HARPER'S LIBRARY of LIVING THOUGHT 
 
NATURAL 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 BY THE HONBLE. 
 
 W. H. 
 FREMANTLE, D.D. 
 
 DEAN OF RIPON 
 
 HARPER X 
 BROTHERS 
 
 LONDONXNEVYCRK 
 
NATURAL 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 BY THE HONBLE. 
 
 W. H. FREMANTLE, D.D. 
 
 **DEAN OF RIPON 
 
 LONDON AND NEW YORK 
 HARPER & BROTHERS 
 
 45 ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 
 1911 
 
/V 
 r 7 
 
 Published April 
 
PREFACE 
 
 NATURAL religion " has acquired a bad 
 name; and the title of this treatise may 
 suffer from it. I have endeavoured to meet this 
 in the first pages of this book ; but it may be well 
 to state my purpose in writing it in a more direct 
 and explicit manner. 
 
 My purpose, then, is to draw out the fact that 
 Christianity, being divine and supreme, must assert 
 and work out its sovereign position by blend- 
 ing with human life, and with the general 
 development of the whole system of nature 
 which God has made. The assertions of the in- 
 troduction to the Gospel according to St. John 
 have been followed out, which > represent the 
 Word of God as the foundation of all things visible 
 and invisible, asserting that He speaks to the 
 conscience of every man, that, as incarnate in 
 Christ, He claims supremacy over every man and 
 every society of men, and must reign over a 
 united and redeemed universe : and further, that 
 He has entrusted to all who believe in this purpose 
 the duty of carrying it out in dependence upon Him. 
 The Society or Church, therefore, which is to effect 
 this must be universal, and every one who longs 
 for righteousness ought to be welcomed into the 
 band of those who are building up the Kingdom. 
 
 271637 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I find, however, that many otherwise faithful 
 men do not believe this, and are content to set 
 before themselves and the Church the salvation or 
 saintliness of a certain number, the rest (which 
 they speak of as " the World ") being left out. 
 Natural Christianity, on the contrary, recognizes 
 that Christ is, in His own words, " The Saviour of 
 the World," and, in the words of St. John, " the 
 Light which lighteth every man," the fountain 
 of all goodness in all countries and ages, the guide 
 of its development, and the assurance of its final 
 triumph. 
 
 I find also that, in the carrying out of the 
 mission of the Church, a wrong position and value 
 has been assigned to the function of public worship. 
 Our Lord said nothing about it, and gave no rules 
 or exhortations about it, but bent all His energies 
 to the inspiring of the whole life of His followers 
 with the spirit of faith and righteousness . Bu t no w , 
 when men think of religion and the Church, the idea 
 before their minds is the practice of public worship, 
 the buildings in which it is conducted, the regula- 
 tion of its ministers, with some adjuncts of 
 beneficence. But the true object of the Church 
 is not merely to testify by word or by prayer, but 
 to live out the whole life in all its branches, 
 public and private, in all its relations to God and 
 to man, in the faith and spirit of the Master. 
 Towards this, no doubt, public worship is a great 
 help ; but it must be, as the Master left it, free, 
 
 8 
 
PREFACE 
 
 comprehensive, and mutable. Instead of this, 
 public worship has been made the supreme func- 
 tion ; and rules about it, often belonging to former 
 ages, are made the condition of partaking in it 
 and of membership in the Church. Consequently 
 religion is viewed as an exotic system, denatural- 
 izing human life, and leading to alienation and 
 strife. Natural Christianity must seek to redress 
 the balance, making the life primary, and public 
 worship and its adjuncts auxiliary. 
 
 I find that, mainly through the cause just 
 mentioned, the mass of our working people, the 
 very class from which our Saviour sprang, are 
 alienated, first, from public worship, which seems 
 to them to have no connection with their 
 lives, and also, to a large extent, from religion 
 itself. They are apt to look upon the ministers 
 of religion as agents of a system which has been 
 thrust upon them and to which they do not intend 
 to be enslaved. 
 
 I find, further, that the strife between religion 
 and science, though greatly mitigated, has been so 
 by the perception, on both sides, that religion is 
 an indispensable part of human nature, and also 
 by the conviction that its assertions must not 
 contravene the knowledge which we have of the 
 outer world or of history, and, further, that, while 
 seeking to realize the presence of God universally, 
 it is not only permissible to His servants, but their 
 duty in an age like ours, to investigate the means 
 
PREFACE 
 
 by which he has wrought out His purposes. This 
 conviction leads to that which is here advocated 
 as Natural Christianity. 
 
 Further, I find that, amongst educated men, 
 there is a tendency to be shy of religion as of 
 something strange, the adherents of which do not 
 speak their language or care for what they care 
 for. A Christianity which cares for all sides of 
 human life and all its interests may, I trust, do 
 something to remove this feeling. 
 
 I am aware that much of what I am dealing with 
 here is difficult, and in some ways perilous. But 
 truth must come first, even in touching upon 
 matters and men whom we love. It was said by 
 Dr. Arnold that, the more he loved an institution, 
 the more he wished for its reform and its perfection: 
 and this saying holds good as to the whole field of 
 life. Nothing can withdraw itself from criticism. 
 But criticism does not imply denial, nor need in- 
 quiry lead to negation. And it may be permitted 
 to one who has exercised a strenuous ministry 
 of more than fifty years to commend by his ex- 
 perience the principles which have served him, and 
 have given him an increased and convinced 
 attachment to the Bible and the Church; and 
 that, while opposed to any separate government 
 by the clergy, he has lived in the fullest sympathy 
 with the profession to which his life is devoted and 
 the work of its ministers. 
 
 I have avoided the intricacies of Biblical 
 
 10 
 
PREFACE 
 
 criticism by relying upon the passages which seem 
 to be of unimpeachable authority, or to enunci- 
 ate some truth which, when rightly apprehended, 
 becomes axiomatic. 
 
 I may be allowed to say that, while I have given 
 a strong opinion that the function of public worship 
 has been unduly exalted in comparison with 
 a complete life of faith and righteousness, this 
 must not be taken as an undervaluing of this 
 function itself; but as implying (i) that there is now, 
 as there has been in most periods of Christian 
 history, a danger of dwelling too exclusively and too 
 rigidly upon its forms and rules ; (2) that this has 
 led to a growth of clerical power which, though little 
 realized, is one of our greatest dangers ; and (3) 
 that the only antidote to this is to set forth the 
 importance of a full life lived in Christian faith 
 that which I have called in a previous work " The 
 Gospel of the Secular Life." If, in doing this, 
 I have seemed to go too far, and said what 
 may give offence, I would ask the reader to rectify 
 this impression by the assurance that my object is 
 not to lay stress upon any mere negation, but to 
 enlarge men's views of God's purpose, and of the 
 work of the Church as the instrument for bringing 
 in His reign of universal justice and truth and love. 
 
 W. H. FREMANTLE. 
 
 ii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 KA.GE 
 
 PREFACE . . . . . vii 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. TRUE AND FALSE MEANINGS OF "NATURE" 
 
 AND "NATURAL" . . . . i 
 
 II. MORALS, FAITH, AND IMMORTALITY . 12 
 
 III. PARTIAL AND IMPERFECT RELIGIOUS 
 
 SYSTEMS . . . . 17 
 
 IV. THE IMMANENCE OF GOD . . 23 
 V. THE MIRACULOUS . . . 31 
 
 VI. AUTHORITY. . . 40 
 
 i. The Bible, 40. 2. The Church, 47. 
 3. The Creeds, 48. 
 
 VII. JESUS . . 55 
 
 i. As Messiah, 55. 2. Apocalyptic ideas, 56. 
 3. Birth, 64; wonderful works, 71; Resur- 
 rection, 75 ; our Lord's Divinity, 79. 
 
 VIII. CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES IN NATURAL 
 
 TERMS . . ... 82 
 
 Atonement, 82 ; Election, 83 ; Absolution, 
 83 ; Episcopacy, 84 ; Regeneration or Con- 
 version, 86. 
 
 IX. THE CHURCH AS SOCIETY TURNED 
 
 CHRISTIAN . . .88 
 
 13 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGl 
 
 X. ATTEMPTS TO MAKE HUMAN SOCIETY 
 CHRISTIAN. ENGLAND AS AN EXAMPLE 
 
 i. The Church and the Empire, 103. 2. Eng- 
 land becoming a Christian Church, 105. 3. The 
 assertion of this at the Reformation, 107 ; 
 subjection of the Ecclesiastical to the National 
 power, 107. 4 and 5. This system still in viridi 
 cbservantid, 114. 6. Its beneficial working in 
 the present day, 135 ; in legislation, 135 ; 
 judicial matters, 136; finance, 137; and ad- 
 ministration, 138. 7. It has the promise of 
 the future, 138; (i) as regards unity, 138; 
 (2) for social progress, 147. 
 
 XI. EXPLANATION OF RELIGIOUS TERMS IN 
 
 A NATURAL AND PRACTICAL WAY . 149 
 
 I. God, 149. 2. Jesus Christ, 152. 3. Sal- 
 vation, 154. 4. Condemnation and Hell, 156. 
 5. The wrath of God, 160. 6. Apostasy of 
 the race, 161. 7. The Atonement or Recon- 
 ciliation, 163. 8. The blood of Christ, 167. 
 9. Christianity not sectarian, 169. 10. Con- 
 version, 173. II. Up and down, 175. 12. 
 The Church and its ministers, 180. 13. The 
 Sacraments, 183. 14. A good man vir bonus 
 estquis* 186. 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 TRUE AND FALSE MEANINGS OF "NATURE" 
 AND "NATURAL" 
 
 WHAT do we mean by the terms Nature 
 and Natural ? Sometimes we contrast 
 Nature as non-human with Human Nature ; 
 but for the present discussion we take Man 
 in all the range of his powers and organizations 
 as part of Nature. Sometimes again, as when 
 Rousseau spoke of a state of nature, what is 
 meant is man in his rudimentary state that 
 is, man such as we know him now in mental 
 power but without civilization something which 
 never existed if Evolution in any sense is true, 
 and which therefore is an undefined fiction. 
 Man has from the first been a progressive being. 
 The words of Genesis, from whatever source 
 they come, describe his true nature : Replenish 
 the earth and subdue it and have dominion. 
 That is, Man's nature is social ; and he is to 
 hold supremacy, which implies knowledge. In this 
 lies the germ of all intellectual and social develop- 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ment. Man's nature is not statical but dynamical, 
 and you must take the whole of his expansive 
 powers as included in the term " human nature." 
 In this Man is .in the closest analogy with all 
 living things. Their true nature is their full 
 nature, growing towards perfection. Will anyone 
 say that the true nature of a rose or a geranium 
 is best seen in the hedgerow, and not in the finished 
 product with its splendid colours, its outspread 
 or doubled petals and its matchless scent ? Why 
 and how should we limit the nature of man to 
 some arbitrary stage of his development ? His 
 true nature is his perfect nature, fully wrought 
 out in all its powers mental, social, and spiritual. 
 We may, no doubt, use popular language, 
 as when we say, " There is a great deal of human 
 nature about such a man," meaning that the 
 ordinary, average human nature, which will have 
 its own way, or resents and avenges injuries, is 
 largely present in him. But we know, in speaking 
 thus, that we are taking a part, the most common 
 part no doubt, of human nature for the whole. 
 And so when we speak of the " natural man " 
 contrasted with the spiritual,* ^VXIKOS with 
 TTvcv/iartKos, we are contrasting qualities, not 
 spheres of being, the man in whom animality is 
 
 * It seems to be very unfortunate that our Revisers should 
 have retained the word "natural" in this passage (i Cor. xv. 
 44-9). It appears to imply that all that is spiritual is un- 
 natural, and that man's true nature is destitute of the element 
 of spirituality. 
 
NATURAL WRONGLY CONTRASTED WITH SPIRITUAL 
 
 strong with the man in whom the higher life 
 is developed. But it is the higher life which is 
 natural. Similarly, when we speak of natural in 
 contrast with artificial, we commonly imply that 
 art is misdirected to produce a false impression ; 
 the true art, whether in " music " or " gymnastic," 
 is the drawing out of the faculties in their proper 
 line of evolution ; when something false has crept 
 in the true artist calls for a return to nature. 
 
 If it is asked, further, whether there is no con- 
 trast between nature and grace, between a man 
 subjected to the ordinary influences of this world, 
 of what he sees and hears, and a man subjected 
 to the influences of the Spirit of God, we may 
 answer, first, that the world around us includes 
 the highest as well as the lowest influences, 
 and that grace or spirituality as a quality of 
 the soul is human nature in its noblest. It comes 
 from God, you say. Yes ; so do all things. 
 But we must not separate God and the world. 
 You cannot take in the world as a whole without 
 taking in God ; for God not only encircles but 
 interpenetrates the world : He is the eternal 
 energy by which it moves. But, secondly, we 
 must answer that the supposition that there 
 are some men wholly sensual and others wholly 
 actuated by divine grace is a fiction. It is con- 
 trary to the doctrine of the New Testament 
 which bids every man call God his Father, and 
 acknowledges "the Light which lighteth every 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 man." We are in contact with the invisible and 
 the spiritual at every moment and in every 
 occupation. It is only for purposes of investi- 
 gation and of science that we separate them. 
 As in geometry we assume perfect circles and 
 straight lines which do not exist in the actual 
 objects before us ; as in political economy we 
 start from the hypothesis that a man is always 
 and only seeking wealth, and this with complete 
 knowledge and with full powers of self-deter- 
 mination, all of which hypotheses are creations 
 of the imagination, so in religion we may isolate 
 one sphere of being from another ; but, in actual 
 fact, there is no such separation. The material 
 and the spiritual are subtly intertwined. No 
 doubt if we were to say that God is part of nature 
 we should go wrong, because He is "above all 
 and through all and in us all." But we have a 
 right to say that God is in the highest degree 
 Natural. No part of nature can be separated 
 from Him or be what it ought to be, what it is in 
 its true essence, without Him. 
 
 The fault of the older writers on Natural 
 Religion is that they have assumed a contrast 
 between this and revealed religion. But revelation 
 is itself eminently natural. St. Paul prays for 
 his converts that they may have "the spirit of 
 wisdom and revelation." * The drawing aside of 
 the veil of our ignorance, whether by the pro- 
 * E P h. i. 17. 
 
FAULTS OF DEISTS AND THEISTS 
 
 cesses of science or by the subtle intuitions which 
 God imparts to man, and to which some men of 
 exact science are not strangers in their own 
 sphere, is a sublimation of natural processes, 
 not a contradiction to them. The Deists of the 
 eighteenth century erred by the stress which 
 they laid on the negation of miracles, with which 
 they bound up the whole work of redemption ; 
 and Butler's arguments against them are best 
 when he shows that many of the things objected 
 to are natural and reasonable, as when he points 
 out that God punishes men through the working 
 out of natural laws. The modern Theists again 
 err, not in their direct teaching, which is often 
 excellent, and excellent through its freedom, 
 but in this, that they misunderstand the work 
 of our Saviour, connecting it with the ideas of 
 never-ending torments and substitutional punish- 
 ment, and ignoring the redemptive power of 
 sympathy which makes it possible for one man 
 to raise others to God ; and thus misunderstand- 
 ing the work of Christ, as shown in such words 
 as " I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw 
 all men unto me," and " The love of Christ 
 constraineth us, because we thus judge that, 
 since one died for all, therefore all died." We 
 may, then, apply the inductive method to theology. 
 We may be truly Christian Positivists. It is 
 remarkable that Bishop Westcott constantly 
 maintained that Positivism was in many respects 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 a true form of religion.* The fault of Auguste 
 Comte was not in applying the positive method to 
 the whole of the phenomena with which a thinker 
 has to deal, but in refusing to go as far as that 
 method will safely carry us that is, in refusing to 
 acknowledge as anything knowable the Eternal 
 Energy behind phenomena. The philosophy of the 
 present day, even where it calls itself Agnostic, 
 recognizes this Energy, f and even recognizes it as 
 the chief of all facts. But the Agnostic equally 
 with the Positivist errs in declaring it unknowable. 
 I need hardly add that there are many things 
 equally wrong in Comte's philosophy, which I 
 only instance as being the most thorough attempt 
 to treat all phenomena, material, social, and 
 spiritual, as under the realm of law. He was 
 especially, even ludicrously, wrong in the account 
 he gave of the origin of Christianity, which, 
 indeed, he seems never to have studied. 
 
 How, I ask, can we know any cause except 
 by its effects ? But, if we know Life, or Love, 
 or Gravitation, or Ether, or the subtle influence 
 of man upon man, by seeing these at work, and 
 rising from the phenomena to their causes, why 
 should we hesitate to acknowledge the Supreme 
 Cause of all, and to clothe Him with the attri- 
 butes of truth and beneficence which we see 
 
 * See his " Aspects of Positivism in Relation to Christianity " 
 appended to The Gospel of the Resurrection. 
 
 t See quotation from Herbert Spencer, at p. 19. 
 
AGNOSTICS AND POSITIVISTS 
 
 working themselves out in the world ? Man's 
 capacity for religion that is, for fellowship with 
 God (or, to speak as a Positivist or an Agnostic, 
 his power of apprehending the Universal Being 
 and living in union with it) is as demonstrable 
 as his capacity for assimilating food. The saying 
 of Augustine is a truth of experience : " O Lord, 
 we are made for Thee ; and our spirits have no 
 rest till they find rest in Thee." 
 
 When men speak of rising from facts, or be- 
 ginning with facts, they are apt to speak of 
 external facts only, either those of the physical 
 world or the manifestation of moral phenomena 
 in events. But we must take in all the facts. 
 The inner life of man is as much a fact as are the 
 facts of optics or of some great battle. We have 
 been too long under the dominion of externals. 
 It is time that we should assert that the human 
 personality, with all its functions and its needs, 
 must always be the centre of interest. The 
 value of the first chapter of Genesis is not that it 
 gives a cosmogony more or less in harmony with 
 subsequent investigations, but that, in contrast 
 with the Pantheistic or idolatrous systems which 
 divinized the external powers and placed man 
 beneath them, it enthrones man as supreme, and 
 makes him, not the sun or the winds or the light- 
 ning, the image of God. And, further, it is man 
 in his relations, not in his individual capacity, 
 that is dwelt upon. " In the image of God created 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 He him, male and female created He them." 
 This may rightly seem to us to give a positive 
 ground for the representation of the divine per- 
 sonality, not as merely individual, but as social ; 
 we need not dwell upon this here. What is much 
 more important is that it points to the moral 
 and social life, the life of true relations, the 
 life of righteousness, as the necessary and supreme 
 requirement of humanity. The Bible, therefore, 
 which may be said to be the history of the establish- 
 ment and practice of true relations between 
 spiritual beings that is, between God and man, 
 and between man and man is in the fullest sense 
 human and natural. 
 
 The Bible culminates in Christ: and Christ 
 has been viewed in past times in an unnatural 
 light. Men have begun, we may venture to say, 
 at the wrong end : they have supposed that 
 they know the metaphysical nature of God, 
 and have attributed this to Christ, and thus 
 have made a contrast between the divine and 
 the human elements in Him which has caused 
 endless disputes ; and these disputes have made 
 His life unreal to us, and to a great extent de- 
 stroyed its moral power. We are returning from 
 this in the present day : yet, as it seems, we are 
 hampered by the wrong processes of the past. The 
 Synoptic Evangelists (we must begin with the 
 Synoptics because they give us the simple narra- 
 tive, while in the fourth Gospel St. John represents 
 
MORAL SUPREMACY AND DIVINITY 
 
 the later and maturer phase of reflection) tell 
 us of one who went about doing good, subject to 
 all the conditions of our nature, but differing 
 from us only in this, that his goodness is supreme.* 
 This moral supremacy is the central point for 
 every man who calls himself a Christian. In itself 
 it is in the highest sense natural ; it is in the 
 adjuncts attributed to it, or the inferences drawn 
 from it, that there is anything that can be called 
 unnatural. But let a word be said as to Moral 
 Supremacy. Men say that it is not the same as 
 Divinity. But this comes from taking a low 
 view of morality. Christian morality is the work 
 of the Spirit of God. God is Love ; and Christ 
 is the image of that Love in humanity. On 
 the moral side, therefore, which is of the 
 chief importance to us, as being the most 
 knowable and that from which all meta- 
 physical ideas about God must start, to say that 
 Christ is morally perfect is to say that He is 
 divine. 
 
 * Perhaps a few words here may be devoted to the late Father 
 Tyrrell's book, Religion at the Crossways (p. 228), which is an 
 attempt to destroy the supremacy of moral goodness, and to 
 go back to the idea that representations which he sometimes 
 speaks of as metaphysical, sometimes as Apocalyptic, some- 
 times even as justifying the Zoroastrian notion of the perpetual 
 antagonism of Ormuzd and Ahriman, are indispensable and 
 supreme over righteousness, that these representations are 
 preserved for us in the Roman Church and its ordinances, 
 and that to deny these is worse than to deny God Himself. 
 "A heretic," he says, "is worse than an infidel." 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 That which has here been called the chief point of 
 all, the moral supremacy of Christ, must be taken 
 for granted, since this treatise appeals to convinced 
 and enthusiastic disciples of the Master. It is the 
 chief point of all because God must be thought of 
 not less as supreme power than as supreme good- 
 ness ; and, if we are convinced that Christ is morally 
 supreme, we are thereby asserting that He is 
 the image or Son of God. We are all sons of God, 
 it may be said ; and Christ was not merely a 
 very good man. We all feel that this is so ; 
 but the definition of it is beyond us. It would 
 be impossible here to attempt to show the features 
 of His character and teaching which have con- 
 vinced us personally, which have convinced 
 generation after generation, even after it had 
 seemed that their force had been discounted 
 or that human progress had gone beyond them. 
 Let it be assumed that we agree in reckoning 
 Christ as the supreme Lord of our own consciences 
 and of all human life. The deepest thought has 
 always returned to Him ; and such a return we are 
 now witnessing, unless we are much mistaken, 
 not in our own country only and in America, 
 but both in France and in Germany. But in 
 France adhesion to Christ is marred among half 
 the people by its being supposed to be necessarily 
 connected with the Papal system, while the 
 opponents of that system are rather in the position 
 of seekers for a moral basis of their aspirations 
 
 10 
 
SUPREMACY OF CHRIST 
 
 than as having found one. The aspiration, 
 however, is seen from time to time, and signally 
 in a speech of M. Jaures' addressed to the clerical 
 party some three years ago. 
 
 ii 
 
CHAPTER II 
 MORALS, FAITH, AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 THE attempt we are making to harmonize, 
 and in a certain sense identify, Christianity 
 with the natural course of human life and history 
 is often suspected because it is thought that it 
 seems to shut out the eternal world, which is 
 assumed to be the principal, or even the sole 
 object of religion. On the one side Christianity 
 is blamed as being nothing but " other- worldli- 
 ness," and therefore as having little bearing 
 on human progress ; on the other it is said that 
 to dwell on the moral side of Christianity detracts 
 from the hopes of the eternal world and the 
 highest parts of human life. These questions 
 become very pressing when the moral training 
 of the 3'oung is thought to be sufficient in itself, 
 and is set in opposition to Christian teaching ; and, 
 on the other hand, when it is maintained that 
 the highest moral teaching is worthless unless an 
 element which is not moral, but is sometimes 
 conceived as Apocalyptic, or in an exclusive 
 sense spiritual and religious, be superadded, and 
 the expression " other- worldliness " is accepted 
 as right and necessary, and special religious 
 
 12 
 
FAITH THE HIGHEST FUNCTION OF MAN 
 
 ceremonies or ideas, such as those of the Church 
 of Rome, are reckoned necessary to the main- 
 tenance of this spirituality. But human nature 
 is one, and the spiritual and the moral interlace 
 one another ; the Power also by which the whole 
 world is upheld and actuated is one, so that the 
 separation of the spiritual from the rest of the 
 whole development is fictitious. It is of use only 
 for the purposes of thought, and only for a season. 
 The objects of faith are as real (to the believer,) 
 as substantial and clear (Heb. xi. i), as the things 
 we see and touch. And those who have not 
 embraced the faith which makes them so are 
 really deficient in the exercise of the most im- 
 portant of human faculties. Moreover, the action 
 of the invisible Energy over the visible results 
 becomes clearer and clearer ; materialism seems 
 to have almost died out. And if the various 
 attempts whether of Faith healing or of psychical 
 research, or even of so-called Christian science 
 should be able to bring the invisible world more 
 definitely within the domain of exact knowledge, 
 this would only mean that a part of nature with 
 which scientific thought has hitherto been too little 
 acquainted is becoming more fully known to us. 
 It was said by Auguste Comte that religion was 
 first revealed and afterwards reasoned out ; 
 and, though M. Comte, in his dogmatic manner, 
 shut out as beyond our ken the belief of God, 
 yet his saying is applicable to our Christian faith. 
 
 13 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 What we believe to have been imparted through 
 the ancient seers and through Christ Himself 
 by the immediate action of the Holy Spirit 
 becomes the object of research and reasoning, 
 and passes by degrees into positive knowledge. 
 
 We may look at this great matter from what 
 may be called the other side. You say, Let us teach 
 morals but not religion. Is this possible or 
 desirable ? You make a code of morals, but 
 a code is but a small part of either morals or 
 faith. You want many other things, especially 
 the force of example, and the influence of mind 
 upon mind, and the great and successful experi- 
 ments in those sides of human life, of which 
 history is full. Is it reasonable to leave out the 
 history of the process through which we and 
 the more cultivated branches of the human race 
 have been impelled along the path of moral 
 goodness ? And, when we arrive at the con- 
 viction that the centre of this process is to be 
 found in the life and death and resurrection of 
 Jesus Christ, how can we in our moral teaching 
 omit not only His teaching btit His personality ? 
 
 But if, on account of the unhappy divisions 
 existing amongst Christians, this highest source 
 of human goodness has to be omitted either in 
 families or in public schools, or in public dealing 
 with the social and political spheres, those who 
 believe in Christ need not despair ; for, if Christ 
 is in every man and in all history and all know- 
 
MORALS AND FAITH 
 
 ledge, if the conscience of each man is the organ of 
 the Holy Spirit, then we must believe that all 
 honest teaching and all attempts to impart good 
 principles are, as we may say, Christianity in its 
 lower grades ; and if, as we see to be the fact, 
 the moral atmosphere of a Christian country, 
 its literature and its public opinion, is very 
 largely saturated with Christian ideas, we may 
 believe that the lower grade will be a step up- 
 wards towards the higher. There can be ulti- 
 mately but one moral standard, and it is that 
 which is furnished to us by the Cross of Christ. 
 
 Still, we cannot but crave some firmer hold 
 on the eternal world than human life and morality 
 present to us. We may admit and assert that 
 the various grades of moral life which we have 
 touched upon fit into and lead up to one another. 
 But we have, as all history shows, a craving 
 for the knowledge of God and for an assurance 
 that our hopes for the good of mankind are not 
 cut short by death. We enter here on the region 
 of faith ; and much of the confusion which besets 
 our religious ideas and conduct comes from the fact 
 that faith and scientific certainty have not been 
 realized as distinct faculties of the soul equally 
 natural and equally necessary to us, but still dis- 
 tinct. Yet faith is a faculty which we use every 
 day, and without which our intercourse with one 
 another could not be carried on. In the com- 
 monest transactions of business we often say 
 
 15 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 " We must trust somebody." The speculations 
 of the merchant, the conduct of a household, 
 the ventures of political life, all demand this 
 faculty ; much more does all social intercourse. 
 Consequently, when a man feels that Jesus Christ 
 has been to him the highest moral influence, 
 he cannot but feel a longing to know and possess 
 the power by which the life of the Master was 
 supported. Christ was supported by prayer. 
 We constantly read of His spending whole nights 
 in prayer to God. He, therefore, who would follow 
 Christ must himself pray and teach both young 
 and old to pray. And prayer must be to him not 
 merely an occasional act, but a constant com- 
 munion with God. 
 
 But the assurance which this communion en- 
 genders is a moral one, like that which comes 
 from the practice of justice or of kindness. If the 
 distinction of faith and scientific certainty is not 
 preserved, religion is turned into a set of pro- 
 positions or of ceremonies which can be imposed 
 upon men at all stages of their development, and 
 then it becomes successively a bondage and an 
 irritant, and finally a provocative to rebellion. 
 This is what we see in its fullest form in France, 
 and what we have to beware of in England. 
 
 16 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 PARTIAL AND IMPERFECT RELIGIOUS 
 SYSTEMS 
 
 IT is necessary to touch here upon some 
 of the more fundamental questions which 
 have been merely glanced at above. 
 
 The first of these is the relation of God to the 
 world, and the attempts which have been made 
 to define it. 
 
 There is no one, we may assume, that fails to 
 acknowledge the existence of a power by which the 
 whole world is moved, of something beyond and 
 below the phenomena which meet our eyes and 
 which we can see or hear or touch. To the Hindu 
 or the Buddhist this spiritual substratum is alone 
 the reality ; the rest is Maya, a deceptive appear- 
 ance. And in Europe we may see a tendency in 
 the same direction, whether in the mediaeval 
 realists or of philosophies like that of Hegel in 
 Germany. The spiritual is greater than the 
 changing appearance, the idea or substance 
 than the phenomena. To each of these God 
 is the substance, the underlying reality, the in- 
 forming and actuating Power of the whole universe. 
 Such a belief when it passes into morals breeds 
 
 c 17 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 questions of the deepest kind. To the thorough- 
 going pantheist there is no morality. The Hindu 
 will say of a little child, "He is like God ; good 
 and evil are indifferent to him." It would be 
 beyond the scope of a work like the present to go 
 into the questions thus raised. The belief, how- 
 ever, in the immanence of God, which is to a 
 certain extent liable to the same difficulties, we 
 must touch upon in a later place. 
 
 We have said that no one presumes to deny 
 the existence of some supreme power. M. Comte, 
 indeed, is sometimes spoken of as an atheist ; 
 but his position was merely that of such a force 
 as we call God nothing could be known. He was 
 really an Agnostic, only protesting against those 
 who professed to know more. Moreover, the 
 Positive Philosophy must be credited with a 
 great advance upon the philosophy of the previous 
 century, which was materialistic. Comte placed 
 man in the supreme place in the universe, as 
 the Bible does ; and not man as an animal or 
 an automaton, nor only as endued with mind. 
 The affections were to him the highest element 
 in humanity. The world was ruled by the heart 
 of man ; and the Humanity, which he spoke of 
 as God, was essentially Love. This must be 
 acknowledged to have in it the rudiments of the 
 teaching of St. John. 
 
 Let us take the Agnostics of our day, and we 
 shall find in them almost always the rudiments of 
 
 18 
 
IMPERFECT RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 
 
 a Natural Christianity. John Stuart Mill, for 
 instance, was brought up as an atheist : but who 
 could impute atheism, or deny the praise of deep 
 thoughtfulness and desire for spiritual good, which 
 is of the very nature of faith, to the man who 
 wrote as follows, after a criticism of some of the 
 faults of Christian systems : "I believe that the 
 doctrines and precepts of Christ are irreconcileable 
 with nothing which a comprehensive morality re- 
 quires," and who declared his belief that no better 
 rule of life for mankind in general could be given 
 than that each man should ask himself before 
 each action whether or not Christ would have 
 approved it. 
 
 The testimony of Herbert Spencer is still clearer. 
 His book upon ecclesiastical institutions concludes 
 with the following remarkable passage : 
 
 " But one truth must grow even clearer the 
 truth that there is an Inscrutable Existence every- 
 where manifested, to which he can neither find nor 
 conceive either beginning or end. Amid the 
 mysteries which become the more mysterious the 
 more they are thought about, there will remain 
 the one absolute certainty, that he is ever in 
 presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from 
 which all things proceed." * 
 
 A similar testimony is borne by Huxley, who 
 coined the word Agnostic. He is recorded as 
 saying in reference to a power such as that 
 
 * Herbert Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions, p. 843. 
 19 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 described by Spencer, that if that were what was 
 meant by God, " He would be a fool who, even in 
 his heart, denied its existence." And he was fond 
 of quoting the words of the prophet Micah : 
 ' ' What doth the Lord require of thee but to do 
 justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly 
 with thy God?" 
 
