righteousness and may walk 
 happily therein. Our success will lie in 
 putting men into the right relations with 
 the things around them, in suggesting to 
 them how they may conquer the hindrances 
 which confuse and weaken them, and in
 
 i " The Way" 33 
 
 helping them to walk with hope as those 
 who see their way and the goal towards 
 which they are tending. The goal, indeed, 
 best defines the way : " Lord," said Thomas 
 to his Master, "we know not whither Thou 
 goest : how know we the way ? " They 
 who see a goal, however dimly, before them, 
 will understand that they have to walk 
 directly towards it, helping and cheering one 
 another amidst the difficulties and wearinesses 
 of the way. That was a significant title, 
 indeed, the Way, that was given to their 
 religion by the first Christians. Saul, if he 
 found any "of the way" at Damascus, was 
 to bring them bound to Jerusalem. It was 
 an abbreviated form of several equivalent 
 phrases, by which Christianity was described. 
 " These men . . . proclaim unto you the way 
 of salvation." Apollos "had been instructed 
 in the way of the Lord." But it was a fine 
 instinct that felt that the new religion might 
 characteristically be named by this one word : 
 it recognised that Christians were to regard 
 themselves as called to walk in a certain way 
 towards a goal which was shewn to them. 
 
 I am to ask my readers, then, to look 
 D
 
 34 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 frankly upon human society as not explained 
 or fully accounted for by what is visible and 
 earthly, but as having a spiritual constitution, 
 an unseen Lord, a spiritual life to lead, a 
 spiritual destiny to fulfil. It may be that in 
 such contemplations we shall be in some 
 degree dissociating ourselves from those who 
 have only known Christianity as a scheme 
 for rescuing individuals out of a perishing 
 world and endowing them with perpetual 
 happiness in the world beyond the grave. 
 But any one who passes from that conception 
 of Christianity to such a one as we are 
 assuming will find, it may be confidently 
 said, a new light shining upon the sacred 
 books of our faith. The Gospels, he will 
 see, are setting forth a kingdom of heaven, 
 which was heralded by John the Baptist, had 
 been foreshadowed by the national prophets 
 of Israel, and was brought in by the Son of 
 God ; and which was to grow in the world 
 till the world should be covered by it and 
 made its own. He will find St. Paul occupied 
 with continual thoughts of the binding of 
 men together in Christ, of marvellous dis- 
 closures of Divine purpose in the handling 
 and training of mankind, of developments of
 
 i Hopes for the Poor 35 
 
 redeeming and constructive, action which age 
 after age was to work out and exhibit. There 
 is no book of the New Testament which is 
 not more concerned with social and progres- 
 sive Christian life than with the felicity of 
 individuals in escaping from the pains and 
 securing the pleasures of the future world. 
 
 Looking at mankind thus, from the point 
 of view of the New Testament, we ought, I 
 take it, to be greatly interested by the agita- 
 tions, speculations, and demands which the 
 progress of democracy is everywhere stimu- 
 lating. There may be serious economic 
 errors in the schemes which attract the 
 ardent friends and champions of the poorer 
 classes ; it seems almost obvious, indeed, that 
 the short cuts to universal comfort to be 
 made by means of the legislative manipula- 
 tion of property are delusive ways : and it is 
 very desirable that losses and disappointments 
 should be prevented by the diffusion of 
 economic knowledge, so that the unsparing 
 correction of experience may not be needed 
 to impart wisdom to communities refusing to 
 be otherwise taught. But the believer in 
 the kingdom of heaven can never have
 
 36 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 reconciled himself to the physical disadvan- 
 tages from which the life of the poor suffers 
 in comparison with that of the rich, nor to 
 the moral disadvantages which make it 
 especially difficult for the rich to enter into 
 that kingdom : and he must recognise 
 Christian hopes and ideas in much of what 
 is stirring the hearts and imaginations of 
 those who make up the masses. What he 
 will observe with misgivings is the general 
 agreement to look to material equality and 
 material comfort as the supreme objects. 
 Equality has no real title to be a serious 
 object of pursuit ; neither Nature nor the 
 Gospel pays it any homage. And it is 
 certain that the teaching of Christ is one 
 continued warning against the setting of the 
 heart on the things of this life as the true 
 treasures. It cannot be admitted that in the 
 light of the Gospel the poor man is any more 
 justified than the rich man in making the 
 things which money can buy his principal 
 consideration. 
 
 And what will be our attitude towards 
 that haughty science of which evolution is at 
 once the creed and the divinity, which sees 
 in all human affections only so many dis-
 
 i The Legitimate Claims of Science 37 
 
 guises of the primary animal craving ? 
 Within its own region of natural history, in 
 its own business of the tracing of processes, 
 we cannot but pay deference to its claims 
 and its conclusions. We shall feel bound to 
 refrain from outcries as we see it, however 
 untenderly, correcting errors into which 
 religion has fallen. We ought to have faith 
 to welcome with admiration and thankfulness 
 all that it discovers, as so much revelation of 
 the creative methods of the God whom we 
 worship. But we shall insist on its being 
 noted that, if evolution is all, if all that a man 
 can know is that he and other things have 
 come to be what they are by processes of 
 cause and effect which could not have been 
 otherwise, then the qualities which we have 
 been taught and are resolved to prize most 
 in human life are smitten with blindness and 
 death. Where is the place for reverence, 
 where for hope, where for thankfulness, 
 where for purpose and choice, where for 
 faith, where for self-offering, where might 
 we not ask for love itself, if the only real 
 knowledge is the perception of the necessary 
 successions of nature ? Let us allow fully 
 what naturalist science can do : it may breed
 
 38 Order and Growth CHAP, i 
 
 wonder, it may feed the intelligence, it may 
 cultivate accuracy of statement and modesty 
 of pretension ; but, if it claims to be all 
 knowledge, it smiles at the sense of duty, at 
 delight in serving, at the trustful hope that 
 rises superior to every disappointment, as 
 illusions which the instructed eye can see 
 through. We do not claim for spiritual 
 affections, such as we name conscience, and 
 reverence, and gratitude, and hope, and 
 resolution, and devotion, that they have a 
 right to create a God and a heaven and an 
 ideal world to which they may attach them- 
 selves. But we cannot help honouring them 
 as witnesses ; and we hear them bearing 
 witness to what has been revealed to us in 
 Christ. And we hold it reasonable to believe 
 that any doctrine which commends itself to 
 these affections and causes them to grow in 
 their beneficent health, has therein the best 
 confirmation that our minds are able to 
 receive.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE IDEAL UNITY OF MANKIND IN THE UNI- 
 VERSAL CHURCH 
 
 IN discussing the ties which bind men 
 together, it is often neither necessary nor 
 desirable to extend our view far beyond the 
 circle of those with whom we are ourselves 
 connected. But we find ourselves easily 
 drawn on from the narrower to the wider 
 circles ; and we cannot consider what most 
 deeply concerns man without being con- 
 strained to think of all mankind. This larger 
 view is more habitual to speculators in these 
 days than it has been previously, for two 
 chief reasons : we now embrace the whole 
 world with some sort of knowledge, and are 
 at least roughly acquainted with the popula- 
 tions to be found in any part of it ; and we of 
 this generation have also a greatly increased 
 knowledge of the past history of the human
 
 4-O Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 race as a whole. Our students of the primi- 
 tive history of man have for some time been 
 guided by the luminous principle that the 
 present condition of the most backward races 
 resembles the prehistoric condition of the 
 races which are now the most civilised. The 
 application of this principle is beset by some 
 difficulties and obstacles like those which 
 delay the inquirers who investigate the 
 history of life upon this globe ; but on the 
 whole the great fact of gradual development 
 and progress asserts itself increasingly and 
 irresistibly. We are accustoming ourselves, 
 not very willingly, to think of the races of 
 men as having been slowly and unequally 
 civilised, rising from stages even lower than 
 that of the least civilised population which 
 travellers have described to what they 
 respectively are now. It must be admitted 
 that this view disturbs greatly the traditional 
 Christian conceptions of human history : we 
 cannot yet determine in what respects and to 
 what lengths it will ultimately modify them. 
 But when the faith in Christ and the Father 
 has proved its power to assimilate the new 
 scientific doctrine, it will be seen to have 
 achieved a greater triumph, and to have
 
 ii The Beginnings of Mankind 41 
 
 entitled itself to a higher authority over the 
 minds of men, than it has won in any previous 
 religious crisis. I cannot understand how 
 any Christian mind can fail to be somewhat 
 troubled by those savage populations living 
 in animal habits through aeons of seons. It 
 is not easy to fit the existing uncivilised 
 tribes, some of which seem destined not to 
 be a practical difficulty to us much longer, 
 into any scheme of the government of man- 
 kind by a gracious Father ; but there is 
 something yet more oppressive, and more 
 difficult to adjust to the biblical traditions, in 
 that aspect of the past which anthropology 
 presents to our view. 
 
 It cannot be said that the actual origin of 
 mankind is yet made clear to us. The gap 
 between man and the ape is not completely 
 bridged over so as to connect the lowest 
 known man either with the highest known 
 ape amongst the present tenants of the earth, 
 or with any which the remains preserved by 
 the earth under its surface have disclosed to 
 us. Many avenues of thought and discovery 
 end for us in baffling obscurity. We find 
 ourselves encouraged to push our specula- 
 tions and researches as far as we can ; but
 
 42 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 there is always a point at which the Maker 
 says to us, Thus far shalt thou go, and no 
 farther. It is intended, we must conclude, 
 that we shall derive our chief and most trust- 
 worthy knowledge from what we can see 
 around us, from what we can study in the 
 actual play of mutual relations. Something 
 of the past is brought under our view, that 
 we may know change and progress and 
 development ; and something of the future 
 is presented to our imagination, that we may 
 be drawn onward by it. We are made con- 
 scious that we are limited and dependent 
 creatures, able to know that there are things 
 we cannot know, checked to our unavail- 
 ing surprise and impatience by insoluble 
 questions and unaccountable contradictions. 
 There is no higher wisdom for us than to 
 take hold humbly of the Hand held out to 
 guide us. 
 
 If we look around us over the world with 
 the thought of the constitution of society in 
 our minds, it will be natural that we should 
 first take note of the existence of Christen- 
 dom. There are a number of nations and 
 races which are united by the common pro-
 
 ii The Religions of the World 43 
 
 fession of the Christian religion. These are 
 the principal races and nations of the world. 
 Christendom embraces all Europe, both the 
 Americas, considerable portions of Asia and 
 Africa. The Christian faith has been heredi- 
 tary for many generations in Europe, and its 
 extension over other parts of the globe has 
 been due more largely to migration of Euro- 
 pean races than to the propagation of the 
 faith amongst non-Christians. But Christian- 
 ity began in Asia ; salvation was from the 
 Jews. The proclamation of a crucified Jew 
 as the Son of God, and of the kingdom in 
 which he ruled as divine and universal, was 
 accepted by gradually increasing numbers in 
 the course of many ages, until every Euro- 
 pean people submitted to the Christ as Lord. 
 The Christian religion, thus widely dominant, 
 brings to our minds other religions. Facing 
 the religion of the New Testament along a 
 border of some length stands the religion of 
 the Koran, founded similarly within historic 
 times, and propagated also similarly over a 
 wide area from an obscure Eastern centre. 
 The third of the great religions of the world 
 is the Buddhist, the beginnings of which are 
 not so well known as those of the other two,
 
 44 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 but are not out of the reach of investigation. 
 There is a medley of other religions, descend- 
 ing to a chaos of almost incredible supersti- 
 tions. It is alleged that tribes have been 
 found having no religion at all ; but if this is 
 true, they comprise an insignificant portion 
 of the human race. As a rule, human beings 
 living together have always had some beliefs 
 in supernatural powers, and these beliefs have 
 exercised a more controlling influence than 
 any others over their lives. Some philoso- 
 phers hold that they can trace religion to its 
 very first roots in the natural delusions of the 
 most undeveloped of mankind, and can show 
 with precision by what necessary processes it 
 has undergone its innumerable modifications. 
 Of the religion which is professed by 
 Christendom, and which has had so much 
 to do with the progress of mankind, it is a 
 special characteristic that it claims to be 
 intended for the whole world. The same 
 pretension may, no doubt, be put forth on 
 behalf of Islam and Buddhism ; but the 
 character of a Universal Religion is more 
 conspicuous in Christianity and has been 
 more persistently asserted by its advocates. 
 We speak for convenience' sake of Christian-
 
 ii The Christian Religion 45 
 
 ity as a religion, but this name was not used 
 by its founders. They spoke, instead, of a 
 Gospel and a Church. They described them- 
 selves as envoys, charged with a message of 
 forgiveness and promise from the God of 
 heaven and earth ; and their work was to 
 found in every place societies of those who 
 received their word as authentic and accepted 
 Jesus the Crucified as their Divine Lord. A 
 religion was, no doubt, a result of the preach- 
 ing of the Apostles ; that is to say, a combina- 
 tion of creed and worship, statements of 
 what was held with regard to the supernatural 
 world by believers in Christ and the Father, 
 joined with common modes in which they 
 offered their prayers and their praise. But 
 when Christians have regarded themselves 
 as the adherents of a religion, they have 
 always been weaker thanVhen they reckoned 
 themselves as having received a Gospel and 
 as forming a Church. To substitute the 
 Christian religion for the Gospel of Christ 
 and the Catholic Church has been as in- 
 jurious to Christianity as it has been plainly 
 a departure from the methods of its founders. 
 All Christians are properly, not professors of 
 a religion, but members of the Catholic
 
 46 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 Church. Those who commend Christianity 
 as the best of the religions of the world, but 
 pronounce it to be good for certain races 
 only and deprecate its being pressed upon 
 other races, are superior persons not really 
 sharing the beliefs on which they look down 
 with indulgence. It is not easy to imagine 
 what a local Christianity, intelligently held, 
 could be. If it regards Christ as divine, it 
 must claim the whole world for Him ; if it 
 does not, it must reject nearly all the tra- 
 ditional creeds and prayers of the Church, 
 and must go on purging itself till it ceases 
 to be Christianity, and becomes a residuum 
 of sentiment and morality to which other 
 religions ought, on its principles, similarly to 
 reduce themselves. A religion true and good 
 for one race cannot well help being the proper 
 religion for all races. 
 