 We might take the testimony of Matthew 
 Arnold, who, though stumbling at the attribution 
 of personality to God, yet showed the utmost 
 value for the person of Christ, and insight into 
 His teaching, and remained a communicant of the 
 Church to the end of his life. 
 
 No one, probably, has been put forward as a 
 teacher of pure atheism more than Haeckel, but 
 his most recent work, A Scientific Confession of 
 Faith, shows a clear return towards God and im- 
 mortality. " God," he says, "as we are compelled 
 by reflection to recognize, is not to be placed over 
 against the material world as an external being, 
 but as a divine power or moving spirit within the 
 cosmos itself " ; and "It is just as inconceivable 
 that any of the atoms of our brain or of the 
 energies of our spirit should vanish out of the 
 world as that any other particle of matter or 
 energy should do so." Mr. Page Hopps, who 
 gives these quotations (Contemporary Review, 
 January, 1911), sets beside them some words of 
 the present Archbishop of York in which he 
 speaks of God as " the great all-encompassing 
 
 20 
 
HAECKEL, SPENCER, DARWIN 
 
 energy of the universe, realizing Himself in the 
 highest instincts and aspirations of men and in 
 the lowest origins of life," " dwelling within the 
 world of His own making, present in its processes, 
 and realizing His will and purpose through them." 
 
 This idea of an Eternal Energy by which all 
 things are sustained and impelled is an essential 
 feature of the doctrine of evolution, by which 
 all modern thought has been coloured. We 
 need not touch upon the special form in which 
 it appears in the Origin of Species, or in the 
 opposing theories of Lamarck or Weissmann. 
 When Darwin's work first appeared, the question 
 was frequently asked : Does not this constitute 
 a denial of the work of the Creator ? "No," 
 was the sufficient answer made by Asa Gray, 
 Darwin's friend ; " it is an attempt to show how 
 the Creator has worked." * But this it unquestion- 
 ably does ; it makes us realize the presence of 
 the same eternal Power in all parts of the Creation. 
 This appears, indeed, in the modern physical 
 doctrines of the correlation of forces and the 
 conservation of energy. 
 
 Too much, however, has been made of the 
 mode in which evolution takes place, and too 
 
 * Another of the prominent men of science at the time when 
 Darwin's work was discussed by the British Association in 1860 
 pointed out to the present writer, who also was present at that 
 memorable discussion, that the word Creation had only a 
 negative significance, that it merely implied that we did not 
 know the process by which, through the divine power, the world 
 came into being, but which the evolutionist attempted to explain. 
 
 21 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 little of the evolving force. Men have been too 
 ready to give up the enigma. Even Darwin, 
 as is seen by his correspondence with his friend 
 Asa Gray, said that it was doubtful if man had 
 the faculties for solving it. But, without dog- 
 matizing, we may ask how anything spiritual 
 or immaterial can be known. We see the plant 
 or the animal ; we cannot see nor touch the 
 immaterial thing which we call life. But no one 
 can doubt that it is there, and that it is not a 
 mere mechanism. We can understand something 
 of its properties and its character, and may come to 
 learn more even of its first appearance in the world. 
 
 So, when we realize the Eternal Energy, we 
 can infer not only its existence, but also some- 
 thing of its properties and its mode of action. 
 From it all things spring, says Spencer. Can we 
 be wrong in inferring that the Being from which 
 they spring is superior to them ? Must not our 
 reason follow that of the Psalmist : "He that 
 planted the eye, shall he not see ? and He that 
 made the ear, shall He not hear ? " We cannot 
 be wrong in attributing personality and justice 
 and love, and all the virtues to which the heart 
 and conscience of man bear witness, to that Power 
 from which man springs. 
 
 But if this be true, we must look to the presence 
 of this Power in every part of the Creation. It is 
 all of Him, and He is not merely omnipresent but 
 immanent in all things. 
 
 22 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 
 
 THE doctrine of the divine immanence is un- 
 questionably a Christian one. The Preface 
 of the fourth Gospel attests it. " In the beginning 
 was the Word, and the Word was with God, and 
 the Word was God." " All things were made by 
 Him " or through Him. And this assertion is not 
 weakened by the fact that the Word, or Logos, 
 or Memra (to use the word adopted by the re- 
 ligious thought of Palestine), which was so potent 
 in the Egyptian religion and in the writings of 
 Philo, passes also into the New Testament. It 
 shows that Christianity is not a wholly new or 
 separate thing, but is the crown of an edifice 
 partly prepared beforehand ; and this is sub- 
 stantially the teaching of St. Paul as well as St. 
 John. 
 
 The immanence of Christ as the Word in every 
 part of the creation is emphasized by Athanasius 
 in his treatise on the Incarnation. See especially 
 chapter xvn. 
 
 St. Augustine goes farther, and insists on the 
 unity of the religious aspirations of men before 
 Christ appeared with " that which is now called 
 
 23 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the Christian religion." The passage is in his 
 Book Concerning the True Religion, chap. i. A : 
 " Num res ipsa quae nunc Christiana religio nuncu- 
 patur, erat apud antiques, nee defuit ab initio 
 generis humani quousque ipse Christus veniret in 
 carne, unde vera religio quae jam erat coepit ap- 
 pellari Christiana. 
 
 " Far that very thing which is now called the 
 Christian religion existed among the ancients, and 
 never was lacking from the beginning of the 
 human race until the time when Christ Himself 
 should come in the flesh ; from which time the true 
 religion, which already existed, began to be called 
 Christian." 
 
 To revert now to the right conception of God, 
 it must be said that the chief question is not, as 
 has been commonly assumed, whether there is a 
 God (for that js hardly denied), but rather what 
 is the character of God. In the Bible there are 
 hardly any passages arguing the existence of 
 God, but the stress is laid on His character. 
 " A God " might mean Moloch ; but the God of 
 Israel is the Lord who loves righteousness, who 
 gives strength to the weak, who cares for the 
 poor, who pardons iniquity. And these things, 
 too, are assumed, not argued out. The appeal is 
 to the universal conscience. But the revelation 
 is gradual : the true character of God is unveiled 
 by degrees ; but it emerges at last into clearness 
 in the prophets ; and, after its full manifestation 
 
 24 
 
IMMANENCE AND CHARACTER OF GOD 
 
 in Christ, it becomes the inheritance of the world. 
 A similar gradual process of unveiling had been 
 going on among other nations, so that the pro- 
 phets speak of Rahab (Egypt) and Babylon with 
 " those who know God " ; and when Christ is 
 preached to the heathen at Antioch or Lystra, 
 the apostle's word finds an echo in the hearts of 
 the hearers. 
 
 In the opening passage of the fourth Gospel 
 this naturalness and immanence of God and of 
 Christ is clearly set forth. The Word of God 
 is the creative power by which the whole world 
 is built up ; and that Word is the Light which 
 comes to every man, making all who will receive 
 it to become the sons of God. The whole process 
 culminates in the manifestation of the Word in 
 Christ. By Him, to quote the words of St. Paul 
 (Col. i. 17), All things stand fast. The world is 
 made for man, who is God's image ; and Christ is 
 in every man. 
 
 What is this but to say that the Word of God, 
 who is immanent in the whole creation in all its 
 ranks, and most of all in man, dwells by their 
 very nature in all men ? His voice is heard by 
 all, though they do not all obey it. 
 
 Several questions arise about this. 
 
 i. It is asked whether God's immanence does 
 not preclude the faith of His being a Father, 
 to whom, as to a separate personality, we can 
 look up and pray who acts without us as well 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 as within ; whether, to use the words of religious 
 philosophy, He is transcendent as well as immanent. 
 We must maintain that He is both. It may be illus- 
 trated by a simple supposition. Every part of my 
 body is partaker of the life that is in me. I am im- 
 manent in it, and my will directs it. Now, suppos- 
 ing that any part of the body should be endued 
 with a life of its own (as, indeed, it is said that the 
 body is made up of particles which have some sort 
 of self-direction), and that it could act with con- 
 sciousness and will, would that in any way inter- 
 fere with its owning me and my life as the source 
 of its life ? I should still maintain my position 
 of transcendence over it ; and it, unless it should 
 become rebellious and break through the natural 
 order, would say, in the words of Tennyson, 
 " Our wills are ours to make them Thine." 
 
 2. But what, then, of the more difficult problem 
 of evil ? If the Spirit of the Almighty gives us 
 breath and maintains our strength of body and 
 of mind, then is He not maintaining us when 
 we do wrong ? Does He not become our accom- 
 plice in our evil deeds ? We are here face to 
 face with the two insoluble problems of free will 
 and of the permission of our Maker and Preserver 
 to His creatures to do wrong. We can only say 
 that a willing servant is better than an automaton, 
 that a repentant sinner is often better than one 
 who needs no repentance, and that in God's 
 infinite mercy He can (as our experience shows) 
 
 26 
 
IMMANENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 turn evil into good. " God hath concluded them 
 all in unbelief, that He might have mercy upon all." 
 
 Meanwhile the doctrines of the unity of the 
 world through the indwelling of God, and of His 
 presence and that of Christ in all human con- 
 sciences, is a great help to us in taking in the 
 doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. 
 If Christ is in every man, then the Incarnation 
 is the highest point of a process which is in its 
 very essence natural : and, as St. John says, 
 " The Word was the Light of every man," and 
 " The Life was manifested," " the Word was 
 made flesh." If, further, we acknowledge the 
 Father and the Son to be alike God, and God 
 to be a Spirit, we shall be little inclined either 
 to doubt that the object of our worship is a 
 Trinity, or to make assertions beyond those of 
 Scripture, whether with the Western theology 
 we speak of one Substance in three Persons, or 
 with the Eastern of three Substances in one 
 Essence. Yet we cannot but feel that these 
 definitions belong more to philosophy than to 
 faith ; and in the form which they reach in the 
 "Quicunque Vult " they are felt increasingly to 
 be unfit for use in the congregation. 
 
 These considerations also solve for us the 
 difficulties which have been felt in harmonizing 
 moral goodness with religion when it is found in 
 men who have not known Christ consciously, but 
 have followed the divine voice which speaks in 
 27 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 their consciences ; whether they be philosophers 
 like Socrates, or founders of religions like Buddha, 
 or simply good men whom we cannot call definitely 
 religious. St. Paul says, " When the Gentiles 
 do by nature the things of the law, they show 
 the law written upon their hearts." * 
 
 If God be everywhere and in every man, then 
 the promptings of good which they are obeying 
 are those of the Holy Spirit ; they partake of 
 the anima naturaliter Christiana. And it has 
 been well observed that when St. Paul speaks 
 of the larger evolution of the Christian life, he 
 uses the very words of Greek moral philosophy : 
 " Whatsoever things are true or of good report, 
 if there be any virtue or any praise, think on 
 these things." We might think it was Aristotle 
 who was speaking. 
 
 These considerations may help towards the 
 solution of the question now agitated both in 
 France and England respecting Moral Education, 
 to which we have already referred. It is true 
 that moral teaching, if religion is completely 
 ignored, is stunted and insufficient ; but there is 
 no such break in the nature of things between 
 morals and religion, as is presumed on both sides 
 of this controversy. If God is the universal 
 Energy, and is Himself in the highest sense a 
 moral Power, then every sincere effort after 
 goodness is a part of the work of His Spirit. 
 
 * Rom. ii. 15. 
 
 28 
 
RELIGION IN EDUCATION 
 
 Those who wish to dispense with religion do so 
 almost always because of the disputes which 
 it begets through the undue stress laid on doctrinal 
 forms or modes of worship or clerical organizations, 
 all of which, though of great value, are not of 
 the essence of the Christian religion. On this 
 more will be said later on. It is enough at this 
 point to insist that the essence of Christianity is 
 Christ Himself, His life and death, His teaching 
 and influence, and the confession of His divine 
 Supremacy. History is without meaning if 
 He is left out : is it thought that it could be 
 taught with the omission of the lives of great 
 men who have influenced human progress 
 of whom Christ is in almost any computation 
 the greatest ? " The true worshipping of God," 
 says our Church in its Litany, is " righteousness 
 and holiness of life." If the distinction between 
 essentials and even the most important adjuncts 
 were kept in view, and many of the things which 
 have caused dispute were placed in the category 
 of what logicians call " inseparable accidents," * 
 a great step would be taken towards agreement. 
 The belief in the immanence of God also tends 
 to clear up the mystery of prayer. The two highest 
 forms of prayer are, first, Acceptance of the will 
 of God ; and, secondly, Communion with Him ; and 
 to these the ordinary objections do not apply. 
 Do they really apply to the third and most com- 
 
 * Aldrich, c. i, 6 ; Whately, b. ii, c. v, 2. 
 29 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 mon category of prayer, that of petition ? To 
 a certain extent, yes ; that is, if minute requests 
 are proffered as a sort of demand, or if prayer is 
 used as a kind of physical force so many prayers, 
 so much result. But this is not Christian prayer. 
 But have not those who deprecate this abuse 
 of prayer gone too far when they forbid the 
 mother from asking for the life of her sick child or 
 a famine-stricken people from crying to God for 
 relief ? The same God who prompts the prayer 
 works through all the agencies which sway the 
 intricate scheme of Creation, and we cannot 
 limit His person or His wisdom in the use of them 
 to bring about the results of His will. 
 
 If God is the underlying Power and Eternal 
 Energy by which the whole world is actuated, 
 prayer is the natural expression of our union 
 with Him and the dependence of ourselves and of 
 all things upon Him. To a Christian mind the ques- 
 tion becomes simple. We have the right, as God's 
 children and servants, to bring before Him every- 
 thing that affects us in weal or woe, great or small. 
 But we do so in consciousness of our ignorance. 
 " O my Father, if it be possible." But " Thy will, not 
 mine, be done." This cry is eminently natural. It 
 suggested itself to Socrates in the prayer : 
 
 Zeu /JcuriAeu, TO, //,cv ecr$Aa 
 ', ra 8e \vypa 
 
 " Great Jove, the good, whether we ask or no, 
 Give us ; the evil, ev'n though ask'd, deny." 
 
 30 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE MIRACULOUS 
 
 BUT now, if we dare to feel ourselves thus in 
 contact with divinity, are we not in contact 
 with that which has been called supernatural ? 
 And does this not lead to the belief in prodigies 
 and miracles ? There is a great deal of confusion 
 and difficulty about this ; but it seems to be 
 gradually yielding to two considerations : (i) That 
 scientific investigation is more ready than at any 
 former time to acknowledge the importance of 
 spiritual powers and experiences ; (2) that Christian 
 authority, the voice of the Spirit of God within us, 
 both sanctions and demands such investigations. 
 
 This brings us to a discussion of what are 
 commonly spoken of as miracles that is, of 
 works which are thought to have a special power 
 to prove the truth of Christianity. The word is 
 an unfortunate one, and should not be used 
 if we can avoid it. What does it mean ? To 
 Paley and all his school, and in the common 
 estimation of mankind, though it seems never 
 to have been precisely defined, it appears to 
 mean an effect which is without a cause, or one 
 in which God has acted directly without any 
 intervening medium ; and the importance of 
 
 31 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the event is supposed to lie in the assumed fact 
 that it is contrary to the course of nature, that 
 the laws of nature are in these cases broken 
 through. But is not this an unwarranted as- 
 sumption ? and is there not the utmost danger 
 in making such an assumption ? The words 
 by which these events are described, whether 
 in their derivation or in their use, in Scripture 
 or theology certainly do not warrant such a 
 definition. 
 
 " Miraculum " means only a wonderful event ; 
 and this, whether or not we know the cause. 
 If we add that it is an event which brings 
 us consciously into the presence of God, that is 
 done by every striking event a battle, an eclipse, 
 an earthquake. Such things bring before us 
 in a special way the fact of the presence and 
 energy of the Eternal. His power seems con- 
 centrated for the moment on one point ; we 
 seem to be face to face with God. " Surely God 
 is in this place," or " Doubtless there is a God 
 that judgeth in the earth." 
 
 The best and most testing illustration we can 
 use is that of the crossing of the Red Sea. It 
 has been commonly held it was held by Matthew 
 Arnold that this was in an eminent sense miracu- 
 lous. But it certainly was not an event without 
 a cause, nor was it an instance of the exertion 
 of the will of God without any intervening medium. 
 The accounts are quite clear on this point. The 
 
 32 
 
MIRACLES THE EXODUS 
 
 sea driven back by the strong east wind and 
 leaving the sand dry, the storm-cloud beating 
 in the face of the Egyptians while the lightning 
 made clear the path of Israel, and the waters of 
 the lagoons to the North and the Red Sea to 
 the South serving as walls to mark out the path ; 
 the clear shining forth of the sun (the eye of God, 
 as the thunder is His voice), and the returning 
 tide of the morning which overwhelmed the 
 Egyptians, are, all of them, the elements through 
 which God is working. It is remarkable that 
 when the book called the Speaker's Commentary 
 was written, at a time of theological excitement, 
 with the special object of reinforcing the faith 
 in the authenticity of the Biblical narratives, 
 the commentator of the Exodus treated each 
 part of the account of the passage of the Red 
 Sea as a description of natural phenomena. Was 
 it, then, less a miracle ? Was it less calculated 
 to impress the minds of witnesses or readers 
 with the sense of the Divine presence ? Not if 
 we are content to believe that God works out His 
 purposes through that Nature which He has 
 made, and that the winds and the sea obey Him, 
 combining their power for the deliverance of 
 His people. 
 
 There are three words which describe the 
 wonderful events recorded in the Bible ; but 
 none of them demands the sense which is com- 
 monly implied by the word miracle. The word 
 
 D 33 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 itself, as pointed out above, means simply a won- 
 derful event, and if we add that the narrative is 
 intended to make us conscious of the Divine 
 presence, that is a sufficient interpretation of the 
 word. The Biblical words are, first, orrjpciov, a 
 sign ; and this translation is that which has been 
 adopted (though not quite uniformly) in the 
 Revised Version, as, for instance, in the statement 
 of the water turned into wine. " This beginning 
 of His signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and 
 manifested forth His glory." The second word, 
 Swaps, simply denotes power, or an act of power, 
 and this also is recognized by the Revised Version, 
 as in Mark ix. 39 : " There is no man that shall 
 do a mighty work in my name " ; or Hebrews ii. 4 : 
 " By signs and wonders and by manifold powers " ; 
 and, when the word is translated " miracles," 
 the margin says " Great Powers." A third word, 
 repas, or wonder, like miraculum, does not 
 prejudge the nature of these mighty works ; 
 and it seems unfortunate that, while the word 
 " miracle " is supposed in popular language 
 to imply an event without a cause or the action 
 of God without any medium, it should still be 
 used at all, for it is the source of endless confusion. 
 When men like Hume have said that they did not 
 believe in miracles ; or when men, in a phrase which 
 has become common in our day, say " Miracles 
 do not happen," it is impossible to know what 
 is meant, and endless controversy has gone on 
 
 34 
 
SIGNS, POWERS, AND WONDERS 
 
 about " miracles " without any attempt being 
 made on either side to define the word. 
 
 But two remarks of the utmost importance 
 must be made : 
 
 i. In the controversies about " miracles " 
 it has been assumed that a miracle implies a 
 violation of the laws of nature and its uniformity ; 
 and consequently " Natural Religion " has often 
 meant Religion which denies God's revelation 
 of Himself, because such a revelation involves 
 the assertion of facts which are supposed to contra- 
 dict the laws by which the world is governed. The 
 answer which has often been given to this is 
 that we do not know all the laws of nature, and 
 that all that can be meant by " the objector " 
 to a " miracle " is that the fact stated is contrary 
 to the laws of nature as we know them. This 
 has seemed to imply that there may be exceptions ; 
 this we cannot assert. And it is certain that 
 most of the wonders, whether of sacred or profane 
 books, have become more natural to us. The 
 case of the Exodus has just been touched upon. 
 Similarly, when Herodotus reports that those who 
 sailed round Africa declared that the sun had 
 twice changed its course by rising on their right 
 hand instead of their left or vice versa, he seems to 
 be narrating a prodigy ; but now the statement to 
 us means no more than that the Phoenicians had 
 rounded the Cape of Good Hope and had re- 
 turned. In a great many cases a similar advance 
 
 35 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of knowledge may make a " miracle " easy to 
 believe. And our wisdom will be commonly 
 to maintain no more than this, that a certain 
 statement, if precisely representing the facts, is, 
 or at least appears to be, contrary to the laws 
 of nature so far as we know them.* 
 
 2. The other observation is this : that there 
 is no impiety in using all our powers of judgment 
 in ascertaining the real facts with which we are 
 dealing. We are contending that religion and 
 Christianity are natural, and we cannot but 
 blame the tendency to represent occurrences as 
 being strange, and to the ordinary understanding 
 impossible, when the statement of them in Scrip- 
 ture does not demand this. For instance, the 
 words of the poetical book of Jasher which 
 have created perplexity and controversy, " Sun, 
 stand thou still," have a marginal reading, " Sun, 
 be thou silent," and may well be understood 
 of the sun being darkened by the tremendous 
 hail-storm which is described in the previous 
 
 * This matter is very clearly stated in the luminous work of the 
 late Duke of Argyll, called The Reign of Law > at pages 14, 15 : 
 ' ' The real difficulty lies in the idea of Will exercised with- 
 out the use of means not in the exercise of Will through means 
 which are beyond our knowledge. Now, have we any right to 
 say that belief in this is essential to all Religion ? If we have 
 not, then it is only putting, as so many other hasty sayings do 
 put, additional difficulties in the way of Religion." "Those 
 who believe that God's will does govern the world must believe 
 that, ordinarily at least, He does govern it by the choice and use 
 of means. Nor have we any certain reason to believe that He 
 ever acts otherwise. " 
 
 36 
 
THE DUTY OF INQUIRY 
 
 verse. The prose writer, who quotes from the 
 book of Jasher, understands the words as im- 
 plying an actual suspension of the sun's motion ; 
 but the tendency to turn poetry into prose is 
 well known, and must be allowed for in scriptural 
 as in common literature. We may notice the 
 reverse tendency by comparing the prose state- 
 ment of the passage of the Red Sea with that 
 of the Psalms : the perfectly natural description 
 of the prose writer that the waters became a 
 wall (that is, a defence and a guide) to the Israelites 
 as they crossed the uncovered sands becomes to 
 the poet " The floods stood upright as a heap, 
 and the waters were congealed in the heart of 
 the sea " (Exod. xv. 8). 
 
 We must hold, then, that it is not merely a right 
 but a duty for believers who have the capacity 
 for such investigations to endeavour to under- 
 stand the events which, with the considerations 
 stated above, may rightly be called miracles. 
 But in this there is no concession made to rational- 
 ism or so-called naturalism ; for these systems 
 go upon a false hypothesis. Rationalism starts 
 from the presumption that we have a sufficient 
 knowledge of the universe to be able to say that 
 all narratives must be made to comply with our 
 present experience ; and " naturalism " implies that 
 all which is not within the scope of exact science 
 is for all practical purposes non-existent ; whereas 
 we all believe in a state into which we pass 
 
 37 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 when we die, but of which we have as yet no 
 trustworthy experience, though faith makes it 
 real to us; we believe also in the Divine Spirit 
 working incessantly, by means often unknown 
 to us, for the fulfilment of His own purposes. 
 But, though our knowledge is very imper- 
 fect, its bounds are extended from one age 
 to another ; and, as with space, the farther 
 we penetrate the more we are conscious of the 
 vastness of our ignorance ; we are, as Newton 
 said, like children picking up shells on the shore, 
 while the depths of the ocean are unexplored ; 
 and further, the scientific examination of religious 
 experience, the knowledge of non-Christian re- 
 ligions, the growth of mysticism, the fuller under- 
 standing of the Bible, and the realization that 
 our own lives are swayed not merely by our 
 own consciousness, but by vast unknown or but 
 partially known powers without and within us, 
 must make us very cautious in denying what 
 is reported to us with a fair show of honesty and 
 capacity. 
 
 But we must add that it is a weak faith which 
 demands wonders as its support. Our Lord 
 discouraged it when He said, " Except ye see 
 signs and wonders, ye will not believe." The 
 object of wonders is twofold : first, to arrest the 
 attention and make the presence of God more 
 clearly felt ; but, secondly, to make us realize 
 the constant working and indwelling of God. 
 
 38 
 
NOT WONDERS BUT A FULLER FAITH 
 
 The faith which depends on wonders is the 
 childish state, and belongs to a stage of growth 
 which is passing away. We must not limit our 
 views by a literal adherence to the reports of 
 men and times which knew nothing of the uni- 
 formity of nature and the constancy of law, 
 but must learn to realize in our daily experience 
 the presence of the Almighty Father, in the 
 physical world, in the social world, and in that 
 region where the two meet and act or react one 
 on the other, in the spirit of a great teacher who 
 said : " The curtain of the physical world is 
 closing in upon us. What is this but that the 
 arms of His intelligence are embracing us on every 
 side ? " * 
 
 * Professor Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul Essays and Disser- 
 tations, New Edition, p. 236. 
 
 39 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 AUTHORITY OF BIBLE, CHURCH AND 
 CREEDS 
 
 i. THE BIBLE 
 
 T)ERHAPS this may be a convenient place 
 ]L at which to say a word about a saying 
 originally used by Professor Jowett, that " we 
 must read the Scriptures like any other book." 
 The saying falls in with the general purpose 
 of this treatise ; but what does it mean ? Pre- 
 sumably it is a protest against unreasonable 
 interpretations of Scripture, whether coming 
 from Patristic sources or from more modern 
 theories of literal inspiration. But how do we 
 read other books ? To read them aright we must 
 not only understand words and idioms, but 
 we must enter into the atmosphere in which 
 the author wrote, we must know something of 
 his age, his surroundings, the ideas and preposses- 
 sion of those among whom he lived. No one 
 would read Montaigne or Shakespeare without 
 understanding something of the French and 
 English history of their time and of its religion 
 and philosophy and social movements. And no 
 one would read the New Testament aright with- 
 40 
 
AUTHORITY-THE BIBLE 
 
 out some knowledge of Jewish modes of thought, 
 of the history of Rome and Greece and Judaea, 
 of the Psalms and prophets, and, let us add, without 
 some sense of a Divine message which the books 
 convey to us. The equipment needed for the 
 two literatures, sacred and profane, is different. 
 And an illiterate man who is filled with the love 
 of God will understand the Bible better than a 
 clever man whose emotions have never been 
 stirred by the longing for the Kingdom of God 
 and the powers of the world to come. On the 
 other hand, the Bible has its human side, and 
 men who begin studying it simply as literature 
 will frequently be drawn by it into the current 
 of prophecy and of prayer. 
 
 We may shortly dispose of the subjects of 
 inspiration and revelation which were so much 
 agitated in a former generation, and were sup- 
 posed to make the whole Bible " supernatural," 
 and to guarantee the accuracy of all that it con- 
 tains. It is no longer maintained among us that 
 inspiration implies verbal accuracy, or that 
 each word has some cryptic meaning different 
 from that which it would have in other writings 
 of the same time as the Biblical book which we 
 are studying ; or that the historical narratives 
 are as exact as they would be in the writings 
 of a time in which the historical conscience 
 is awake both in the writer and in the reader. 
 It matters little even that the writers in certain 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 cases took the fabric of their history from traditions 
 outside the Jewish or Christian Church. It 
 is the use which they made of such materials 
 which shows their inspiration. The narrative 
 of the Creation or the Deluge or of the Tower of 
 Babel may have come from other writings, or 
 from a general tradition current in Western 
 Asia ; but the lessons which, as they have come 
 down to us, they are designed to teach are those 
 of true religion. The story of the Creation in- 
 volves five assumptions of supreme importance: 
 (i) that the substratum of the universe and its 
 meaning are spiritual and purposeful, chaos 
 becoming order by the movement of the Spirit 
 of God ; (2) that the various ranges of the Creation 
 culminate in man, and therefore that man 
 is not, as in other systems, subject to the powers 
 of the physical or animal world, but supreme over 
 them ; (3) that the various parts of the creation 
 are valued by their approach to man ; (4) that 
 man is the image of God ; (5) that man is a 
 social being and the monogamic family a divine 
 ordinance. 
 
 The present writer is by no means disposed 
 to undervalue the germs of moral or spiritual 
 truth to be found in non- Christian systems ; he 
 would treat them as the product of the divine 
 Word or Spirit which is the light of every man, 
 and would think of those who believe in them 
 as being, in some rudimentary degree, in the 
 
 42 
 
GENESIS-THE REVELATION OF GOD 
 
 condition of many of the Old Testament characters, 
 varying from that of Micah in the Book of Judges 
 to that of the noblest of the Psalmists ; but he 
 would ask with confidence whether the same 
 amount of spiritual truth could be found in any 
 short passage of the Koran or the Vedas, or the 
 books of the Buddhists or the Chinese, as is to be 
 found in the first chapter of Genesis. 
 
 As to the word Revelation, although it is 
 common to use it as a declaration of objective 
 truth about God, in contrast with the subjective 
 process of Inspiration, yet the two terms are 
 practically the same. The Revelation or un- 
 veiling of God and of things divine is made 
 through the spirit and consciousness of the 
 inspired man ; and when St. Paul desires that 
 fresh progress may be made in the divine life, 
 he prays that his converts " may be granted 
 the spirit of revelation" that is, that through 
 their consciousness the truth concerning God 
 may be unveiled to them and others. We none 
 of us doubt that this unveiling has been made 
 in a partial and evolutionary way, " by divers 
 portions and in divers manners," or that its full- 
 ness is to be found in the life and teaching of 
 Christ. The curious passage in one of M. Comte's 
 books in which he says that religion is first re- 
 vealed and afterwards proved by arguments 
 has been quoted above. The divine truth first 
 communicates itself, whether by the " inner 
 
 43 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 light," as it is called by the Society of Friends, 
 or by statements or impressions of various kinds, 
 to the consciousness of men, whether singly or 
 in societies ; and then they find the proofs of 
 it in experience. The revelation or unveiling 
 of God has come to us through men who main- 
 tained the closest fellowship with Him, so that 
 we can believe that He spoke through them ; 
 and we find proofs of their testimony on every 
 side. If we consider the difference of tone adopted 
 by more " advanced " critics now and that of 
 thirty years ago, and still more the interest shown 
 in the Bible by writers in the popular publications 
 of the present day, we may safely say that there 
 has been a vast recovery of confidence in the 
 important place of religion and of Scripture in 
 human life. 
 
 As an instance of this, we may take the estimate 
 of the Acts of the Apostles. Some thirty years 
 ago, men like Zeller and the school of Baur held 
 the field ; and one of our leading historical 
 biblicists spoke of the Acts as a very untrust- 
 worthy document. Now not only does Ramsay 
 treat it as the authentic work of a consummate 
 historian, but the estimate of Harnack himself 
 is hardly less favourable. His book on Luke the 
 Physician speaks of the Gospel and Acts together 
 as a "great historical work," and vindicates it 
 against its adverse critics. 
 
 It would be obviously impossible to make a 
 
 44 
 

 THE BIBLE AND HISTORICITY 
 
 distinction between parts of the Bible which can 
 be treated with the absolute confidence shown to 
 it by St. Jerome or by the schoolmen or the 
 men of the Reformation and of other parts which 
 are subject to doubt. In some parts of even the 
 New Testament the narrative may seem faulty ; 
 but the general fact and the lesson intended by 
 the writer is clear and convincing. In other 
 cases, especially in the case of the fourth Gospel, 
 we have the noblest teaching bound up with 
 a narrative which at least raises difficult questions. 
 The story of the woman of Samaria may have 
 questionable elements in it, but the words " not 
 in this mountain nor at Jerusalem " and " God 
 is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must 
 worship Him in spirit and in truth/' are surely 
 a divine revelation. The healing of the noble- 
 man's son, if read with Western literalism, may 
 be a difficulty ; but the words, " Except ye see 
 signs and wonders, ye will not believe," surely 
 spring from a divine intelligence. The facts 
 connected with the raising of Lazarus may, as 
 literally told, seem doubtful, but what Christian 
 is there to whom the words, "I am the resurrection 
 and the life ... he that believeth in me shall 
 never die," do not convey the true and good 
 news of God ? Critics like Jean Reville or Loisy 
 constantly say that this or that passage is un- 
 historical. Probably so, we may say, if judged 
 by modern standards of historicity ; but what 
 
 45 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 then ? Is it meant that the author, whoever 
 he was, set to work to make up a story which 
 has no foundation ? If not, then surely the duty 
 of the critic is to endeavour to see what the 
 substratum of truth is on which the account is 
 grounded. And if it be asked who is to judge of 
 this, or if it be said that when we put aside the 
 literal accuracy we open the door to every sort 
 of vague guess, the reply must be that the powers 
 of discernment which we expect in a loyal critic, 
 his knowledge of the use of words and the mode 
 of expression among those to whom the writer 
 belonged and for whom he wrote, must be our 
 chief help ; and that a sincere heart will do 
 much in the way of disentangling the truth from 
 questionable surroundings. 
 
 What the Higher Criticism* is to the learned 
 man, the assimilating power of a divine sym- 
 pathy is to the simple believer. He may, 
 and no doubt is, often liable to mistakes ; but 
 who that reads the works of critics can deny 
 that they also may be deceived, and that what 
 a man asserts with confidence at one time he 
 is obliged to correct with equal positiveness 
 after a few years ? Often common sense must 
 
 * By the Higher Criticism is meant not, as is often thought- 
 lessly supposed, a criticism made by men who pretend to have 
 more discernment than others, but the criticism which deals with 
 ideas and tendencies in contrast to the Lower, which is con- 
 cerned with the text alone. The Higher Criticism has of late in 
 Germany led men back in many cases to traditional views. 
 
 46 
 
THE HIGHER CRITICISM-CHURCH AUTHORITY 
 
 be called in to correct the verdicts both of scholars 
 and theologians, as well as those both of traditional 
 believers and of partisans. 
 
 2. CHURCH AUTHORITY 
 
 There is, however, another power with which 
 the inquirer has to deal : this is that which is 
 called in a somewhat vague way Church authority. 
 It consists in part of the affirmations of the great 
 Councils and of the Creeds which flowed from 
 them ; in part also from a general consensus 
 of believing men, like that which is implied in 
 the noble words of the Te Deum, " The Holy 
 Church throughout all the world doth acknow- 
 ledge Thee." A great deal of what has been said 
 about the Bible applies to this also. But the 
 misfortune is, first, that this authority is apt to 
 be that of ages and institutions which are not 
 ours, and consequently that no account is taken 
 of the great changes which all human things 
 have undergone ; and, secondly, that Church 
 authority has almost always meant the authority 
 of the clergy. Consequently there is a twofold 
 gap between the authority and those over whom 
 it is exercised. On each of these some ex- 
 planation must be given ; and to each of them 
 the principle of this treatise must be applied ; 
 Christianity must be worked out in harmony with 
 the actual condition and needs of human life. 
 
 47 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 3. THE CREEDS 
 
 When it is said that the Church is our teacher, 
 as in the current expression " The Church to 
 teach and the Scriptures to prove," our minds 
 almost inevitably gravitate towards the age of 
 the great Councils where the Creeds were formed, 
 or else to that of the Reformation when a new 
 set of dogmas came into being. Can either 
 of these be our guide and teacher now ? Do we 
 go to them in our teaching or in solving difficult 
 points of conduct ? Those who have been practi- 
 cally engaged in parochial work, or in any of 
 the movements of thought or of Christian energy, 
 would hardly answer Yes. The Nicene Creed, 
 no doubt, expressed some of the great Christian 
 principles, but in a manner suited to those imbued 
 with Greek metaphysics ; and, as has been well 
 said, we can as little think in Greek as we can 
 speak in Greek : the " Quicunque Vult " is the 
 same thing translated into Latin, and drawn 
 out into its formal consequences ; the one is the 
 creed of the Greek philosopher, the other of the 
 Latin logician. 
 
 We have to translate these affirmations into 
 common or natural language before they can 
 be of use to us ; and this is a process which few 
 can accomplish successfully. Their main object 
 is to assert the Divinity of our Lord ; but it 
 involves this in such terms as those which speak 
 
 4 8 
 
THE CREEDS 
 
 of Him as "of one substance with the Father," 
 or " begotten before all worlds " ; there is no- 
 thing which tells us of His moral supremacy or 
 assists the simple man in grasping the truth that 
 God is love and that Christ's Sonship involves, if 
 it is not identical with, the plain fact that he 
 presents to us the divine love in a human life ; 
 the moral side is left out, the metaphysical is 
 alone presented. So in the " Quicunque Vult," 
 an assertion like that which says that Christ 
 was God ' ' not by conversion of the Godhead into 
 flesh " is very difficult for any but a practised 
 theologian to reconcile with the words of St. John, 
 " The Word was made flesh." Yet it is of such 
 assertions, and not of anything which touches 
 the heart and the life, that we are required to 
 say, under penalty of eternal death, " This is 
 the Catholic Faith." It is true that in the last 
 verse of the Creed it is said that those who have 
 done good will go into life everlasting ; but we 
 may well suspect that, in the minds of those 
 who, like Clovis and his warriors, could thunder 
 forth this or similar expressions as a kind of 
 battle-cry, " those who have done good " meant 
 the Catholics, and "those who have done evil" 
 meant their Arian foes. 
 
 But it may be said, " At all events the Apostles' 
 Creed is simple, and we can all agree upon it as 
 a basis for religious teaching." But what does 
 it teach ? Is there anything of God's love or of 
 
 E 49 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Christian goodness in it ? God is the Father 
 but Jupiter was " Father of gods and men " 
 there is no moral connotation necessarily in the 
 word. He is Maker of heaven and earth there 
 is nothing of His making man in His own image, 
 loving him, saving him. Jesus Christ is the only 
 Son there is nothing to show that in Him we 
 are all sons of God, nor in what sense Christ 
 is the Son, or His only Son. It is not said that it 
 is in Him we are all sons of God. Neither the 
 descent into hell nor the resurrection of the body 
 have any clear meaning to the mass of the people. 
 It is said that it is the glory of the Creed that it is 
 a mass of facts. But the power of our religion does 
 not consist of the statement of facts, but in the 
 spiritual meaning of the facts. And it would be well 
 for those of the Anglican Communion who con- 
 demn Nonconformists for not caring fully enough 
 for the Creed, and for insisting on the Bible as the 
 great teacher, to remember what has just been 
 said. The God of the Creed is the Maker of the 
 world ; the God of the New Testament is " the 
 Father of mercies and the God of all comfort." * 
 
 * The words of Harnack put this clearly. After an eulogy 
 upon the Creed, he says : Yet one misses all reference to His 
 preaching, and to the image of Him as the Saviour of the 
 poor and sick, of the publicans and sinners, the image of His 
 personality as it shines forth in the Gospels. The Creed con- 
 tains only a set of titles or headings. In this sense it is 
 imperfect ; for no confession is perfect which does not present 
 the Saviour to the eyes of men and their hearts. (Glaubenbe 
 kennt niss (loth Ed.) p. 34). 
 
 50 
 
THE CREEDS AND THE BIBLE 
 
 These remarks are made not to undervalue 
 the compendium of facts contained in the Creed, 
 but to combat the idea that it can be placed 
 upon an equality with, or as a substitute for, 
 " God's Word written," as we are taught to call 
 the Bible. It is quite true that we can prove 
 each statement of the Creed by the Bible ; but 
 the full teaching of the Bible can never be got 
 out of the Creed. We may fill up the facts stated 
 in the Creed by explanations of their spiritual 
 bearing ; but this implies that the Creed taken by 
 itself gives us Bible facts without showing their 
 moral and spiritual importance. 
 
 But " The Church " teaching implies a great 
 many things besides the three Creeds. The 
 Roman Catholic must add to it all the articles 
 of the Creed of Pope Pius IV as sanctioned by 
 the Council of Trent, and the new doctrine of 
 the Immaculate Conception, and the dogma that 
 the Pope is infallible apart from any consent 
 of the Church. The Protestant must take as his 
 guide one of the many Confessions drawn up in 
 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ; the 
 Anglican must accept the thirty-nine articles ; 
 the Wesleyan must be guided by John Wesley's 
 notes on the New Testament ; the simple Christian 
 by the traditional forms in which he has been taught 
 his religion by parents, ministers, or friends. It is 
 true that all these systems contain much precious 
 truth, that each is of value as a statement of the 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 mode in which the various branches of the Church 
 have viewed their common inheritance ; and 
 that the matters of importance which they all 
 have in common are more than those in which 
 they differ. But there are two things which 
 are far more important than them all : of these 
 one is the Bible, the other the lives of good men. 
 And if it is objected that the Bible was written 
 at divers times and manners, so that some of 
 the things that have been said about the Creeds 
 apply to it also, the answer is that the Bible in- 
 cludes, as the Creeds do not, the Living centre on 
 which all depends, the spirit of the life of Christ 
 and His teaching. If all is viewed in relation to 
 these we shall not go wrong. 
 
 But it may be objected that both the Bible and 
 the Creeds are limited in their scope, while any 
 system which professes to be in accordance with 
 the natural development of mankind must be 
 universal. To this we may reply, first, that we 
 rely on the facts as truly interpreted, and 
 that the Bible gives us the principles by which 
 we may interpret the facts. Are we wrong 
 in saying that the Law and the Prophets of 
 Israel are the teachers not of one nation, but 
 of mankind ? The early narratives of the Old 
 Testament .contain, as has been pointed out above, 
 principles which are of universal import the unity 
 indeed, the spiritual unity of the whole crea- 
 tion, the supremacy of man as a spiritual being, 
 
 52 
 
UNIVERSALITY OF BIBLE TEACHING 
 
 made after the image of God, the institutions of 
 social life, radiating from the monogamous family. 
 The Mosaic law is distinguished from all other 
 laws by the stress it lays upon brotherly kindness 
 and the care for the poor, the widow, the slave, 
 the stranger in which it anticipates the social 
 and political efforts of the present day. It is 
 admitted that the revelation in the Old Testament 
 is progressive, according to the needs of a gradu- 
 ally developing conscience, and the lower stages 
 of development are necessarily and admittedly 
 defective ; but the Psalms and the Prophets gain 
 a height of moral life which is essentially uni- 
 versal. Such words as " The Sacrifice of God is 
 a broken spirit," " In offerings for sin thou hast 
 no pleasure," " Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God," 
 " I will think upon Egypt and Babylon with 
 those that know me," " Blessed be Egypt my first- 
 born and Israel mine inheritance," attain the full 
 note of universality, and prepare for the teaching 
 of Christ and of St. Paul. The second considera- 
 tion is that the general life and development of man- 
 kind is grounded on the principle of election. We 
 do not advance with a uniform step, but those on 
 whom some new capacity has been bestowed go 
 forward and lead the rest. In the new theories 
 of development this is eminently the case. There 
 springs up, we know not how, some special form 
 of life with a superior power of use and adaptation 
 which causes it to live when others pass away. 
 
 S3 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 However this is to be accounted for, the fact is 
 there, and the survival of the fittest, though its 
 supremacy may have been exaggerated, is certainly 
 a vera causa. And, similarly, the consequence of 
 the knowledge of God, of righteousness, and of 
 immortality, comes forth not exclusively, but 
 supremely in the Bible, and is destined, we can- 
 not doubt, to impart throughout all time the 
 guiding principles of human progress. This is 
 the true meaning of election, which, though often 
 both by Jew and Christian perverted into the 
 notion of favouritism and exclusive possession, is 
 shown in the life and teaching of Christ to be a 
 call to labour and to suffer in a pre-eminent 
 degree for the good of the world. We have a 
 right, then, to claim for the Bible not that it is 
 the exclusive organ of divine revelation, but that 
 it is its leading and supreme expression. 
 
 And similarly, though in a far lesser degree, 
 with the Creeds. However much we may feel 
 that they demand explanations or a translation, 
 not of words but of ideas, we may vindicate for 
 them a central place as the most terse and in- 
 telligible expression of the facts to which they 
 bear testimony, and as containing the kernel of 
 great truths to which they act as the rind. 
 
 54 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 JESUS, (i) HIS MESSIAHSHIP. (2) APOCA- 
 LYPTIC IDEAS. BIRTH. (3) WONDERFUL 
 WORKS. (4) RESURRECTION 
 
 i. MESSIAHSHIP 
 
 BUT there are two very important points to 
 be added, points which have of late been 
 much discussed. The first of these is this : Are we 
 justified in speaking of Jesus as the Messiah or 
 Christ ? It is certain, unless the solemn testimony 
 of the Evangelists is wrong, that He claimed the 
 title, and accepted the expression of it by His lead- 
 ing disciple, and indeed drew out the confession, 
 " Thou art the Christ." The prophecies on which 
 this title was grounded are, indeed, less distinct 
 than has often been supposed. Sometimes it is a 
 blessed time which is foretold ; sometimes the ideal 
 nation, the Servant of the Lord ; sometimes warrior, 
 or a king whose reign will be just and beneficent ; 
 sometimes a person in whom the divine Saviour 
 and those whose character is an image or type of 
 His are blended together. But the mind of the 
 Jewish Church was surely right in expecting a 
 person in whom all the spiritual glory of these 
 foreshadowings was gathered up ; and it is an un- 
 doubted fact that the expectation of such a person 
 
 55 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 had become a part of the Jewish faith when Jesus 
 of Nazareth appeared. What He did with the 
 Messiahship is comparable to what He did with 
 the Commandments. They are transformed and 
 transfigured by passing through the crucible of 
 His divine conscience. " Do not kill " becomes 
 " Do not grieve your brother by expressions of 
 contempt, and, if he is offended, take the first step 
 to reconciliation." " Do not steal, or covet," 
 becomes a direction of ideal generosity. And, 
 similarly, the Messiahship becomes no longer the 
 expression of a king crushing his enemies with a 
 rod of iron, but that of a meek and gentle friend 
 who touches the conscience and the heart, and 
 casts out falsehood, injustice and unkindness, and 
 rules by persuasion and by love. If this leader- 
 ship is the supreme moral power, how can we 
 hesitate to accept Him as head not only of the 
 typical nation, that of Israel, but of the whole 
 human race, the embodiment for all men of the 
 divine Spirit ? And how can we fail to realize 
 that the faith which takes Him as our leader unites 
 us also to Him and gives us the power to take 
 part in His work of redemption by drawing men 
 to righteousness? 
 
 2. APOCALYPTIC IDEAS 
 
 But, as has been said in a previous page, the 
 hopes of the future form part of what has been 
 called the apocalyptic part of divine revelation, 
 
 56 
 
JESUS AS THE MESSIAH 
 
 of the heavenly state, of the Kingdom of God, of 
 the resurrection of the dead and the life of the 
 world to come. To this part of Christian teaching 
 we must turn our attention. 
 
 We cannot expect to find as much teaching 
 which relates to a future life as to the Kingdom 
 of Christ in this world. Probably we should not 
 be able to understand any exact details which 
 might be given us. At all events, it is best for us 
 to start with that which we can understand ; and 
 we have to avoid the misappropriation to the 
 future state of Bible texts which relate to God's 
 kingdom in this world, as well as merely fanciful 
 notions which have no real authority. Yet the 
 curiosity of men as to what our future state is to 
 be has naturally caused them to dwell dispro- 
 portionately on the world to come. No doubt 
 what is said is enough for us. We have also to 
 remember that the divine principles of life must 
 always be the same. God cannot change, nor 
 have we any reason to think that the essentials of 
 human nature can change ; and if we can realize 
 the principles by which God governs the present 
 world, we have there the best key to the world to 
 come. 
 
 It should be remembered that the time between 
 the Old and New Testament was the age of the 
 Apocalypses. The Book of Daniel stands forth 
 as the chief of them, since it was incorporated, 
 though late and though after a long controversy, 
 
 57 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 into the canon of the Scriptures. It is in part 
 a narrative of past events written for the "en- 
 couragement of the Jews during their persecution 
 by Antiochus Epiphanes, and their great deliver- 
 ance under the Maccabees. The writer then turns 
 his attention to the future, and after setting forth 
 the fortunes of the kingdoms with which those 
 of Israel were intertwined, as they lay open to 
 his spiritual insight, closes with the vision of a 
 Kingdom of God and His saints, and with the 
 resurrection and judgment to come. It is possible 
 that the figurative language used in the last 
 chapter may be translated into a description of 
 a kingdom of Judaic righteousness. But since it 
 is certain that in the age after the exile the Jews 
 imbibed the hope of immortality, and that this 
 was so completely bound up with their religion 
 that St. Paul speaks of it as the faith " to which 
 the twelve tribes instantly serving God day and 
 night hope to come," we may take the expressions 
 of those who sleep in the earth awaking and shining 
 as the firmament as definitely relating to the eternal 
 hope. Still, these are only the end of the long vista 
 of human history ; and those who have investi- 
 gated the Apocalypses of the period of which we 
 are speaking, consider that they form an equivalent 
 to what is with us the philosophy of history. This 
 is the view of Westcott * in England and of 
 
 * See article on the "Book of Daniel" in the Dictionary of 
 the Bible. 
 
 58 
 
JESUS AND APOCALYPTIC IDEAS 
 
 Auguste Sabatier * in France ; I may say also of 
 Professor Charles at a later time. This leads us 
 to think of the Apocalyptic portions of the New 
 Testament as also belonging primarily to the 
 Kingdom of God upon earth, though its principles 
 are certainly applicable to the eternal kingdom 
 also. It has been constantly asked whether our 
 Lord's great prophecy of Matthew xxiv. relates to 
 the destruction of Jerusalem or to the end of the 
 world ; and it is clear that " the end of the 
 world " there means the end of the age or dispen- 
 sation, though we may rightly apply it, as is the 
 case with most prophecies, to great events of other 
 times in which the same principles are involved. 
 
 The angels or messengers sent forth with a great 
 sound of a trumpet to gather the elect from the four 
 winds, are evidently the servants of God sent forth 
 to proclaim the Gospel ; and the appearing of our 
 Lord and His sign in the heavens, which He de- 
 clared would usher in the great changes that were 
 to come, relate to His coming in power and in Spirit 
 before the destruction of Jerusalem. There is one 
 passage which may be regarded as the key for the 
 whole of our" Lord's Apocalyptic words : it is t in 
 Matthew xxvi. 63, 64, in his answer to the words 
 addressed by Him to the High Priest : "I adjure 
 thee," says the Priest, administering to Him the 
 well-known form of oath, " that thou tell us whether 
 thou be the Christ." And the reply is, " Thou hast 
 
 * L? Apocalypse juive a pamphlet. 
 59 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 said," or, " I am," and " hereafter ye shall see the 
 Son of Man sitting on the right hand of God and 
 coming in the clouds of heaven." The word " here- 
 after " here (air' a/m) is used (Authorized Version of 
 the Bible) in the sense which it bears in the Eng- 
 lish of the sixteenth century (as in the familiar sen- 
 tence " that we may hereafter live a godly life," 
 that is, from this time forward), and it stands in 
 the Revised Version " henceforth." The declara- 
 tion of our Lord is therefore, " From this time 
 forward you shall see me sitting at the right hand 
 of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." 
 The Authorized Version appears to Englishmen of 
 our time to make an assertion which is most mis- 
 leading. But the full force of the true reading 
 (" from this time forth ") seems not to have been 
 recognized. No one can suppose that Christ, 
 being at the mercy of His judges, or, rather, His 
 murderers, meant to say that from this time for- 
 ward he would be seen sitting on a throne at God's 
 right hand, or in a cloud in heaven, for such an 
 assertion would in a few hours have been shown 
 to be false. We are driven necessarily to give the 
 words a spiritual sense : " From this time you 
 will be conscious of a spiritual power which you 
 will needs recognize as divine, clothed with God's 
 authority, like that of the vizier at the right hand 
 of an earthly king, and surrounded by a cloud," 
 a figure which (as in the words of Daniel, " One 
 like the son of man came with a cloud," and in 
 
 60 
 
CHRIST'S USE OF APOCALYPTIC TERMS 
 
 the conception of both Jews and Gentiles, as in 
 the words of Horace, "Nube candentes humeros 
 amictus ") implied the presence of divine power. 
 This power, no doubt, the wretched men who sat 
 on the judgment seat even then began to feel ; 
 and when our Lord came again on the day of 
 Pentecost, that power was felt by three thousand 
 men on whom the guilt of the crucifixion rested. 
 This was also the mode of His coming as promised 
 in the discourse at the supper table (" I will come 
 again and receive you to myself ") . And it assumed 
 another aspect in the fall of Jerusalem, to which 
 St. Paul's prophetic words must be applied : 
 " The revelation of the Lord Jesus, in flaming fire 
 taking vengeance on them that know not God " 
 (2 Thess. i. 8). 
 
 If we follow out what has now been said, a new 
 light is thrown by it upon two very important 
 points : first, What is meant by the coming of 
 Christ ? and, secondly, Did Christ Himself and 
 His apostles expect that this coming would take 
 place literally and externally within their own 
 generation ? To which we may add the question, 
 What are we to expect in accordance with the 
 Creeds as to what we term the Second Advent ? 
 
 i. If the coming of Christ be (it must be that, 
 whatever further it may be) a coming in Spirit 
 and in power, then it is a continuous coming, the 
 coming of the Redeemer to take possession of the 
 world which He has won by the cross. The asser- 
 
 61 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 tion of it before the Transfiguration implies an 
 anticipatory vision of the time when Christ's 
 glory will break forth in its spiritual splendour 
 before the whole world. The later assertion 
 (Mark xiv. 30) that " this generation shall not 
 pass away till all be fulfilled," needs to be inter- 
 preted, like so many similar cases of the fulfilment 
 of prophecy, as meaning, " These principles will 
 receive a fulfilment in the destruction of Jerusa- 
 lem," but not as implying an exhaustion of their 
 meaning. These cases are instances of the memor- 
 able words of Lord Bacon, that " Divine prophecy 
 being of the nature of its author, with whom a 
 thousand years are as one day, is not restricted 
 to any one fulfilment, but contains in itself spring- 
 ing and germinal fulfilments, though its completion 
 may belong to a single event." Christ comes to 
 individuals, to cities, to nations ; He comes in 
 blessing or in judgment ; He comes in various 
 phases of human progress ; He will at last be 
 manifested in such a way that all men must see 
 and acknowledge Him as divine : " Behold He 
 cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see Him." 
 If this be true, we have an answer to our ques- 
 tion. Christ did not only expect to return in that 
 generation, but His expectations were fulfilled ; 
 and the expectation was shared by the early dis- 
 ciples, and was fulfilled to them. But this return 
 was to be, and was, a return in spirit and in power. 
 Their expectations were an instance of the per- 
 
 62 
 
CHRIST'S COMING IN THE SPIRIT AND POWER 
 
 spective of prophecy ; that is, that, as a distant 
 scene appears sometimes near and sometimes 
 far, and any report which may be given of 
 it depends largely upon the disposition of the 
 beholder, so the prophets and the faithful have 
 viewed the great consummation. Christian faith 
 must be satisfied under present conditions with 
 the assurance that the Spirit of Christ and com- 
 munion with Him is the supreme power in the 
 life of mankind, which must gather into itself 
 whatever of truth or spiritual energy at present 
 exists, and eventually rule over what St. Paul 
 speaks of as " all principalities and powers " ; 
 and that He, whether in outward form or inward 
 presence, but certainly recognized and understood, 
 will be Lord of all. 
 
 In all this there is nothing but what is in har- 
 mony with the development of human life and 
 experience. But an attempt is apparently being 
 made to reproduce the Apocalyptic notions in 
 their literal form as suited to the ignorant, or to 
 those who cling to the elements of strangeness 
 in Christianity, and in some cases to use this 
 false literalism to support the element of mystery 
 in church ceremonies. To what extent a connec- 
 tion may exist between the ministrations of the 
 Church and the eternal world may be a proper 
 subject of discussion. But when men have reached 
 the stage at which reason rather than imagination 
 is required for religious progress, or at least that 
 
 63 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the imaginations of an age of childhood need to be 
 supported by manly reason if they are to abide, 
 it is evidently of supreme importance that they 
 should not be slaves to the letter, but should be 
 able to interpret the words in which religion has 
 come down to us by means of their counterparts 
 in ordinary life. This is the meaning of Natural 
 Christianity. 
 
 3. THE VIRGIN BIRTH 
 
 But, coming now to the facts of our Saviour's 
 life, we are met at once by that which, we cannot 
 deny, has in this age of scientific inquiry been a 
 stumbling-block to many who are true Christians 
 the story of His birth from a Virgin. We cannot 
 turn aside from this in a treatise like the present ; 
 yet it is difficult to enter into it without some 
 sense of irreverence. There is need for sympathy 
 and forbearance on both sides ; nor can we think 
 it right that those who doubt should by a harsh 
 dogmatism be driven out from Christian com- 
 munion or ministry. But it seems evident that 
 the denial of the facts as narrated in the Gospels 
 of St. Matthew and St. Luke is not demanded 
 either by criticism of the documents or by modern 
 science. 
 
 We may take St. Luke as a most careful and 
 critical writer. He tells us in a Preface, the style 
 and manner of which attest its truthfulness, that 
 he had " traced the course of all things accurately 
 
 6 4 
 
THE BIRTH OF OUR LORD 
 
 from the first." The authority of his writings 
 has passed through the ordeal of German con- 
 troversy, and the greatest of German scholars 
 begins his work on "St. Luke, the physician," by 
 speaking of " the great historical work which has 
 come down to us in two parts, the third Gospel 
 and the Acts of the Apostles." St. Luke had had 
 the opportunity, when in Palestine for two years 
 during St. Paul's imprisonment, of making in- 
 quiries for himself; and, although the portion 
 (Luke i. 3~ii. 40) bears the stamp of a simple idyll 
 with a style of its own incorporated by him be- 
 tween a critical Preface and a series of accounts 
 written in almost classical Greek, yet the fact of 
 its incorporation gives it his authority. 
 
 It is true that the event narrated is unique; 
 but the coming of Christ into the world is the 
 coming of the one Supreme personality into human 
 life ; and, unless modern science can tell us, first, the 
 measure of the action of the Eternal and creative 
 principle of life upon the human soul, and, secondly, 
 that of the human soul upon the body, it cannot 
 pronounce the account of the birth of Christ to be 
 incredible. But it does not attempt this. Its witness 
 is rather to the opposite effect.* We may, therefore, 
 
 * Darwin, Plants and Animals undet Domestication, II, 
 page 354 ; " From the several foregoing considerations we may 
 conclude that the difference between sexual and asexual gener- 
 ation is not nearly so great as at first appears " ; page 337 : 
 " Sexual and asexual reproduction are thus seen not to differ 
 essentially ; and we have already shown that sexual repro- 
 
 F 65 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 refuse to be drawn into denial or the supposition of 
 a mythical story when we read the account given 
 by St. Luke, and may not feel that we are doing 
 violence to the God who reveals Himself in modern 
 investigations when we read in all their simplicity 
 the solemn words of the Gospel ; " The Holy Ghost 
 shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest 
 shall overshadow thee : therefore that holy thing 
 which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son 
 of God." 
 
 Nevertheless, we must consider the testimony of 
 Scripture on the other side. The words of Isaiah, 
 said by St. Matthew to have been fulfilled, must be 
 taken, like so many others which assert the fulfil- 
 ment of prophecy, as meaning, " This is an in- 
 duction, the power of re-growth, and development, are all 
 parts of one and the same great law." Duke of Argyll, Reign 
 of Law, page 229 : "Mr. Darwin's theory gives an explanation, 
 not of the processes by which new forms appear, but only of the 
 processes by which, when they have appeared, they acquire a 
 preference over others. '' 
 
 Professor Loeb, of Chicago (in the Centenary Book of Essays, 
 published at Cambridge for the centenary of Charles Darwin's 
 birth in 1909), p. 250, gives instances in which, in certain orders 
 of living beings, virgin births have followed even upon artificial 
 stimulation. Any one desiring to follow out further this side of 
 the matter, may be referred to a short treatise entitled, How 
 Shall This Be? or, the Nature of the Virgin Birth, by the Rev. 
 E. H. Archer-Shepherd, Vicar of Avenbury, Herefordshire. 
 (Rivingtons, 34, Covent Garden.) 
 
 At the time when some stir was caused by a misreport of 
 a part of the present treatise, which had been prepared with 
 a view to private discussion, the author received a letter 
 from a well-known military man on the subject. He had some 
 years before in a distant colony been in company with two 
 gentlemen engaged in botanical researches. In the course of 
 
 66 
 
NEGATIVE TESTIMONY OF SCRIPTURE 
 
 stance or parallel case," in this instance the assur- 
 ance given by the birth and name of the child "God 
 with us. " * Plain honesty requires us to admit that 
 outside the two first chapters of St. Matthew and 
 the two first of St. Luke, it is absolutely non- 
 existent in the New Testament. The genealogies 
 of our Saviour are those of Joseph, not of Mary ; 
 Jesus was known by His first disciples (John I. 45) 
 as the son of Joseph. The mode of His birth is 
 never appealed to by the Apostles, though there are 
 many occasions on which it might have been intro- 
 duced, and though all the chief events of the 
 Saviour's life His birth, His circumcision, His 
 works of mercy and of power, His temptation, His 
 agony, His trial by Pilate, His death, resurrection, 
 and ascension are used to enforce their teaching ; 
 and the natural inference is that it was unknown 
 to the writers of the New Testament, except to 
 those who penned those chapters of the first and 
 third Gospel ; or that, if known to^them, it was 
 
 conversation some remarks were made on the Gospel history, 
 and he said to them that he supposed that many things in it 
 appeared incredible to them, especially the Virgin birth of our 
 Lord ; but both of them replied that the effect of their re- 
 searches had been the contrary to that which he had assumed : 
 they had met with so many cases of parthenogenesis that they 
 could not on scientific grounds refuse credence to the account 
 given by the two evangelists. 
 
 * " Behold, a virgin shall conceive," etc. (Isa. vii. 14) means 
 "One who is now a virgin shall be married and bear a son ; 
 and before this child shall be old enough to discern good from 
 bad, the kings of Syria and Samaria, whom you dread, shall 
 pass away. This will be a sign that God is with you, and the 
 child shall be called Immanuel as a token of this assurance." 
 