 It would seem that the name Catholic, 
 when it was first joined to Church by the 
 sub-Apostolic Christians, meant the united 
 body of all the local churches, and was hardly 
 intended to imply of itself that the Church of 
 Christ aimed at embracing all mankind. But 
 perhaps the former sense passes naturally into 
 the latter. Certainly, when we look at the
 
 ii The Universality of tJie Chiirch 47 
 
 Christian communities as they are now spread 
 over the face of the globe, and think of the 
 Catholic Church as the body comprehending 
 these, we cannot help receiving at the same 
 time the impression that the Church opens 
 its doors to all mankind, and, according to 
 the glorious traditions of its whole history, 
 claims all peoples and tongues for its own. 
 When once the barrier between Jew and 
 Gentile was broken down under the ministry 
 of the Apostles, the universality of the Church 
 in its fullest sense was established. For the 
 Jew, believing in the election and separate- 
 ness of his own nation, knew of no distinctions 
 amongst the Gentiles, and the fusion of Jew 
 and Gentile in the Christian society implied 
 the freest and amplest admission into that 
 society of Greek and Roman, barbarian and 
 Scythian, Indian and Chinese alike. 
 
 But when we look at the Christendom 
 around us more closely, what we see is no 
 united Christian society bound together by 
 the same creed and common usages of 
 worship and a single system of govern- 
 ment ; but a multitude of societies, all call- 
 ing themselves Christian, each drawing a 
 certain cincture round itself by distinctions
 
 48 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 of belief and ritual and government, all 
 regarding each other with more or less of 
 disapproval. The observer cannot but ask 
 himself, " Where is the Catholic Church ? is 
 it broken into these fragments, and itself lost 
 from the world ? Or are we to speak of it as 
 still existing ? If so, what is it ? " That is a 
 question which has been exercising the minds 
 of very many Christians in England during 
 the last three-quarters of a century. All the 
 secessions to the Church of Rome that have 
 taken place in that time have been due to the 
 belief that the Papal Church is the Catholic 
 Church. " The Catholic Church must be 
 somewhere upon the earth," it has been 
 argued, " if Christianity is still to be regarded 
 as true. It must have unity for its most 
 obvious feature. You cannot take bodies 
 which excommunicate each other, two or 
 three or any number, and say that these 
 form together a single society which can 
 be named the One Catholic and Apostolic 
 Church. There is one society in these days 
 which claims to be by itself and exclusively 
 the Catholic Church, and that is the society 
 which historically has the best title to repre- 
 sent the original undivided Christendom."
 
 ii The Anglican Point of View 49 
 
 In vindicating the spiritual constitution of 
 human society, I desire to maintain that the 
 Catholic Church, rightly understood, is the 
 form of the appointed union and communion 
 of mankind. The question, How is the 
 Catholic Church to be understood ? is there- 
 fore one which directly concerns our subject. 
 Let us look at this question from the point of 
 view of members of the Church of England. 
 
 It must be admitted that the Anglican 
 position is an anomalous one, of which it is 
 not easy to give a good logical justification. 
 It is none the less likely on this account to 
 be a good position, made for us by the God 
 of history instead of being chosen by our- 
 selves or by our fathers, having peculiar 
 advantages which it is our duty to study 
 and develop and use. It must be a deep 
 and obstinate feeling that this is so, such a 
 real faith in God's guiding providence as is 
 wiser than logical satisfaction, that has kept 
 Anglicans in general from following the lead 
 of those who have sought a home in the 
 Papal Church. We know what can be said 
 in defence of our separation from that Church. 
 We claim that we retained at the Reformation, 
 and still retain, all the links of historical con-
 
 50 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 nection with the original Catholic Church, 
 and that submission to the Bishop of Rome 
 is not one of such links. We charge the 
 Roman Church with being in fault, and with 
 being to such a degree in fault as to be 
 responsible for the schism. We charge that 
 Church with having gradually adopted doc- 
 trines and practices which were unknown to 
 the primitive Catholic Church, corruptions 
 which those who desire to be loyal to primi- 
 tive Christianity might perhaps tolerate in 
 others rather than separate openly from them, 
 but which they cannot accept, when it is 
 sought to impose them by authority, as 
 parts of their own religion. We may regard 
 our renunciation of the Papal claims as a 
 provisional and temporary protest, only pro- 
 longed though it be prolonged for centuries 
 until it please God to bring the authorities 
 of the Roman Church to a better mind, and 
 so to make reunion possible. We derive 
 some comfort from the contemplation of the 
 Greek Church and other Eastern Churches, 
 which shew us that we do not stand alone in 
 our separation from Rome, but that there are 
 other Christian bodies not acknowledging the 
 authority of the Pope which have as good a
 
 n The Anglican Point of View 5 1 
 
 claim as the Church of Rome, on the grounds 
 of historical continuity and loyalty to primi- 
 tive Catholicity, to be regarded as portions 
 of the Catholic Church. But to a mind 
 possessed by the idea of a visible and per- 
 petual Society founded and organised by 
 Christ, and endowed with his own authority, 
 the See of Rome, with its unbroken traditions, 
 its ancient territory, its wide rule, its assump- 
 tion of universal dominion, not to speak of 
 its spiritual graces, which there is a good deal 
 of an opposite character to neutralise, must 
 have an imposing authority and a reasonable 
 fascination ; whilst the position of the Church 
 of England, after the best that can be said 
 for it from the Catholic point of view, must 
 remain disturbingly irregular and unsatis- 
 factory. 
 
 It has become a sort of tradition with 
 Englishmen to acquiesce in anomalies, and 
 even to be rather proud of them ; and it is 
 a sound faith, having much support in our 
 experience, that irregularities of the surface 
 and the absence of logical cohesion may 
 be signs of an increasing Purpose running 
 through the ages, and may point to a unity 
 deeper than that of external order. Holding
 
 5 2 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 fast this faith, let us note without shrinking 
 how we stand. The Anglican Churches form 
 now a great communion, and an assemblage 
 of their bishops is no inconsiderable Council. 
 The English Church may say with the Patri- 
 arch, " With my staff I passed over this Jor- 
 dan, and now I am become two bands." At 
 the time when it put its Jordan between the 
 See of Rome and itself, it had for its people 
 the scanty population of this island, drawn 
 rather by loyalty to the sovereign than by 
 religious conviction. Rome claimed the sub- 
 mission of the king or the queen as well as of 
 the clergy, and the revolt against the Pope 
 was a royal and national act, which carried 
 the clergy with it. The civil power, essen- 
 tially national under the Tudor rule, took to 
 itself a large part, not at any moment strictly 
 denned, of the ecclesiastical authority which 
 it wrested from Rome. We have in England 
 no corporate society consisting of members of 
 the Church. There is no such person as a 
 member of the Church of England known by 
 any definition to our law. The Church, as 
 such, has no self-government. There is an 
 ecclesiastical organisation, all the parts of 
 which are recognised and supported by the
 
 ii TJie Anglican Point of View 53 
 
 law of the land. We have bishops and dio- 
 ceses, parsons and parishes ; bishops, priests, 
 and deacons ; churches and a ritual and 
 churchwardens ; two clerical assemblies, one 
 for each archiepiscopal province ; possessions 
 belonging to ecclesiastical bodies and persons, 
 and a central Commission, appointed by the 
 civil power, exercising an important control 
 over these possessions. The law of the 
 Reformation period assumed that in England 
 every one subject to the law belonged also to 
 the Church ; and the assumption has only 
 been modified in the way of exempting from 
 certain ecclesiastical obligations those who 
 like to claim the exemption. The Church 
 in England has for the most part* been 
 thought of as the ecclesiastical organisation 
 of the land sustained and controlled by the 
 national authorities ; and this Church has 
 had for its people or members all English 
 subjects who have not expressly dissociated 
 themselves from it. There are many at this 
 time, clergymen and laymen, who cling to a 
 tradition of a certain constitutional co-ordinate 
 power in the Convocations over matters of 
 doctrine and ritual ; but whilst there are 
 those who declare that they will submit to
 
 54 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 no change in these matters which is not 
 sanctioned by a Convocation, no one has yet 
 been found who undertakes to submit to a 
 decree of a Convocation, whatever it may 
 be, as of itself binding upon him. There is 
 indeed no existing authority, or combination 
 of authorities, to which all clergymen hold 
 themselves bound to submit ; which is a 
 peculiar and inconvenient feature of the 
 present condition of the Church in this 
 country. 
 
 Must it not be allowed, then, that we 
 English Churchmen, whose first business is 
 with our own case, stand in a curiously 
 dislocated relation towards the presumed 
 universal Church or society of Christ ? 
 When we look beyond ourselves, besides 
 those Churches which in common with 
 English Churchmen make much of historic 
 continuity and succession, and especially as 
 regards the order of bishops, we have 
 before our eyes the Christian communities 
 which have broken off, not only from Rome, 
 but from the tradition of the early Church, 
 and which have no bishops at all, or none 
 who claim direct descent from the Apostles. 
 These communities are so large and im-
 
 ii The Many Sections of the Church 55 
 
 portant, they have so much of real devotion 
 to Christ, they manifest the graces of 
 Christian life so abundantly and attractively, 
 they are so hearty and so rational in their 
 allegiance to the sacred volume accepted by 
 all Christendom, that it is utterly impossible, 
 in considering Christendom, to leave them 
 out of account. Those who feel bound to 
 excommunicate these bodies for their want 
 of Episcopacy cannot bring themselves to 
 disown the members of them as fellow-mem- 
 bers of Christ. But what a Christendom 
 it is that we look out upon, we English 
 Christians, when we desire to see that Holy 
 Catholic Church in which we believe ! 
 Christianity, indeed, we see more widely 
 extended over the globe than ever : but 
 where is the one Society of the first days ? 
 It was not the baseless fabric of a vision, 
 because it has left so many wracks behind : 
 but must we not conclude in despair that it 
 was one of the failures of poor humanity ? 
 Whilst it was still very small, it was a real 
 society, and it had the Divine ambition of 
 drawing all men as fellow - members into 
 itself. But what was practicable on the 
 small scale was not, it appears, practicable
 
 56 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 on a large scale ; the organism grew, but it 
 began to crack and split, and it is now 
 broken up into a number of fragments, 
 severally by no means unworthy of con- 
 sideration and respect but fragments ; and 
 not only without cohesion, but actually 
 hustling each other, and almost in a state of 
 war. 
 
 If, however, we go back to St. Paul, the 
 greatest of the founders of the Church, and 
 the thinker from whom our chief conceptions 
 and phrases about the Church are derived, 
 we shall find reasons for believing that he 
 would warn us against such despair and 
 would bid us take courage. For the Church, 
 in his pages, is plainly not the mere aggre- 
 gate of the societies which he and the 
 Twelve had created. The Church of St. 
 Paul's Epistles is an ideal body ; and the 
 Christian societies of his day were far from 
 being ideally perfect. Some modern inter- 
 preters of the Apostolic records, going beyond 
 the things which are written, would have us 
 believe that amongst the Twelve, even, there 
 were deadly jealousies, and that between 
 Paul and the leaders of the Twelve there 
 was violent opposition and untempered de-
 
 ii The Church Ideal to St. Paul 57 
 
 nunciation. We need not think thus of 
 these elect souls, these loyal servants of the 
 one Master; but we must admit that the 
 differences thus exaggerated were in reality 
 such as to cause pain and some scandal, 
 and that the leaders who themselves held 
 together in Christ had followers who acted 
 as vulgar partisans. To St. Paul the Church 
 was an ideal body, of which Christ was the 
 head, and Christians as they should be 
 societies and individuals the limbs and 
 organs. He would not look at them only 
 as they were, members of the same local 
 Church often separated from each other by 
 private quarrels and factious partisanship, 
 sometimes a whole Church, as at Corinth, 
 rebelling for a time against its founder. It 
 may not be quite easy for us to put ourselves 
 at his point of view. We must be able to 
 distinguish between an ideal and an imaginary 
 body. If a non-Christian had assumed that 
 this Jew's idea of a Church was nothing but 
 a creature of his imagination, St. Paul would 
 have taken the assumption as a matter of 
 course : but he would have been impatient 
 if a fellow-Christian had regarded the idea 
 of Christ's body as anything but most real.
 
 58 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 The Church was the creature of God's 
 purpose, the design which God was working 
 out in the history of mankind. The visible 
 embodiment, in the actual Christian society, 
 was not separate from the Divine idea, nor 
 was the Divine idea separate from the visible 
 embodiment. The Christian societies could 
 not have been what they were, in fellowship 
 and hope and conquest of the world, had not 
 God been moulding them after his perfect 
 system, and quickening them with his perfect 
 life ; and the pattern was, Christ the Head 
 and men the members, all the members per- 
 forming their several functions in happiness 
 and harmony ; and the life, the one Spirit 
 of the Father and the Son. And this in- 
 visible work of God could not have been 
 thought of as real, unless it had been clothing 
 itself with the actual history of human beings. 
 But the Divine idea, instinct with the living 
 Divine energy, did not bring its work 
 summarily to perfection. It was content 
 with gradual growth, it could bear with 
 defects and faults ; and these shortcomings 
 were manifold and grievous in every associa- 
 tion of believers. God's will and design 
 for every member was that he should be in
 
 ii The Ideal Church 59 
 
 such healthy attachment and subordination 
 to the Head, so tied by spiritual nerves and 
 muscles to his fellow-members, that the body 
 might be an irreproachable and efficient 
 body. The Church figured itself to the 
 Apostolic eye as a glorious bride, not having 
 spot or wrinkle or any such thing ; the 
 human society thus figured was called to be 
 holy and without blemish. And towards 
 this perfection the Divine energy was con- 
 tinually striving. But it did not overpower 
 the rebellion or the inertia of human wills. 
 "Not holding fast the Head," ov Kpartov rrjv 
 KG(j)a\ijv, was the account which St. Paul had 
 to give of many a Christian, in some degree 
 of every Christian. If only each had been 
 able to hold fast the Head, the perfect 
 Divine idea would have had a less imperfect 
 historical clothing. But even as it was, any 
 one looking at what was proper and dis- 
 tinctive in the Christian societies, at what 
 was good and constructive and productive 
 in them, was in the way to discern the body, 
 and to perceive it to be Christ's. 
 