 67 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 accounted by them (as it must be to us), as quite 
 insignificant as a mark of the Incarnation in com- 
 parison with the witness of the life and moral 
 personality of our Lord. We may add that 
 Athanasius in his treatise on the Incarnation of 
 the Word gives no doctrinal importance to it, al- 
 though he was writing only a few years before 
 the Nicene Council, in which he took so prominent 
 a part, and at which all that bears on our Lord's 
 Divinity was of prime importance. On the other 
 hand, the simplicity of the narrative of St. Luke, the 
 lovely idylls of the manger-bed, of the shepherds 
 and the angels, of the presentation in the Temple, 
 of Simeon and Anna, and of the boyhood at Naza- 
 reth, make the thought of an invention of the whole 
 story repugnant to every Christian sentiment, we 
 may venture even to say, repugnant to every intelli- 
 gence which can take in the subject in all its aspects. 
 What, then, is the result of these facts to us ? 
 Evidently, that the details of our Lord's birth are 
 recorded for reverent meditation, not for dogmatic 
 assertion or public proclamation. It is one thing 
 to refuse to deny the recorded facts ; it is another 
 to put them into a creed for use of the congregation, 
 and yet another to take an article out of its place 
 and make it the matter on which our whole faith 
 hangs, and still another to drive out those to 
 whom it seems dubious, and who may not unjustly 
 say, " The testimony of Scripture taken as a whole 
 is not such as to compel our belief." 
 68 
 
THE VIRGIN-BIRTH FOR FAITH NOT DOGMA 
 
 It stands, no doubt, in our Creeds; but it 
 certainly formed no part of the Creed ofNicea; 
 and Harnack seems to have proved that at Rome 
 the Apostles' or Roman Creed which contained 
 this article was superseded by the Nicene * until 
 well on in the eighth century, when the " Apostles' 
 Creed " came back from Gaul with this and other 
 additions, and spread from Rome throughout the 
 West. There are two articles of this Creed f the 
 words " descended into hell " and " the Resurrec- 
 tion of the body " which we treat almost exactly 
 in the manner in which it seems that the Virgin 
 birth should be treated. The descent into hell 
 was at one time the most practically influential 
 of all articles in the Creed. At the end of the 
 Middle Ages the belief in the descensus ad inferos, 
 
 * Harnack says "Nicene (Constantinopolitan) " ; but the 
 Council of Constantinople formulated no creed, and the addi- 
 tions to the Nicene Creed are of inferior authority. The Council 
 of Constantinople was repudiated both by Rome and by Egypt, 
 and Cyril (450) quoted only the Nicene Creed in his polemics 
 against Nestorius (431) 
 
 f Das Apostolishe Glanbensbe kennt niss (loth Ed.), pp. 13- 
 15. It is to be remarked that these two clauses of the Creed 
 which are without any known conciliar authority gradually 
 gained their supreme importance about the time when the move- 
 ments arose (i) for the excessive value of virginity, and (2) for 
 the cult of the relics of the dead, the former of these being 
 introduced by the hermits who came to Rome with Athanasius 
 in 346. The ideas and practices connected with these additions 
 to the Creed were resisted byjovinian, Helvidius and Vigilantius ; 
 but these protesters were crushed by the great authority of St. 
 Jerome, and monachism, mariolatry and purgatory dominated 
 the mind of the Church for more than a thousand years. 
 
 69 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 accompanied as it was by the belief in purgatory 
 and the treasury of merit, occupied men's minds 
 supremely, and drew forth boundless efforts for 
 the erection and maintenance of chantries and 
 the endowment of offices for the liberation of suffer- 
 ing souls. But now we hardly give a thought to 
 it ; and, whether we adopt Pearson's view that 
 it means no more than that the soul of our Lord 
 " was conveyed into such receptacles as the souls 
 of other persons used to be/' or whether we have 
 any theory as to the place of departed spirits, we 
 are free to give our opinion, if we have formed 
 one, but not to call men heretics who have another 
 opinion. Similarly, we must treat the Resurrection 
 of the body, which was fiercely debated in the 
 fourth century between the Origenists and men 
 like St. Jerome. No one now would hold what 
 was then the orthodox and victorious opinion that 
 the physical particles which are buried will be 
 gathered again to form our resurrection bodies. 
 We know them to have been scattered, and in 
 many cases to enter into the composition of other 
 organisms ; and we are content to believe in the 
 persistence of the personality without trying to 
 define the nature of that " house not made with 
 hands " into which it passes. In a similar way 
 we may expect that the next generation will deal 
 with the Virgin birth, allowing for various modes 
 of treating the accounts. 
 
 70 
 
OUR SAVIOUR'S WONDERFUL WORKS 
 
 4. THE MIRACLES 
 
 But what, it is often said, is the use of explaining 
 by natural causes a single " miracle," when the 
 Bible is full of miracles ? It is not pretended 
 that everything can be explained. We must 
 beware equally of the dogmatism which refuses 
 to discuss or inquire and of that other dog- 
 matism which contemptuously rejects all that 
 it cannot explain. Something has already been 
 said on this subject earlier in this treatise, and 
 it was pointed out that the modern idea of a 
 miracle is that of an effect without a cause, of the 
 Divine will acting without any medium, which is 
 never asserted in the Bible. Indeed, how could 
 such a conception of a miracle be present to the 
 minds of men who had no notion of the uniformity 
 of nature ? And the fact that this notion of 
 uniformity, which is the basis of all modern con- 
 ceptions of nature, was absent from the mind of 
 the scriptural writers should make us slow to 
 take their statements in an exact literal sense. 
 For instance, when Eutychus fell from the loft 
 and was taken up dead, and St. Paul bent over 
 him and said, " Trouble not yourselves, for his 
 life is in him," is it not certain that the difference 
 between unconsciousness and actual death was 
 not present to St. Luke who recorded the facts ? 
 And is it not possible that a similar account may 
 be given of the other instances of raising the 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 dead ? Is it irreverent even to believe that our 
 Lord Himself, whose knowledge was limited by 
 that of his age, could not have made the distinction 
 between what modern science would recognize 
 as death, with its instantaneous commencement 
 of decay, and the many forms of swooning, of 
 syncope and of hysteria, which sometimes 
 deceive the wisest of modern times ? We must 
 remember that the criteria and language of the 
 East differ from that of the West, and the mode 
 of narration of the first]century from that of our own 
 day. Human nature itself has in many respects 
 changed. A case of the burial of a man in the 
 Punjab and his resuscitation after six weeks was 
 guaranteed by English eye-witnesses of the highest 
 credit, and reported by the late Sir Monier Williams. 
 It is even said by some of those who are conver- 
 sant with the East, that no man would be thought 
 anything of as a religious leader who did not, in the 
 estimation of his followers, raise the dead ; and we 
 may believe that when our Lord bade His apostles 
 " heal the sick and raise the dead," as if the two 
 things were on the same plane of possibility, He 
 was speaking of a process very different from 
 what in scientific days would be implied by raising 
 a dead body to life. 
 
 Everyone in the present day is willing to admit 
 a natural cause in the acts of healing recorded in 
 the Gospels ; and we feel that, far from being a 
 disparagement of the divine power dwelling in 
 
 72 
 
DEATH, SICKNESS, DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 
 
 our Saviour, it is a fresh witness for it. Some may 
 say that such an explanation brings the work of 
 Christ down to a level with that of Vespasian, as 
 recorded by Tacitus, when 4ame men at his 
 presence recovered their strength. But it seems 
 much truer to argue: If the impression of a 
 great imperial presence could work upon a palsied 
 or hysterical frame, the impression made by the 
 supreme personality of Christ upon the weakened 
 souls and bodies of men is a witness to the higher 
 power of righteousness and love which was in Him. 
 We are justified in laying stress on the words so 
 often used by our Saviour, " Thy faith hath 
 saved thee," and to apply them both to bodily 
 and to spiritual rehabilitation. Especially is this 
 the case in reference to demoniacal possession 
 and its cure, which is attested all through the 
 early Church, and again and again by Saint 
 Jerome as an eye-witness in the end of the fourth 
 century, and of which instances are recorded 
 even in the present day. The enfeebled frame 
 which has become a prey to violent uncontrollable 
 impulses is wrought upon, and its truer life drawn 
 forth, by the serene majesty of the Christ and His 
 followers. It must, of course, be admitted that 
 some of the records of the Gospels, if taken literally, 
 are contrary to the course of nature as we know 
 it ; but they are few. The water turned to wine ; 
 the multiplication of loaves and fishes ; the 
 walking on the water ; the stilling of the tempest. 
 
 73 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 No man can explain every statement such as these 
 are, and, as has been argued above, we cannot 
 suppose that we know the limits of what is possible. 
 Nevertheless, criticism has its claims. The 
 witnesses were predisposed to expect wonders in 
 their religious leaders ; Oriental hyperbole must 
 be allowed its part ; and the reports must have 
 passed through several hands before they reached 
 their present form. 
 
 It is also to be observed that the narratives of 
 events which seem contrary to ascertained law 
 are almost wholly to be found in Asia, where the 
 mental constitution was far less scientific, and 
 there seems to have been an enfeeblement of the 
 nervous organization of men in New Testament 
 times. Hardly any such events are reported after 
 St. Paul's passage into Europe. The restoration 
 of the Pythoness at Philippi to her reason, and 
 the healing of the father of Publius and others 
 at Melita, may have been exceptions to this, but 
 they are the only ones. If we read consecutively 
 the 1 6th to 1 8th chapters of the Acts, which 
 describe St. Paul's journey in the Greek cities, 
 and then pass on to the igth, and its narrative of 
 his work at Ephesus with its curious arts and the 
 spirits whom the seven sons of the sons of Sceva the 
 Jew could not cast out, with handkerchiefs and 
 aprons carried from the person of St. Paul to the 
 sick and effecting their cure, and with the wild 
 fanaticism of the worshippers of Diana, we cannot 
 
 74 
 
ST. PAUL'S WONDERFUL WORKS 
 
 but be struck with the contrast between East and 
 West. St. Paul, indeed, speaks of the SiW/ms 
 and yapta-para. m/xarwv as exercised in Corinth : 
 but they come quite naturally between " teachers " 
 and " helps " and "governments." It is in- 
 conceivable that he should have made this 
 collocation if he had meant to describe, separated 
 only by a comma, plain functions of human life- 
 like teaching and a stupendous breach of the 
 laws of the universe. It is not, however, necessary 
 that we should understand the process of causation 
 in dealing with each event, especially with things 
 belonging to ages so distant and so different from 
 our own. It is commonly said that, if we knew 
 the whole process, we should see that all was 
 subject to law ; and we ought to give due weight 
 to the argument relied upon by a man of so much 
 authority as the late Duke of Argyll in his Reign 
 of Law (p. 15), that unexpected results may follow 
 from the manipulation of the ordinary facts 
 and laws by a higher intelligence, just as the 
 vital power in us enables us to raise our limbs in 
 apparent contravention of the law of gravitation. 
 
 5. THE RESURRECTION 
 
 Ought we then to think of the Resurrection as 
 a violation of natural law ? Rather, as a clear 
 intimation to us of a sphere of existence of which 
 our present faculties cannot judge. It is not the 
 resuscitation of a corpse, and in this it was 
 
 75 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 entirely different from the restoration to life 
 of Lazarus or Eutychus. The resurrection 
 of our Lord was the revelation of one 
 who has passed into another state of existence. 
 Lazarus died again and returned to corruption, 
 but " Christ being raised from the dead dieth 
 no more" (Rom. vi. 9). St. Paul, the earliest 
 direct testifier to the Resurrection, identifies the 
 appearances to the other apostles with the 
 " Heavenly Vision " given to him at his conver- 
 sion.* He also identifies it with the general belief 
 in the resurrection of the dead, which was the 
 faith of " the twelve tribes instantly serving God 
 day and night." f The preaching of the Resurrec- 
 tion in later times has not made this distinction 
 between a resuscitation, or return under mortal 
 conditions, and a spiritual existence (the " spiritual 
 body" of which St. Paul speaks (i Cor. xv. 44)). 
 But two expressions of Bishop Horsley's published a 
 century ago J may be quoted : " The tomb was not 
 opened to let the Saviour out, but to let the 
 women in," and " The accounts all show that He 
 was invisible save to the eye of faith." A curious 
 question of Bishop Westcott's may also be men- 
 
 * I Corinthians xv. 3-8. 
 
 t Acts xxvi. 6, 7. 
 
 I "Sermons on the nature of the evidence by which the fact 
 of our Lord's resurrection is established : by Samuel Horsley, 
 late Bishop of St. Asaph," published 1810, pp. 167, 202, 204-5, 
 208. A very remarkable work, as anticipating in a large 
 measure the results of modern inquiry. 
 
 7 6 
 
CHRIST SEEN AFTER HIS RESURRECTION 
 
 tioned : " If our Lord was under mortal conditions 
 when He appeared after His resurrection, with 
 what garments was He clad ? " 
 
 I may notice a remarkable speculation of the late 
 Bishop Harvey Goodwin on the appearances of per- 
 sons after death to their friends, though he refused 
 to apply it to the Resurrection. He was a student 
 of optics, and he observed that the usual course of 
 perception began with the impression of the object 
 seen upon the retina, thence passing from the 
 retina to the optic nerve, and thence again to the 
 conscious personality of the person seeing. May we 
 not (so he argued) think of the process as reversed 
 in the case of visions or appearances the im- 
 pression being made first on the mental or spiritual 
 organs of personality, thence passing on to the 
 optic nerve, then to the retina, and thence pro- 
 jected on to the outer sphere ? If we carry this 
 possibility a little further, it would mean that the 
 soul of the living man was in contact with one in 
 the spirit-world, and that, by the process just 
 described, the vision which was primarily a 
 spiritual one was also made outward, visible, 
 and real. 
 
 This might, if the process can be proved to be 
 real, be applied without impropriety to account 
 for the phenomena of the Resurrection. It would 
 be in harmony with the promises made by our 
 Lord at the supper-table of His re-appearance to 
 His faithful disciples. " I will not leave you 
 
 77 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 comfortless, I will come unto you." It would 
 not be a fanciful thing, as the use of the word 
 " vision " might suggest to some persons, but the 
 real contact of the spiritual personality in the 
 other world with the spirit of the person to 
 whom the vision came in this world. It may 
 be said that, when we speak of a spiritual 
 existence, we are going into the region of the 
 supernatural. But this must depend on the 
 question whether we give to the words " nature " 
 and " natural " the extension advocated in the 
 first lines of this treatise. When we speak of the 
 mind or affections as distinct from the bodily 
 frame, we go beyond the sphere of the senses. 
 Why then should we stop there ? Our belief in God 
 as the eternal energy, or as the supreme goodness, 
 is one to which our reason ascends by induction ; 
 and our own personality and its relation to God are 
 the primary ground of our belief in immortality. 
 We cannot explain the world, whether material 
 or biological or moral, without the hypothesis of 
 God's existence ; nor can we explain human 
 nature with its hope and trust and longing for 
 the ideal and for social perfection without the 
 hypothesis of a spiritual world and of immortality. 
 We pass by necessary steps from the material to 
 the spiritual and the eternal ; and if our original 
 contention be true that the proper idea of nature 
 is nature in its highest form, then God and the 
 spiritual world are in the fullest sense natural. 
 
 78 
 
RESURRECTION AND DIVINITY 
 
 In any case, however we may conceive of the 
 state of our Lord during the interval between 
 the moments of Easter and Ascension, the wit- 
 nesses of those " to whom He showed Himself 
 alive after His Passion " are sufficient to assure us 
 of His triumphal existence beyond the grave, 
 which has " brought life and immortality to light " 
 for all mankind. 
 
 6. OUR LORD'S DIVINITY 
 
 Before leaving the question of the wonderful 
 works of Christ, it must again be asserted that the 
 contention that the belief that in almost all cases 
 (perhaps in all) they had a natural and intelligible 
 cause does not destroy their value as evidences 
 of His being truly the Christ and the Son of God. 
 The frequency of their occurrence (see Matthew 
 xi. 3-6) and their connection with His Messianic 
 redemptive power (Luke iv.) harmonize with the 
 belief in His divine nature, though the main proof 
 of this will always lie in His character and teaching. 
 
 And from this it follows that, when we speak 
 of the divine nature of Christ, a large part 
 of the difficulty of explaining the assertion of 
 the two natures blended into one is removed. 
 We might, indeed, invoke the words of the 
 " Quicunque Vult " : "As the reasonable soul 
 and flesh in one man, so God and man is one 
 Christ." The union of soul and body, though we 
 cannot explain it, is natural ; why then should the 
 
 79 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 union of God and man be thought of as non- 
 natural ? So long as God was thought of as not 
 merely separable in idea, but actually and per- 
 manently separated from the world and mankind, 
 so long the old insoluble disputes were bound to con- 
 tinue insoluble, we venture to say, because the 
 denial of our Lord's divinity called on us to bow 
 down to something less than the Highest, while its 
 confession led in its final development to the notion, 
 which sounds like a reductio ad absurdum, though 
 it was held by such men as Westcott, that Christ 
 had no human personality. If that were true, 
 does not the whole idea of the Incarnation become 
 unreal, and our Lord a mere phantasm ? But we 
 are saved from this by the belief in the immanence 
 of God. If God be in all His works, if He be the 
 evolving power which has worked upwards from 
 the beginning, then each portion of the Creation 
 is endued with a share of divinity, and man who 
 is capable of conceiving of God and knowing Him 
 has the chief share in it. It is this, and not the 
 special manner of Christ's coming into human 
 life, that St. Athanasius puts forward in his 
 great argument in his work De Incamatione 
 Verbi. This is no more than the witness of 
 Scripture which speaks of the Spirit of God as the 
 creative agent, and of " the seven Spirits of God " 
 as " sent forth throughout all the earth." Then, 
 when Christ appears as the head of the human 
 race, He is supremely, absolutely possessed by this 
 
 80 
 
THE INCARNATION 
 
 Divine Spirit. " God giveth not the Spirit by 
 measure unto Him." Or, to put it in another 
 way, equally Scriptural : The Word which was 
 with God and was God, was the light of every 
 man, and took human form completely in the 
 person of Christ. Christ, so far from being a non- 
 natural being, is the most truly natural of all men, 
 because He draws out, in Himself, to perfection 
 that nature which in the rest of us is stunted. 
 We must think of the Spirit of God struggling 
 upwards through the whole Creation and fulfilling 
 Himself at last in the one perfect Man " the 
 image of the invisible God, the first-born of all 
 Creation " (Col. i. 15, R.V.). 
 
 81 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES IN NATURAL 
 TERMS 
 
 WE may now touch briefly upon a few of the 
 most notable Christian doctrines, those 
 which have seemed most difficult and have pro- 
 voked most controversy, though they are expres- 
 sions of truth which may be properly called natural, 
 i. The Atonement. The object of Redemption 
 is to restore man to his natural and proper con- 
 dition. Sin is degradation, an act of atavism, 
 which falls backwards into animalism instead of 
 rising to glory and honour : an act of selfishness 
 which narrows us instead of the expansion by 
 which we attain to universal love. But the life 
 of Christ and the death in which it culminated 
 " Now is the Son of Man glorified," as He exclaimed 
 when He entered on His Passion has the attractive 
 power which He described in the words, " I, 
 if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men 
 unto me." This attraction is in perfect consistency 
 with the laws of the moral affections. Self- 
 devotion is attractive to us all ; and so is love, 
 and so is the truth which shows itself^in^equity and 
 the just balance of mind. And when these three 
 
 82 
 
ATONEMENT AND ELECTION 
 
 are perfectly blended, as they are in the death of 
 our Saviour, they have a matchless power over 
 the human spirit. This forms the true basis for 
 the doctrine of the Atonement, which is a recon- 
 ciliation of heart and will to God by the moral 
 power of the Cross.* And this also gives a true 
 basis to the expressions of piety, which dwell so 
 specifically on the blood of Christ. 
 
 2. The doctrine of Election. So long as this 
 was conceived as the arbitrary choice of certain 
 men to exclusive happiness, it was unnatural and 
 immoral. But if we follow the teaching of St. 
 Paul that we are predestinated to be conformed 
 to the image of Christ (Rom. viii. 29), the doctrine 
 is the expression of simple fact, namely, that special 
 spiritual endowments are given (we know not 
 how) to certain individuals and races ; but that, 
 as in Natural Selection certain peculiar ex- 
 cellences, at present unaccountable, become the 
 parents of all progress, so these endowments 
 are given to men not in order that they may 
 attain personal happiness or eminence, but that, 
 being like Christ, they may work and suffer 
 for mankind. We are not chosen that we may 
 sit on the right or left of a king, but that we may 
 approach to the image of the great Sufferer and 
 Saviour. 
 
 3. The doctrine of Absolution. It is a law of the 
 
 * This will be found expanded in Part IV of this treatise, 
 p. 163. 
 
 83 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 spiritual life that the true penitent is absolved : 
 but also that the assurance of forgiveness by one 
 who has spiritual insight is an uplifting power 
 to us. The public declaration of this is rightly 
 committed to those who preside over our prayers 
 and our Christian teaching; but the private 
 conveyance of it to individuals must depend on 
 the acknowledged spiritual power of the person 
 conveying it, which may be by declaration or by 
 manifestation of sympathy. So far as the clergy 
 are felt to have this insight, as they ought to have, 
 they naturally take the lead in conveying the 
 healing message ; but there is nothing to restrict it 
 to them. As a plain matter of fact, it is conveyed 
 in many different ways by persons of many 
 different conditions. Sir Thomas More said that, 
 in Utopia, every one was free to choose his con- 
 fessor among priests or laymen, among men or 
 women. 
 
 4. The doctrine of Episcopacy. Is it not a 
 plain social law that everywhere there must be 
 one head in an army, an assembly, a commercial 
 company, a municipality, a state ? And is not this 
 a much stronger ground on which to stand than a 
 supposed command of our Lord, or a special 
 institution enjoined by Him ? History shows 
 that the Episcopate only gradually, in the course 
 of ages, and by adaptation to changing needs, 
 reached its present form. But the social needs 
 of mankind are an ordinance of God, and there- 
 
 8 4 
 
EPISCOPACY AND OTHER DOCTRINES 
 
 fore we may justly speak of Episcopacy as divine : 
 but we must gladly admit the principle (even if, we 
 may think, in diminished potency) in the Presby- 
 terian or Congregational systems, in the persons 
 of Moderators or Presidents or the recognized 
 heads of bodies of worshippers. We may further 
 extend this view as the sacredness which has 
 been attributed to public worship comes to be 
 extended to all acts which are done in the name 
 of Christ. The leaders of men in all departments 
 will be, whether so named or not, the Bishops of 
 the Church of the future. 
 
 We might go on, did space allow, through the 
 whole range of Christian doctrines ; but it may 
 be hoped that these instances, though briefly given, 
 may suffice to indicate the possibility, and the 
 advantage, of treating matters of doctrine accord- 
 ing to the ascertained principles of the nature of man 
 as a spiritual being in contact with the Divine 
 nature, which is made human to us through " the 
 man Christ Jesus." But it is more important 
 in a short and imperfect sketch of a Natural Chris- 
 tianity, to turn to the practical side, and to show 
 how important the views which have been here 
 expressed are in their bearing on the Christian 
 life, both individual and social. 
 
 5. Practical Christianity. If what has been said 
 of Redemption and Atonement be true, then the 
 great change effected by Christianity in the indi- 
 vidual is one entirely according to the course of 
 
 85 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 nature. We cannot bind human nature to one 
 process. Like the Spirit of God, " it bloweth where 
 it listeth, and thou canst not tell whence it cometh 
 or whither it goeth." Some men are acted upon 
 rapidly, some slowly. With some, Christian ordi- 
 nances have the greatest power, with others silent 
 meditation : sometimes men move in masses, some- 
 times in units. But the highest moral power is 
 always at work, and affects all men. Consequently, 
 it is impossible to trace any absolute line between 
 men such as is spoken of as conversion or re- 
 generation. That such a change passes over 
 men in various ways every student of the spiritual 
 life must admit. But that we can always recog- 
 nize it is by no means true. A hopeful man will 
 see signs of it, and presages of the final victory 
 of good over evil, almost everywhere. Nor is it 
 necessary that religion should express itself in 
 strange and strained words or practices. The 
 simplest words which express affection or self- 
 denial or aspirations after good are best. But, 
 on the other hand, we must recognize Christian 
 influences and Christian experience as part of the 
 natural life, not to be turned from in ordinary 
 conversation or in scientific inquiry. And, further, 
 practices such as asceticism, which denaturalize 
 human life, unless adopted, as they were by St. 
 Paul, for the good of mankind during " the present 
 distress/' must be inconsistent with the principle 
 we are upholding. Any mode of action, of course, 
 
 86 
 
THE CHRISTIAN THE TRULY NATURAL MAN 
 
 which will further the objects of piety, or of doing 
 good to others, or aid in establishing the Kingdom 
 of God, may be embraced readily ; but not for 
 its own sake. The common or natural life 
 what our Lord spoke of as " eating and drinking " 
 is God's will for us, with the exception just made. 
 The Christian life is the ordinary life of human 
 goodness, sublimated and raised to its highest 
 power by the Spirit of Christ. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE CHURCH. HUMAN SOCIETY TURNED 
 CHRISTIAN 
 
 A^ID similarly, in speaking of the Christian 
 Society or Church, we may say that it is 
 simply human society transformed by the Spirit 
 of Christ. Our Lord Himself was a loyal member 
 of the Jewish nation, and His own first endeavour, 
 as also that of His apostles, was to infuse His own 
 spirit into the nation " to gather the children of 
 Jerusalem under His wings." Only when they 
 showed that " they would not " did He take the 
 momentous step of founding a separate Society. 
 But His invitation to the Jewish people was re- 
 peated at Pentecost according to His last injunc- 
 tions. " The promise is unto you and your 
 children " " Ye are the children of the prophets " 
 " To you first God hath sent Jesus Christ to 
 bless you." 
 
 Think what would have been the result if this 
 invitation had been accepted. The Jewish nation 
 would have become the first Christian Church. 
 And this we may rightly consider to be the normal 
 or natural condition of things under the Christian 
 
 88 
 
THE TRUE SOCIAL LIFE 
 
 dispensation, each human institution, by accepting 
 the divine principle of life, becoming a part of the 
 Church the family first, " The Church which is 
 in thy house " ; then the social circle, as repre- 
 sented by the early Churches in the Roman cities ; 
 then the Christian nation and the Empire. The 
 attempt made by Theodosius and Gratian to 
 make the Empire one vast Church, though it 
 may have been premature, was in the right 
 direction. The condition of things established 
 for more than a thousand years in England is, 
 we may feel sure, the highest type of the Church, 
 where the nation as a whole, with all its powers, 
 acts as a Christian Church ; where, as in our 
 Bidding Prayer, or in our prayer for the Church 
 Militant, we take in, as integral parts of the Church, 
 the Sovereign, the nobles, the magistrates, the 
 clergy, the Parliament, and all orders and degrees 
 of men in their several stations, praying that they 
 may all work together for one end, the end of 
 Christian righteousness, and assist each other in 
 fulfilling it. It is, no doubt, as St. Paul said * of the 
 Church of his day, " a great house," in which there 
 are vessels of gold and silver, of wood and of brass ; 
 and in which discipline must be exercised (as it is 
 by our laws), "for the punishment of wickedness 
 and vice," a school in which each individual may 
 rise by good training from class to class. By 
 no other system than by this inclusive and natural 
 * 2 Tim. ii. 20. 
 89 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 one can we ensure that all the moral forces of the 
 nation shall work, not in antagonism but in unity, 
 to convert human society into the Kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 It remains, therefore, to speak of the Church as 
 the institution by which religion operates upon 
 mankind. It is here most of all that we need to 
 maintain the naturalness of Christianity, because, if 
 the Church as the organ of the divine life is an exotic 
 element always kept apart from the free develop- 
 ment of mankind, and either dominant over it or 
 contending with it for the mastery , it is evident that 
 the two systems will clash continually, and that an 
 unworthy representation of truth and of morality 
 will be presented to men, arousing their contempt 
 or their animosity. It is the chief object of this 
 treatise to show that these evils are needless. 
 Unity and universality must be the characteristics 
 of that which is divine. 
 
 Church writers and workers are apt to form 
 their conceptions upon too narrow a basis, and 
 to take their ideas of the Church and its functions 
 from too late a period. And secular writers and 
 actors are apt to accept the estimate thus formed 
 as inevitable or even as axiomatic. But when 
 this is done a wrong direction is taken, and, for 
 the most part, if we ask the question, What 
 are you speaking of when you use the word 
 Church ? the answer, if given truly, must be 
 simply, The Clergy. The mass of mankind 
 
 90 
 
UNIVERSAL CHARACTER OF THE CHURCH 
 
 do not count, and whatever lay element exists is 
 there only by consent of the clergy and on terms 
 dictated by them. If any one will take the pains 
 to read a few pages in any book or newspaper 
 treating of these subjects, and note the passages 
 in which the word Church occurs, they will find that 
 the things attributed to " the Church " are really 
 the acts of the clergy and their special adherents. 
 This is not said invidiously, as if the clergy had 
 some evil or selfish motive. It is the fault of a 
 wrong assumption, that the main, or even sole 
 object of the Church is public worship with its im- 
 mediate adjuncts, a sphere in which the clergy 
 must necessarily be predominant. 
 
 St. Paul defines the Church as " The body of 
 Christ, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all." 
 The universality of the Church is here proclaimed ; 
 and, when we set before us the declarations that 
 " Christ, the true light, lighteth every man," that 
 " all things consist or stand fast through Him," * 
 and remember that our Lord reproached His dis- 
 ciples for forbidding those who " followed not with 
 them," while showing faith in His name, that St. 
 Paul made it his chief teaching that it is faith as 
 contrasted with ordinances which saves, we cannot 
 but believe that the single thing which our Lord 
 regarded as important was the devotion of the 
 heart, and that, whatever ordinances were 
 established among his followers, He would regard 
 * Col. i. 17. 
 
 91 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 as of secondary importance, and would not wish 
 them to be the means of excluding any who loved 
 and followed Him. It is said, indeed, that He 
 founded the two Sacraments : but how different 
 is His treatment of them from the use made of 
 them in later times ! Baptism was an ordinance of 
 the Jews : proselytes, Essenes, the disciples of 
 John, were baptized. It was held that all Israel 
 had undergone baptism at Sinai, and that there- 
 fore their children did not need it. Our Lord, no 
 doubt, allowed its use in the formation of that 
 which was at the time a new Jewish sect, but the 
 tradition, if not the record itself, says significantly 
 that " Jesus baptized not, but His disciples." * 
 And St. Paul, though he uses the symbolism of 
 baptism to enforce the renunciation and faith 
 needed in Christians, yet marks emphatically the 
 superiority of his office as a proclaimer of the 
 Gospel over that of the administrator of the 
 sacrament. f Logicians find everywhere a class of 
 things which they call " inseparable accidents " 
 that is, things which necessarily accompany ideas 
 in order to give them visible embodiment, but are 
 only to be esteemed as helps to our consciousness 
 of the mental or spiritual reality ; and we may 
 say that both our Lord and St. Paul treated the 
 Sacraments as amongst this class. They are privi- 
 leges which it would be strange indeed to neglect ; 
 but, if it is said that the act of baptism is to be 
 * John iv. 2. f Cor. i. 13-17. 
 
 92 
 
BAPTISM AND THE LORD'S SUPPER 
 
 enforced under penalty of everlasting death, the 
 Sect which refuses the ordinance stands there to 
 refute us. We might almost think that God had 
 provided the community of Friends as a protest 
 against such a doctrine. Our Lord would surely, 
 even if He had given a more emphatic command, 
 have considered the exaggerations and false teach- 
 ing which had caused such a protest as good reason 
 for counting their faith for righteousness apart from 
 the law. And the same may be said in reference 
 to the Lord's Supper, which was the Jewish 
 Passover appropriated by our Lord as a memorial 
 of His death. It is certainly a strange thing for 
 any believer to refuse this ordinance ; but we have 
 to admit that the controversies and superstitions 
 which have gathered round it have been among the 
 main causes which have driven believers away ; and 
 there are certainly instances known to the present 
 writer in which very earnest and capable men 
 have felt that they served God better by abstaining 
 than by partaking of an ordinance which had been 
 so much denaturalized. 
 
 We may say then that, though the participa- 
 tion in the Sacraments is a high privilege, and is, 
 speaking generally, the mark of those who believe, 
 yet that it is contrary to the genius of our religion 
 to frame these acts into a peremptory and exclusive 
 law. The Church of Christ has no formal bounds. 
 We are taught to say " Grace be with all them that 
 love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity " ; and, 
 
 93 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 looking even further, as our age is bound to do, 
 " in every nation he that feareth God and worketh 
 righteousness is accepted of Him." One of the 
 most competent men known to the author has 
 said : The Church of Christ has a centre, but no 
 circumference. 
 