 There seems to be no reason why we in 
 this age should have a different conception 
 of the Church Catholic from that which St.
 
 60 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 Paul had. If we take his view, the Church 
 Catholic, the universal Church, is first in- 
 visible, and secondarily visible ; not in the 
 sense in which the distinction has been used 
 in modern times by those who make the in- 
 visible Church consist of a certain number of 
 visible persons whom Christ sees to be alone 
 his true members amongst the multitude of 
 apparent Christians ; but invisible, as the 
 mystical or ideal Society which is the inner 
 creative substance of the earthly Christian 
 societies, the perfect structure up to which 
 they all are growing ; and visible, as being 
 represented in these human societies, which 
 are made up of the very mixed materials of 
 human nature, are far from being ideally 
 perfect in knowledge or in life, but are 
 struggling forward, and all doing something 
 to make the one Catholic Church an outward 
 existence in the world. If, in obedience to 
 the Christian impulse which prompts us to 
 look for good in all things, we try to find 
 some comforting explanation of the divisions 
 of Christendom, it is possible to perceive that 
 they are turned to good account in two ways : 
 they effectually hinder Christians from sub- 
 stituting the seen for the unseen, the body
 
 ii St. Paul's Apostolate Irregular 61 
 
 for the Head, a fatal evil into which a well- 
 compacted earthly Catholic Church might 
 betray them ; and, through the various forms 
 which Christianity has taken and the different 
 lines along which it has pushed its energies, 
 these divisions which trouble us may have 
 been made the means of giving a fuller 
 presentation of the Divine idea than a single 
 Church would have been able, or at least 
 likely, to exhibit. 
 
 Have orthodox Churchmen ever clearly 
 recognised what a justification of irregularity 
 is to be found in the commission and work of 
 the Apostle Paul ? Nothing could be more 
 definite than the authority given to the 
 Twelve. The special admission of St. 
 Matthias, in the place of the Traitor, was 
 intended to preserve the outward complete- 
 ness of that authority. The Twelve were to 
 sit on twelve thrones. They actually ruled 
 the Church as its authorised official chiefs 
 during its early years. But Saul of Tarsus 
 arose, claiming that a special commission had 
 been given to him in visions. The regular 
 course would have been that he should have 
 submitted his pretensions and credentials to 
 the Twelve, and that they, if they thought
 
 62 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 fit, should have sent him forth. But he did 
 not ask them to sanction his work. He 
 maintained an almost ostentatious independ- 
 ence. He acted on the assumption that the 
 commission given to him in visions was as 
 good as that which the Twelve had received. 
 His Master was the Master of the Twelve, 
 and Paul professed an earnest desire to work 
 in harmony with them ; but the co-operation 
 was to be on terms of equality. With a 
 certain haughtiness St. Paul was accustomed 
 to declare that he would produce no creden- 
 tials except the results which he accomplished, 
 the Churches which he founded. His pre- 
 tensions were abundantly, irresistibly justified; 
 but it was at the cost of formal regularity. 
 
 Instead therefore of regarding the many 
 Churches of Christendom as the fragments 
 which show that the Catholic Church has 
 been broken to pieces, as the ruins of the one 
 Temple of God, of the one City of God, we 
 shall see in their variety a proof that the 
 Catholic Church which each of them aims at 
 representing is something more comprehen- 
 sive and more spiritual than the best of them. 
 They may encourage us as prophecies of a 
 greater unity yet to be realised, instead of
 
 ii The Future of the Church 63 
 
 depressing us as memorials of a unity that 
 has been lost. Members of each religious 
 communion, if they are thus advised, may go 
 on repeating more earnestly than ever their 
 belief in the Holy Catholic Church as the 
 hidden spiritual structure which binds them 
 all together, and which has in each a more or 
 less inadequate expression. And the way to 
 the more glorious unity of the future will be 
 not so much through attempts to create a 
 complete and exclusive Church by mutual 
 concessions and compromises, but through a 
 growing loyalty of each believer and each 
 body of believers to the unseen Head. We 
 may leave in God's hands the work of build- 
 ing up universal mankind into the universal 
 Church of his Son, that he may accomplish 
 it in his own manner and his own time, 
 bending ourselves for our part to the fulfil- 
 ment of the clear duty of endeavouring to 
 keep the unity of the Spirit in obedience to 
 Christ. We of the English Church shall 
 justify with a clear conscience our traditional 
 tolerance of anomalies, so long as they do not 
 choke spiritual life ; and shall be careful not 
 to cast away, in the craving for outward 
 regularity, any historical element which may
 
 64 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 be the means of enabling us to perform more 
 effectively our appointed share of the great 
 Divine operation. 
 
 If, with the faith of Catholic Christians, 
 we believe in Christ as the Head of all man- 
 kind, it will be impossible that we should not 
 see in this relation the most comprehensive 
 and the most authoritative of human bonds. 
 It is in the Church Catholic that is, in the 
 whole human race acknowledging its true 
 Head that the proper unity of mankind 
 consists and is explained. This unity is 
 always getting itself confessed by all men, 
 whatever their faith may be. That men are 
 in some way bound together, that to any man 
 nothing that is human is altogether alien, is 
 a creed which nature teaches, and which 
 forms the ground of all good and humane 
 effort. It is one of the chief lessons set to 
 this generation, to learn the brotherly obliga- 
 tions of nation to nation, of the civilised to 
 the uncivilised, of all men to all men. The 
 worshipper of evolution will see in this com- 
 prehensive humanity only a wider extension 
 of those tribal feelings and habits which grow 
 out of the discovery that each man is stronger 
 and happier when he joins himself with others
 
 ii The Moral Unity of Mankind 65 
 
 than when he stands alone. The course of 
 things, the evolutionist observes, is teaching 
 men that a nation had better not be quarrel- 
 some in dealing with other nations, any more 
 than clansman with clansman. The growth 
 of international sympathies, he holds, will by 
 degrees make the strong civilised race dislike 
 taking advantage of the weak and uncivilised. 
 Others, whilst they recognise no headship of 
 mankind, will yet use and feel warranted in 
 using the language of obligation, will speak 
 of right and wrong as well, as of evolved 
 feelings, with regard to the action of the 
 strong towards the weak. They find in 
 themselves an acknowledgment of what is 
 right and best in relations and behaviour, 
 there are ideas of justice and of duty and of 
 mutual regard in the air which speak to them 
 with authority, and the dictates of which 
 are confirmed by contemplation and experi- 
 ence ; and they will not only act upon these 
 themselves, but they will peremptorily call on 
 fellow-men to act upon them also. They will 
 maintain that it is a shame for the strong to 
 oppress the weak, for the knowing to circum- 
 vent the simple, in Africa or in Asia as well 
 as in England or the United States. And 
 F
 
 66 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 there is no known worshipper of evolution 
 who does not allow himself to be drawn 
 beyond the range of his proper observations 
 into the admissions and appeals of those who 
 thus worship the ideas of righteousness and 
 love. The Catholic Christian goes the whole 
 length of their roads both with the wor- 
 shipper of evolution and with the worshipper 
 of moral ideas. He recognises with devout 
 reverence that the Father of men is leading 
 mankind by the evolutionary processes of his 
 providence into the ways of universal con- 
 cord. The ideas of justice and goodwill, of 
 reciprocal obligations, of the embracing of 
 every human being within the bonds of 
 humanity, are to him also in the air. They 
 are not only in the air, because he knows 
 how they come there and understands the 
 authority which they claim ; and he adores 
 them as the attributes of the Father who has 
 exalted the Divine Son of man to be the 
 Head of his body the Church ; but they are 
 in the air, being the very Breath of God, 
 what the Christian names the Spirit of the 
 Father and the Son, of which we have all 
 been made to drink. Whoever confesses the 
 authority of righteousness and love must
 
 ii Problems as to the Unity of Mankind 67 
 
 needs be thought of by the Catholic Christian 
 as a fellow- worshipper of his God. 
 
 There are certain problems, speculative 
 problems, for example, as to the unity of 
 origin of the races of mankind, and as to the 
 distinctions between man and the inferior 
 animal races, and practical problems as to the 
 reasonable rights of the lower human races 
 and the best treatment of them, and as to the 
 possibility of combining all sorts of races in 
 one creed which present difficulties to us 
 all alike, but which cause, it may be admitted, 
 more anxiety and pain to Christian thinkers 
 than to others. The claim to see by a light 
 in the heavens which other men do not use 
 has its responsibilities and its inconveniences. 
 If the Purpose of. God revealed in Christ 
 sheds illumination over our spiritual nature 
 and the world to which it belongs, it makes 
 the dark places of creation and history more 
 incomprehensible. When we have reasoned 
 our utmost about some of the difficulties 
 which try the faith of the Christian, there 
 may be nothing for us to do but to leave off 
 reasoning, to admit the difficulties with can- 
 dour, and to pass on. We may gather, I 
 repeat, from these experiences of our help-
 
 68 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 lessness that we are intended to see a little 
 way backwards into the past, that we may 
 understand our surroundings and ourselves 
 the better ; a little way before us into the 
 future, that the glory of it may attract us : but 
 chiefly to look around us into our own environ- 
 ment, and upwards to the heaven above. 
 
 There are two great subjects, Trade and 
 War, which are especially demanding the 
 attention and exciting the interest of those 
 who recognise the brotherly bond uniting all 
 men and all races of men together. On the 
 principles of trade Catholic Christianity has 
 anticipated political economy. Before this 
 modern science was born or thought of, the 
 meaning of trade was thus expounded by 
 Christian faith 1 : "Forasmuch as the great 
 and Almighty God hath given unto mankind, 
 above all other living creatures, such an heart 
 and desire, that every man desireth to join 
 friendship with other, to love and be loved, 
 also to give and receive mutual benefits : 
 it is therefore the duty of all men according 
 
 1 From Letters Missive of Edward VI., A.D. 1553, pre- 
 served in Hackluyt, and in Harris's Voyages and Travels, 
 1705, vol. i. p. 507.
 
 n The Uniting Effects of Trade 69 
 
 to their power to maintain and increase this 
 desire in every man, with well-deserving to 
 all men, and especially to show this good 
 affection to such as being moved with this 
 desire come to them from far countries. . . . 
 For the God of heaven and earth, greatly 
 providing for mankind, would not that all 
 things should be found in one region, to the 
 end that one should have need of another, 
 that by this means friendship might be 
 established among all men, and every one 
 seek to gratify all." The Christianity of the 
 type illustrated in these noble sentences of 
 some minister of Edward VI. is evidently in 
 favour of the utmost freedom of trade. The 
 democratic spirit of our day, whilst it would 
 be greatly attracted by these sentiments, is 
 embarrassed as to adopting them and carrying 
 them out, partly by want of economic know- 
 ledge, partly by national prepossessions. 
 Those who would call themselves Socialists 
 are very much inclined to be cosmopolitan, 
 and one of their dreams is of such a combina- 
 tion of the working-classes of the world as 
 would enable them to dictate their own terms 
 to capitalists of all nations ; but, on the other 
 hand, the working people of each country
 
 7O Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 regard foreign competition as directly injuri- 
 ous to their interests, and a superficial view 
 of the influences affecting their condition is 
 apt to make them favourable to the protection 
 of native industries, and to the exclusion of 
 foreign labour and foreign products. Con- 
 sidering that the democratic population of 
 every other country in the world, including 
 our own colonies, is insisting upon a policy 
 of protection, or what has been called 
 nationalist economy, it ought not to surprise 
 us if the working classes here in England, 
 when they realise that by putting forth their 
 combined strength they can sway the govern- 
 ment of the country, should aim at making 
 their respective trades more prosperous by- 
 putting checks on foreign competition. 
 Christianity should throw the weight of its 
 consciousness of the common humanity and 
 its sense of the sacredness of the ties which 
 bind all men and all nations together against 
 any action of separate countries which would 
 be detrimental to the general prosperity of 
 the world. Those who believe with our 
 forefathers in a God of heaven and earth 
 greatly providing for mankind, will be slow 
 to believe that nations can be benefited in
 
 ii The Spiritual Significance of War 7 1 
 
 the long run by a policy of self-protecting 
 exclusiveness. 
 
 That it is right, however, for a nation to 
 defend itself all Christians, except the followers 
 of George Fox, have allowed ; and we have 
 to face the paradox that war is not forbidden 
 by the religion which declares all men to be 
 brothers. Certainly there must be something 
 wrong when brothers have to do their best 
 to kill and impoverish brothers. But the 
 duty of fighting in certain circumstances is a 
 witness that there are better things to care 
 for than physical life and freedom from 
 physical pain. The independence and honour 
 of a nation, the repression of wrong-doing 
 and insolence, are objects in behalf of which 
 it is not merely legitimate, but a duty to God 
 and to mankind, to come to blows. God, let 
 us not hesitate to say, teaches hands to war 
 and fingers to fight for the defence of the 
 order of the world against those who would 
 violate it. The Father of all men hates ill- 
 will and deceit more than wounds and death ; 
 and it would be quite possible to hate more 
 and deceive more in submitting to an aggressor 
 than in meeting him on the field of battle. 
 The feelings of soldiers arrayed against each
 
 / 2 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 other, even in the heat of conflict, are not 
 necessarily as murderous as their acts ; it is 
 quite conceivable that they may have very 
 little of bitterness or ill-will in them. What 
 is needed on behalf of peace is not that the 
 most conscientious and humane nations 
 should disable themselves from fighting ; but 
 that each nation should feel it to be wrong 
 and unworthy to seize on the possessions or 
 hurt the self-respect of other nations, and 
 that the neutral should be ready to incur 
 some risk and to bear some loss in coercing 
 the insolent and aggressive. 
 
 It is a part of our discipline that we should 
 have to struggle with contradictions and 
 confusions in working out the spiritual designs 
 of our Maker. The road towards perfection 
 is no smooth one. The great encouragement, 
 without which we could hardly persevere, is 
 to see that progress is possible, and is actually 
 being made. In trading and fighting with 
 each other men will indulge, we must expect, 
 the evil passions of covetousness and pride 
 and cruelty, they will call deceit and lies to 
 their aid ; but the spirit which God breathes 
 into his children has the task of purging trade 
 and exalting it into mutual help, of making
 
 ii The Goal of the Divine Purpose 73 
 
 war more noble and humane and rare until 
 it dies out. And the goal which the Christian 
 sees before him as the necessary object of the 
 Divine Purpose is a world made harmonious 
 and happy by the all-conquering mind of 
 brotherhood.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE CIVIL ORDER OF HUMAN SOCIETY 
 
 IN the last chapter we regarded the Catholic 
 Church as representing the true and real 
 relation of the human race to its invisible 
 Head, a relation which makes all men fellow- 
 members together, and is the living root of 
 the universal bonds and duties of humanity. 
 We go on to consider how men, as social 
 beings, find themselves further organised. 
 
 As we look around us, we see ourselves 
 and our fellow-men gathered into groups of 
 various kinds and sizes, called civil as distinct 
 from those which are ecclesiastical or religious. 
 The most characteristic feature of the civil 
 order at the present stage of history is the 
 tendency to largeness of grouping. It is 
 an age of empires, of dominions vaster 
 than have ever been known before, in the 
 sphere of government ; as, in the sphere of 
 economics, it is the age of larger associations
 
 CH. in The Great Dominions of this Age 75 
 
 for business. Within the last few years our 
 own country has included an empire in its 
 ancient realm, and the sovereign bears the 
 title of Queen and Empress ; and we con- 
 template with amazement the imperial 
 responsibilities accumulated on the Crown 
 and the Parliament of Great Britain and 
 Ireland. Everywhere we see some move- 
 ment of acquisition, absorption, federation ; 
 and these things take place not by design, 
 hardly even through the workings of irrepres- 
 sible ambition, but under the pressure of the 
 course of things. Was there ever anything 
 more grandiose in the history of the world 
 than the recent partition of Africa by some 
 five European powers, summarily transacted 
 with the pen of diplomacy by mutual agree- 
 ment between these powers ? Will it be 
 possible for the great dominions of this age 
 to hold themselves together without breaking? 
 What new effects will they have upon the 
 peace, the commerce, the general develop- 
 ment of mankind ? These questions will be 
 answered in time by history. The God of 
 the world is preparing his own future ; it is 
 he who makes us, and not we ourselves. 
 We shall move safely, in so far as we suffer
 
 76 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 ourselves to be led by his guiding hand. 
 The more we see the strings of destiny 
 plainly taken out of our hands by the great- 
 ness and spontaneousness of the main move- 
 ments of the world, the more are we thrown 
 back upon simple allegiance to the sceptre of 
 righteousness and love. 
 
 Let us turn from the largest of civil groups 
 to the smallest. The Family was never more 
 important, never more interesting to observers 
 and thinkers as the elementary unit of society, 
 than it is now. It was a natural mistake, but 
 it is held to be a demonstrated mistake, to 
 assume the family to be the actual primitive 
 germ of human society. The family appears 
 to have been originally confused in more pro- 
 miscuous aggregations of human beings. It 
 is rather to the honour of the family that its 
 distinctness and importance have grown with 
 the growth of civilisation. The one husband 
 and the one wife, and their children belonging 
 to them ; the husband and the wife keeping 
 to each other, the parents caring for their 
 children and the children honouring their 
 parents : this complex unit is a fixed and 
 to all appearance a permanent factor of the
 
 in The Sacredness of the Family 77 
 
 most highly developed and happiest human 
 society. To the Christian these relations 
 are sacred ; and what a difference it makes 
 to the family if they are held to be sacred by 
 the members of it ! Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 may shew us that these relations prove 
 themselves most favourable on the whole 
 to the sustentation of the race ; and this may 
 be to some the complete explanation of them. 
 The demonstration is one to be welcomed by 
 the Christian ; it entirely falls in with his 
 view : but he sees more in the family than 
 the evolutionist does ; and what he sees is 
 evidently favourable to him it will seem in- 
 dispensable to the purest and most beautiful 
 and most delightful affections. We learn from 
 our sacred books that the family is God's 
 creation ; that the union of the marriage-pair 
 is a symbol and living expression of the union 
 between Christ and humanity ; that a father 
 is a visible witness to the Divine Fatherhood, 
 and that children are trained by the habit of 
 looking up to the earthly parent to know in 
 some real manner the Father in heaven. 
 We think we are right in setting a value 
 upon tender and thoughtful and reverent 
 affections, and in reckoning these a precious
 
 78 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 part of the total product of human existence ; 
 and it seems to us that they are like a delicate 
 vapour which would be chilled and precipi- 
 tated by contact with the philosophy that sees 
 in them nothing but the necessary outcome 
 of the individual's desire of what is pleasant. 
 How to make the best of the family is one 
 of the problems upon which opinion and legis- 
 lation are in all advancing countries con- 
 strained to exercise themselves. Christian 
 opinion is reasonably and rightly jealous of 
 any innovation in custom or law which 
 threatens to lower the relations of the home 
 and to impair their vitality. But Christian 
 opinion is not always wise ; it is seldom as 
 free to learn as a stronger faith would enable 
 it to be. And it is often very difficult for 
 any one to know for certain what the effect 
 of an innovation upon the family or home 
 would be. The most emphatic and obtrusive 
 Christian opinion is generally content to stand 
 by tradition, and has thus been sometimes in 
 opposition to changes which experience has 
 ultimately proved to be beneficial. Many 
 questions which are more or less pendent 
 in these days of ours have their chief interest 
 in their bearing upon the home. Compulsory
 
 in The Perfecting of the Family 79 
 
 education, education by the State, public and 
 charitable relief of poverty, the concession to 
 women of instruction and public duties, the 
 enfranchisement of wives, liberty to marry a 
 deceased wife's sister, legal divorce, are of 
 this class. If any measure or custom pro- 
 moted under one or other of these heads could 
 be demonstrated to be on the whole and in 
 the long run injurious to the family, Christian 
 feeling ought to be against it, and wise states- 
 manship would shrink from advocating it. 
 But it is a fact to be borne in mind, that the 
 removal of obstructions which have been 
 excusably defended as necessary safeguards 
 has often been the means of promoting a 
 higher, because a freer, moral life. The aim 
 to be kept in view is not a carefully fettered 
 home, but a growth of the higher kind of 
 spiritual or personal relations. Whatever 
 convictions and customs and laws will most 
 effectually build up the perfect family, these 
 will not only be best for each family, but will 
 on that account be of the highest value to 
 human society in general. 
 
 If it may plainly be seen that advancing 
 civilisation bears its witness to that sacred-
 
 8o Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 ness of the Family which is one of the tradi- 
 tions of Christian belief, it is evident also that 
 the idea of the Nation, as a larger group of 
 human beings, holds its ground in these 
 days, and commands even more deference 
 from men's minds than it has ever received 
 before. It is true that this appears to be an 
 age of empires ; and some wise men have 
 dreaded the ideas of an empire as tending to 
 encroach upon and swallow up the character- 
 istic consciousness of the nation. According 
 to the Christian view, the Divine Maker is 
 seen to have planted men in families, in 
 tribal commonwealths or nations, and in the 
 universal community ; these are the three 
 organisms which hold the first rank amongst 
 all the groupings of men, and by the authority 
 of which human duties are chiefly defined. 
 An empire of the old Oriental type, pro- 
 fessedly founded on force, governed by 
 despotic rule, existing for the aggrandise- 
 ment of a single man or a dominant race, 
 careless of the forms of national life and of 
 the institutions which have availed to express 
 the mind of the people and to protect their 
 rights, has been odious to those who have 
 learnt to reverence the nation, and has been
 
 in What is a Nation ? 8 1 
 
 regarded by them as a temporary agency of 
 destruction and change. But the ways of 
 Providence are not to be prescribed. And 
 the aspect of the world at the present time 
 seems to indicate that imperial magnitudes 
 are not incompatible with national sentiment. 
 There are empires and empires. It may be 
 possible for an empire to be in effect a great 
 nation. Or there may be a kind of distribu- 
 tion of the feelings and activities of national 
 life, of the sense of a national calling and the 
 duties proper to it, between smaller bodies or 
 organisms within an empire and the empire 
 as itself an organism. In-any case it belongs 
 to Christian faith to learn the lessons of the 
 present, rather than to cling to any tradition 
 that is passing away. 
 
 If we try to define a nation, we discover 
 that this is not a simple matter. And when 
 nothing turns upon or is deduced from the 
 definition, we need not embarrass ourselves 
 with the obligation to define. But the irregu- 
 larities of national development are so great, 
 that it is difficult to use any particular 
 nation for didactic purposes without stumb- 
 ling into confusion. We should not like to 
 be forbidden to speak of the English nation.
 
 82 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 But we might at once be asked what popula- 
 tions the term includes. Do the Scottish 
 people form part of the English nation ? Or 
 do they themselves constitute a Scottish 
 nation ? The Nationalists of Ireland have 
 for their aim that the Irish people may 
 become a real and acknowledged nation : 
 ought we then to look for the essential points 
 of nationality in the legislation which is to 
 create a parliament and a ministry for that 
 country ? By questions like these every 
 enthusiast for nationality might be put into 
 difficulties. There is no difficulty, however, 
 in imagining an ideal nation. We can think 
 of a population occupying a land enclosed 
 within defined boundaries, speaking the same 
 language, subject to one supreme governing 
 authority, using the same laws, looking back 
 over a common history, inheriting the same 
 glories, worshipping the same God : to a 
 people living under these conditions we 
 should unhesitatingly give the name of a 
 nation. And Christians will feel that there 
 is something high and entitled to respect in 
 this name. It is true that the idea of a 
 nation is less distinctively Christian, less 
 properly belongs to the New Covenant, than
 
 in The Civil Order in the Bible 83 
 
 that of the family, or that of the whole com- 
 munity of men. The age and world of the 
 New Testament knew next to nothing of 
 nations ; and it was the peculiar task of the 
 Apostles of Christ to proclaim the universal 
 Divine kingdom, and to found the universal 
 Divine society. But Christendom, in inherit- 
 ing the Scriptures of the Old Covenant as 
 sacred, has had for its continual study the 
 history of a race made into a nation by their 
 God. In the commonwealth of Israel the 
 civil order is traced directly to Divine 
 authority. And no people can read the 
 Hebrew Scriptures with the old Jewish and 
 Christian faith and not receive from them 
 a strong influence upon its political mind. 
 It is enough to quote the well-known words 
 in which Milton, by the mouth of our Lord, 
 places the prophets of Israel far above other 
 statists and lovers of their country : 
 
 " As men divinely taught and better teaching 
 The solid rules of civil government, 
 In their majestic unaffected style, 
 Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome. 
 In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, 
 What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so, 
 What ruins kingdoms, and lays cities flat : 
 These only, with our law, best form a king."
 
 84 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 It is impossible that any ruler or politician 
 formed by the study of the law and the 
 prophets of Israel should not think of a 
 nation as having a Divine calling, and being 
 organically part of the Divine creation. 
 And though the Apostles, in an age when 
 national life was overwhelmed and thrown 
 into confusion, had little occasion for speak- 
 ing of nations, we have in the New Testa- 
 ment continual recognition of civil government 
 as a ministry held under God. The law and 
 order even of the Roman Empire were from 
 God ; and every one who administered justice 
 was carrying out a portion of the will of 
 God. So that to Christians the civil order, 
 including the institutes of government and 
 defence and the administration of justice, 
 is a work of God ; and the more there 
 is of coherence and continuance and happi- 
 ness in a commonwealth, the more plainly 
 will it seem to them to bear the impress 
 of the Divine hand. And the passion 
 which the idea of nationality is able in 
 these days to inspire, and the sacrifices 
 to which it impels, may be explained as 
 paying, however blindly and confusedly, the 
 homage due to the authority of that idea and
 
 in The Enthusiasm of Nationality 85 
 
 confessing it to be a part of the creative will 
 of God. Patriotism, loyalty, is not a foolish 
 intoxication ; it may be the soberest self- 
 offering to the God of our country and of our 
 fathers.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 JUSTICE 
 
 THE name of justice is closely and necessarily 
 associated with the idea of the nation or 
 commonwealth ; and I go on to consider how 
 the recognition of this organism of human 
 society, as belonging by its essence to the 
 invisible world, and having its origin and 
 authority in God, bears upon the nature of 
 justice and the questions connected with it. 
 
 Here again I may appeal to a passion by 
 which the feelings of men are moved in an 
 unprecedented degree at the present time. 
 There is a certain dissatisfaction stirring and 
 heaving in the mind of the general popula- 
 tion, in this country, in the more advanced 
 parts of Europe, in our colonies, and in the 
 United States of America. It seems to many 
 that a less unequal distribution of the things 
 which men desire might be attained, and it
 
 CH. iv The Prevailing Reverence for Justice 87 
 
 is always assumed and declared that the 
 attainment would be a triumph of justice. 
 Justice is invoked without hesitation as an 
 authority to which all men may be expected 
 to pay deference, and to which those on 
 whom it may inflict losses should submit 
 with the best grace they can. When men 
 are deprived of what they believe to be just, 
 a singular emotion, such as easily finds vent 
 in tears, is excited in susceptible natures. 
 Together with the desire of improvement in 
 the conditions of possession, there is a great 
 anxiety to arrive at a more exact fulfilment 
 of justice in all the other matters with which 
 justice is concerned. The mental ease of 
 innumerable persons is being continually dis- 
 turbed by doubt whether this or that arrange- 
 ment or transaction is as just as it might be. 
 Never, I think it may be said, was justice 
 more Divine to men than it is now. 
 