 But if we have no formal boundaries to the 
 Church, but look upon it as, according to the 
 words above quoted, " the fullness of Him who 
 filleth all in all," * and as bearing to ordinary men 
 or societies a similar relation to that which men 
 of genius bear to the ordinary workers in the 
 same sphere, what difference, it may be asked, 
 is there between it and the world or human 
 society generally ? There are several considera- 
 tions which we must bear in mind before we 
 answer this question. The first thing is to set 
 before us the object for which the Church exists. 
 The nature and bounds of each society are best 
 seen when we realize what its purpose is. If 
 then we consider the Church as existing for the 
 purpose of making God as revealed to us in Christ, 
 and His saving health, known to mankind, and 
 thus to establish His Kingdom by making Him 
 truly Lord over all, we must recognize all who are 
 engaged in this work as forming part of the 
 Church. And further, if we believe that the re- 
 demption wrought by Christ is universal and is 
 destined to include the whole human race, we must 
 * E P h. i. 23. 
 
 94 
 
CHURCH MEMBERSHIP 
 
 look on the whole world and every person in it 
 as potentially a part of the body which is to bring 
 about this result. In the later Epistles of St. Paul 
 (those of the Captivity) which deal with this 
 subject, and in which he may have been aided in 
 working out his convictions by the spectacle 
 of the vast unity of the Roman Empire, the 
 purpose of God is described in these words : 
 " That in the dispensation of the fullness of the 
 times He may sum up all things in Christ " ; * 
 and the instrument by which this is to be effected 
 is the Church, " which is His body, the fullness 
 of Him that filleth all in all " the full body, as the 
 Apostle exclaims, of Him by whom the whole 
 world stands fast, and by whom and for whom 
 all things are created. We must conceive, then, 
 of every person and thing in the world as having 
 some place in this great scheme, some portion in 
 building up the Kingdom of God. 
 
 If, further, the question is asked, How can the 
 things or persons who are valid members of this 
 body be marked off from those which are only 
 potentially so, the answer is that they are marked 
 off by the will to work in the joint cause, and by a 
 certain understanding of its purpose. None who wish 
 sincerely to contribute to the building up of God's 
 Kingdom of righteousness can justly be rejected. 
 The whole human race is one great brotherhood 
 with a common purpose of which it becomes more 
 * Eph. i. 10. 
 
 95 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and more conscious. We have worked toward it 
 as yet only partially, and by means of disjointed 
 efforts. We must work in the future with unity 
 and conscious purpose. And if it is further asked 
 how the present organizations which call them- 
 selves Churches, or exist as societies for sound but 
 limited purposes, whether they be sects or families 
 or nations, are to be related to the whole body, 
 we may refer to that which has been said above 
 about the system of Election by which God's 
 purposes are wrought out. In pre-Christian times, 
 the Jewish community was the elect of man- 
 kind in the diffusion of divine righteousness, while 
 other races had the leadership in art or in philo- 
 sophy or the power of government; but when 
 Christ had come, all were to be blended into one. 
 A similar change is now demanded. The Church 
 of conscious votaries of Christ must admit the 
 value of other forms in which men have felt after 
 the divine. The time is come when what is best 
 in all those forms should be combined in friendly 
 effort, without which each is limited and one-sided. 
 They must aid and not counteract one another. 
 
 The present age is one in which we are com- 
 pelled to extend our horizon and our efforts accord- 
 ing to the fuller perception which is opened to us 
 of the purpose of God. If science is learning that 
 the world of Spirit is at least as important as that 
 of matter, and that the two must be connected both 
 in research and in action ; the world of faith also 
 96 
 
ELECTION AND UNIVERSALITY 
 
 is learning that it cannot exist by itself, but must 
 go forth in works of philanthropy, in efforts for 
 the increase of knowledge and civilization, for the 
 furtherance of public health and for international 
 peace that every human society is a great brother- 
 hood, each member of which must learn to help the 
 rest in the spirit of their common Lord ; and, if in 
 the past co-operation between the different parts of 
 the human family has been hindered by lack of 
 mutual knowledge, this hindrance has been re- 
 moved by the ease of locomotion, correspondence, 
 and intelligence. The West has been the teacher 
 of the East, and is learning that there is also much 
 that the East can teach her. It is no longer possible 
 to maintain as permanent barriers the languages 
 or the customs or the religions which have separated 
 us. And it is only a further step, though a great 
 one, which will make us feel that manufactures 
 and art and all the agencies by which human life 
 is conducted, must abandon their selfish seclusion 
 and minister to the general welfare ; and further, 
 that imperial rule must have a moral purpose for 
 upraising the weaker, and inspiring the stronger 
 with the duty and the blessedness of service. All 
 this and similar considerations without number 
 compel us to realize the purpose of God and. the 
 Kingdom of Christ, and to recognize that the 
 true Church is that which can contribute most 
 effectively to the great consummation. 
 
 If this is true, then we must enlarge our view 
 
 H 97 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of the Church. It has hitherto been supposed that 
 the Church is concerned primarily with public 
 worship, and that whatever else it attempts must 
 be conditioned by its relation to public worship. 
 We must now consider it not merely as having a 
 general influence on human life through the power 
 exerted by public worship, but as uniting and 
 merging itself in the general life, finding there 
 the main field of its activity, and realizing that, 
 if this is not done, its endeavours will to a large 
 extent be sterile, and also to a large extent a 
 hindrance to the highest good. It may seem a 
 strange thing to maintain that two ordinances 
 which have always been thought generally neces- 
 sary to salvation are to be treated as no longer 
 absolutely necessary. But does this not corre- 
 spond to the facts ? We are estimating Chris- 
 tianity in its natural bearing that is, as connected 
 with actual facts. As regards both the Sacraments, 
 a true Christian judgment would surely say that, 
 considering the verdict of history and experience 
 in all its bearings, we are bound to believe that 
 some of the truest Christians have been found 
 amongst those who have discarded their use. 
 If we speak of law we must go by legal maxims ; 
 and there are many acts which, though not pre- 
 cisely in conformity to the legal demands, may 
 be validated by other means. A receipt, for 
 instance, to use a homely illustration, is not 
 valid without a stamp ; but it is allowed to 
 
 98 
 
EXCLUSIVENESS AND DIVISION 
 
 prove the fact that the money has been received 
 by other means ; and certainly a man who has 
 found difficulties in the forms of baptism or the 
 Lord's Supper is counted amongst us as a brother 
 Christian if we see in him the marks of faith and 
 a good life. It seems almost a crime when, instead 
 of extending the bonds of Christian fellowship, 
 we erect fresh barriers against it, and narrow the 
 membership of the Church by turning a privilege 
 into a formal obligation, and making an ordinance 
 like confirmation a law of exclusion. This is the 
 high road of sectarianism. 
 
 It is certain that this course of exclusiveness 
 presents Christianity to men in an unreal and an 
 invidious light, and turns away the thoughts of 
 sincere Christians from their true object, which is 
 the regeneration of the whole life of mankind by 
 the infusing into it of the Spirit of Christ. 
 
 Those who bear the name of Christ are need- 
 lessly divided. Even if the absolute necessity of the 
 two Sacraments were not reckoned absolute, we 
 should still have peculiarities of their administration 
 to cause division ; and the larger sections of the 
 Christian body are divided internally by smaller 
 differences of ritual or of opinion, almost all of 
 which relate to some form of public worship or 
 the discipline of its ministers, and have little 
 cognizable influence on the life. Can we not form 
 a true and more natural basis of fellowship, such 
 as that which Christ and His apostles indicate, 
 
 99 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 by the fact that they spoke as little as possible 
 of public worship and its forms, and bent all their 
 efforts to sanctify the life of the community ? 
 
 The truest conception that we can have of the 
 Church is that it is simply human society turned 
 Christian. The Church sprang out of the syna- 
 gogue, and the synagogue was simply the congrega- 
 tion or gathering of the whole nation. " Church " 
 and " synagogue " are the same word, meaning 
 the gathering of the nation in the name of God to 
 carry on its life in His faith and fear. 
 
 The Jewish Ecclesia or Church was a nation, 
 and Christ never said anything to show that His 
 Church was to reject the national attributes and 
 position whenever the nation should come in the 
 natural order of conviction to confess Him as 
 its true Lord. Only, according to the declara- 
 tion which He made in answer to the confession of 
 Peter, the foundation must be Himself. He must 
 Himself be recognized as giving by His life, His 
 teaching, and His self-sacrifice the fundamental 
 principle of the national life, its laws, its social 
 system. In the only other place in which He used 
 the word " church " it was to urge His servants not 
 to take the law into their own hands, but to bring it 
 before the local councils or assemblies, by which 
 the Jewish synagogues were administered, and 
 which had power to enforce the law by excom- 
 munication and by stripes, and even by capital 
 punishment where this was not prevented by 
 
CHURCH AND NATION 
 
 some power like that of Rome. Of course, the 
 nation having apostatized, a new effort must be 
 made to reconvert it ; but the hope of a national 
 status was never abandoned. On the contrary, 
 the first effort of the Christian preachers was to 
 call upon the nation to accept the true founda- 
 tion : " The promise is unto you and to your 
 children." Whether we read the speech of Peter 
 at Pentecost or that of St. Paul at Antioch in 
 Pisidia, we find the same national ring about the 
 language ; and when the Jews as a nation rejected 
 the true King, the turning to the Gentiles meant 
 not merely an appeal to individuals, but an appeal 
 to the community as a whole. St. Paul was a 
 Roman citizen, and, as Sir Wm. Ramsay has 
 pointed out, he never lost sight of the nation in 
 the individual. He speaks of the Gentiles as a 
 whole. He sought out the great cities, Athens, 
 Ephesus, Rome, the centres of the national life 
 of the East, of Greece, and of the Empire itself. 
 His keenest desire was to see Rome, not merely, 
 we may feel sure, as the greatest aggregate of 
 individuals, but as the head and centre of imperial 
 power. If we read the Epistles of the Captivity 
 we see the imperial idea constantly emerging ; 
 the dominion of Christ is to be universal like that 
 of Rome ; like the Empire it is to break down 
 barriers raid to unite all nations ; it is to bind 
 together the family which was the only corporate 
 body on which effectual power could then be 
 
 101 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 exercised ; but, looking to the whole of humanity 
 and its future, so far as the power of justice 
 and of government extended, St. Paul teaches 
 that its rulers and ministers must, even at that 
 stage, be recognized as the ministers of God. 
 
 102 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 ATTEMPTS TO MAKE HUMAN SOCIETY 
 CHRISTIAN 
 
 i. THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE 
 
 IT is a true though a melancholy reflection that 
 when a more complete adaptation of Christian 
 principles to imperial rule became possible in the 
 days of Constantine and Theodosius, the result 
 was not at once successful. But the chief causes 
 of this may be seen in the view of the Church en- 
 gendered by the centuries of persecution. It 
 had been limited in its outlook and the range 
 of its activity, so that it preserved the attributes 
 of a sect ; and the Empire meanwhile had been 
 following out its own traditions of dominion. 
 Consequently the church teachers never appealed 
 to the Emperors to become ministers of God in 
 their capacity of governors, but merely as pro- 
 tectors of a great sect. Laws were made for the 
 keeping of Sunday, for the suppression of idolatry, 
 and similar objects, in the interests of the Church as 
 a sect ; and the Emperors took part in the doctrinal 
 controversies of the time, first with a view to peace 
 and afterwards to enforce their own views. No 
 doubt the true ideas of religion influenced the 
 
 103 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 legislation of Constantine and Theodosius ; but 
 these great rulers never seem to have felt that in 
 their secular position they were servants of God 
 and bound to rule justly and leniently. The 
 well-known scene in which Ambrose repelled 
 Theodosius from the Church on account of his 
 cruel massacre at Thessalonica may be rightly 
 quoted as an exception to this ; but it has rather 
 served in the course of history to enhance the 
 claims of the ecclesiastical dominion over the 
 secular power, than to raise the lay power to a 
 sense of its Christian responsibility. 
 
 And thus the Church was started on its voyage 
 through the Dark Ages, not as a comprehensive 
 and expansive institution leading mankind in the 
 path of righteousness, but as a clerical sect 
 occupied primarily with public worship and the 
 maintenance of forms of doctrine and observances, 
 at times enjoying the protection of the secular 
 power, at times opposing it. There were attempts 
 at uniting the religious and common life, but 
 such attempts were always frustrated by the false 
 opposition which had been engendered between 
 the two powers. Charlemagne wished to rule 
 as a Christian sovereign, but his influence passed 
 away with his personal rule and his empire. 
 Hildebrand wished to make Christ a feudal 
 Prince, but the Pope and the clergy were to be 
 Christ's vicegerents, while the secular rule was 
 in his eyes, and in those of his successors, little 
 104 
 
THE SECULAR CHRISTIAN POWER 
 
 better than organized robbery. The name of the 
 Holy Roman Empire was assumed by the Emperor 
 Frederick II as an assertion that his rights were as 
 valid as those of the Pope ; but the result then, as 
 afterwards in the England of Henry II and Becket, 
 was mainly the juxtaposition of two powers, the 
 one representing secular justice in its harshest 
 aspect, the other a clerical leniency which favoured 
 the ecclesiastic but shielded the malefactor. 
 It was the growth of national power and the 
 conviction that only through the national or- 
 ganization could the divine justice and unity be 
 established that were the strength of the Reforma- 
 tion. The appeal of the Reformers in their desire 
 for justice was always to the sovereign and the 
 nation. The nation became the Church, and the 
 King its head. 
 
 2. ENGLAND BECOMING A CHRISTIAN CHURCH 
 
 This is the constitution as established in England, 
 and it has never been altered amidst all the 
 vicissitudes through which our country has passed. 
 No doubt there are many circumstances which 
 are thought to have shaken it, and even to make 
 it appear absurd to attempt to restore it or to 
 argue in its favour. But there are good grounds 
 for upholding it, as the present writer has always 
 done. He ventures to assert, first, that this identi- 
 fication of the nation and the Church, or, to put 
 
 105 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 it more plainly, the assertion that the English 
 nation claims to be a branch of the Christian 
 Church, is one which has been made from its very 
 birth, and, after many assaults from the clerical 
 power, was definitely vindicated at the Reforma- 
 tion ; secondly, that, far from its having been 
 given up, it is at the present moment in viridi 
 observantid ; and, thirdly, that it is the condition 
 of things best suited to the present condition of 
 the Christian life amongst us, and contains in itself 
 the promise of the future. 
 
 It will not be denied that in the Saxon times 
 there was a perfect unity ; the country acted as a 
 Church even before it was one nation. The Wit an 
 contained both clergy and laity ; and, though at 
 times there were separate councils of clergy, they 
 were summoned by the King, not by the Arch- 
 bishop. The Bishop and the Earl sat side by side 
 in the County Court, and the points debated in 
 the councils, whether clerical only or mixed, were 
 the same. When the Conqueror introduced 
 foreign ecclesiastics and a foreign discipline of the 
 clergy, it was with a view of bringing the clerical 
 system more, not less, under the Royal control : 
 he would not swear allegiance to the Pope, though 
 that Pope was Hildebrand, and the Decretals 
 now became English law. The English sovereigns 
 on the whole maintained their right to rule over 
 an undivided realm, though some of them, 
 especially the Lancastrian kings, for selfish 
 
 106 
 
UNITY OF CHURCH AND REALM 
 
 advantages yielded for a time to a foreign power. 
 So that when under Henry VIII the unity of the 
 realm was definitely established by law, this was 
 spoken of not as anything new, but simply as the 
 restoration of the ancient subjection of the 
 ecclesiastical power to the head of the Christian 
 nation. 
 
 3. THE REFORMATION. SUBJECTION OF ECCLESI- 
 ASTICAL TO NATIONAL POWER 
 
 Historians have often been deceived by the use 
 of the word Church. It had during the Middle 
 Ages acquired the meaning not of the Christian 
 community, but of the clergy and their immediate 
 adherents. These formed a vast body, including, 
 first, all the orders of clergy proper, then the monks, 
 then persons attached as servants or otherwise 
 to churches and monasteries, and lastly a vast 
 number of what may be called protected persons, 
 who were possessed of some slight rudiments of 
 learning. A man, for instance, who was accused 
 of a capital offence, could claim what was called 
 " Benefit of Clergy " by reciting a verse of the 
 Bible in Latin. The verse usually chosen was the 
 first verse of the fifty- first Psalm, which gained 
 from this use of it the title of the neck-verse. 
 All this mass of people made up what was called 
 Holy Church, and could claim certain privileges 
 and immunities, such as " Benefit of Clergy " 
 
 107 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 above-mentioned, just as, in another sphere, the 
 right of sanctuary was recognized. When, there- 
 fore, we read in Magna Charta that the Ecclesia 
 Anglicana should retain its liberties, this does not 
 mean the Church of England as it is now commonly 
 understood that is, a body of persons who attend 
 public worship under particular forms, and are 
 by them marked off from the rest of the nation (an 
 interpretation which would have been impossible, 
 since there were no Nonconformists), but the 
 clergy, or rather " the clerisy," as they have just 
 been described. Their peculiar laws or customs 
 were to be respected a proviso, however, which 
 was subject to the recognized condition that the 
 ultimate power, in the case of election of Bishops 
 and Abbots, resided in the Sovereign. And, simi- 
 larly, when the great Act of Appeals, in the time of 
 Henry VIII was heralded by the declaration of 
 the law that there are in England, as an Imperial 
 whole, two sets of persons who are capable of 
 declaring the law, the one in sacred matters, the 
 other in civil matters, and that the division 
 which is connected with the sacred that is, the 
 ecclesiastical law, is called Ecclesia Anglicana ; 
 what is meant is not what we now call, somewhat 
 vaguely, the Church of England, but the ecclesias- 
 tical body above described. It is sometimes 
 argued from this very notable Preface not only 
 that the Church of England, as we understand it 
 vulgarly, exists as a separate body within the 
 
 108 
 
SUPREMACY OF THE KING AND NATION 
 
 nation, but that the King, when he claims to be 
 head of this body, is asserting a personal power 
 separate from the constitutional power expressed 
 by Acts of Parliament ; but the fact that the 
 Preface is itself an Act of Parliament contradicts 
 all such notions ; and the statute itself not only 
 lays down the constitutional law on the subject by 
 its own authority, but actually requires the 
 clergy to conduct the church services as they 
 have before been held under penalties prescribed 
 by Parliament alone. The further legislation of 
 the Reformation period is all in the same direction. 
 All the effective legislation was conducted by Par- 
 liament or by Royal proclamation. The position of 
 the Convocations of the clergy under the reformed 
 system has never been accurately defined. But 
 whatever their position, it is certain that they 
 represent the clergy alone. On the only occasion 
 on which they passed laws with the Royal Assent, 
 that is, in framing the Canons of 1603, it is true 
 that they proposed to legislate for the whole nation; 
 but this action was withstood by the Parliament, 
 who spoke of themselves as a body of Churchmen, 
 and protested against laws being passed by the 
 clergy alone. It is a legal maxim that any statute 
 of the realm which conflicts with an ecclesiastical 
 Canon overrides it ; and although it was held 
 by Lord Hardwicke's famous judgment (which, 
 however, has never been tested by the highest 
 Court of Appeal) that the Canons of the Convoca- 
 
 109 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 tion were binding on the clergy, since the clergy 
 were represented in that assembly, it is certain 
 that they cannot prevail against the laws of the 
 realm, which alone represent the " Church and 
 realm " as a whole. It was said by Burke that 
 the Convocations were nominally a part of the 
 Constitution, but that, being then in abeyance, 
 it would be very rash to give them any power : 
 and the experience gained by fifty years since their 
 resuscitation does not encourage any proposal 
 to bestow legislative or judicial powers on them, 
 nor on the body called Representative Council, 
 which has been organized of late years on sectarian 
 principles, and which would make the clergy 
 supreme. 
 
 It is often argued that this national government 
 of clerical affairs, or more properly the identifi- 
 cation of the Church with the nation, was repealed 
 by the Act of Toleration in the reign of William III, 
 which gave liberty of worship to Nonconformists. 
 But the fact that the nation, acting as a Church, 
 allowed its members to worship according to their 
 own consciences, does not imply that they ceased 
 to be members of the English branch of Christ's 
 Church that is, of the whole aggregate of Christians 
 who in their whole life are striving to serve God 
 and to bring in the Kingdom of Christ. If the 
 only duty of the Church were the conduct of 
 public worship and the public teaching of religion 
 in certain prescribed forms, it might be limited 
 
 no 
 

 
 SCOPE OF THE ACT OF TOLERATION 
 
 by special laws framed for those special purposes ; 
 but it would then be a stunted and clericalist sect 
 belying its best traditions, which are those of 
 nationality and of universality. 
 
 It is not, indeed, to be denied that the language 
 of the Toleration Act was somewhat ambiguous, 
 and that the word Church of England was in some 
 places used in the popular and limited sense which 
 it still is apt to bear. But when Nonconformists 
 are spoken of as " persons dissenting from the 
 Church of England," it is evident that this dissent 
 relates to the limited sphere of Church ordinances, 
 and that the toleration given relates to freedom 
 from the penalties previously enacted for non- 
 compliance with these ordinances. No one who 
 realizes that Christ demands the whole life of man 
 would limit the Church in this way ; and the 
 tendency of national sentiment in recent times 
 has been to dwell more, not less, on that side of 
 religion which takes in the general life, and seeks 
 to inspire the whole fabric of society with Christian 
 justice and brotherly love. It is this which is 
 meant by natural Christianity in contrast with the 
 Christianity which is limited by ordinances. 
 When such expressions are used they must be 
 interpreted according to the matter in hand. 
 When a person is asked, for instance, in reference 
 to some position which he seeks, whether he is a 
 member of the Church of England, he knows that 
 the question relates to the narrower view of the 
 
 in 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Church as a system of worship. But if he is claim- 
 ing a position of citizenship, as in the times before 
 the Test Act was abolished, or if, having no 
 special ecclesiastical convictions, he asserts a right, 
 say to a seat in his parish church or to be ad- 
 mitted to the Holy Communion, no one can 
 deny him.* Such^claims should be insisted upon 
 and admitted readily ; the utmost extension that 
 is possible should be given to the boundaries of the 
 National Church, even in such technical matters 
 as these. 
 
 Leaving, therefore, these questions relating to 
 the less important points, namely, the forms of 
 public worship, about which the founder of the 
 Christian Church hardly said a word, and looking 
 to these matters of truth and morals, both public 
 and private, towards which all His teaching was 
 directed, we cannot but conclude that the main 
 objects of Christian endeavour, and conse- 
 quently of the Christian Church, ought to be the 
 living out of the life of the whole community in its 
 highest moral and spiritual power, and this not 
 merely by means of the Church as an exotic or 
 separate body, acting, as it were, from without, but 
 by the actual living of the Christian life by all the 
 
 * Before the Test Act was repealed, and no man could be a 
 member of a Corporation unless he received the Communion 
 according to the Prayer Book, attempts were made to exclude 
 from the Communion all who had not been confirmed, hut the 
 Courts held that no such exclusion could be allowed. 
 
 112 
 
FULL DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 nation and in all the circles of moral activity which 
 it contains. The Church of England can be nothing 
 short of this. 
 
 This point needs to be insisted on. We talk 
 in common parlance of " going to church," the 
 action of the Church on the community, etc. But, 
 if we are Christians, we are the Church. " Where 
 two or three are gathered together in my name," 
 said our Lord, " there am I in the midst of them." 
 These words have been commonly restricted to 
 assemblies for public worship, instruction, and 
 religious or charitable work. There is no reason 
 for this restriction. Wherever men meet with a 
 good purpose, they meet in Christ's name. The 
 family meal, the daily meeting for the work of 
 any calling which ministers to human needs, to 
 art or knowledge or invention, all are gatherings 
 in the name of Christ. Those who speak lightly 
 of such occupations, and contrast them with 
 the Church, have missed the teaching and spirit 
 of the Master, and are doing a wrong to 
 the Church, which (St. Paul says) " is His Body, 
 the fullness of Him that filleth all in all." True, 
 they may be conducted in a wrong spirit, and then 
 they are not Christ's churches : but also the 
 gatherings or societies which we commonly call 
 churches may become synagogues of Satan. 
 If we have the Lord's Spirit, we shall be expansive. 
 Our policy towards men and institutions will not 
 be exclusive but inclusive, not driving them 
 
 i 113 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 further into the darkness, but trustfully seeking 
 to make them fully partakers of the light. 
 
 4. THIS SYSTEM STILL " IN VIRIDI OBSERVANTIA " 
 
 But no doubt this view of the Church of 
 England will strike men generally as an ideal 
 rather than as a practical ground of action, so far 
 have they drifted in the direction of clericalism; 
 and it is necessary to point out that, on the 
 contrary, it is both right in principle and perfectly 
 feasible, or rather that it is in actual and strenuous 
 operation. 
 
 First, then, the objection to the nation being 
 itself the Church of England is made on the ground 
 that the nation consists of many individuals, 
 some of whom differ from others in their views 
 of Christian truth or practice, and some even 
 do not profess Christianity at all. But this is 
 exactly what is to be expected in a vast community 
 such as the nation. In such a community there is 
 hardly a matter on which all are agreed, and yet 
 we are one. The principles on which we act and 
 the standard of right are on the whole well-known 
 and observed. There is probably no great aggre- 
 gate of human beings which is fundamentally 
 more united than the British nation. If we go 
 back to the foundation of the Church itself, the 
 only foundation which is laid, which is faith in 
 Christ, implies a trust in the'essentials of humanity, 
 
 114 
 
THE CHURCH THE WHOLE CHRISTIAN NATION 
 
 which He alone fully represents, and consequently 
 every true man has in Him the essentials of this 
 faith. Israel was the righteous nation, although 
 many Israelites were very imperfect men, their 
 kings frequently idolaters, their heroes as im- 
 perfect as Samson or Jephthah. If we go deeper 
 and ask what was the divine verdict upon the 
 nation, we find in the prophets denunciations of 
 judgment upon wickedness and apostacy, but no 
 attempt of a select few to claim that they them- 
 selves are God's special favourites to the exclusion 
 of the rest. Israel is to be blamed and chastened, 
 but he is Israel still ; and those who made the 
 highest profession are those who are most reproved. 
 It is true that in the first Christian Churches each 
 individual was called on to make a profession of 
 faith and to accept baptism : and such a pro- 
 fession must always be a means of grace it is 
 a blessing in every way to belong, by a definite 
 act of profession and incorporation, to the holy 
 brotherhood. If we turn to the New Testament, 
 we find the language of our Lord to be that of 
 extreme condemnation of the leaders ; but these 
 very men are recognized as "sitting in Moses' 
 seat," and even Caiaphas is treated with respect. 
 The nation is full of sects, but a man is not separ- 
 ated from .the commonwealth of Israel because he 
 is a Pharisee or a Sadducee, an Essene or a Hero- 
 dian. Can it be right that a follower of Christ, 
 because he differs from the largest body of His 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 people about Baptism or Confirmation, should 
 be treated as outside the Church ? In the Church 
 of Corinth even those who denied the Resurrection 
 were not excommunicated. And, further, the 
 society has a right to make its own rules. But 
 a society which is set up with a view to embracing 
 humanity as a whole must become more and more 
 universal : its arrangements must be constantly 
 readapted to the progress of mankind and become 
 less and less exclusive. If, on the other hand, 
 the boundaries of the Church are to be fixed 
 by the clerical power, it is evident that a dis- 
 proportionate stress will be laid on public worship 
 and its details : and the old controversies of the 
 fourth or sixth, the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries will be revived, and the more important 
 matters of general human interest will be put out 
 of sight and severed from Christian influences. 
 
 It will, perhaps, be argued that there is little 
 danger of this since the tendency of religion in 
 the present day is to go forth into social enterprise. 
 We have " institutional churches " and Christian 
 Social Unions, and exhortations to the younger 
 clergy to take part in society, its interests and 
 its amusements. No doubt the general feeling 
 which prompts such measures is a good one ; 
 but there are two dangers in it. The first of these 
 is that a vast amount of labour is forced upon the 
 clergy which ought to be undertaken by the laity. 
 The accounts of charitable institutions in a parish 
 
 116 
 
LIMITATIONS OF CLERICAL ACTIVITY 
 
 very commonly devolve upon the parson, the corre- 
 spondence and finance of the Church schools is 
 conducted by him, and he is praised for the vast- 
 ness and multiplicity of his work. But, so far 
 as they are permitted to join in Church work, the 
 laity feel more and more that it is not their own 
 work, but that they are merely helpers of the 
 clergy, and, having no power, they by degrees lose 
 all interest and initiative, whereas in a healthy 
 Church life every member should feel that he is 
 bound to take an active part. 
 
 But the other danger is still graver, and has 
 hardly yet begun to be felt. It is this, that a separate 
 and limited body undertakes to do the social work 
 of the whole. This body which affects to be " the 
 Church " assumes to do what can only be properly 
 done by the national organs. It does it necessarily 
 only in part, and will not co-operate with others. 
 If we hear of a Christian enterprise with the affix 
 " church " before it, we at once know, first, that 
 it will be conducted under the control of the clergy ; 
 and secondly, that no Nonconformist need apply. 
 And when such an enterprise is found to cover 
 but a portion of the ground and the work is 
 taken up by the national power, those who have 
 begun it often show a jealousy of what has grown 
 to be their right of control, and insist on continuing 
 to impose their own special views as conditions of 
 joining in the common work and then religion 
 is made to appear as a hindering, not a helping 
 
 117 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 power in human progress. When things have 
 come to this pass, Christianity, instead of being 
 recognized as a stimulus to the natural develop- 
 ment of social good, is made to appear as a hostile 
 force, and awakens, even against our Lord Himself, 
 an indignation and hostility which should be 
 directed against the unchristian infatuation and 
 action of a section of His ministers. This seems 
 to be the chief matter to which attention should 
 be directed in most Christian countries at the 
 present day, and its difficulties must be solved 
 by taking a natural and common-sense view of the 
 situation, and realizing that it is in this rather 
 than by insistence upon ecclesiastical rules that 
 the work of the Spirit of God is to be seen. Such 
 words as, " It is right to save life, not to destroy 
 it," sweep away a vast mass of false religion. 
 
 We may return then to the proposition that a 
 nation may be a Church, as the Jewish Church 
 was ; and, if so, that it ought to act as a Church. 
 We have in the earliest Christian records the narra- 
 tives of whole families which became churches, 
 such as those of Cornelius the centurion or the 
 j ailer at Philippi. Are we to suppose that they were 
 all fully convinced of such truths as the divinity 
 of our Lord or the Holy Trinity ? Evidently they 
 simply followed where the head of the family led, 
 and bound themselves to " live soberly, justly, 
 and godly " in the present world. When St. Paul 
 in the Epistle to the Ephesians speaks of the 
 
 118 
 
THE CONVERSION OF SOCIETIES 
 
 Christian family, it is evidently a body composed 
 of the same persons who before had been a heathen 
 family ; he says nothing about Christ's doctrines 
 or ordinances ; he speaks of them simply as a 
 family who are conducting their mutual relations 
 in the spirit of our Saviour. And in the Epistle to 
 the Colossians and Philemon he speaks of the 
 family and their friends as " The Church in their 
 house." If we examine the Epistles to the Corin- 
 thians we cannot but see that they are addressed 
 to what has been called a " multitudinous " body, 
 among whom some denied the Resurrection and 
 many were living in immorality ; yet the only 
 person who is to be cast out is a man living in 
 incest, and he is to be re-admitted as soon as he 
 shows signs of repentance. 
 