 This worship of justice, as a power which 
 speaks with authority to the consciences of all 
 men, is the more remarkable when we notice 
 the extreme difficulty which men find in de- 
 termining what justice means, and in agreeing 
 upon any principle or method by which what 
 is just is to be ascertained. It is easy to see
 
 88 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 that some dealings, whether in the shape of 
 a division of things desired, or in that of 
 an assignment of reward or punishment, are 
 what all would admit to be unjust. But 
 why they are unjust would not be so easily 
 explained. It is when we try to make existing 
 arrangements or customs more just that the 
 difficulty confronts us in the most perplexing 
 form. Take the apportionment of taxation 
 for an example. What is the just principle 
 of apportionment ? It will be very generally 
 agreed that it is just for all citizens to 
 contribute something towards the expenses 
 of government. But how are their respective 
 contributions to be assessed ? Is it just that 
 a father of a family should pay more or that 
 he should pay less than an unmarried man 
 receiving the same income ? The family 
 man gets more from the government, that 
 is an argument on the one side ; he has less 
 to spare, that is an argument on the other 
 side. It sounds fair that all should contribute 
 proportionately, though we might ask whether 
 it should be in proportion to the property of 
 each, or his income, or his expenditure, and 
 whether the other claims on his means should 
 be taken into account ; but we are all inclined
 
 iv The Making of Just Arrangements 89 
 
 to favour the poor, and to most minds it 
 would seem just to lay heavier burdens than 
 the proportion of their means would assign 
 on the rich than on the poor. Some would 
 perhaps go so far as to say that it is contrary 
 to ideal justice that any should be better off 
 than others, and therefore that the State 
 ought to do all that it can be constrained or 
 enabled to do to level existing inequalities. 
 It would be a convenient conclusion that the 
 levying of taxes and rates is a matter to which 
 justice does not apply. This, however, would 
 be very unwillingly admitted. And it would 
 be found that in other provinces there is 
 similar difficulty in framing rules of self- 
 evident justice ; so that men might find them- 
 selves driven at last to the extremity of giving 
 up the use of the words just and justice 
 altogether. 
 
 Never were men less likely to do this 
 than now. They are more deeply persuaded 
 than ever that the regulation of human affairs 
 ought to be in accordance with justice. The 
 work of philosophers consists for the most 
 part in making formulas for the modes of 
 thought and action to which men are being 
 really impelled by the progress of social
 
 9O Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 development ; and there is no question which 
 human life is now putting more urgently to 
 speculators than that which asks what is the 
 nature of justice. 
 
 In all ages it seems to have been believed, 
 by wise men and the multitude alike, that 
 justice could be explained by equality. It 
 has been declared by respectable authorities, 
 and proclaimed in the face of the world, that 
 men are equal, and that they have equal 
 rights. Justice is held by many to be the 
 giving to equal men of their equal rights. 
 There must be something in this notion of 
 equality to account for the sway which it 
 has obtained over the minds of men. But 
 the moment you lean upon it for support it 
 proves itself no better than a broken reed. 
 There is a certain rough classing of people 
 together which is found necessary for the 
 purposes of external administration ; some 
 protection against arbitrary and oppressive 
 behaviour has been found in the rule that 
 persons were to be treated alike ; and it 
 looks as if this were the ground, and the 
 only ground, for the homage paid to equality. 
 But men are obviously not equal ; they are
 
 iv Does Jiistice mean Equality ? 9 1 
 
 not born equal, any more than they become 
 so. There is nothing to support an assump- 
 tion that the Creator meant or means them 
 to be equal. The whole structure of human 
 society appears rather, one may say, to be 
 built upon inequality. Where the law treats 
 persons in the same way, it is easy to see 
 that its justice is imperfect, precisely because 
 it cannot take account of the real inequality 
 of the persons. Perfect justice will be char- 
 acteristically unequal, because it will observe 
 with careful discrimination the endless differ- 
 ences that actually exist in persons and in cir- 
 cumstances. It seems disrespectful to a wide- 
 spread belief to dismiss equality as an impostor; 
 but I have failed to see any light thrown by 
 it upon the essential nature of justice. 
 
 A partial explanation of the common 
 feeling about justice may no doubt be found 
 in the authority which Law exercises over 
 the general mind. The justice with which 
 men are concerned in actual life is to a very 
 large extent that of the law. Possession 
 which the law recognises is assumed as a 
 matter of course, by the possessor at least, 
 to be just possession ; and any forcible
 
 92 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 interference with it is resented. The law 
 punishes crime, and to get an offender 
 legally punished is said to be to bring him 
 to justice. It is an obvious account of 
 justice, therefore, to define it as being what 
 the law prescribes. Law will have to be 
 itself accounted for ; but that may be done 
 without bringing in the idea of justice : and 
 then the ultimate explanation of justice 
 might be sought in referring it to the law. 
 There are two defects in this explanation, 
 (i) There is a considerable part of life with 
 which the laws do not interfere; and men 
 habitually think and speak of acts and 
 arrangements in spheres outside the law as 
 being just or unjust. Indeed in our ordinary 
 speech we seem rather to limit the use of 
 these words to extra-legal action. We do 
 not speak of an assault or a burglary as 
 unjust. We say that a schoolmaster is 
 unjust when he favours one boy in a class ; 
 that an employer is unjust if he binds a man 
 to the fulfilment of a legal engagement made 
 in ignorance or misunderstanding. (2) It is 
 also habitual to speak of laws themselves as 
 being just or unjust. In these days men 
 consciously and with much effort make laws ;
 
 iv The Evolution of Justice 93 
 
 they repeal old laws and add new ones : and 
 it is the professed aim of legislators to render 
 the law as just as possible ; that is, to bring 
 it into conformity with a standard of justice 
 assumed to be antecedent to it and above it. 
 
 But the philosophy of evolution is that with 
 which we all have to reckon. Most well- 
 informed persons are feeling now that they 
 must at least find room in their scheme of 
 things for the chief principles and conclusions 
 of the theory if it is not rather to be called 
 the science of evolution. And this philo- 
 sophy has spoken definitely, by the mouth 
 of its most illustrious exponent, on the subject 
 of justice. Mr. Herbert Spencer is expressly 
 engaged in setting forth the origin and 
 nature and applications of justice in a work 
 of which he has already published the earlier 
 portion ; x and it is impossible not to recog- 
 nise that his analysis and history have a 
 great deal of truth in them. He traces 
 justice, as he traces everything, to the one 
 primal instinctive force, the desire of what 
 is agreeable. This is originally a solitary 
 force, dwelling in the single individual. 
 
 1 See the Nineteenth Century for March and April 1890.
 
 94 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 Every man, every animal, is an organism 
 desiring what is pleasant and striving to get 
 it. Out of this impelling desire all the 
 virtues have grown. This primal desire has 
 led, in a way which can be described and 
 explained, to the creation of society, and the 
 development of all social habits. I am 
 giving Mr. Spencer's view ; but as one 
 which undeniably accords with facts which 
 we must all acknowledge. In very early 
 times it became evident that a living being 
 might obtain more pleasure by co-operating 
 with other living beings than by standing 
 alone. Thus society began. One living 
 being can directly give pleasure to another ; 
 but it is chiefly for the two objects of defence 
 and of economy of production that men have 
 associated themselves together. Smaller 
 groups have become larger, that they may 
 defend themselves the better, and that they 
 may produce more of what men like and 
 more easily. By the primal instinct, the 
 strong man makes use of his strength for his 
 own advantage ; but several together, though 
 they may be separately less strong, are 
 stronger than the strongest. And, to make 
 association possible, individuals must consent
 
 iv ' The Evolution of Jiistice 95 
 
 to some restrictions upon their pursuit of 
 what they like. To live and work together, 
 individuals must be at peace ; and they will 
 not be at peace if all are, without restriction, 
 trying to get, at their neighbour's expense, 
 the most of what pleases them. By degrees 
 the interest of the society, though it has for 
 its original and only rational foundation the 
 desire of the individual, becomes predomi- 
 nant. Individuals are sacrificed freely by 
 the will of the larger number to the interest 
 of the society ; and, what is more remark- 
 able, they are actually so wrought upon 
 that they sacrifice themselves. A curious 
 topsey - turveyism of nature ! Self-sacrifice 
 comes of the force of habit. The interest 
 of the society obtains in the course of long 
 ages a dominant power over the collections 
 of feelings called minds ; and the self-seeking 
 animal, through the sole development of 
 self-pleasing habits, is led to do the opposite 
 of pleasing self. That is the simple explana- 
 tion of all human life as we see it now. And 
 justice is the actual relation, the relation 
 which the progress of the race produces, 
 between the activities of single persons 
 pursuing their own pleasure, and the restric-
 
 96 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 tions imposed upon the activities of each by 
 the simultaneous activities of others living 
 with them. The balance or compromise is 
 not always the same ; it varies at different 
 stages of human progress ; but what is 
 always meant by justice is the ratio or 
 equilibrium or resultant produced at each 
 moment by the struggle for what pleases, 
 between the self-seeking of the individual 
 and the restrictions imposed upon it by the 
 simultaneous self-seeking of fellow-members 
 of the society. The philosopher, observing 
 the course of things, can watch how either of 
 these forces, the impelling and the restraining, 
 gets a little the better of the other ; he 
 perceives how the sustentation of the race, 
 which is the combination of the prosperities 
 of individuals, is on the one hand favoured by 
 the freedom of the individual, which gives 
 advantages to strength and superiority, and 
 how on the other hand it is favoured by the 
 restraining influence of the community, which 
 secures concord and preserves the weaker 
 from being crushed. 
 
 These observations are full of instruction ; 
 they throw light on the manner in which the 
 accepted rules of justice have been evolved.
 
 iv Mr. Spencer s Justice N on- Moral 97 
 
 But this philosophy of Mr. Spencer's is purely 
 naturalistic, and has no title to be called ethi- 
 cal. The ideas of right, duty, obligation, are 
 foreign to it ; the names represent conceptions 
 which this philosophy pronounces to be illu- 
 sions. Mr. Spencer and other thinkers of 
 his school persist in using the common moral 
 phraseology ; in truth they cannot help it ; 
 no man can hold converse with other men 
 without using it. But they use it illegiti- 
 mately ; they are denying their own princi- 
 ples whilst they use it. It is astonishing 
 that they can endure this perpetual self- 
 contradiction. Let me quote a recent 
 statement ^of Mr. Spencer's, made in the 
 very face of this problem. "If you ask 
 what prompts me to denounce our unjust 
 treatment of inferior races, I reply that I 
 am prompted by a feeling which is aroused 
 in me quite apart from any sense of duty, 
 quite apart from any thought of Divine com- 
 mand, quite apart from any thought of reward 
 or punishment here or hereafter. In part 
 the feeling results from consciousness of the 
 suffering inflicted, which is a painful con- 
 sciousness, and in part from irritation at the 
 breach of a law of conduct on behalf of which
 
 98 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 my sentiments are enlisted, and obedience to 
 which I regard as needful for the welfare of 
 humanity in general. If you say that my 
 theory gives me no reason for feeling this 
 pain, the answer is that I cannot help feeling 
 it ; and if you say that my theory gives me 
 no reason for my interest in asserting this 
 principle, the answer is that I cannot help 
 being interested." l " Quite apart from any 
 sense of duty " ; "I cannot help feeling the 
 pain, the interest." Yes, that is a frank 
 statement of the beginning and end of this 
 philosophy. Feelings come by nature, the 
 feelings which we call moral among the rest. 
 One man cannot help feeling generous ; an- 
 other cannot help feeling greedy and cruel. 
 The sense of duty is an illusion. Certainly, 
 anything less calculated to carry authority to 
 the conscience, and bring a sense of duty to 
 bear upon it, than the varying balance between 
 the self-seeking of the individual and the self- 
 seeking of the aggregate of other individuals 
 could not easily be imagined. Even if this 
 balance could show us satisfactorily how all 
 
 1 This is quoted from a letter which Mr. Spencer kindly 
 wrote to me, and which was published, with his permission, 
 in the (London) Guardian^ 6th August 1890.
 
 iv Justice in Independent Ethics 99 
 
 the common notions of what is just between 
 man and man are formed, one chief thing 
 which we want to know is why justice speaks 
 with authority to the universal conscience. 
 
 Some of those who uphold a real but non- 
 theological morality would speak of the idea 
 of justice as involved in the constitution of 
 the human mind. They pay homage to this 
 idea as independent, as immutable, as belong- 
 ing in some essential way to the higher nature 
 of man. There is something in ourselves, 
 they hold, which will tell us what is just if 
 we will listen to it ; and our moral nature 
 makes it our duty to listen to it. Others 
 would say that justice consists in the arrange- 
 ments which are best for society, and that in 
 virtue of our moral nature the good of society 
 is a law and ideal for the individual. These 
 doctrines of a transcendental morality are 
 high and draw us upwards, but they leave on 
 many minds an uncomfortable impression of 
 vagueness and arbitrariness. The phrases 
 independent and immutable, though they 
 commend themselves to our reverence and 
 our sense of obligation, hardly agree with 
 what experience proves to be the progressive
 
 i oo Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 nature of morality. Nor is it satisfactory to 
 all of us to be thrown back on our own minds 
 as an ultimate authority. We would rather 
 depend upon something that does not so evade 
 and fail us as our own natures are apt to do, 
 something to which we could more confidently 
 appeal in praising and condemning, in exhort- 
 ing and coercing, our fellow-men. 
 
 If we take courage to assume we to 
 whom the assumption is a possible one 
 that there is an Unseen Power, a Living 
 God, whose creatures and children we are, 
 who is training by his own methods and for 
 his own ends the race which he has brought 
 into existence, and whose will we have some 
 trustworthy means of knowing, these conclu- 
 sions amongst others will follow : we shall 
 understand the unity and community of men ; 
 the meaning of progress, and its harmony 
 with order, will become apparent to us ; and 
 we shall perceive ourselves to be subject to a 
 government the authority of which it would 
 be absurd to call in question. And we are 
 led on to the apprehension of justice as being 
 essentially the order in which the Maker con- 
 stitutes the civil groups of men ; in one sense
 
 iv Righteousness 101 
 
 the aggregate of the relations, in another 
 sense the fulfilling of the relations, in which 
 the Maker of all binds men to one another 
 and to the things around them. 
 
 This is the idea of justice which we find 
 running through the Bible. The Anglo- 
 Saxon word " righteous " is used more com- 
 monly in both Testaments than the Latin 
 word "just"; and it is due perhaps to this 
 biblical use that righteousness has come to 
 mean to our ears something both wider and 
 more religious than justice : but in the Bible 
 itself no distinction between them is intended. 
 One of the questions raised by any inquiry 
 concerning justice, and one which puts itself 
 especially to believers in the Bible, is in what 
 sense we can speak of the Supreme God as 
 Himself righteous or just. It was the chief 
 thought of the children of Israel concerning 
 their God Jehovah, that He was just or 
 righteous : what did they mean in so describ- 
 ing Him ? The first answer would probably 
 be that they regarded Him as rendering to 
 every man according to his works. But this 
 was rather what they were sure a righteous 
 God would do than that which constituted 
 His righteousness. They did not profess to
 
 IO2 Order and Growth ' CHAP. 
 
 understand fully what God's rewards were, 
 or the methods of his distribution of them. 
 What they felt in praising Jehovah as the 
 righteous God was that he was a Ruler who 
 might be trusted, a Ruler whose, dealings 
 with them, if they knew all, would commend 
 themselves to their consciences and under- 
 standings as being for the best. They 
 believed, with much experience to sustain 
 the belief, but with some also that perplexed 
 it, that if they served him by keeping loyally 
 the regulations made for their commonwealth, 
 they would prosper, and that if they behaved 
 disloyally and licentiously, they would suffer. 
 Jehovah was a Ruler who might be trusted 
 without reserve. That is, he was essentially 
 a God of order. The order of the physical 
 universe was from him ; the moral or spiritual 
 order of human society was from him. All 
 relations between man and man which proved 
 themselves happy and wholesome were his 
 ordinances, and he sustained those relations 
 and promoted the fulfilment of them by 
 rewards and punishments. 
 
 In the New Testament, St. Paul is the 
 exponent of a profound and fruitful idea 
 concerning Divine and human righteousness.
 
 iv Justification 1 03 
 
 He held with peculiar intensity the old Jewish 
 belief in righteousness, and the righteousness 
 in which he believed was essentially practical. 
 No man was to be called righteous unless he 
 acted righteously : God's righteousness was 
 such as would certainly manifest itself in 
 rendering to every man according to his 
 works. But it was revealed to St. Paul 
 that the inner nature of man was such, and 
 he was so related to the God who made him, 
 that he could only be right by looking up to 
 God and submitting to him and allowing 
 himself to be made the trustful agent of 
 the Divine will. One who set himself to 
 walk in his own way, and who made himself 
 his only master, was sure to go wrong and to 
 fail. The strength and success of man's life 
 were to be found in filial dependence and sur- 
 render and conformity. Human righteous- 
 ness or justice came through submission to 
 the righteousness or justice of God. This was 
 St. Paul's theory of justification. And in his 
 philosophy of justice we may again see the 
 idea of order glorified. The world to his 
 eye is built up out of orderly relations pro- 
 ceeding from and sustained by the one living 
 Creative Power ; and the law for each man is
 
 iO4 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 that he should keep the place and do the 
 work assigned to him. He will find the 
 place and the work, and receive the suffi- 
 ciency he needs, through humility, teachable- 
 ness, reverence, in a word, through faith. 
 This, then, is what we learn from the Bible, 
 that God is just in being the author and 
 maintainer of the spiritual order of the 
 universe, and that human justice is the due 
 observance and fulfilment of the relations 
 which God creates. 
 
 Substantially the same explanation of jus- 
 tice is given in the most famous of all books 
 on this subject, Plato's treatise called The 
 Commonwealth, or, Concerning Justice. By 
 a method of inquiry which may strike a 
 'reader as artificial, but which proves itself 
 rich in interesting suggestions, Plato comes 
 to the conclusion that Justice is the principle 
 by which each class and every member of the 
 commonwealth are kept in their places in 
 the places, that is, which the prosperity and 
 happiness of the commonwealth as a whole 
 would assign to them. Plato set the society, 
 the commonwealth, above the individual, and 
 he thought he saw in the constitution of the
 
 iv The Platonic Justice 105 
 
 community an enlarged form of the nature 
 of the single man. He compared the ruling 
 class with the reason, the fighting class with 
 the combative emotions, the industrial class 
 with the appetites ; and as social justice 
 appeared to him to be the principle which 
 kept the classes of the commonwealth in 
 their respective relations and places, and so 
 maintained the harmony and well-being of 
 the community, he was led to explain justice 
 in the individual, by analogy, as the principle 
 which kept the reason, the emotions, and the 
 appetites in their proper relations, and so 
 produced the well-balanced man, the man at 
 peace in himself. We shall prefer to this 
 account St. Paul's idea, that justice in the 
 man is conformity to the spiritual order by 
 which he is environed. But we may claim 
 Plato as maintaining and illustrating the 
 truth that the explanation of Justice is to 
 be found in the moral order of which the 
 living Creator of mankind is the Author. It 
 is in this explanation that we discover the 
 ultimate reason of the authority with which 
 justice speaks to the human mind, an 
 authority which seems to increase with the 
 development of human society, and which is
 
 106 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 forcing itself on our attention so strongly at 
 the present time. 
 
 In the age of Plato there was evidently 
 the same sort of difficulty as there is now in 
 understanding justice. He mentions some 
 of the lower views of it to which men were 
 led by inquiry and analysis at that time. 
 Justice was said to be the interest of the 
 stronger, 1 of those who obtained the mastery 
 in a society. These made the laws for their 
 own advantage, and the carrying out of the 
 laws was called justice. Another view 2 was 
 that justice consisted in the compromise 
 between the appetitive activities of the in- 
 dividual and the appetitive activities of his 
 neighbours, or the regulated equilibrium of 
 individual freedom and social restriction, 
 which is precisely the explanation of justice 
 which Mr. Herbert Spencer is now engaged 
 in elaborating. If either of these explana- 
 tions is adopted as adequate, the veil of regal 
 authority is torn from justice, and it is ex- 
 posed as a false pretender. No one can 
 reverence the naked interest of the stronger, 
 or appeal to it with passion as a law which 
 
 1 The Republic, book i. p. 338. 
 
 2 Ibid, book ii. pp. 358, 359.
 
 iv The Authority of Justice 107 
 
 ought to commend itself to the consciences of 
 his neighbours. Nor do we feel moved to 
 bow with moral conviction before the mere 
 resultant of conflicting appetites. But if the 
 moral authority of justice is derived from the 
 will of the Creator who is working out the 
 perfection and happiness of human society, 
 that authority may be seen to back up even 
 the interest of the stronger and the equili- 
 brium of struggling desires. There can be 
 no practical justice without coercive law, and 
 coercive law cannot be enforced except by 
 those who have strength to rule. As soon 
 as administration becomes efficient and pros- 
 perous, justice is sure to prevail in some 
 tolerable degree, whether the rule be that of 
 an African chief or that of a civilised demo- 
 cracy. And rule becomes stronger as its 
 administration is more orderly. Similarly the 
 willing subjection of desires in the individual 
 to the restrictions imposed upon them by the 
 combined desires of others is a homage 
 rendered to order, that is, to justice, or to 
 the regulating will of the Creating Power 
 who cares for the good of all. If we desire 
 to interrogate the instinctive feelings of man- 
 kind as to the nature of justice, we may trace
 
 io8 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 the idea of order in the two great synonyms 
 right and just. For right, rectum, probably 
 means ruled in the sense of straight rather 
 than in that of enacted by force. And just, 
 from jus, appears to mean what is joined or 
 fitted, or as we say adjusted. Equal also, 
 aequum, I am inclined to suggest, may have 
 derived its original authority from its primary 
 sense of evenness. Straight, fit, even these 
 terms all describe orderly arrangement ; and 
 they express the natural feeling of the early 
 societies of men about what is just. 
 
 Behind any systematic equilibrium of the 
 moment which is felt to give satisfaction and 
 comfort to human minds and to be helping 
 forward harmonious co-operation and the 
 building up of society, men have always had 
 some conception, however vague it may have 
 been and however little they may have known 
 how to describe it, of something better in ad- 
 justment and harmony than the best which 
 has yet been realised. The dissatisfaction 
 which is indispensable to improvement and 
 progress has been nourished by this vision. 
 Men and societies of men have always lived 
 upon Promise ; and when the breath of Hope, 
 responsive to Divine Promise, fails to breathe
 
 iv The Justice of the Future 109 
 
 perpetually upon their minds, they fall into 
 torpor and decay. The advanced com- 
 munities of the present age are blessed with 
 'wonderful benefits of justice, but the restless- 
 ness of humane and sympathetic natures, 
 pouring out complaints and reproaches 
 against what they perceive to be unequal 
 and unsatisfactory in our relations to one 
 another and the things around us, is a token 
 and witness that the God of mankind has not 
 finished his work but is preparing yet nobler 
 and more perfect developments of it.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 PROGRESS 
 
 THOSE who deny themselves the advantage 
 of referring to the Divine will as the ground 
 and explanation of morality, and who are at 
 the same time unwilling that morality should 
 be regarded as nothing more than the result 
 of experience, are led to ascribe authority to 
 the moral law by declaring it to be absolute 
 and immutable, entitled by what it is eternally 
 in itself to the respect and obedience of man- 
 kind. Except for the prestige thus obtained 
 for morality, it would seem better, as being 
 more in accordance with observed facts, to 
 think of morality as progressive. If justice, 
 for example, is to be regarded as an absolute 
 and immutable law, having a natural authority 
 to the human mind, it must be something so 
 vague and intangible that it will hardly be 
 serviceable for guidance ; and practical per-
 
 CHAP, v Rights of Man Imaginary 1 1 1 
 
 sons will be tempted to pronounce it to be a 
 metaphysical eidolon, a projection of what 
 men happen to be for the time accepting as 
 just arrangements. We learn from the 
 history of mankind that men's conceptions of 
 what is just have varied greatly in time and 
 place, have in fact grown with the growth 
 of civilisation. And the view of justice ac- 
 cording to which it means, as a law, the 
 aggregate of the relations of civil society, 
 and, as a habit, the fulfilment of those rela- 
 tions, has this advantage, that it expects 
 justice to make advances as human society is 
 developed. 
 
 Some assumptions which have been con- 
 fidently insisted upon, but which have been 
 productive of confusion, are disposed of by 
 this view. We cannot hold that there are 
 any absolute rights of man. Instead of 
 entering into controversy as to the specifica- 
 tion of such rights, and maintaining that 
 certain rights may be properly, whilst others 
 are improperly, claimed for man, we shall 
 know of no rights inhering either in man as 
 man, or in any man as an individual. Men's 
 rights will be such securities and liberties as 
 are assigned to them, to speak most simply,
 
 ii2 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 by the law ; or, to allow for some laws 
 being behind the age, by the best general 
 judgments of the community at the stage of 
 development to which it has been brought. 
 There are many, perhaps, who would un- 
 willingly give up the notion that freedom, for 
 example, is a natural right of man ; though 
 the unwillingness will be less if they have 
 tried to define natural freedom, and have lost 
 themselves in the hopeless difficulties of the 
 attempt. But we, knowing nothing of 
 freedom as a natural right, shall not be 
 hampered by any necessity of pronouncing 
 what the freedom is which nature bestows on 
 man ; to us freedom will be a kind of elbow- 
 room required for the performance of the 
 parts assigned to a man by the constitution 
 of the society in which he finds himself. 
 Even slavery, such as makes a human being 
 an article of sale and purchase, we cannot 
 denounce as the violation of a natural right. 
 The essential injustice of slavery will be that 
 it is incompatible with the duties of a member 
 of a family and of a commonwealth. If we 
 should hear it affirmed that the private own- 
 ing of land is contrary to eternal justice, the 
 allegation will be to us not so much untrue
 
 v Justice not Oracular 113 
 
 as without meaning ; whilst at the same time 
 the claim of any person to hold something 
 which he has inherited or acquired, as made 
 his by absolute justice, will be a vain imagina- 
 tion. Questions of possession are not to be 
 settled by reference to an absolute and eternal 
 justice, because the justice which we know is 
 dependent and progressive. 
 
 How then are we to find out what is 
 just ? 
 
 We must have the courage to conclude 
 that, on many points as to which men have 
 eagerly claimed the authority of an imperative 
 justice for arrangements which they have 
 desired or approved, there is no intelligible 
 decree of justice to be heard. As to posses- 
 sions, contracts, assessments, remuneration, 
 punishments, we cannot profess to know any 
 rules or standard, to have access to any oracle, 
 of abstract justice. If it be said that justice 
 requires that men should have this and that, 
 should pay or be paid so much, should have 
 so much punishment inflicted on them, we 
 have to admit that, apart from law and 
 custom and the good of the community, we 
 have no rule for determining just ownership, 
 just wages, just prices, just penalties. We
 
 1 1 4 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 cannot allow ourselves the satisfaction of 
 affirming that justice requires that one man 
 should be as well off as another, or that every 
 man should have the environment that will 
 be most favourable for his development, or 
 that a poor man should have a vote as well 
 as a rich man, or a woman as well as a man, 
 or that no man should receive lower wages 
 than will keep him and his family at a certain 
 level of comfort. It is one thing to cherish 
 aspirations after universal happiness, another 
 thing to assume that, so long as the universal 
 happiness is not realised, there are personal 
 wrongs which the community is bound and 
 able to redress. When we consider how 
 freely and confidently claims are made in the 
 name of absolute justice for what we should 
 gladly welcome as improvements, we may 
 well feel reluctant to forego the support which 
 the name of justice gives to a demand. It 
 seems almost pathetic, for example, that those 
 who may be insisting, as if the thing were as 
 clear as day, that justice requires that certain 
 labour should be paid for at the rate of 6d. an 
 hour, should have to be asked why justice does 
 not rather fix the payment at gd. or is. an hour. 
 There are certain principles, however,
 
 v The Authority of Law 1 15 
 
 which, from the point of view of a progressive 
 Divine order of the world, we may bring to 
 bear upon human affairs, in the hope of 
 securing such justice as is possible and real. 
 