 We may put this in another way. When any 
 individual becomes a Christian, he is the same 
 man, with his special character and relations. 
 He takes Christ for his Master ; but, while he 
 places himself in Christ's school, you find him 
 often a sadly mixed character ; you trust, never- 
 theless, that good will triumph over evil in him. 
 A similar change passes over a nation. When the 
 Saxon kingdoms one by one became Christian, 
 the mass of the people followed their kings and 
 gave a general assent to Christian teaching and 
 discipline. Some ten thousand persons are said 
 to have been baptized in a single day ; they 
 entered the school in a mass but it required 
 
 119 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 centuries to elapse before any large part of 
 them reached its higher classes. And this view 
 of the matter that is, of a mass of humanity 
 all bound up in social bonds, with many dif- 
 ferent grades and gifts, all working upon each 
 other for good but with varied success is evi- 
 dently that of St. Paul. In his pastoral Epistles, 
 which have a special value for us as dealing with 
 a more advanced social organization, he describes 
 the whole body as the " house and Church of the 
 living God," the " pillar and ground of the 
 Church " (i Tim. hi. 15). Yet of the same body 
 he says (2 Tim. ii. 19) : " In a great house there 
 are vessels of gold and silver, of wood and of 
 brass, some to honour and some to dishonour."* 
 That is a description which will apply to the 
 nation-Church which we are speaking of. We 
 cannot argue from the fact that it contains a 
 great variety of characters and beliefs with special 
 practices that it is not a real Church ; for, 
 if St. Paul in the first century could describe it 
 thus, much more, after the changes of human 
 society in eighteen centuries, must it be expected, 
 and allowed for, that still greater variety will 
 exist in the Christian nation without its ceasing 
 to be Christian. Those who have set to work to 
 
 * And we may recall his injunction to Titus (i. 12, 13) to 
 rebuke the Cretan Christians sharply because the testimony 
 remains true. " The Cretans are at way liars, evil beasts, idle 
 gluttons." 
 
 120 
 
IMPERFECTION AND GRANDEUR OF THE CHURCH 
 
 pick out a certain number and to call those thus 
 selected, whether by their opinions or by their 
 practice of special ordinances, by the name of 
 Church or of " saints," which belongs to the whole 
 body, have simply established sects which have 
 denaturalized human life instead of restoring it 
 to its proper ideal. It is true that Christians cannot 
 all be alike. But a school of thought need not 
 be a party, and a party need not be a sect, and a 
 sect need not be a body separate from the Church ; 
 the Church also should be as wide as possible, 
 otherwise it will lose one of its noblest attributes, 
 that of universality. If it loses that, at least as 
 its acknowledged ideal and goal, it will cease to 
 be " the body or fullness of Christ " and with this 
 its claim to be the representative on earth of the 
 Kingdom of God. 
 
 5. THE SYSTEM STILL " IN VIRIDI OBSERVANTIA " 
 
 In what has been said so far it has been argued 
 that there is nothing contrary to the claims of re- 
 ligion in holding that a nation may become a 
 Church ; and further, that this must be at least 
 the goal aimed at, if we hold to the teaching of the 
 New Testament that Christ is Lord of all, and 
 that, according to St. Paul's oft-repeated words, 
 all rule and authority, all the powers and princi- 
 palities which sway our lives, are subject to His 
 authority. Christian people are so far from 
 accepting these divine principles that they can 
 
 121 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 hardly be said to aim at giving them force. In 
 many cases they absolutely deny them, and deride 
 those who maintain them. It is not seldom 
 that we hear them represented either as worldly 
 or as impracticable. But, putting aside such 
 thoughtlessness, as it must be deemed, it is not 
 unreasonable so ask, first, Whether such a state 
 of things has ever existed as that of a nation or 
 commonwealth being also a Church ? and, secondly, 
 Whether this can exist consistently with freedom 
 of conscience and with the expression of varieties 
 of religious experience in special societies for 
 Christian worship and instruction ? I think that a 
 little attention to historical and present facts 
 enables us to answer these questions in the affirma- 
 tive. We must, however, hold fast these axioms : 
 (i) That the object of the Church is not, as is con- 
 stantly assumed, merely the assertion and pro- 
 clamation of Christian truth, but the living out 
 of the whole life on Christian principles, not ex- 
 cluding certainly the department of life which is 
 administered by the clergy, and to which the 
 name of Church is often but wrongly appropriated 
 in an exclusive sense, but also not excluding the 
 other functions by which the general life of the 
 community is conducted. (2) That the voice of 
 those who administer these other functions is, in its 
 measure, the voice of the indwelling God as truly 
 as that of the ministers of public prayers and 
 preaching Christian worship and beneficence thus 
 
 122 
 
SOCIAL LIFE AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 
 becoming natural, blending with the development 
 of human society, and both acting upon it and 
 being acted upon by it. (3) That, as the Christian 
 Society develops, the social action becomes the 
 main call of the Church, and that, however valuable 
 the definitions of doctrine or the special ordinances 
 may be as the expression of Christian principles 
 and the enforcement of these principles by public 
 prayer and sermons and Sacrament, yet that the 
 thing of chief importance is the living out of these 
 principles in all departments, so as to claim each 
 department for God, to make the world, one part 
 after another, truly a part of the Kingdom of 
 God. In this process every class of men has its 
 part the father of the family, the trader, the 
 governor, the minister of health, the man of science 
 or of art : each has his gift, and, as one of our 
 noblest Collects says, his ministry, and the circle of 
 life to which he belongs, is a necessary element in 
 the process by which the world is to become not 
 ideally only, but actually the Kingdom of God. 
 
 This ideal has never been wholly absent from 
 the greater minds of the Church, but it has been 
 fitfully realized or even attempted in action. And 
 the attempts have been accompanied by conditions 
 which have made its realization impossible. Some- 
 times, as in the reigns of Constantine or Theo- 
 dosius or Justinian, as their codes show, the 
 application of Scriptural ideas has been enforced, 
 but in a narrow and tyrannical fashion, often quite 
 
 123 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 losing sight of the spirit of Christ. Sometimes the 
 zeal for orthodoxy has led to the suppression of 
 great elements of truth. Sometimes, as in the 
 case of the laws of Charlemagne, the strong man 
 who had imposed them had no successor of 
 adequate force. Sometimes, as in the attempt 
 of Hildebrand, it has been marred by the attempt 
 to make the clergy supreme. Sometimes, as in 
 the later Middle Ages, the greatest elements of 
 religion, the worship in spirit and in truth, the 
 worship which consists of righteousness and holi- 
 ness of life, has been crushed under a weight of 
 ceremonial and superstition ; sometimes, as in 
 the age succeeding the Reformation, the violence 
 of controversy has made men lose sight of the 
 Christian life and spirit altogether. 
 
 Nevertheless, the attempts have been in the 
 right direction. Their comparative failure should 
 not make us imagine that they are wrong in 
 themselves, but should stimulate us, as in every 
 other case of social reform, to do away with the 
 faulty elements, and seek to give life to those 
 which are sound. And at least it will be allowed 
 that in England the unity of the nation and its 
 profession of Christianity has been not a mere 
 attempt, but in the main a great reality. Our laws 
 are truly and increasingly a Church Discipline, 
 far more effective than any clerical code, for "the 
 punishment of wickedness and vice and the 
 maintenance of religion and virtue." And the 
 
 124 
 
ATTEMPTS AT NATIONAL CHRISTIANITY NOT VAIN 
 
 great acts which have banished persecution, 
 emancipated slaves, softened the criminal law, 
 made education universal, raised class after class 
 to the full rights of citizenship, have been, though 
 often resisted by those who are called the Church, 
 great acts of the Spirit of God. The nation itself, 
 not a section of it, has shown itself to be the true 
 Church of Christ. 
 
 It is not necessary here to do more than point 
 out that in the great nations of Europe the 
 assertion of this unity of public life with Christian 
 morality has been consistently made and carried 
 into effect. It is so in Russia, in Germany, in 
 Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Holland. In 
 France, and largely also in other Roman Catholic 
 countries, we see the evil effects of the Papal 
 system overlaying the genuine Christian life, 
 making it constantly more rigid and sectarian, cast- 
 ing out all liberal thought, and thus, while claiming 
 to direct the national conscience, perverting it, and 
 driving it into infidelity. 
 
 And the great public acts which have banished 
 persecution, emancipated slaves, softened the 
 criminal law, made education universal, raised 
 class after class to the full rights of citizenship, 
 have been, though often resisted by those who 
 are called the Church, great acts of the Spirit of 
 God. The Nation itself, not a section of it, has 
 shown itself to be the true Church of Christ. 
 
 In England, as has already been pointed out, 
 125 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the unity of the ecclesiastical with the national 
 power has existed from the first, and the ecclesias- 
 tical (miscalled the spiritual) has been kept subject 
 to the national. Even the Conqueror, though he 
 carried the banner of the Pope at Hastings, would 
 not do homage to him : and, though he admitted 
 various ecclesiastical changes, he did so with the 
 object of bringing the whole system more fully 
 under the national supremacy. And when, at the 
 Reformation, the Royal or National power was 
 re-asserted, this was done not as a new thing, 
 but as a restoration of rights which had been 
 impaired by a false and foreign element. No one 
 can doubt that the Reformation brought the clergy 
 under the National power, or that the attempt 
 of Laud and his compeers to make the clergy 
 supreme under the separate Government of the 
 King and apart from the Parliament drove the 
 nation into rebellion, or that the policy of the 
 Restoration, reactionary though it was, gave no 
 countenance to the idea of a clerical church inde- 
 pendent of the national organs. 
 
 But it is said that the Act of Toleration in the 
 reign of William and Mary broke up this national 
 unity. It has been shown above that this was 
 not its purpose or its effect. The nation remained 
 in the truest sense a Church, that is, a community 
 endeavouring to carry out the principles of 
 Christianity in the whole of its public life, but 
 gave permission to its citizens to form associations 
 
 126 
 

 NEED OF NATIONALIZATION FOR LEGISLATION 
 
 for public worship freely. Some disabilities 
 remained, and the Sacramental test was enforced 
 as a condition of holding certain offices ; but these 
 tests have been removed by the sense of justice 
 in the nation- Church, which has often shown 
 itself so much more Christian than the ordinance- 
 Church which stood in the way of notional union. 
 
 It would be impossible, in a treatise like the 
 present, to examine minutely all the documents 
 which govern us in regard to these questions. But 
 a few of the more obvious may be touched upon, 
 with the remark that one of the strangest things in 
 human life is the way in which men go on repeating 
 words of the plainest import, and yet refuse to 
 acknowledge them in practice. 
 
 Take first the power of legislation. It has 
 already been pointed out that all the great Acts 
 of the Reformation period were passed by Parlia- 
 ment without any recognition of the clergy some- 
 times in the teeth of clerical resistance. They 
 contain the Acts of Appeal in which Appeals 
 to Rome are taken away and given to the King, 
 who is to deal with them in the same way as with 
 Admiralty cases, and no pre-eminence is given 
 to the clergy in the Commissions which are to hear 
 the Appeals : and these are followed by Acts 
 which deal with the ecclesiastical judicature in a 
 directly anti-clerical sense.* They contain also 
 
 * See especially the Act for laymen to be judges in ecclesias- 
 tical courts, 37 Henry VIII, c. 17. 
 
 
 127 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the two Acts of Uniformity, establishing the two 
 Prayer Books of Edward VI, and the similar 
 Act of Elizabeth, which was certainly opposed by 
 the Convocations, and which, it may be noted, 
 contain the Ornaments Rubric so much relied 
 on by those who would bring back the ordinances 
 to the form which they took before the Reforma- 
 tion, but which refers to Parliament and Parlia- 
 ment alone as its authority. It is true that, in 
 accordance with the usual mode of action of those 
 days, as seen in the case of the Conge d'Elire, the 
 old forms were allowed to remain, but all force 
 was taken from them ; and the power of the 
 Convocations of the clergy, though not com- 
 pletely destroyed, yet was so hampered in its 
 exercise that it has never since been used success- 
 fully either for judicial or for legislative purposes ; 
 and it has become a legal maxim that the Statute 
 law of the nation overrides any Canon of the 
 clergy, whether ancient or modern, which conflicts 
 with it.* It is true that the right of the nation 
 itself to legislate on all " Church " questions 
 has been hampered of late years by the clericalistic 
 movement of sixty years ago ; but no other mode 
 of legislation has been set up or even proposed ; 
 and, though it is often said that Parliament is 
 
 * It is possible that even more decisive action might have 
 been taken in the subjection of the clerical assemblies but for 
 the fact that they still retained the power of the purse until the 
 reign of Charles II. 
 
 128 
 
CHURCH LEGISLATION IN PARLIAMENT 
 
 unfit to legislate on ecclesiastical matters, its 
 legislation during the last century has included all 
 the facilities for forming more parishes and re- 
 lieving spiritual destitution, for the formation of 
 more dioceses at home and in the colonies, for the 
 admission of Scotch and Colonial clergy to officiate 
 in England, numerous Acts for the discipline of 
 the clergy and the improvement of the Church 
 services, such as those for the improved Lectionary 
 and the shortened services, and the alteration 
 of the tests or subscriptions made by the clergy, 
 a great and liberating Act, against which the 
 clerical assemblies had lately protested. It is 
 true that Parliament very rightly objects to 
 discussing matters of ritual or doctrine ; but its 
 attitude is very much the same as that taken 
 at the time of the Act of Uniformity of 1662, 
 when, though the House of Lords is believed to 
 have made some alterations in the Prayer Book, 
 the Commons, having before them the Book as 
 proposed by the Government after examination 
 by the Convocation and the Savoy Conference, 
 passed two resolutions : one, that this House 
 would not enter into the details of the Prayer 
 Book, the other that they had the power to do so. 
 This is, in fact, the attitude winch has been taken in 
 almost all cases throughout our post-Reformation 
 history in regard to matters affecting religious 
 worship ; the proposals of change have been pre- 
 pared by Royal Commissions, the general direction 
 K 129 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of which has been given by the national Govern- 
 ment, and the Legislature has accepted the finding 
 of the Commission as to details. This method of 
 legislation has remained in viridi observantid ; nor 
 has any other been proposed nearly so just or so 
 effective. We are not engaged in discussing a new 
 constitution ; the present is sufficient and is in 
 active exercise ; and the burden of proposing a 
 change rests with those who are discontented with 
 our present practice. But though the inclination of 
 clerical opinion and of Churchmen in the narrower 
 sense shows a certain discontent, they have 
 hitherto failed to propose such a change even as 
 regards the narrower field of Church life, that 
 which is confined to the sphere of public worship 
 and its immediate adjuncts. When we look to the 
 wider view of the Church which is now opening 
 out to us, and think of the nation itself as inspired 
 with Christian faith and of the national life as 
 grounded upon Christian justice and beneficence, 
 it is evident that no clerical or sectarian power can 
 possibly be substituted for that of the nation 
 itself. To remove grievances, to raise the poor, 
 to teach the young, to make taxation just to all, 
 to bend the powers of the criminal law to the 
 recovery of the erring members of the community, 
 to train the people in a life which shall be clean, 
 healthy, and orderly, to encourage international 
 peace these are the acts of the Christian body, 
 by whatever name we call it, and the attempt 
 
 130 
 
THE CHRISTIAN RULE OF KING AND NATURE 
 
 to do the work of the greatest instrument of 
 Christian progress by other than national means 
 is nothing but an usurpation, and can never 
 elevate the usurper, but will, if successful, 
 surely drag down to a lower level the true and 
 complete community. 
 
 The system of unity of the nation as a Christian 
 body under its sovereign and the national organs, 
 is witnessed by all our formulas of worship as 
 used at the present day. The inauguration 
 of the sovereign is not merely, as it is usually 
 called, his coronation, to be the head of a secular 
 body, but his consecration as head of a Christian 
 nation. He is clothed with episcopal robes, and 
 the Bible is given to him with the adjuration 
 that he should rule according to its principles. 
 He is to be the Christian ruler of a Christian 
 people. It is sometimes made a complaint that 
 it is no more the King who is supreme, but the 
 Parliament ; and that, though the allegiance of 
 the clergy and those who call themselves Church- 
 men in the more limited sense is due to the King, 
 no such allegiance is due to the great council of the 
 nation. But the same might be said of every de- 
 partment of Government in a State of which the 
 monarch has become constitutional instead of 
 arbitrary ; and the argument, if admitted, 
 would drive us into absolutism or into anarchy. 
 Further, the Parliament has never ceased to be 
 Christian, but prays daily in the Saviour's name 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 for guidance in its deliberations, and the whole 
 Church adds its prayer. And if what has been 
 said of the limits of the Church, and also of its 
 wider functions, be true, our allegiance is due to the 
 body which represents the nation and Church 
 in its larger sense quite as much as to the sovereign 
 personally. It is to be desired that in any reform 
 of our Prayer Book the changes from Tudor 
 times to the present should be emphasized, and 
 that it should be made clear that the prayers for 
 the sovereign are meant to be for the national power 
 as it actually exists the " powers that be " which 
 are " ordained of God" and are " His ministers." 
 
 It is not necessary to dwell on the constant 
 mention of the sovereign in our prayers ; but 
 two special instances may be made prominent : 
 the one that in the Litany, where we ask that he 
 may be kept in the true worshipping of God, 
 which is denned as " righteousness and holiness of 
 life," and which indicates that the Christian unity 
 of the nation does not depend solely nor even 
 primarily on the formalities of public worship, 
 but on the whole Christian life in all its depart- 
 ments : the other that after the recitation of the 
 Decalogue ; the prayer is not for the clergy and 
 their teaching, but for the King as a minister of 
 God, that he may enforce the Commandments by 
 governing the people in wealth, peace, and 
 godliness ; and similarly in the prayer for the 
 Church militant, before anything is said about 
 
 132 
 
NATIONAL CHRISTIANITY IN THE LITURGY 
 
 the clergy and their functions, the prayer is for the 
 sovereign as a ruler of the whole nation, and for 
 those who bear rule under him, that they may 
 repress wickedness and vice, and maintain justice, 
 true religion, and virtue. If in this connection we 
 study the Bidding Prayer, the image rises before 
 our minds of a vast community, in which rulers 
 and subjects, clergy and laity, and the whole of 
 the common people, are striving in the name of 
 Christ to maintain the principles of true religion 
 in the conduct of their life, individual and public. 
 That is the true Church of England ; for, since the 
 same prayer defines the Catholic Church as " the 
 whole body of Christian people dispersed through- 
 out the whole world," the " Church of England " 
 must be understood to mean the whole body of 
 Christian people in England. 
 
 But further, it may be said that these documents 
 belong to a time which has passed away. On the 
 contrary, they are in viridi observantid at this 
 moment, and are producing fruits of the greatest 
 importance, such as can never be produced by a 
 separate society and its organs. The maintenance 
 of the present system is a constant protest against 
 sectarianism and clericalism in the conduct of the 
 national life, and gives it a direction towards the 
 building up of the whole community in all its 
 branches in practical Christianity. The attempt* 
 
 * Those who have promoted and framed this Council have 
 never disclosed their objects. The present writer endeavoured 
 
 133 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 which is now being made to substitute for this a 
 body denned by forms of public worship alone, 
 and which is limited to those who adhere in the 
 narrowest sense to these forms as they were 
 settled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
 must result in the perpetuation of division, in 
 fixing the minds of Christians upon the points 
 on which they differ, not on the progress of divine 
 justice and truth in the general life, in which they 
 may agree and work together ; and, by making 
 too much of the element of public worship which 
 is the special department of the clergy, it must 
 tend to give them an undue position in the Chris- 
 tian body ; and this again is sure to be followed 
 by reaction and rebellion. A clergy attempting to 
 rule is sure to make agnostics, indifferentists, and 
 enemies. 
 
 We must therefore hold on to the present 
 constitution as most in accordance with the will 
 of God so far as it is given to us to understand it. 
 There are three principal features of it on which we 
 may touch : the legislative, the judicial, and the 
 financial. 
 
 in vain to elicit some such disclosure, the only answer being 
 that the formation of the Council had been determined on. One 
 of the Bishops on another occasion considered that the three 
 great matters dealt with in the next sections, namely, legisla- 
 tion, judicature and finance, might be expected to be committed 
 to the Council. 
 
 134 
 
SYSTEM OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALITY NOW IN VIGOUR 
 
 6. BENEFICIAL WORKING OF THE SYSTEM IN 
 THE PRESENT DAY 
 
 (a) For Legislation 
 
 On the legislative we have already dwelt, 
 showing its justly supreme position and its con- 
 tinued beneficial working in the present day. If 
 we think of Christianity as the great elevating 
 power over the whole life of man, we cannot but 
 see how much better this great cause is advanced 
 by Parliament than by any clerical assembly. 
 The clerical assembly is for the most part occupied 
 with matters of dogma and of ritual, about which 
 Christ said hardly anything, and which are treated 
 with something of professional, if not sectarian 
 narrowness ; the Parliament has before it the whole 
 life of the nation, and, even when it deals with 
 directly religious questions, is apt to impart to them 
 a more moderate tone and a greater consideration 
 for the larger life of the community. Who would 
 dare to say that public education or the licensing 
 question or the public health or the poor law are 
 not matters of primary concern to the Church of 
 Christ ? Who -can deny that one at least of the 
 most pressing needs of the Church system is some 
 plan for giving the Laity generally in each parish 
 a voice in its administration? Yet the hopes of 
 those who desire a just settlement of these matters 
 are fixed not on some exclusive Church body, but 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 upon Parliament. They know well that any 
 sectional body, such as that called the Represen- 
 tative Church Council, would hinder or cripple 
 any full reforms. 
 
 (b) For Judicial Purposes 
 
 Yet no progress can be made with them 
 except through the national legislature. As 
 regards the judicial power, the fact that the 
 judges in the ecclesiastical courts are not the 
 bishops but trained lawyers, that the law they 
 administer is " the King's ecclesiastical law," 
 and the final appeal is to the Privy Council, has 
 preserved the influence of English justice in a sphere 
 from which it has been apt to be absent. Each 
 of the great ecclesiastical parties has by turns had 
 its liberty vindicated by the Privy Council Court, 
 when the ecclesiastical court would have con- 
 demned it : the evangelical section in the Gorham 
 case in 1850, the liberal section in that of the 
 Essays and Reviews in 1864, and a few years later 
 the Sacrament alists in the Bennett case.* The 
 protests raised by what appears to have become 
 the dominant section of the clergy and their 
 
 * In each of these cases the Court which represented "the 
 Church "in its narrower and clericalist sense gave a wrong, 
 that is an unchristian judgment ; the Court which represented 
 the national power gave a just and Christian one. It was the 
 national power, not the sectarian and clerical, which spoke the 
 word of righteousness, which is the voice of God and of His true 
 Church. 
 
 136 
 
PRESENT BENEFITS OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALITY 
 
 followers against these decisions seems to show a 
 greater regard for the privileges of their order 
 than for justice. But it is justice, not ecclesiastical 
 privilege, which is the divine attribute. It is 
 to the ministers of plain justice, not to the up- 
 holders of a separate class-law, that the solemn 
 words are spoken, " I said that ye are gods." 
 (Ps. LXXXII. 6 ; John x. 34.) 
 
 (c) For Finance 
 
 As regards the third branch of national power 
 in the ecclesiastical sphere, the financial, who 
 can doubt that its administration under Statute 
 Law by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners has 
 been of the greatest value ? The Commission has 
 husbanded the vast revenues which it controls, 
 and which had been miserably wasted while in 
 clerical hands, in a manner which has made them far 
 more valuable and far more serviceable to the 
 Church system which they are designed to support. 
 He would be a rash man who would give these back 
 to clerical management. All these three spheres, 
 the legislative, the judicial, and the financial, have 
 proved the importance of applying to the ecclesi- 
 astical affairs that is, to the system by which 
 Christian worship and teaching is administered 
 under the care of the entire community the plain 
 principles of justice and of common sense which we 
 apply in common life ; they are examples of what 
 we mean by Natural Christianity. 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 (d) For Administration 
 
 One more exercise of the national power must 
 be mentioned as showing that its authority as that 
 of the Church itself is no theory but a thing in 
 common use ; it is the appointment to Bishopricks 
 and other ecclesiastical offices by the Crown. 
 These appointments are made on the recommenda- 
 tion of the Prime Minister, who holds his office 
 by the consent of Parliament that is, of the 
 nation. If this practice, though sometimes ob- 
 jected to by theorists, is acquiesced in by all but 
 a few, it is clearly an instance of the nation ex- 
 ercising the full power of the Christian Church in 
 one of its most important functions. 
 
 7. THE SYSTEM HAS THE PROMISE OF 
 THE FUTURE 
 
 (a) For Christian Unity 
 
 There are many other matters to which these 
 principles may be applied, matters of present and 
 living interest. We are all conscious of " the 
 danger we are in through our unhappy divisions," 
 and there is a genuine desire to heal the breaches 
 which were made between the various societies of 
 Christian worshippers in the sixteenth and seven- 
 teenth centuries. But as yet this desire has had 
 little result. May we not assume that this frustra- 
 
 138 
 
PROMISE OF THE FUTURE THROUGH NATIONALITY 
 
 tion is due very largely to the fact that we have 
 made Christianity a kind of exotic plant hardly 
 touching the general and natural life of mankind, 
 and sometimes touching it for mischief ? All the 
 bodies of Christian worshippers seem now to be 
 feeling this. Their present methods do not attract 
 men as they formerly did. Public worship is not so 
 well attended ; the Bible is not so much read. 
 There are probably many reasons for this, and we 
 need not attribute it to a lessened interest in 
 religion ; certainly the manner and extent in 
 which religion is discussed in the Press, and the 
 activity both in foreign missions and in social 
 progress which is common to all the divisions of 
 religionists, would lead to the conclusion that 
 that interest was on the increase. We may expect 
 that the indifference or alienation caused by the 
 criticism of the Bible or of the Church system will 
 pass away ; we have seen many changes in the 
 popular conception of religion even in our own day. 
 The views of serious men about inspiration, about 
 the mode by which the reconciliation between God 
 and man has been effected by our Saviour, the 
 ideas connected with rewards and punishments in a 
 future state, and many other points, are not now 
 the same as they were half a century ago ; and, 
 though those who have advocated these changes 
 have met with the usual fate of reformers and 
 been treated as enemies, both they and their 
 followers have kept their hold on the essentials of 
 
 139 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Christianity, and there has been a marked return 
 from mere criticism and scepticism to the Bible 
 and to Christ. 
 
 Nevertheless, the divisions between Christian 
 denominations or sects still remain, and are a 
 perpetual reproach and a provocation to un- 
 christian feelings. 
 
 It is thought that if the process of unification 
 which our formulas imply, and which it has been 
 attempted to draw out in this treatise, were made 
 effective in the present day, it would involve 
 some form of constraint or persecution on those 
 who differ from the main principles of such a 
 unification, or from some details of its application. 
 But if there is goodwill, this fear will prove to be 
 groundless. We again appeal to nature. Is it 
 natural that men who have the same object in life, 
 who recognize each other as brothers, should stand 
 apart in mistrust because of some matter of minor 
 importance ? No doubt if we set out with a 
 theory that a difference about the forms of public 
 worship must cause this mistrust and separation, 
 such an exaggeration will produce and aggravate 
 the evil. But, we ask, is not such a notion fic- 
 titious ? We meet each other freely in all the 
 dealings of life, in education, in business, in 
 society, in matters of art or of knowledge ; and in 
 all these we do not ask whether such a man is a 
 member of a peculiar sect, but whether he is true, 
 just, right-minded ? If so, we trust him and 
 140 
 
NATONIAL CHURCH SYSTEM NOT REPRESSIVE 
 
 work with him without scruple.* Why should 
 a difference about the modes of public worship 
 separate us ? The theory, no doubt, which sup- 
 poses that our Lord Himself laid down the lines 
 on which His followers should organize their 
 public worship, and bade them stand aloof from 
 all who did not accept this rule, would make us 
 mistrust each other ; but if our contention is true 
 that the life is the real standard (and Christ Him- 
 self said, " By their fruits ye shall know them "), 
 we must seek for union, and seek it not in the 
 forms of worship, but in the realities of life. We 
 all confess that the true life is that which is lived 
 in accordance with the principles of the life of 
 Christ. " Grace be with all them who love the 
 Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity." That is the 
 word of an Apostle ; but we have the direct 
 teaching of our Lord Himself as its source. As 
 has been pointed out above, His disciples ask 
 Him whether they are to forbid one who exerted 
 a spiritual power in His name but did not f How 
 with them, and He replied, " Forbid him not." 
 In later times it has not been uncommon for Chris- 
 tians to think that faith is shown by strict ad- 
 herence to some rule or definition ; he alone is 
 a " good man " or a faithful Christian or a 
 
 * It was thought that when the Universities were freed from 
 tests, religion would suffer and strife would be promoted ; but 
 the contrary has been the case. Men of different denominations 
 associate and work together with hardly a thought of their 
 differences, 
 
 141 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 " good Churchman," who holds some mode of 
 expressing Christian doctrines often mistaken 
 or sectional. Let those who judge thus remem- 
 ber that they are directly placing themselves 
 in opposition to Christ. To love Christ, to own 
 His spirit to be supreme, to exert an influence 
 over men in His name it is this which makes 
 the Christian. We again recall the fact that our 
 Lord's teaching contains no direction about the 
 matters we dispute about : our sectarianism is 
 of our own invention. Moreover, of late years, 
 those who have investigated the history of the 
 early Church have shown that the forms of 
 worship or the position and government of the 
 clergy, which form the subjects of our disputes, 
 are not inherent in its primitive constitution. 
 The idea that there is a class of men so completely 
 set apart from the rest by a divine law as that 
 no blessing can attend any Sacraments or other 
 ordinances administered by others, is found to 
 be contrary to historical truth, as well as to 
 Christian brotherliness. The organization of the 
 Church is seen to have been made according to 
 its needs from time to time, not to have been 
 imposed upon it by a divine decree ; it is essen- 
 tially secondary as compared with justice and 
 truth and love, and also essentially mutable. It 
 is thus that the Spirit leads us. There is no 
 external and unchangeable rule to Him who 
 " breatheth where He listeth." 
 142 
 
OBSOLETE RULES AND IDEAS 
 
 If that be true, there is no longer any need for 
 the perpetual enforcement of rules or laws which 
 were framed in past centuries under conditions 
 which have passed away. It was held by the 
 late Archbishop Benson that there was no reason 
 why the various denominations in England should 
 not continue their own modes of worship and 
 government while included in the same national 
 Church body ; only he would have excluded those 
 who received the Holy Communion otherwise 
 than according to the order of the Prayer Book 
 that is, from episcopally ordained clergy. Is it 
 not time that this rule should be relaxed ? It is 
 well known that the most eminent divines of the 
 Church of England, even in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, urged their clergy when abroad to communi- 
 cate with the Protestant non-episcopalian churches. 
 If a corresponding relaxation of our rules were 
 adopted, and all penalties for inter-communion 
 were removed, the way, it seems, would be open 
 for a complete religious peace. 
 
 It is, no doubt, almost a dogma with our non- 
 episcopalian churches, that the national power 
 ought not to interfere with the affairs of religion. 
 But this arises from a supposition which we are 
 combating, namely, that by religion is meant the 
 ordinances of public worship. If religion is, as 
 is being here maintained, a matter of the whole life, 
 the government of the municipality, of the county, 
 or the nation cannot but be constantly occupied 
 
 143 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 with matters essentially religious, such as educa- 
 tion or marriage or public morality, and the general 
 well-being of the citizens. The community is be- 
 coming more and more the chief moral educator ; 
 and, though the enforcement by law of Christian 
 principles must be, as we have learnt during the last 
 four centuries, not immediate nor absolute, yet 
 the influence of these principles upon our laws and 
 public life is increasing, and is a bulwark not of 
 compulsion, but of tolerance. The danger of the lay 
 power interfering unduly in matters which touch the 
 conscience, against which our forefathers had to 
 contend, is now hardly more than a bugbear. The 
 outcry against it is really the complaint of the 
 clergy and their special adherents who attempt 
 to usurp what belongs to the national power ; 
 and it has been shown above that, where the lay 
 power has intervened, as in the ecclesiastical judg- 
 ments of the Privy Council, it has been the whole- 
 some corrective which common sense and justice 
 and liberty legitimately exert over clerical pre- 
 judice. 
 