 (i) If we regard the authority of justice as 
 being that of the order in which the Creator 
 is constituting and developing human society, 
 it will be inevitable that we should pay an 
 almost unqualified deference to the regula- 
 tions sanctioned at any time by law and 
 custom. And this respect for law will be in 
 accordance with the common and universal 
 feeling about justice. The first notion of men 
 everywhere as to what is just is, that it is 
 what the law prescribes or sanctions, that 
 the just man is he "qui consulta patrum, qui 
 leges juraque servat." The authority of law 
 and the belief in justice have grown simul- 
 taneously in historic communities. So that 
 it has been easy for disputers to maintain 
 that the whole explanation of justice is to be 
 found in this account of it, that it is the 
 arrangement made by law, and that to be just 
 is to obey the law. The anti-moral arguer in 
 the Republic of Plato, accepting that defini- 
 tion and pushing inquiry a step further, was 
 able to contend that justice meant the interest
 
 1 1 6 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 of the stronger ; for the law, he argued, was 
 made by those who had power in a commun- 
 ity, and they naturally made such rules as 
 were for their own advantage. There is a 
 great deal of truth in these statements, cynical 
 as they may appear. The laws in force at 
 any time in any land will always indicate by 
 the bias of their favour what class is there 
 and at that time holding the chief power ; or, 
 if we take the persistency of laws into account, 
 we should rather say, what class had for some 
 time previous to the given moment been 
 holding the chief power. But the rules which 
 seem to us as we look back upon them to 
 have been prompted by the selfish interest of 
 the stronger are so much better than the 
 absence of laws, and the enforcement of 
 such rules is so much better than the 
 absence of an enforcing power, that even 
 under what we should call an oppressive 
 regime we should find it reasonable to 
 associate, if we could not quite identify, 
 justice with legality. What men chiefly want, 
 in living their lives, is to know what they can 
 depend upon. This is what makes the uni- 
 formity of the laws of nature so indispensable 
 a basis of human life and progress. Philo-
 
 v The Value of Regiilar Government 117 
 
 sophers have discovered that the laws of 
 nature are cruel, and there are some specu- 
 lators who expatiate with enjoyment upon 
 the unmoral tyranny of the God of nature ; 
 but these laws work uniformly, and men learn 
 that they can depend upon them, and this 
 trustworthiness more than compensates for 
 the alleged cruelty. And so the first thing 
 necessary for progressive life in a community 
 is that there should be an administration upon 
 which men can calculate, that they should 
 know to what arrangements they have to 
 adjust their plans and efforts, with what ex- 
 pectations they may look forward to the 
 future. It is uncertainty, arbitrariness, that 
 afflicts men with a sense of injustice, and 
 paralyses the provident endeavours on which 
 progress and prosperity depend. I do not 
 admit, however, that human laws are at any 
 time more than in part the expression of the 
 selfish desires of the stronger ; they are the 
 result of many impulses and movements in 
 human life : what I urge is that laws, or 
 customs having the force of laws, are the 
 actual form in which the Creator is making 
 human society ; and that therefore justice is, 
 both in fact and reasonably, to a very large
 
 1 1 8 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 extent, the same thing as legality. It is in 
 accordance with our faith in an orderly Divine 
 development that justice should be to us 
 what our fathers were led to enforce. 
 
 (2) But there is another principle which 
 the same faith equally commends to our atten- 
 tion. We can recognise a justice superior to 
 laws because the order which finds expression 
 in laws is a spiritual and growing order. The 
 will of the Maker is that we should know 
 and fulfil the relations in which he constructs 
 his human world ; and he is continually 
 developing those relations into a greater 
 complexity and a more satisfying harmony. 
 There is much fulfilment of these relations 
 which transcends the sphere of coercive law ; 
 and the coercive law of a community must of 
 itself be continually improved by a progres- 
 sive race. St. Paul, full of the faith in an 
 ordering Lord, lays down the duty of the 
 child in these words : " Children, obey your 
 parents in the Lord, for this is just " ; whilst 
 in the twin-passage he writes, "Children, 
 obey your parents in all things, for this is 
 well -pleasing in the Lord." Obedience to 
 parents belongs for the most part to supra- 
 legal duty, and can only in the lower and
 
 v Improvement of the Social Order 1 19 
 
 superficial degree be the subject of coercive 
 laws ; but also the laws relating to it have 
 needed and have received continual improve- 
 ment. What the Romans thought just with 
 regard to the subjection of children to fathers 
 seems to us now no better than barbarous. 
 There are races of men whose laws are very 
 stationary ; but those races are themselves in 
 the rest of their life similarly stationary. 
 Races that advance will find it necessary to 
 modify their laws. I have said that the feel- 
 ing for justice keeps pace with the authority 
 of law amongst any people ; and I infer, 
 therefore, that the enthusiasm in demanding 
 justice which is characteristic of our time is a 
 sign that our laws commend themselves in no 
 ordinary degree to the general mind, and 
 have a powerful influence over it. But it is 
 also true that we perceive amongst us indica- 
 tions of a somewhat restless eagerness to 
 change the existing order. This desire of 
 improvement we must admit to be from God. 
 It bears witness to a creative power, working 
 in men's lives and in history, which purposes 
 to make human society better than it is. 
 The existing order is good for its time ; that 
 there should be order at all is the thing
 
 1 20 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 supremely good : but we may hope for a 
 better order than that in which we now have 
 our part We cannot see distinctly far ahead ; 
 but we are taught to look for more of har- 
 mony and health throughout the whole body, 
 for a condition in which the members, fulfilling 
 their respective offices with more enjoyment, 
 will also make more valuable contributions to 
 the common well-being. Any modifications 
 of the social system which will be favourable 
 to a really better social condition should find 
 us ready, as soon as our eyes are opened to 
 the recognition of them, to accept and pro- 
 mote them. And it will be just, or justice will 
 demand, that the changes of law and custom 
 that may be thus indicated should be made. 
 
 (3) But there is a third principle which 
 will claim our attention, that social changes, 
 when seen to be desirable, should be made 
 with as little of disturbance and friction as 
 possible. The infinite value which we find 
 in order and in the reign of law involves this 
 principle. 
 
 It is impossible for us to admit that a 
 right of undisturbed possession inheres in any 
 man, or that individual ownership is the basis 
 of society. Statements to that effect are
 
 v Disturbance Undesirable 121 
 
 freely made, but the belief they express is a 
 mischievous error, and the needs or interests 
 of society have constantly repudiated it. The 
 only title to possession which a man has is that 
 which is given to him by the order of society 
 speaking through the law of the land ; and 
 that which law has given, law has reasonably 
 asserted the right to take away. After all, 
 it is no harder upon a man that the interest 
 of the community, sought deliberately through 
 a well-considered piece of legislation, should 
 modify his possession of anything, than that 
 his property should be affected, as it is every 
 day, by non-legal changes which are due to 
 some desire of the public, and which effectu- 
 ally alter values without altering laws. There 
 are those who hold, with an unthinking sort 
 of positiveness, that a man has an absolute 
 right to anything which he happens to have 
 received or obtained ; a certain number of 
 persons Mr. Henry George and his dis- 
 ciples hold that a man has a right to possess 
 anything except land. With the latter class 
 we can agree about the exception : we can 
 see that no man has an absolute right to the 
 ownership of a piece of land ; but we must 
 maintain that no man has an absolute right
 
 1 2 2 Order and GrowtJi CHAP. 
 
 to the ownership of any other things. What 
 we have further to urge, with regard to the 
 owning of land and other things alike is, that 
 the orderliness of life, which is justice, requires 
 that present legal possession should be treated 
 with the utmost respect that is compatible 
 with the Creator's purpose of progress. 
 Where possession is grossly abused, it may 
 be necessary or desirable, in the interests of 
 that justice which is the improved order of 
 things immediately ahead of us, that its rights 
 should be roughly interfered with ; there have 
 been states of national life in which revolu- 
 tionary violence has been inevitable. But to 
 our own country the inestimable blessing has 
 been given of changes made with the least 
 possible disturbance. The changes made at 
 various times in our laws and customs have 
 been very great ; they could easily be so 
 exhibited as to seem revolutionary ; in our 
 own time they have been both considerable 
 and rapid. They are chiefly such as have 
 been naturally involved in the transference of 
 power from the few to the many ; but there 
 have been changes also which we should not 
 as a matter of course call democratic, such 
 as those relating to trade and religion and the
 
 v Gradual Reform tJie most Secure 1 2 3 
 
 position of women. As a rule, these changes 
 have been made after full discussion and 
 consideration, on the ground that they were 
 for the advantage of the whole community, 
 and with a very tender regard for existing 
 rights and prepossessions. And we have had 
 our reward in a feature of English history 
 which strikes every observer, that the whole 
 population has acquiesced in the changes 
 after they have been made, and that reaction- 
 ary movements are virtually unknown in this 
 country. If we may innocently indulge in 
 the boast, we may say that ideal justice 
 requires that social modifications should be 
 carried out in the future in the same manner 
 in which it has been the custom and the 
 happiness of the English nation to carry 
 them out in the past. 
 
 It is chiefly through the displeasure caused 
 by unjust acts that we are led to think about 
 justice ; as it is illness that makes us think 
 about health. We call certain acts unjust 
 acts by which any one is deprived of advan- 
 tages which properly belong to him not, 
 ultimately, because they sin against rights 
 or claims inherent in individuals, but because 
 they are disorderly, violations of the order of
 
 124 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 society. The feeling of resentment in an 
 individual against injustice done to him 
 arises in part from that instinctive primary 
 desire to have and to get which to the 
 evolutionist philosophy is the single force 
 of life ; but it is also in part the indignant 
 resistance of the social body to disintegrating 
 and destructive action, and to a violation of 
 the will of its Maker. And it is one result 
 of experience, one important feature of ad- 
 vancing civilisation, that it is felt to be of 
 the highest importance that the forcible pre- 
 vention and punishment of injustice should 
 be taken out of the hands of the individual 
 who thinks himself to be wronged, and 
 placed in the charge of the community. All 
 men have been brought to believe that they 
 judge most truly about wrong when they 
 regard it as done still more against the 
 social body and its Maker than against the 
 single person. 
 
 The contemplation, therefore, of justice 
 or of injustice, as we have understood them, 
 will keep our thoughts fixed upon the well- 
 being the harmony and health and growth 
 of the social body. The real guide to 
 justice is the well-being of the community.
 
 v Equality and Rights Delusive 125 
 
 If we adapt our conceptions and language to 
 this principle we shall seem perhaps to be 
 losing something of directness and definite- 
 ness of appeal in ceasing to insist upon the 
 natural rights of man and of men, but the 
 loss will be only apparent ; we shall in reality 
 be rescued from some seriously misleading 
 confusions. We cannot assume that inequal- 
 ity, as such, is unjust ; we perceive that 
 equality is impossible, that like the threatened 
 equilibrium of the solar system it would be 
 death. It would be a great gain if this 
 were thoroughly realised in our social agi- 
 tations. And it will conduce similarly to 
 clearness of view and soundness of action 
 if rights are understood to originate in the 
 social body and not in the separate members 
 of it. It might sound monstrous to many 
 persons if they were told abruptly that they 
 have no rights ; but it would be really much 
 simpler and better if all could attain to the 
 true Christian consciousness of having no 
 rights, except such as are needed and 
 assigned for the fulfilment of their respect- 
 ive duties in their respective places. It 
 would be chimerical to attempt to abolish 
 or repudiate the phraseology of personal
 
 126 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 rights ; but it is not impossible to acquire 
 the habit of thinking of rights as assigned 
 and defined by the laws, that is ultimately by 
 the well-being, of the social body. 
 
 And those who dwell upon the satisfactory 
 justice of the future as consisting in the ful- 
 filled relations of the ever -improving social 
 order will be drawn into an habitual temper 
 of unselfish hope. The Christian must be- 
 lieve in his God, the Father of Jesus Christ, 
 as a Power leading things onward. He per- 
 ceives a Divine energy working without haste 
 but without rest in the movements of the 
 world. The Christian's God is entitled the 
 God of hope; and it is one of our most 
 characteristic privileges to abound in hope. 
 And our hope is of the glory of God ; that 
 is, of the diffusion of a heavenly light, such 
 as that which shines in the face of Jesus 
 Christ, to be manifested expressly in the 
 sphere of human life. Christians may well 
 therefore be the fanatics of progress, per- 
 sistently believing in it, ready to give them- 
 selves for it. For they can understand how 
 it may be the privilege of an individual to 
 sacrifice worldly advantages to which he
 
 v Philanthropy 1 2 7 
 
 might have clung, or which he might have 
 pursued, in order to serve the Creator's high 
 purpose and to help more effectually in the 
 building up of the body. And they will be 
 ready to learn from the past, and to watch 
 all indications pointing to the future, so that 
 they may throw their endeavours trustfully 
 into whatever may seem to be the appointed 
 line of human development, and may go for- 
 ward without timid apprehensions. 
 
 When we think of social improvement, it 
 is inevitable that we should have chiefly in 
 view the raising of the lower members of the 
 social body. Though it is not they only who 
 need to be improved, it is their condition 
 that troubles and pains us most. But that 
 of the many who are a little above this class 
 we cannot but feel to be also such as should 
 make us uneasy. For many years all anxious 
 Christians have been thinking and trying 
 how the lowest may be made happier fellow- 
 members of the body. The name of Philan- 
 thropy has been given to the endeavour to 
 raise by various schemes these classes which 
 excite our compassion. It is beginning to 
 be said on behalf of these classes that they 
 want, not charity or philanthropy, but justice.
 
 128 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 The meaning of those who use the phrase 
 may generally be that wages ought to be 
 raised at the expense of either the employer 
 or the consumer. But there is a deeper 
 sense in which the saying may be instruct- 
 ively interpreted. The action of philanthropy 
 is not such as we should call orderly ; it sees 
 evils, and catches at abnormal expedients for 
 promptly abolishing them. Its tendency is 
 for the most part to weaken domestic and 
 social ties in its endeavours to heal the 
 miseries of the individual. It is confident, 
 and sometimes arrogant and indocile, on the 
 strength of its good intentions ; but its 
 schemes deserve to be described, in an ex- 
 pressive word, as demoralising. There is 
 therefore a lamentable deduction to be made 
 from the good which philanthropy does on 
 the one hand to those who labour generously 
 in its work, and on the other hand in some 
 happy instances to the individual objects of 
 it. The best influences are those which tend 
 in any way to strengthen the ties of the home 
 and of the social system, and to promote the 
 due fulfilment of them. Better health of the 
 body is what is wanted more than all sorts of 
 salves and plasters and stimulant potions.
 
 v The True Forces of Elevation 129 
 
 Whatever nourishes the self-respect and the 
 sense of duty of the careless and the despond- 
 ing, whatever sustains their faltering perse- 
 verance, is worth infinitely more than the 
 gifts of indulgent sympathy. Not chanty, 
 in the sense of weakening indulgence or dis- 
 integrating experiments ; but justice, in the 
 sense of the due fulfilment of natural relations, 
 is what is needed for the effective raising 
 of the low. And to support this, a certain 
 discipline of restraint and constraint, some 
 use of what is rigorous and painful by the 
 hands of God and men, may be more valu- 
 able than philanthropy. 
 