 Yet it is felt by many that the position given 
 to the clergy of the Anglican Church, in assigning 
 to them alone the tenure of ecclesiastical benefices 
 and committing to them the authoritative inculca- 
 tion of religion in every parish, bears unjustly upon 
 those who cannot accept the Anglican forms of 
 worship. 
 
 This is undoubtedly a great difficulty ; yet it 
 
 144 
 
DIFFICULTIES OF CHRISTIAN UNITY NOT INSOLUBLE 
 
 does not appear insoluble. If the whole life of the 
 community is the life of the Church, and we accept 
 the present and actual condition of our constitu- 
 tion under which the nation-church, though it has 
 two sides, is yet one whole, which cannot live 
 rightly without full weight being given to each 
 side, then the system under which the general 
 ecclesiastical affairs are controlled by the national 
 organs should be extended to the parishes. If 
 parochial councils could have been established 
 when the proposal for them was carried to a 
 second reading in the House of Commons in the 
 year 1872, and the Government of the day had 
 not in the succeeding year broken their under- 
 taking that they would facilitate its full discus- 
 sion, justice and equity might have reigned 
 instead of the clerical autocracy which has been 
 allowed to alienate one class after another, and 
 has gone far to reduce the Church of England to a 
 clericalist sect. A few changes might have been 
 found necessary, such as the allowance of the 
 preaching of Nonconformists in the church pulpits, 
 and of the Anglican clergy in those of the Non- 
 conformists, under proper control ; and the quasi- 
 legal if not illegal license given by the Bishops to 
 a few laymen to officiate in the Church might, 
 without breach of discipline, have been legalized 
 and greatly extended, so as to draw out the gifts 
 of the laity and to diminish the evil of a multiplicity 
 of small parishes, each with its own pastor whose. 
 
 L 145 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 presence is more needed elsewhere. The late 
 Archbishop Benson, as we have seen, declared 
 that there was nothing to prevent each Non- 
 conformist body governing itself as they do now, 
 and, like the Orders in the Roman Catholic 
 Church, be subject to their own Generals, if only 
 the separation at the Lord's Supper could be 
 avoided. Surely, if that be so, alternative forms 
 might be arranged which would present no 
 stumbling-blocks to either party, and one or 
 other of which might be adopted according to local 
 needs. This would become more and more possible 
 as men became accustomed to look at the whole 
 life as the subject and expression of Christian 
 faith. 
 
 It would be vain to attempt to forecast the 
 future. What we can do is gradually to free our- 
 selves from the fetters forged by the mistakes 
 and misunderstandings of the past, to prevent 
 new ones from being bound upon us, and to 
 encourage all that tends to the unveiling of 
 Christian truth and the establishment of Christian 
 brotherhood ; being guided by the twin powers, 
 both of which, it has been contended here, are 
 natural, the circumstances in which God's provi- 
 dence has placed us, and the right judgment which 
 is the gift of His Holy Spirit. 
 
 146 
 
CHRISTIAN NATIONALITY PROGRESSIVE 
 
 (b) For the Advancement of Knowledge and for 
 Social Progress 
 
 It may seem on a cursory view of this treatise 
 as if a part of it were of merely ecclesiastical 
 interest, and that it has little to do with the 
 present and future needs of the nation and of 
 manhood. This might be a valid criticism if our 
 standpoint were that commonly taken, with its 
 separation of human life into the opposing spheres 
 of the secular and the sacred. But it is one chief 
 object of Natural Christianity to do away with 
 this antithesis ; and if the principle at the root of 
 this treatise is sound, this unity of the powers 
 which have been separate and antagonistic has 
 with it the promise of the future. Instead of 
 teaching men to dread the progress of knowledge, 
 it will further it with all its might. Instead of 
 dreading the advent of democracy, it will rejoice 
 that the mass of our brother-men are rising in 
 the social scale and in political value. It will aid 
 the cause of freedom and of peace ; it will, by 
 awakening the Christian conscience of the nation, 
 help men to abandon the selfish and shortsighted 
 policy which is inducing them to limit the race in 
 order that the few that may be left may be richer, 
 and will teach them to value a pure family life, 
 and think it a noble duty to send out its members 
 to assist in the task of developing the world by 
 
 147 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 their ever-increasing power, and raising its in- 
 habitants by a truly Christian civilization; and 
 it will do all this under the impulse of faith in 
 the Father and Redeemer of mankind, who " will 
 have all men to be saved," and to co-operate with 
 Him and with one another in making justice, truth, 
 and love supreme in every heart and in every 
 society. 
 
 148 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 EXPLANATION OF RELIGIOUS TERMS IN A 
 NATURAL AND PRACTICAL WAY 
 
 i. GOD 
 
 " This is life eternal, to know Thee" 
 
 THE fault of most of those who have spoken of 
 God has been that they have assumed a know- 
 ledge which is beyond us. "No man hath seen God 
 at any time," and in our ignorance we attribute to 
 God actions, feelings, limitations which belong to 
 ourselves. Even when we assert that He is a 
 Person, we have to beware of what is called Anthro- 
 pomorphism, the framing of an idea of God after 
 the image of man. We cannot, for instance, 
 help speaking of Him as just and loving ; but 
 these attributes may easily pass, the one into 
 hardness and want of sympathy, the other into 
 favouritism or easy indifference. " Is He the God 
 of the Jews only, and not of the Gentiles also ? " 
 exclaims St. Paul ; and the outlook which is given 
 by the answer to this question leads us far beyond 
 the limitations even of our present ideas. In the 
 controversies of the fourth and subsequent cen- 
 turies concerning the Godhead, each party seems 
 
 149 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to have supposed that they knew the metaphysical 
 nature of God ; and the difficulties of forming a 
 satisfactory theory were those of harmonizing 
 newly perceived facts with preconceived ideas, 
 the Incarnation and divine supremacy of Christ 
 with men's presumed knowledge of the nature of 
 God. Even when we take in the second part of the 
 text above quoted, " The only begotten Son, 
 which is in the bosom of the Father, hath declared 
 Him," the difficulty is but partially removed. 
 It is one of the advantages which come to us 
 through non-Christian theories, such as pantheism 
 or materialism or even atheism, that they make 
 us more modest in our assertions. 
 
 It is better for us to begin with what is actual 
 and, in the true sense, natural, with the Eternal 
 Energy which moves and redeems the world, 
 and to judge of its character by the facts which 
 history discloses, to rise through the supremacy 
 of man in the creation, to the supremacy of 
 special races and individuals, and thence to the 
 supremacy of Christ, and the revelation through 
 Him of the Name or character of the Father. 
 No doubt the higher and fuller revelation has at 
 times disclosed itself partially and prematurely, 
 and we shall welcome such intuitions whether 
 in ancient or in modern days, whether in those who 
 had a more distinct revelation or in those who 
 were only " seeking the Lord, if happily they 
 might feel after Him and find Him." But for the 
 
TRUE AND NATURAL IDEAS OF GOD 
 
 most part the saying of St. Paul describes the 
 fact, " That was not first which is spiritual, 
 but that which is natural " (or rather, human in the 
 lower sense). It is in harmony with the saying of 
 Aristotle that " That which is first in nature 
 (that is, in the true nature of things) is last in 
 coming into being." * 
 
 The metaphysical nature of the Almighty 
 Power which rules us is only in part disclosed. 
 It is enough for us that His character has been made 
 known to us in the character of the best men, 
 and in the life and death of Christ. The greatest 
 hindrances to belief have come from the mis- 
 representation of His character of God, chiefly 
 through a too literal acceptance of Scriptural 
 expressions, and through non-recognition of the 
 progress! veness of revelation, which implies imper- 
 fection in the early stages ; and our hope lies in 
 the return to the simplicity and naturalness 
 of the Gospel. That God is a Spirit ; that He 
 is a Father to us all ; that the whole develop- 
 ment of the world in its creation and its his- 
 tory has had in it a purpose of love, that God 
 Himself is holy and just, and that those who 
 imbibe His Spirit and follow His Will are alone 
 fulfilling the purpose of their being and of Nature 
 in its higher sense, arid that He has purposed to 
 bring back into unity and perfection through the 
 redemptive power disclosed in Christ the whole race 
 
 * Arist, Mctaph., i, 8 (7), Hp&Tov rrj 0&rei tvxa-Tov T-Q yevfoet. 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of man, and with it the whole world which is 
 subject to man, is what the New Testament 
 teaches. We accept it not as a matter of scientific 
 exactness, but of faith, a faith which is not mere 
 belief, but which carries the whole life with it. 
 This faith grows to assurance through the testi- 
 mony of history and of experience. It is this 
 revelation of God, His Name or nature and His 
 purpose, which was preached by Christ from the 
 very beginning of His ministry as " The Good 
 News of the Kingdom." 
 
 This view of the power and character of God 
 enables us to realize His presence and unity in 
 the whole course of the world and of human affairs, 
 and to dissociate our faith in Him from most 
 of the notions which have divided Christians 
 and have enslaved them to disputable and fettering 
 systems. It identifies God with all that is good 
 in mankind, and especially with the spirit of 
 Christ, and gives us the impulse which is needed 
 to make good prevail ; for " it is God that worketh 
 in us, both to will and to do of His good pleasure." 
 
 2. JESUS CHRIST 
 
 When we utter the name of our Lord we are not 
 uttering a mere name but a proposition. The 
 preaching of the Apostles was that " This Jesus 
 whom we preach to you is the Christ." The 
 Christ or Messiah was shadowed forth by the 
 
 152 
 
CHRIST THE LORD OF ISRAEL AND OF ALL NATIONS 
 
 prophets as the one who was to be Lord and 
 head of the people of Israel. The intimations were 
 not perfectly clear, but enough to fix the mind of 
 the people on the One who was to come. What 
 Jesus did was to embody in His own life the 
 deepest and fullest features of the life the prophets 
 had sketched, and to show that the highest ideal 
 was not that of outward grandeur, nor yet of 
 adherence to rules and forms of religion, but of 
 service and self-devotion, closing with the great self- 
 surrender of the Cross. Upon two occasions of the 
 greatest importance the question was asked by 
 Him, or of Him, whether he was the Christ, and He 
 answered that He was. The one was in reply to 
 St. Peter's answer (which he Himself approved) 
 to the question, " Whom say ye that I am ? " 
 " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God " 
 (Matt. xvi. 15, 16) ; the other, His own answer 
 to the question of the High Priest (Matt. xxvi. 
 63-4), " I adjure thee by the living God that thou 
 tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of 
 God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said." 
 This was the affirmation that the character of 
 meekness and equity and self-sacrificing love 
 which was shown forth in Him was that to which 
 the history of Israel had led up, and which gave 
 its possessor the spiritual Kingship over the con- 
 science, the heart, and the life of the nation. He 
 was Lord of all whose hearts God had opened to 
 discern the true, the divine goodness. 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 But what is this to us ? That depends on what 
 the Jewish race is to the world. It was chosen 
 to be the typical nation, elected to show forth 
 by its ideals, by its sins, its sufferings, and its 
 endurance the conditions of man's life, both 
 individual and in society, and the principles by 
 which it is guided, and which are natural and 
 divine natural because divine. History has 
 confirmed the words of St. Paul that the events 
 of the Old Testament were written as examples or 
 types for the admonition of all later ages. And 
 the fact that Jesus has shown Himself, especially 
 at the Cross, to be in the spiritual sense the King 
 of the Jews is our guarantee in claiming for Him 
 a spiritual dominion over all ; he is the destined 
 Judge and Saviour of all mankind. 
 
 3. SALVATION 
 
 Every system of religion, Christianity most of 
 all, sets before those who are attached to it 
 that which we all call salvation. " Believe on 
 the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." 
 It would hardly be wrong to say that to most men 
 the very goal they seek in religion is to be saved. 
 But to most men the idea of " Salvation " is 
 rescue from a terrible doom awaiting the sinner 
 in the world to come. Of this doom something 
 will be said further on. But it is important to 
 point out at once that the New Testament speaks 
 
RESTORATION OF MAN TO HIS TRUE NATURE 
 
 of Salvation mainly as a present possession. 
 " By grace ye have been saved " ; "By grace ye 
 have been saved through faith " (Eph. n. 5, 8). 
 " He that heareth My word and believeth on 
 Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life . . . 
 hath passed from death unto life " (John v. 24). 
 If we follow this teaching we think primarily not 
 of the future (except as the culmination of the 
 process), but of the present. Secondly, we are 
 learning to think less of personal safety from 
 punishment, and more of immunity from a sinful 
 and evil condition of the spiritual being. " He 
 shall save His people," not from punishment or 
 from suffering, but " from their sins." Further, 
 the expression Salvation implies not merely the 
 negative side, the cessation of certain evils, but 
 the state into which their cessation brings us, a 
 state of spiritual health that which is put before 
 us in the patristic writings as Salutare Domini. 
 We may compare with it the common expression 
 " safe and sound." It is the possession of the new 
 life, with all its activities, its efforts for good, both 
 in the individual and in society, and it allies itself 
 with the progress of the race and the central hope 
 of the Kingdom of God. In this it is eminently 
 natural. All the world understands, at least in 
 some measure, what is meant by a sound state 
 of the human faculties. Christianity gives the 
 complete and therefore natural meaning to this 
 soundness. Moreover, the constant brooding 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 over a state of condemnation and our escape from 
 it induces a morbid state of mind, and one little 
 calculated to advance our own good and that of 
 mankind. The old idea is that of a religion of 
 death, and of the steps needed for the mere removal 
 of death ; the Christian religion is a religion of 
 life, and makes us partakers of the energies of 
 God, and of a life of unceasing progress. 
 
 4. CONDEMNATION AND HELL 
 
 It is astonishing to observe what a vast part 
 the idea of eternal punishment has played in 
 religion, especially in its popular forms, and how 
 texts of scripture, which either do not bear upon 
 it or merely shadow forth the misery of exclusion 
 (which may be removable) from spiritual blessed- 
 ness and the remorse of a sinner in the presence of 
 the Holy One, have been strained to form a picture 
 of physical torments to endure through endless 
 spaces of time. In the reaction which has taken 
 place against this tendency the natural feelings of 
 mankind and a wholesome revolt against cruelty 
 and injustice have borne a great part. But it may 
 be well to touch upon a few of the principal ex- 
 pressions and texts which have been supposed to 
 teach the doctrine of everlasting punishment, and 
 to ask how far Christianity is responsible for such 
 teaching. 
 
 Several such passages occur in the teaching of 
 
 156 
 
FALSE VIEWS OF CONDEMNATION 
 
 Christ Himself, and some writers and teachers 
 who have renounced His allegiance have done so 
 on this account. We may take as central the words 
 (Matt. v. 22) "Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, 
 shall be in danger of hell fire " (margin, Gehenna). 
 Gehenna was the horrible place outside Jerusalem 
 where fires were kept burning to destroy the offal 
 of the city, and where the bodies of the worst 
 criminals were cast away. It gained its name from 
 " the sons of Hinnom," to whom the valley had 
 belonged, and is also called Tophet by the prophets, 
 who use it as a symbol of horror, a place where 
 the worms never cease to crawl or the fire to burn. 
 Our Lord is describing in the hyperbolical language 
 which He uses for purposes of emphasis, the en- 
 largement which His spiritual teaching gives to 
 the commandment which forbids murder. In the 
 ordinary administration of justice there were 
 three degrees of punishment, for homicide, for 
 cases where there were palliative circumstances, 
 and for the very worst cases of murder ; the 
 first would be punished by the " judgment " of the 
 ordinary local court, the second would be brought 
 before the central council of the nation, the 
 Sanhedrin, the last would be dealt with probably 
 by some summary process, as a glaring notorious 
 case, and the felon's body would be cast into 
 Gehenna. " In My Kingdom," our Lord's words 
 imply, " not the outer act only will be taken 
 account of, but the man who harbours passionate 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 feelings of anger or condemnation or contempt 
 will be looked upon as a criminal and viewed as 
 worthy, according to the gravity of his offence, of 
 analogous condemnation ; He is not laying down a 
 system of penal law, but, by a powerful metaphor, 
 evoking the moral condemnation of evil passions. 
 We may select another saying of our Saviour 
 at the close of Matthew xxv. 41. " Depart from 
 Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire," and " These 
 shall go away into eternal punishment." The 
 words " ye cursed " are in the margin, " ye 
 who are under a curse " their selfish life is 
 the curse, it is not a curse that Christ inflicts. 
 The everlasting fire is prepared for Satan and his 
 angels ; and, no doubt, whatever the spiritual 
 meaning may be suffering, shame, remorse, 
 disgrace, into that the selfish man must be plunged. 
 But it is the fire which blazes which is eternal, not 
 the continuance of the wretch in it. And when 
 it is said, " These shall go away into eternal 
 punishment," we must note that the word eternal 
 does not mean never-ending, but is a word to 
 which no single English word is equivalent it 
 means at times "essential," at times " divine " or 
 " spiritual " ; and that the word " punishment " 
 is properly chastisement ; so that we may under- 
 stand the meaning to be, They shall depart into a 
 state of spiritual chastisement which will touch 
 the very essence of their being. To infer from 
 these sayings a belief in a state of never-ending 
 
 158 
 
TRUE TEACHING OF THE RESULTS OF SIN 
 
 torment and rebellion inflicted by the just and 
 loving Father of mankind, is a persuasion which 
 is both terrible and mischievous. But we have 
 gained freedom from it not merely through the 
 labours of scholars and theologians, but still 
 more through the common sense of mankind. 
 It has become unbelievable to all who can say 
 that God is our Father and that His name is Love 
 and to all who feel that a just and holy God cannot 
 deal with His creatures in a manner which every 
 good man in the world would condemn. 
 
 But one thing more must be said on this point. 
 The negative process which refuses to believe in 
 everlasting torment has been fully worked out. 
 But the more positive side has hardly yet been 
 approached. If, as has been feared by those who 
 have held to the doctrine, the disappearance of it 
 would mean an assertion that God is indifferent 
 to evil, and that it is well with the wicked and we 
 may promise him life, we might well ask whether 
 the raising of the question had not been harmful. 
 Without the exaggerations which have been grafted 
 on the teaching of Christ, His teaching about a 
 sinner's doom is still truly awful. Christian 
 teachers must not cease from their attitude of 
 warning ; but they must dwell less upon the 
 selfish and hard view of the punishment which a 
 supreme judge may inflict, and much more upon 
 the appeal to the conscience which is made by 
 the thought of sinning against eternal love. 
 
 159 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 5. THE WRATH OF GOD 
 
 This is another expression which has played a 
 great part in Christian teaching. " Flee from the 
 wrath to come." " The wrath of God is revealed 
 from heaven against all ungodliness." Or, 
 in the words of St. Paul (Eph. n. 3), which are 
 incorporated into our Baptismal Office, "We are 
 by nature the children of wrath." " What ! " many 
 pious souls have exclaimed, " can we impute the 
 harbouring and exhibition of anger to the heavenly 
 Father ? " Men speak unguardedly of an " angry 
 judge " ; but no judge would be tolerated who 
 allowed himself to be angry on the bench. The 
 calm, dispassionate condemnation of wrong is that 
 which gives weight to the words of our judges. 
 Nevertheless, where cruelty or tricky dishonesty 
 is brought home to the criminal, a good judge 
 will hardly restrain the strong feeling of indigna- 
 tion. We must observe, however, that the object 
 of God's wrath is in its true essence not the sinner, 
 but the sin. And a just indignation, if shown by 
 one in authority, will always be directed, not to 
 the injury of the wrong-doer, but to his reclama- 
 tion. In the scriptures every punitive infliction 
 is attributed to the wrath of God, as, for in- 
 stance, St. Paul's prediction (2 Thess. n. 6, etc.) 
 of the destruction of Jerusalem. What is anger 
 in the weak man against his child is sublimated, 
 when spoken of God, to a hatred of the evil 
 
 1 60 
 
GOD'S WRATH AGAINST MAN'S ALIENATION 
 
 which is injuring His children, and a determina- 
 tion, even by the infliction of suffering, to rid 
 them from it. 
 
 6. APOSTASY OF THE RACE 
 
 If any one were to tell us that he did not believe 
 in the fall of man and his alienation from God, we 
 should say to him, " Look around, then," or, 
 " Go through the streets of our cities at night," 
 or, " Read the newspapers which give accounts 
 of the police or divorce courts." Many other 
 such replies might be made by pointing him to 
 facts at home and abroad, among Christians and 
 heathens, all tending to the same conclusion, the 
 conclusion of St. Paul, " All have sinned and come 
 short of the glory of God." All depends, no 
 doubt, on the standard we adopt. But in any 
 case the result is similar every man has some 
 sense of right and wrong, and no man lives up to 
 the standard which he acknowledges. And if the 
 world is, as both Christ and St. Paul declare, to 
 stand at the judgment - seat of Christ, that is, 
 to be judged by the standard of perfection which 
 His life presents to us, it is certain that none can 
 face that ordeal. The standard is perfect love, 
 and not only every person, but every act and 
 feeling is in some measure tainted with selfishness. 
 
 But there are three things to be observed as to 
 the way in which the subject has been dealt with. 
 
 i. We are confronted with the old and ap- 
 
 M 161 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 parently insoluble problem of the origin of evil, 
 as to which we can only say (i) that God is better 
 served by free allegiance than by compulsory or 
 automatic movements, and that freedom implies 
 the power to go wrong; (2) that we could not 
 know goodness in its highest form except in con- 
 trast with evil and in overcoming it ; (3) that 
 God has not left us without the means of deliver- 
 ance ; and that (4) as a repentant sinner gives 
 more joy than a man who needs no repentance, so 
 a world redeemed may be a nobler thing than a 
 world into which sin has never entered. 
 
 The question of the Fall, as told in Genesis, is 
 answered first by the general admission that it is 
 of the character of a myth, that is, of a moral truth 
 projected into the world and made vivid by passing 
 into a story the moral truth being the curse of 
 disobedience ; but that the curse is not final and 
 in some respects, especially by the consciousness 
 of good and evil, implies a step upwards in human 
 development rather than a fall. It is the loss of 
 innocence, but the awakening of the higher moral 
 sense, the knowledge of good and evil, and the 
 consciousness of the struggle by which the evil is 
 to be overcome. 
 
 And, finally, we must recognize that the declara- 
 tions of scripture concerning sin have received 
 an exaggerated sense. " Tout dans VEcriture est 
 ideal," was the saying of Adolphe Monod ; that is, 
 the character of " the good " and " the evil " are 
 
 162 
 
FALL AND REDEMPTION 
 
 portrayed in words which have no exact counter- 
 part in actual life. " He that is born of God doth 
 not commit sin," says St. John, and " He that 
 committeth sin is of the devil " ; yet St. John 
 also says, " If we say that we have no sin we de- 
 ceive ourselves." The fault has been that, instead 
 of such expressions being accepted as showing 
 what sin is in its full, abstract and ideal form, they 
 have been taken as describing the actual state 
 of men ; and each action which has, as all actions 
 have, some taint of selfishness has been taken as 
 a wilful and open-eyed transgression of the will 
 of God. We must judge of the world naturally, 
 as we see it, and admit that good and evil are 
 mixed both in society generally and in each in- 
 dividual, and even in every action. 
 
 7. THE ATONEMENT 
 
 (More properly Reconciliation or At-one-ment) 
 
 The word Atonement has been made to " con- 
 note " many ideas which are now for the most 
 part recognized as erroneous ; but the fact which 
 it implies is central and supreme. The word 
 Atonement occurs only once in the English New 
 Testament, and in that place (Rom. v. n) the true 
 meaning, " Reconciliation," has been substituted 
 by the revisers. That we are reconciled to God 
 by the Cross of Christ no Christian can doubt. 
 It is a fact of experience of which all believers are 
 
 163 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 conscious. Christ came to show us God as our 
 Father, and to exhibit in His own life the Father's 
 true character as the deliverer of the world from 
 sin. In doing this he provoked the enmity of 
 those who limited the Father's love, and made 
 His mercy to themselves the means of exalting 
 themselves and despising others. It was in 
 opposing these that He met with His death ; and 
 His death, therefore, was the most signal example 
 of love. It was a sacrifice of Himself which was 
 to reconcile the world. " I, if I be lifted up from 
 the earth, will draw all men unto me " (John xn. 
 32) ; to Him, that is, as the image of the Father, 
 and therefore to the Father Himself. It has had 
 this reconciling power wherever men have felt the 
 true meaning of it, and have been united with 
 Christ in love, in self-denial, in adoration. The 
 Atonement is a fact of experience. 
 
 Moreover, though the idea of reconciliation has 
 been made to imply a change on the part of God, 
 and God cannot change, yet the idea suggested 
 by this is not wholly erroneous. It is true both 
 that " the face of the Lord is against them that 
 do evil," and also " the Lord is nigh to them that 
 are of a broken heart," so that the change in man 
 from one state to the other implies also a change 
 in the aspect of the righteous Father towards him : 
 and this change is effected by the Cross. More- 
 over, when this is represented as a sacrifice, this 
 also is a true representation if the just and moral 
 
 164 
 
TRUE VIEW OF ATONEMENT 
 
 view of sacrifice is preserved. "The sacrifice of 
 God is a broken spirit " ; and this meek bearing 
 of the consequences of sin is justly attributed 
 to Him who by His divine sympathy " bore our 
 sins in His own person." Nor is this a departure 
 from what we are speaking of as natural ; it is 
 natural to us to say of a benefactor, " He made a 
 great sacrifice for me." The greatest of all sacri- 
 fices is that of Him who " laid down His life for 
 His friends." 
 
 It is only when exaggeration comes in that 
 we have ideas which are unnatural and unreason- 
 able connected with the Atonement. " The law 
 must be kept," it is said, " and no repentance can 
 avail punishment must be exacted in its extreme 
 form," or " Some one must die so that justice 
 must be satisfied " : then Christ is to be punished 
 instead of the sinner ; and, because the penalty 
 has been exacted from the innocent, the punish- 
 ment of the wicked is remitted. It is no wonder 
 that such ideas of justice should have provoked 
 opposition and driven men into scepticism. That 
 the just man voluntarily bears the burden of 
 the unjust and the consequences of his sin is 
 a fact of daily experience, and draws forth 
 our deepest gratitude ; but that this should be 
 exacted as a penalty, and that because the 
 penalty had been endured by the just the wicked 
 should go free, is a thing unnatural and impossible. 
 A judge who should act on such a principle as this 
 
 165 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 would not be allowed to retain his position for 
 another day. 
 
 But this interpretation of the Atonement is 
 happily felt to be unneeded ; and it is ceasing to be 
 held. It is due in a great measure to the neglect 
 of the scriptural declarations in a most essential 
 point. There are two effects of the Atonement, 
 which may be termed the negative and the posi- 
 tive. The negative effect is the obliteration of 
 punishment ; the positive effect is reconciliation 
 in heart and will to God. The latter has been put 
 aside, and the former almost exclusively dwelt 
 upon. But in the scriptural declarations the re- 
 verse is the case. The reconciliation of the heart 
 and will is always prominent, and often placed 
 first, sometimes exclusively. The " new cove- 
 nant " is, first, " I will put My laws in their 
 hearts," and secondly, " Their sins, and iniquities 
 will I remember no more." (Heb. vin. 10-13 ; 
 Jer. xxxi. 33, 34.) It is said, " He bare our sins 
 in His own body on the tree (i Peter n. 24, 25) " ; 
 but with what purpose ? Not that we should escape 
 punishment, but " that we should be dead to sin and 
 live to righteousness." Take the words of St. Paul, 
 "The love of Christ constraineth us; because we 
 thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all 
 died " (R.V.), " and that He died for all, that they 
 which live should no longer live to themselves, but 
 to Him who for their sakes died and rose again." 
 Moreover, in the only direct and full statement 
 
 166 
 
FORGIVENESS AND RENEWAL 
 
 of the Atonement, that of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews, the whole stress of the work of Christ is 
 laid on that which is included in the words, " Lo, 
 I come to do Thy will, O God " ; all other ideas 
 of sacrifice are " taken away " (Heb. x. 8-10) that 
 this spiritual sacrifice may be exalted. And it is 
 added, " By the which will we are sanctified." 
 We are drawn in through it into union with the 
 Father. This is the true reconciliation or atonement. 
 It is true that the forgiveness of sin follows 
 upon this : and we may say that it is because of 
 the power of the Cross to draw all men to God that 
 it is also the instrument of forgiveness and of our 
 being saved from punishment. The guilty soul 
 naturally lays hold first of the promise of forgive- 
 ness ; and the thought of mercy by breeding 
 gratitude reacts upon the heart and disposes 
 us to please God. But still the spiritual recon- 
 ciliation is the primary purpose. We must not 
 be constantly going back to think of the escape 
 from a penalty, but must make the Cross, as 
 the supreme revelation of divine love, the in- 
 centive to a life in union with God. This under- 
 lies the declaration of St. Paul that he would know 
 nothing in his preaching but Christ crucified. 
 That alone is the complete reconciliation. 
 
 8. THE BLOOD OF CHRIST 
 
 In hymns, in sermons, in pious conversation, we 
 constantly hear the expression, " The blood of 
 
 167 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Christ" used "There is a fountain filled with 
 blood, drawn from Emanuel's veins," or " Oft 
 as it is sprinkled on our guilty hearts," or " Louder 
 then and louder praise the precious blood." 
 
 It is a scriptural expression, used by St. Peter 
 (l, i. i), " Elect . . . unto obedience and sprinkling 
 of the blood of Jesus Christ." We may hear it often 
 on the lips of earnest Christians to whom it evidently 
 has a powerful connotation. It is not the purpose 
 of this treatise to hinder the use of such expressions 
 of devotion, but to test them by inquiring what 
 they mean when changed into the language of 
 ordinary life, and thus to enable men to use them 
 without unreality. 
 
 In touching on the Atonement we have seen how 
 great was the power of the death of Christ over the 
 consciences of men. It is the supreme expression 
 in act of the divine love, drawing all whose hearts 
 are open to receive it into the inner Sanctuary 
 where they can be face to face with their Lord. 
 Thence it issues to become " The Word of 
 the Cross " (i Cor. 1. 18), which is the foundation of 
 the Christian life in its humility and self-devotion. 
 The metaphor of the sacrifices is brought in, and 
 explains itself simply. The sacrifice was the 
 dedication to God of the thing offered, and the 
 sprinkling of the blood was one of the actions 
 which betokened the union of the offerer with 
 the offering. The sprinkling of the blood of Christ, 
 therefore, implies the union of the believer in the 
 
 168 
 
EXPRESSIONS OF FAITH IN ATONEMENT 
 
 spirit in which Christ gave Himself up to God. 
 " May I be united with the true offering which 
 cries, ' Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God/ ' 
 And, since this is not only an act done once for 
 all, but one which lies at the root of the whole 
 Christian life, the sprinkling becomes the bond 
 which enables us to live in union with our Lord. 
 If, further, we think of the Reconciliation as the 
 pardon of sin and the abolition of its penalty, 
 the words may be taken as the confirmation of 
 the pardon of sin ; and this is the sense in which 
 they are generally and rightly used. But it must 
 be remembered that the use of them by St. Peter 
 distinctly implies the moral relation between 
 the Lord and His servant. It is " obedience and 
 sprinkling with the blood." In the language of 
 common life, therefore, it will mean, May I be 
 united in the self -offering of Christ to God, and 
 may the reconciliation which was made by His 
 death become effectual in my conscience and 
 my life. 
 