 Self-respect, respect for others, trust, 
 hope, fear, these are the steady levers of 
 social elevation, these are the powers by 
 which the Divine Spirit works towards social 
 improvement in the hearts of men. Those 
 who have been led to think thus of human 
 development, whilst they turn away with 
 feelings which I hardly like to characterise 
 from the deification of nature and the doctrine 
 that human and other animals are impelled 
 by greed only, cannot adopt the assumption 
 that the one thing needful, the one aim into 
 which all the efforts of the humane ought to 
 K
 
 1 30 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 be thrown, is to take away from the richer 
 and give to the poorer, and by arbitrary 
 economic processes to make the conditions 
 of different classes less unequal. They may 
 be perfectly willing that the rich should be 
 made less rich, so long as it is not done in 
 ways which will also have the effect of making 
 the poor poorer, a danger which only the 
 ignorant will despise ; they may earnestly 
 desire that the poor should become less poor, 
 and be thankful that this process has been 
 going on so steadily and so universally 
 during the last half century, and count with 
 joyful confidence upon the continuance of 
 this movement : but they will not put their 
 faith in a more equal economic distribution 
 as the effective power of social reform. 
 They may incur taunts from those whom 
 they recognise as honest friends of the less 
 fortunate classes, but who may scorn them 
 as hypocritical religionists if they profess to 
 care for those classes without being ready to 
 join in agitating for an economic revolution ; 
 but they cannot be false to what they see 
 and know. They must retain the old faith 
 that the world of mankind is a spiritual 
 creation. They are bound to bear witness
 
 v Suffering not the Worst Evil 131 
 
 that the spiritual is above and beneath the 
 physical ; that the Creator of mankind has a 
 higher happiness in view for men than that 
 of bodily comfort ; that you cannot raise men 
 by only making it easier to them to get what 
 their appetites crave, but that individuals will 
 probably, and communities certainly, become 
 more comfortable if they are enabled to be 
 more dutiful. 
 
 And they will refuse to regard suffering as 
 the worst of evils. They have learnt from 
 history, their own personal experience con- 
 firming the lesson, that the permission of 
 suffering is one of the methods by which 
 the Creator produces what is best in human 
 life. How, they will ask, can any one 
 know anything of the world and not per- 
 ceive that this is so ? They cannot hear 
 without impatience what is said in kindly 
 excuse of the drunkard and the pauper, that 
 it is impossible for men and women to be 
 good in the low parts of our great cities. 
 " Love have they found in huts where poor 
 men lie." To them it is far more certain 
 that faith and hope can triumph over pinch- 
 ing poverty in the lowest localities than 
 that higher wages will wean men from the
 
 132 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 self-indulgence which issues in brutality and 
 misery. 
 
 It is in truth a little wonderful that persons 
 who know anything of themselves and of 
 other men should be fascinated by schemes 
 which are to make all indiscriminately com- 
 fortable, and which obviously tend to weaken 
 the responsibility of grown men for them- 
 selves and for their families. No more 
 responsibility ! No more struggling ! Well, 
 for a moment, perhaps, that watchword may 
 seem to promise welcome relief. As regards 
 the conditions of the life to come, Christen- 
 dom in general has provisionally accepted 
 this cry. But, for the life with which we are 
 familiar, moral responsibility is one of the 
 surest evidences of the high origin of human 
 nature ; it is through struggling that the best 
 in man has been produced. Without conflict, 
 without combative effort, what would the 
 human race have been ? By being strained 
 in hard exercise, the limbs and organs of the 
 body acquire strength and pliability and 
 adroitness. It has been in the struggling 
 periods of national life, when men were 
 wakeful and combative and aspiring, that the 
 higher capacities of the intellect have been
 
 v Men made Perfect through Suffering 133 
 
 developed. And to struggle is never quite 
 painless, though at times the sensation of 
 pain may be lost in the pleasurable excite- 
 ment of aroused effort. " There be some 
 sports are painful, and their labour Delight 
 in them sets off." Pain unlulled by such 
 excitement, pain that is felt, has of itself a 
 certain power to disencumber the mind of 
 nonsense, and to give keenness to the vision 
 and energy and pathos to expression ; so that 
 we are accustomed to think of the highest art 
 having its birth through travail -pangs, of 
 men cradled into poetry by wrong, who learn 
 in suffering what they teach in song. And 
 in the spiritual region, who are the men that 
 interest us most and attract our deepest 
 reverence ? Is it not they who have striven 
 and suffered ? What sort of admiration have 
 we for the type of man who would be the 
 perfect product of a civilisation in which 
 everything should be made smooth for every 
 one, the man who has never had an anxiety, 
 who has never had an effort called forth by 
 necessity or resistance ? It has been the lot 
 of the sons of men, as well as of the Son of 
 man, to be made perfect through suffering. 
 I do not forget that it might be said, " Do
 
 134 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 you wish, then, to preserve wrongs and 
 anxieties and miseries, as the rich preserve 
 game, that men may be exercised by them, 
 and so may bring forth the fruit of righteous- 
 ness ? Are we not all at one in trying to 
 make the conditions of human life smoother 
 and more agreeable for all ? " I admit that 
 we are confronted here by a speculative 
 problem of some difficulty. If it is by toil of 
 heart and knees and hands that heights are 
 scaled and shining table-lands reached, how 
 will it be with those who live when every 
 valley shall be exalted and every mountain 
 and hill shall be made low, and the crooked 
 shall be made straight and the rough places 
 plain ? If we advance towards nobler states 
 through honest and earnest conflict with evil, 
 what is to become of us when we have suc- 
 cessfully put down evil ? That is a question 
 to which no conclusive answer can be given. 
 It is a familiar difficulty to those who try to 
 realise the life of just men made perfect. It 
 is one of the problems which drive men to 
 simple faith. "Therefore to whom turn I, 
 but to Thee, the Ineffable Name ? Maker 
 and Builder, Thou, of houses not built with 
 hands ! " We are the work of a Creator who
 
 v The Millennium not in Sight 135 
 
 may be trusted. It is he who has made us, 
 and makes us, and not we ourselves. In the 
 meantime, that particular difficulty is not a 
 pressing one. It seems likely that for a good 
 many generations to come we shall have 
 plenty of evil in ourselves and in the circum- 
 stances of the world to struggle with. It 
 may be that we have not now a smooth time 
 before us. We cannot say that wars have 
 ceased ; we can say that when war occurs it 
 is likely to be more awful than ever. There 
 are chances that men may make hurried ex- 
 periments in the art of extinguishing poverty, 
 and may have to learn wisdom through a 
 poverty not lessened but increased. Growing 
 unbelief may produce a growing laxity of 
 life, and if it does the laxity will most surely 
 produce decay, and the decay will produce 
 suffering, and the populations of men living 
 by nature will be shaken out of their ease. 
 Not laxity, but tension, is what the Divine 
 Trainer demands in the spiritual muscle of 
 those whom he sends into the arena. 
 
 Faith in the righteous Creator makes our 
 social duty sufficiently clear to us. Whatever 
 the future may have in store for us, we have 
 to submit ourselves to His guidance so far as
 
 136 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 we can apprehend it, and to accept His will 
 so far as we can learn it, as our supreme law. 
 We are his instruments, to work with him 
 for his ends ; and he is the power which 
 brings order out of confusion, a kosmos out 
 of a chaos. Wherever order is, there is God. 
 And the highest order we know is that of 
 spiritual beings adjusted to each other by 
 spiritual ties, fulfilling their mutual relations 
 with conscious intelligence and happiness. 
 Our task is to do all that in us lies to honour 
 and to realise this order. Where we see 
 friction and misery, there is something wrong 
 for us to mend that is, to help God in 
 mending 1 to the best of our power. And 
 our yearning thought is always to be set 
 primarily upon the spiritual life of those 
 whom we would raise, of the men and women 
 and children who are dislocated and stunted 
 and pining limbs of the social body ; and 
 therefore upon self-control, goodwill, mutual 
 respect, the common pursuit of the common 
 good. To the Christian these virtues are 
 
 1 "Then said his Lordship: 'Well, God mend all!' 
 ' Nay, by God, Donald, we must help him to mend it ! ' said 
 the other." RUSHWORTH (Sir David Ramsay and Lord 
 Rea, in 1630). Motto prefixed to Carlyle's Latter-Day 
 Pamphlets.
 
 v Desire and Competition will remain 137 
 
 rooted in the filial knowledge of God ; and 
 he must therefore desire, as the best thing, 
 that a living and fruitful faith in the Son 
 who reveals the Father may be deepened 
 and extended. It is evident to him that, 
 just in proportion as people become, not by 
 profession, but inwardly and in simplicity, 
 Christian, the necessary virtues of social life 
 begin to flourish, righteousness is seen to 
 prevail, and friction and misery are relieved. 
 The bettering of outward social conditions is 
 a promised reward of the service of righteous- 
 ness. Being Christians, it is impossible that 
 we should not, whilst thinking chiefly of 
 righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy 
 Ghost, desire heartily also outward comfort 
 and prosperity. And we can see that the 
 things of this earth are not merely allowed to 
 be the reward, but are also the instruments 
 and materials, of spiritual advancement. 
 Men are only trained through being tried : 
 thus much can we see of the Divine methods, 
 whilst much remains mysterious and appar- 
 ently contradictory to us. That appetite for 
 pleasant things which, to the agnostic, is the 
 only impelling human force, is to us a real 
 and inextinguishable element in the Divine
 
 138 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 creation. To suppose that we can leave it 
 out of account, to treat it as exclusively evil, 
 is an error for which our calculations will 
 suffer. All attempts to eliminate competition, 
 which is the working of the self-protecting 
 and self-furthering appetite in human beings, 
 from the business-dealings of the world, have 
 a sentence of futility upon them. This 
 appetite is a natural force, sure to assert itself, 
 visibly productive of desirable results. But, 
 as the fleshly appetites the absence of which 
 would be a symptom of death, which are 
 indispensable to the growth and health of the 
 body need to be kept in subjection ; as to 
 allow them to be dominant is to give up the 
 life of the spirit, and the training and success 
 of spiritual life turn upon a continued defiance 
 of the authority of these appetites ; so it is 
 with competition in the industrial and com- 
 mercial world. It is not to be extirpated ; it 
 is to be subjected. The principle and method 
 of competition will never be superseded by a 
 system of government arranging for every 
 one how he is to work and to be made com- 
 fortable : the trial of just men and just nations 
 will be how they can deal with one another 
 honourably and fairly, with consideration by
 
 v Brotherhood still to be Realised 139 
 
 each of the advantage of others as well as of 
 his own ; as St. Paul said, "not looking each 
 of you to his own things, but each of you also 
 to the things of others." That is the splendid 
 field of human probation for the immediate 
 future. To lay down that no one is to 
 possess any goods which he can call his own 
 would be . a mistake, sure to end in failure ; 
 but to gain possessions honourably, to keep 
 them firmly under the foot, to be a true 
 steward of them, to use them nobly and 
 wisely for the general good, to give them up 
 joyfully when a call to such sacrifice is heard, 
 that is the duty and the dignity of the 
 spiritual man. That the application of 
 spiritual principles to human life in our day 
 will tend towards the equalising of classes, 
 and the honouring of every man, and the 
 removing of occasions of grudging and dis- 
 content, as well as towards a more cheerfully 
 acknowledged supremacy of ever- improving 
 law, is what Christians will be constrained to 
 acknowledge and will understand with thank- 
 fulness. The Scripture has not said in vain, 
 " Let the brother of low degree glory in his 
 high estate, and the rich in that he is made 
 low." The adjusting of individuals to their
 
 1 40 Order and Growth CHAP. 
 
 places, and the perfecting of each in his 
 place, with an eye to the common well-being, 
 cannot be imagined as going on without much 
 modifying of our inherited customs and 
 arrangements ; and the changes to be made 
 will evidently be to some extent of the kind 
 which are now kindling the aspirations of 
 the working classes and their advocates. 
 
 But will God grant to us that the "dim" 
 innumerable multitudes, whose minds are 
 now touched by the ferment of not unchristian 
 hopes, may have some discernment given to 
 them of the true glory of society, of the true 
 dignity of the individual ? Ah, how much 
 lies in the answer to that question ! It would 
 seem that throughout the common populations 
 of Christian lands there is much Christian 
 sentiment diffused, hearty impulses of com- 
 passion and good nature, a strong sense of 
 fellowship with their kind, a prompt readiness 
 to take the side of the weak ; but that their 
 slight and wavering hold of what has been 
 disclosed in Jesus Christ of God's action and 
 purposes, and the weakening of the habit 
 (where it is not entirely lost) of appealing 
 reverently and directly to God, leave them 
 without clear ideals, without the needful
 
 v Unto the Perfect Day 141 
 
 sway of Divine spiritual authority over their 
 hearts and imaginations, and without the 
 guidance which would best lead them on 
 their way into the unknown future. They 
 are too apt to listen to those whose worship 
 is of the empty idol Equality, and to believe 
 that the beginning and end of justice is to 
 take from those who have more and give to 
 those who have less. If their eyes could 
 be opened to a higher idea of justice than 
 that of reduced inequality, to a nobler ideal 
 of society than that in which the poor have 
 an increased share of the good things of this 
 life, we might hope to see the promises of 
 the future more richly and more speedily 
 realised. The light from heaven for which 
 we look is essentially that of knowledge and 
 harmonious fellow-work and happiness ; the 
 darkness which keeps it from us is that of 
 greed and pride and ill-will and ignorance in 
 any class and in any heart. May God hasten 
 the time when his thankful children shall 
 be able to say of every part of this earth as 
 well as of the heaven which broods over it 
 The darkness is past ! The true light now 
 shineth !
 
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