 9. CHRISTIANITY NOT SECTARIAN 
 
 In some of the representations given of Chris- 
 tianity, whether in books and systems or in prayers 
 or in conversation, it is made to appear as a kind 
 of afterthought, as something which might 
 conceivably not have been, and consequently as a 
 system of morals or of worship which merely 
 takes its place among the tentative and passing 
 
 169 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 systems evolved from time to time in various 
 places, instead of being the one final revelation of 
 divine truth. It is one great advantage of the 
 effort we are making to show its place in the whole 
 scheme of nature that it becomes to us necessary 
 and indispensable, like the sun or the air in the 
 material world. " Christianity," indeed, has 
 suffered greatly from the partial systems in which 
 it has been set forth and which, by their complexity 
 and even at times by their contradiction to our moral 
 sense, have brought it into contempt. In some of 
 the missions to the heathen the leaders have 
 adopted for their converts the names of Brothers 
 (and in England the name of Friends is justly 
 honoured), in order to escape these entanglements, 
 and there is amongst thoughtful people a cry of 
 " Back to Christ ! " for the same reason. The 
 attempts to effect this purification have, however, 
 in many cases cut off some things which are 
 essential the pruning of the tree must not lop 
 away the necessary branches. 
 
 It was said by the prophet in his protest 
 against idolatry, "The gods that have not made 
 heaven and earth, even they shall perish from 
 the earth and from under these heavens " (Jer. x. 
 n). And we cannot but adopt the words of 
 Tennyson about the little systems which have 
 their day and cease to be. This has been specially 
 the case as regards Christianity. The systems 
 have drawn us away from Christ, and, professing 
 
 170 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND SECTARIANISM 
 
 to explain His position and enlarge His influence, 
 have fatally limited it. Even Athanasius speaks 
 as if the " Incarnation of the Word " depended 
 on the fall of man. But the saying of another of 
 the Fathers gives a truer view, " Etiam si homo non 
 peccasset Christus tamen venisset." His coming 
 was the culmination of the whole process of the 
 Creation and of Nature. That is the meaning of 
 St. John when he says that all things were made 
 by (or through) Him, and that He is the light of 
 every man ; and of St. Paul in declaring that the 
 purpose of the Father is to sum up all things in 
 Christ (Eph. i. 10), and that " He is the first- 
 born of all creation " (Col. i. 15). The sectarian 
 views which have fixed on some one part of the 
 truth or of what has appeared to men to be the 
 truth, whether of doctrine or of worship or of 
 government, and have made it the whole, and have 
 banned and deprecated all others, have crippled 
 and maimed Christianity, and brought it into 
 contempt. We have a right to claim that Christ 
 is Lord of the whole world and especially of the 
 whole human race, and that every good thing 
 which has been done on this earth has been done 
 under His inspiration, and tends to the increase 
 of His Kingdom. But, even when we condemn 
 the narrow views of some persons or sects, we may 
 often perceive that, blameable as their denials are, 
 their exaggerations have fixed the attention of 
 men upon some neglected aspects of truth or of 
 
 171 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 conduct. And this gives us the right to believe 
 that in speaking of Christ we are speaking of the 
 central power of human life, the inspirer of good 
 in all men everywhere, of the ruler's justice, of the 
 lawyer's precision, of the scientist's zeal for the 
 truth of fact, of the artist's love of beauty, of the 
 tradesman's or the inventor's services to his 
 fellows, as well as of the philanthropist's or the 
 preacher's love for the well-being of those around 
 him. All these are parts of the same all-stimu- 
 lating and all-embracing love which the Almighty 
 Father bestows on His children to bind the whole 
 race into one. All are parts of the same Christian 
 love which rises from the giving of the cup of cold 
 water to a little child to the pouring out of the 
 life-blood of the Son of God for the redemption 
 of a world. The knowledge of this culminating 
 act gives force to every part of the process ; but, 
 even where it is not known, the aspiration of every 
 true man is a faith which will be counted for 
 righteousness; and Christ has Himself declared 
 that, where the promptings of the Holy Spirit 
 are not resisted, even blasphemy against the 
 person of the Saviour is not unpardonable. All 
 human goodness, we must believe, makes for the 
 restoration of mankind, not to some strange form 
 of unworldly saintliness, but to its true nature and 
 functions. 
 
 172 
 
CHRISTIANITY OF THE MANY AND THE FEW 
 
 10. CONVERSION 
 
 We have spoken of a world which lies in wicked- 
 ness, and of the work of a Redeemer or Deliverer. 
 A word must be said on the process by which man 
 turns from wickedness, embracing the power and 
 love of the Redeemer. It is true that the process 
 by which this change is wrought out cannot be 
 traced completely. The soul is in direct contact 
 with the Eternal Power and Love. But for this 
 reason we must refrain from generalizing on the 
 special cases which may be known to us ; and this 
 restraint has rarely been practised. Some who 
 are deeply conscious of the power of divine grace 
 over all those who are admitted into the Church 
 dwell upon this admission as the main if not the 
 sole agency. The controversy over Baptismal 
 Regeneration has passed away. It has not been 
 settled, and might break out again ; but each side 
 has learnt much from the other, and there is 
 agreement sufficient to enable men to work 
 together. 
 
 There are, again, those who, while admitting 
 the spiritual advantage of baptism into the 
 Church, hold that the great change denoted by 
 conversion must be a matter of consciousness, that 
 it is capable of being fixed and known, even as 
 regards the time at which it takes place. But 
 both these views in their extreme form have yielded 
 
 i73 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to the natural and common-sense view, which is 
 also that commended by Christ Himself in the 
 words, " By their fruits ye shall know them," 
 and by St. John, " He that doeth righteousness 
 is righteous even as He is righteous." It is much 
 more important to know that a man is good and a 
 doer of good than to know how and when he 
 becomes so. This does not imply that there are not 
 cases of conversion which can be fixed and recog- 
 nized, of which the supreme instance is the 
 conversion of St. Paul. Nor, again, can anyone 
 deny that there are many persons in Christian 
 families who from their infancy and their baptism 
 have been evidently subjects of divine influences 
 which have grown stronger with each year and 
 each circumstance. Our Lord, in speaking to 
 Nicodemus of the great change, says, " We speak 
 that which we know, and testify that which we 
 have seen " ; but, lest any one should limit the 
 change to that which he himself has seen and 
 known, or to the particular form in which he 
 has known it, He adds, " The Spirit breatheth 
 where it listeth " (John iii. 8 margin) ; we may 
 refer also to the words of Rev. v. 6, " The seven 
 spirits of God sent forth into all the earth." 
 
 Moreover, the word Conversion has, by passing 
 into a kind of dogma, been the cause of much mis- 
 understanding. It relates, no doubt, in some 
 passages of Scripture, to the complete change of 
 nature, as " The law of the Lord is perfect, con- 
 
 174 
 
OUR LORD ON CONVERSION 
 
 verting the soul " (Ps. xix. 17), or " They have 
 hardened their hearts lest they be converted " 
 (Isa. vi. 10). But also, in other passages, it relates 
 to a more partial change, as in the words addressed 
 to the apostles, " Except ye be converted and 
 become as little children," or to St. Peter, " When 
 thou art converted strengthen thy brethren." 
 It would be a very harsh inference from these words 
 to say that the apostles or St. Peter had been 
 in a state of spiritual death till these words were 
 spoken to them. 
 
 Nevertheless, the change on which we are 
 dwelling is a great reality, and one which, though 
 it comes from above, whether in its complete or 
 its partial form, all Christian people must be 
 striving for both in the individual souls with 
 which they are in contact and in societies and 
 nations and the whole world. 
 
 ii. UP AND DOWN 
 
 We are all aware of the difficulties which are 
 presented by the contrast between the old and the 
 new astronomy in religious writings and religious 
 ideas. Those who wrote before the time of 
 Copernicus thought of the earth as a plane and 
 of the heaven as a firmament above it in which 
 God dwelt. Christ came down from heaven to 
 earth, and reascended from earth to heaven. 
 The souls of the faithful went up to heaven to 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 dwell with Him, and the wicked went down below 
 the earth. Neither in poetry nor in common 
 conversation can we escape the difficulty which 
 is thus set up. According to our present knowledge, 
 what is " up " in England is " down " at the 
 Antipodes. And even if we could go by an 
 ascension through millions of miles, we should be 
 no nearer to God. God works through all the 
 universe ; but we cannot localize Him ; nor can 
 we form any conception of that other world, 
 beyond the conditions of time and space, where 
 we hope to dwell with Him and " to be with 
 Christ " and with " the spirits of the just made 
 perfect." 
 
 The statements, therefore, whether as to facts 
 and narratives or as to religious teaching, which 
 were made in ancient times must be re-translated 
 so as to adapt them to our present knowledge. 
 There is no great difficulty in doing this when 
 none but material questions are concerned. 
 We make the transition for ourselves. No one 
 imagines that, when he speaks of the sun rising 
 or setting, he will be understood as implying 
 that the sun actually mounts or falls. But in 
 matters that involve either moral and spiritual 
 teaching about the world to come, or the work of 
 God Himself and His action upon the physical 
 universe, the case is not so simple. When the 
 Psalmist says that God went forth before His 
 people (Ps. LXVIII. 7), or the Prophet that God 
 176 
 
INTERPRETATION OF APOCALYPTIC LANGUAGE 
 
 came from Teman (Hab. in. 3), or the Psalmist 
 again speaks of God's going with the singers and 
 musicians in the Sanctuary (Ps. LXVII. 24), no 
 one would require us to take the words literally. 
 Or when the Psalmist says, " He hath made the 
 round world so fast that it cannot be moved/ 1 
 no one would be shocked by our saying that this 
 is merely the impression which the solid earth 
 makes on the imagination of one who does not 
 know that the earth moves with an immense 
 velocity round the sun. But when in the Gospels 
 we read of the stars falling from heaven and the 
 power of the heavens being shaken ; or of the Sign 
 of the Son of Man appearing in the heavens, or of 
 St. Paul's words about the Lord descending from 
 heaven with a shout, and of the faithful being 
 caught up to meet Him in the air, it is not easy to 
 interpret such words in a real and natural sense, 
 or to defend the Apostle from the difficulties 
 arising from questions such as these: Whence 
 will the Lord come ? Will He really be supported 
 by clouds ? Will He be seen only by those living 
 on the small part of the earth of which the place 
 of His coming will be the centre ? and will the 
 saints who rise make a long journey from the Far 
 East or West to the place whence they will arise 
 to meet Him ? It would seem superfluous to ask 
 such questions but that the literalism, which we 
 may hope is passing away, still remains strong in 
 some quarters, and that this gives a handle to the 
 
 N 177 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 scoffer, and causes perplexity to the honest in- 
 quirer. It may be therefore well to explain 
 that such statements could only be made by one 
 writing in an age in which the truer astronomical 
 facts were unknown, and that all that they imply 
 to us is that the faithful departed will not be 
 separated from those still living, but will be 
 joined with them in union with their common 
 Lord in His glory. 
 
 Yet it may be well to go further and to ask 
 what is meant by His glory. We still use in our 
 hymns and worship the language of a King's 
 Court or of Apocalyptic visions ; but, when we 
 sing or pray of palms and thrones and crowns, 
 it is very difficult for children and simple people 
 not to be dazzled by the outward show presented 
 to the imagination, and to realize that the true 
 glory is the moral glory of justice and obedience 
 and love. And so, when we repeat the words of 
 the Apocalypse, " Behold, He cometh with clouds," 
 it is difficult for us to pass from the outward to the 
 spiritual exaltation. Yet when our Lord used 
 these words in His great confession before Caiaphas, 
 that He was indeed the Christ, the Son of God, He 
 accompanied them by the words, " Henceforth," or 
 " From this time forward (not hereafter in the 
 modern sense) ye shall see the Son of Man sitting 
 on the right hand of power and coming in the 
 clouds of heaven," which indicate plainly that He 
 did not mean that He was to sit on a throne, but 
 
 178 
 
THE KEY TO CHRIST'S APOCALYPTIC SAYINGS 
 
 that He was to reign over the hearts and consciences 
 of men, not that He was to come in outward 
 clouds, but to be clad with the attributes of 
 divinity, of which the cloud was the constant 
 emblem ; that this " coming " was to be a coming 
 in spirit and in power, and that those who were 
 then compassing His death, and others, like the 
 three thousand at Pentecost, in increasing numbers, 
 would from that moment begin to realize that He 
 was truly the supreme power, who would come 
 with growing evidence through the ages, till every 
 knee should bow to Him and every tongue confess 
 that He is Lord. 
 
 The childish, literal view of the world and its 
 future, to which the antidote has just been set 
 forth, is by some writers attributed to Christ 
 Himself. Some of the modernist school in 
 France, and some of the latest writers in Germany, 
 have set forth a theory that our Lord, like the 
 writers of some of the Apocalypses current in 
 His day, believed that this world would shortly be 
 destroyed, that the new heaven and earth would 
 come into being with Himself as King over it in 
 the temporal and literal sense. But His general 
 teaching would seem to make it impossible to 
 attribute to Him such a view of things, nor can we 
 understand how one who was beset by such carnal 
 and childish views could be the Lord whom 
 Christians worship. 
 
 179 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 12. THE CHURCH AND ITS MINISTERS 
 
 It is constantly repeated in arguments about 
 religion that Christ " founded a Society " ; and 
 it is inferred that this " Society " is now repre- 
 sented by what are now commonly called Churches 
 that is, companies of men bound together 
 by some speciality of religious dogma or cere- 
 monial, and mainly or primarily, if not exclusively, 
 concerned with public worship and its immediate 
 adjuncts. But " a Society " may have many 
 different meanings, and the suggestion is that 
 Christ's Church was a limited Society, such as one 
 of the good societies of which so many exist 
 among us, and that, as such Societies 'exist for 
 some good but limited object, such as Peace or 
 Temperance, so the Church exists for the limited 
 objects above mentioned ; while all that belongs 
 to the general progress of mankind in government, 
 science, literature, art, or commerce, belongs to 
 another power which is called " the world," and 
 to which " the Church " stands in various relations 
 of mastery or submission, of friendship or enmity. 
 It has been pointed out in this treatise that our 
 Lord never said anything about what we call 
 " going to church," that He prescribed no forms of 
 worship or of organization, but left His followers 
 free to work out the fundamental principle of 
 faith in Him in the whole range of their lives ; 
 and that His Church was to be an all-embracing, 
 
 180 
 
EXTENDED IDEA OF MINISTRY 
 
 ever-expanding company, taking in every ele- 
 ment of the complete life of humanity. The 
 Church or congregation of Israel, into which 
 He and His followers were born, was not re- 
 pudiated. The first effort of Christ, as of John 
 the Baptist, was to renew the heart of the nation 
 by repentance, and to turn it to its proper destina- 
 tion, the establishment of the all-embracing 
 Kingdom of God. When this failed, the nation 
 hardening its heart, the apostles turned to the 
 Gentiles ; but the message to both Jew and 
 Gentile was the same : the universal love of God, 
 the great amnesty and pardon for all men, the 
 establishment of a kingdom of justice and love 
 for the whole world. The expansion of this 
 kingdom was hindered by the persecutions ; 
 and the narrowness thus enforced has continued 
 to beset the Church till now, and is proclaimed 
 as an essential quality of it which must last for 
 ever. The truer idea of the Church is that con- 
 tained in the words of the Lord, " Where two or 
 three are gathered together in My name, there am 
 I in the midst of them." This great saying also 
 has been narrowed so as to apply only to gather- 
 ings for prayer, and for the conduct and regulation 
 of public worship. It ought to be applied to 
 everything which is done in Christ's name and 
 spirit. Every Society which is conducted with a 
 view to the benefit of mankind and the promotion 
 of the Kingdom of God becomes a Church. 
 
 181 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 It follows from this that every man who engages 
 in his life-work (which we truly speak of as his 
 calling from whom if not God ?) and looks 
 upon it in the spirit which St. Paul enjoined 
 even upon the slaves at Ephesus, telling them 
 that they should with good will do service as to the 
 Lord and not to men, becomes a minister of 
 God. This is confessed in one of the noblest of 
 our Collects, which, being used on Good Friday, 
 connects its subject definitely with the Cross, 
 in the notable words, " That every member of the 
 Church in his vocation and ministry may truly 
 and godly serve the Lord." Those whom we 
 commonly speak of as " ministers," or clergy, as 
 though they were the only ministers of Christ 
 and His Church, should properly be termed 
 " ministers of the word and sacraments," or 
 ministers of public worship and its adjuncts. 
 
 If this be admitted, then the questions about 
 what is called Church Government must be solved 
 in the natural way by reference to what is de- 
 manded by the circumstances in which God 
 has placed us. No form of government was 
 enjoined by Christ ; the first officers appointed 
 were for a special and secular need, and were forced 
 into the work of preaching, for which they were 
 not appointed, simply by the necessities which 
 naturally arose. The " elders " were a Jewish 
 or Hebrew institution, and seem to have at first 
 combined all the officers in one body. 
 
 182 
 
CHURCH GOVERNMENT SACRAMENTS 
 
 The episcopate was formed gradually to meet 
 special needs, different in different places, but 
 gradually growing to uniformity. It is pre- 
 eminently natural, since every body of persons 
 acting together must have one head. In this 
 sense it is divine ; but this is the divinity which 
 permeates society, and gives us (in their proper 
 sense) the divine right of Kings, of parents, of 
 magistrates, of tax-gatherers. Our object must be 
 not to detract from the sanctity of clerical offices, 
 but, first, to extend the sanctity to all rule, and to 
 every work which ministers to the completeness 
 of the life of mankind ; and, secondly, to take all 
 society into the Church ; but, thirdly, to prevent 
 the interference of the clergy as a body with the 
 things not pertaining to them, as jurisdiction or 
 finance; for such interference deters them from 
 their proper calling and also robs the so-called 
 "secular" callings of their legitimate sanctity. 
 
 13. SACRAMENTS 
 
 The idea of Sacraments has been unduly 
 limited. If we believe in God as immanent or 
 indwelling in the whole Creation, then the Sacra- 
 mental principle must be universal. Every part 
 must speak of God, and to the eye of faith must 
 convey Him to man. The tendency which we have 
 deprecated of turning a principle into a special 
 ordinance and limiting it to this has nowhere been 
 more disastrous than in the sphere of Sacraments. 
 
 183 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 St. Augustine and other of the Fathers looked upon 
 all the Jewish ordinances as Sacraments, and St. 
 Augustine * praised the wisdom of our Lord in 
 choosing out two of the Old Testament ordinances 
 as supremely important, while letting the rest fall 
 into oblivion. When St. Jerome in his Vulgate 
 Version of Eph. v. 32 translated the words about 
 the " mystery " of marriage by the phrase Hoc 
 magnum Sacr amentum, he did not mean that Christ 
 or the Church had instituted marriage or h ad elevated 
 it to a position equal to Baptism or the Lord's 
 Supper, but merely that it was, in the general sense, 
 an outward visible sign and means of an inward 
 and spiritual grace. The Roman Church reckons 
 five other ordinances as Sacraments, which is 
 partly a recognition of the wider sense of the word, 
 partly a limitation of it to particular ordinances. 
 The Church of England limits the term still 
 further to the two which are instituted, or, to speak 
 more properly, adopted by Christ Himself. But 
 we may well resort to the wider meaning. Baptism 
 may be taken as a type of all purity and cleanliness, 
 as St. Paul says (2 Cor. vn. i), " Let us cleanse 
 ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and 
 spirit/' or the Epistle to the Hebrews, " Our hearts 
 sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies 
 washed with pure water." And the idea of the 
 Lord's Supper, which is that of a feast of fellowship 
 in which God and Christ and our brethren partake, 
 
 * De Doct. Christ. , iii. 9. 
 184 
 
EXTENDED IDEA OF SACRAMENTS 
 
 leads rightly to the hallowing of all our meals. 
 Richard Rot he, in his great work of Theological 
 Ethics, takes one by one the chief occupations of 
 mankind and shows how each is capable of forming 
 Sacraments. The author ventures to quote a 
 passage from his own Bampton Lectures * in 
 which this aspect of the Sacramental principle is 
 stated : " The outward objects with which we 
 deal in all our associations together are not to a 
 Christian mere brute matter. They have been 
 changed by the alchemy of religious thought and 
 feeling. They become to our apprehension the 
 means by which God and the human spirit are 
 perceived and spiritual blessings communicated. 
 Each object of science reveals not only the law of its 
 existence, but a part of God's nature. Each art 
 reveals not merely natural beauty, but human 
 feeling, which is also divine. The family life is full 
 of the outward and visible signs of love, and ' Love 
 is of God.' The common partaking, appropriation, 
 and enjoyment of these, therefore, makes us 
 partakers of each other and of God. ... It is not 
 too much to say that he who thus appropriates the 
 outer world, realizes at every turn the inner mean- 
 ing of the words, ' Take, eat, this is My body/ ' 
 The author would also quote the words of a very 
 thoughtful friend : "I know but one Sacrament, 
 and that is the whole life." 
 
 * The World as the subject of Redemption. Longmans. 
 Revised edition, p. 255. 
 
 185 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 14. A GOOD MAN 
 Vir bonus est quis ? 
 
 The object both of Creation and of Redemption 
 is to produce goodness. We need not raise the 
 question whether the individual or society comes 
 first. Man is social. " Male and female created 
 He them." Yet there can be no goodness apart 
 from conviction and right conduct in each person. 
 The point in question is this : Are there two sorts 
 of goodness ? Can there be a good man who is not 
 a Christian ? or a Christian who is not a good 
 man ? Such an assertion as Newman's, that a 
 base, cringing Italian beggar who has faith is 
 better than a sturdy honest Englishman who is 
 not religious, at once rings false. And those who 
 confine goodness to men who have certain re- 
 ligious feelings become sectarian. The larger idea 
 of the work of the Spirit which has been advo- 
 cated in this treatise makes things clearer. It 
 shows that there is no man wholly destitute of 
 goodness, that the Church in its fullest ideal allows 
 of men approaching God from various sides, that 
 Christ is Lord both of the faithful and of the un- 
 believer, that the Church is a school with good 
 and bad in it, to lead them all to Christ and to 
 God. But the question still remains as to the 
 standard. Christ has shown us the true one ; 
 186 
 
BLENDING OF VARIOUS STANDARDS 
 
 but it is like a diamond with many facets, and 
 none must be denied. The two great evils to be 
 avoided lie in the tendency to exclusiveness. The 
 Pharisee boasting of his own goodness might be 
 good in the points which he mentioned ; he was 
 wrong, first, in comparing himself with the publican ; 
 secondly, in the attempt to make one form of 
 life and goodness prevail exclusively ; thirdly, in 
 not recognizing the good side of bad actions or 
 men. If we avoid these dangers we can walk freely, 
 accepting the various standards faith, honesty, 
 courage, meekness, good sense, strength of pur- 
 pose, gentlemanliness, self-control ; but knowing 
 that these are each of them only shoots from the 
 stem of the eternal righteousness, which found 
 its full expression in the Cross of Christ, and 
 using whatever influence we have to make this 
 appear. Perhaps nothing has more hindered the 
 acceptance of the Christian standard of life than 
 the chasm which men are often made to feel 
 between holiness and simple honesty, though a 
 Christian can hardly deny the words of Pope that 
 " An honest man's the noblest work of God." 
 If this chasm can be bridged over by mutual 
 knowledge and considerateness, a great part of the 
 contrast which exists between religion and ordinary 
 morals, between Church and world, will be re- 
 moved, and we shall fight no more, as we have 
 been apt to do, like ships in the night which do 
 not recognize each other, but as brothers united 
 
 187 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 amongst ourselves against the powers of dark- 
 ness, with Christ recognized more and more as the 
 Leader. Nothing can be conceived more powerful 
 than this as capable of drawing men from sin and 
 ungodliness, and bringing in the object of all true 
 endeavour, the kingdom of righteousness and peace 
 and love. 
 
 It is, indeed, argued most truly that it is not 
 enough to have a true standard of goodness before 
 our eyes : we want a motive principle to make 
 us strive towards it, often through opposition 
 and suffering ; and the Cross of Christ is to the 
 Christian both the standard and the motive ; nor 
 can any description of the Christian life be better 
 than the simple words of our baptismal service, 
 by which we are engaged " to confess the faith of 
 Christ crucified," " to be made like to Him," and 
 " manfully to fight under His banner against 
 sin, the world, and the devil." We need also an 
 object for which to hope and to strive, and this 
 object is the Kingdom of God, the state of things 
 in which Christ will reign completely over every 
 heart and every society of men that state which 
 is drawn out symbolically in the pictures of the 
 New Jerusalem in the Apocalypse. Hitherto the 
 greatest part of Christian endeavour has been 
 spent in the effort to save individual souls out of 
 ruin ; but the language of the apostles constantly 
 leads us beyond this. It says Christ has saved us, 
 and we are workers together with Him to establish 
 
 188 
 
THE TRUE THEOCRACY 
 
 His Kingdom ; and He Himself has said, " I came 
 not to judge the world, but to save the world " 
 (John xii. 27). . The Kingdom has unfortunately 
 been very commonly made to appear to men as the 
 supremacy of the clergy or a conformity to some 
 wilful and limited system ; insomuch that, when 
 men speak of a theocracy, a reign or Kingship of 
 God, this is usually taken to mean the rule of 
 priests or of a coterie which has usurped the name 
 of the Church. This has been the fatal idea which 
 has brought about the alienation of men from 
 religion so markedly in a country like France*, but 
 which in a less degree exists in all civilized countries. 
 We see two forms of goodness standing up in oppo- 
 sition, and at times seeking to destroy one another. 
 The way, the only way, out of such an unnatural 
 state of things lies in the teaching which it has 
 been the object of this treatise to enforce, the 
 teaching which expands the object of Christian 
 endeavour so as to take in the universal good of 
 mankind, and to recognize the Christian standard 
 of goodness in every effort by which the human 
 race is being raised. When this union is effected, 
 we may hope to give a fuller meaning to the Church 
 as being the complete Society of mankind imbued 
 and inspired with the indwelling of God and of 
 Christ ; and we may repeat with a fuller and truer 
 meaning the words in which goodness is described 
 
 * See a remarkable play (lately acted in the Paris theatres) 
 by M. Paul Loyson, termed " Les ames ennemies." 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in both the Old and the New Testament, the 
 one speaking of the man " that walketh uprightly, 
 and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the 
 truth in his heart " (Ps. XV. 2), the other of " the 
 measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ " 
 (Eph. IV. 13). 
 
 190 
 
INDEX 
 
 Absolution, 83 
 Antiochus Epiphanes, 58 
 Apocalyptic ideas, 56, 63 
 
 books, 57 
 Archer-Shepherd, Rev. E. H., 
 
 on virgin birth, 66 
 Argyll, Duke of, on miracles, 
 
 36, 75 
 
 on Darwin, 66 
 Arnold, Matthew, 20, 32 
 Athanasius on Incarnation, 
 
 68,80 
 
 Atonement, 82, 163-7 
 Augustine, 7> 2 4 
 
 B 
 
 Bacon, Lord, on prophecy, 
 
 62 
 
 Baptism, 92 
 Baur as critic, 44 
 Benson, Archbishop,on Church 
 
 unity, 143 
 Bible, human and natural, 8 
 
 culminating in Christ, 8 
 
 superior to Creeds, 50 
 
 Burke on the Convocations, 
 
 1 10 
 Butler, Bishop, 5 
 
 Canons of 1603, 109 
 Charlemagne, his influence on 
 
 the Church, 104 
 Charles, Professor, 59 
 Christ, His supremacy, 9, 10, 
 
 153, I7i 
 
 His divinity, 79 
 
 His life of prayer, 16 
 
 as the Word, 25 
 
 as immanent in creation 
 and man, 25 
 
 His blood, 168 
 
 His Apocalyptic sayings, 
 59-61 
 
 His teaching about conse- 
 quences of sin, 156-8 
 
 Christian life, 86, 140-1, 184 
 Church, its authority, 47, 51 
 
 the true idea of, 89, 90, 94 
 
 legislation by Parliament, 
 128 
 
 ministries, 182 
 
 the Jewish, 88 
 
 191 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Church, not primarily for pub- 
 lic worship, 98, 112 
 
 needlessly divided, 99 
 
 as society turned Christian, 
 100 
 
 relations to the Roman 
 Empire, 103 
 
 under Hildebrand, 104 
 
 under Frederick II, 105 
 
 in Saxon England, 106 
 
 at Reformation, 108-9 
 
 one with the nation, 105, 
 Io8 > I3if 133 
 
 its work and membership, 
 94, 112, 121 
 
 its functions and aims, 122- 
 3, 130 
 
 Clergy, 116-7, M4-5, 182-3 
 Commentary, the Speaker's, 
 
 33 
 Comte, Auguste, 6, 13 
 
 his religious ideas, 18 
 Conversion of families and 
 
 tribes, 118-9 
 
 Coronation a consecration, 
 131 
 
 Creation, story of, its import- 
 ance, 42-3 
 
 Creeds, their language, 48 
 
 Criticism, variations of, 44-5 
 
 Higher, meaning of, 46 
 
 Daniel, Book of, 57 
 Darwin, his attitude to re- 
 ligion, 21, 22 
 on generation, 65 
 Deists, 5 
 
 Descent into hell, 68 
 Development and election, 53 
 
 East and West to unite, 97 
 Education, 12 
 
 religious, 15 
 
 Election, principle of, 53, 83, 
 
 96 
 English Church system, 114 
 
 unity of nation and Church, 
 
 131 
 
 still in viridi observantid, 
 
 121, 133 
 
 has promise for the future, 
 138 
 
 and of social progress, 147 
 Episcopacy, 84, 182 
 Evolution, the process and the 
 
 Power, 21-2 
 
 tbe mode of God's action, 
 20 
 
 Exodus, the, 33 
 
 192 
 
INDEX 
 
 Faith, its objects real, 13 
 
 but subject to reasoning, 
 
 14 
 
 France, its attitude to re- 
 ligion, 1 6 
 
 Friends, Society of, 92 
 
 Genesis, I, 7 
 
 Gentiles, not without God, 25, 
 
 28 
 
 God, imperfect ideas of, 17 
 Immanence of, 23 
 
 His relation to the world, 
 
 25 
 
 knowledge of, 129 
 
 character and purpose of, 
 150 
 
 His wrath, 160 
 Goodwin, Bishop, on Visions, 
 
 76 
 Gray, Asa, 21-2 
 
 H 
 
 Haeckel, his confession of 
 
 faith, 20 
 Harnack, on value of Apostles' 
 
 Creed, 50 
 
 on St. Luke, 44, 65 
 o 
 
 High Priest, Christ's answer 
 
 to him, 59 
 Horsley, Bishop, on evidences 
 
 of resurrection, 76 
 Huxley, his Agnosticism, 19 
 
 Immanence and transcend- 
 ence, 25-6 
 Isaiah, prophecy of Immanuel, 
 
 67 
 Israel and mankind, 52-3 
 
 J 
 
 Jaures, M., II 
 Jerome, Saint, 69 
 Jerusalem, fall of, predictions 
 
 of Christ and St. Paul, 61 
 Jesus, as Messiah, 55 
 Jowett, Professor, 39, 40 
 
 Loeb, Professor, on virgin 
 
 births, 66 
 Luke as historian, 44, 64 
 
 M 
 
 Mill, J. S., his ideas of re- 
 ligion, 19 
 Miracles, 31-9, 71-5 
 
 193 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Miracle, words describing, 34 
 
 solution of, 36-7 
 Morals and religion, 9, 12 
 Mosaic law, 53 
 
 expanded by Christ, 56 
 
 N 
 
 Natural man, 1-2 
 applied to God, 4 
 " Nature," right and wrong 
 use of, i , 2, 78 
 
 Parochial Church Councils, 
 
 H5 
 
 Paul, St., prophecy of fall of 
 Jerusalem, 61 
 
 in Greece and in Asia, 74 
 
 in great Roman centres, 
 101 
 
 Peter, Saint, his speeches, 
 
 101 
 Philippi, jailer of, his family 
 
 becomes a church, 118 
 Positivism, 5 
 Prayer, its true nature, 29- 
 
 30 
 Prayer, the Bidding, 89 
 
 Rationalism, mistakes of, 37 
 
 Regeneration, 173 
 
 Religious systems, 17 
 
 Representative Church Coun- 
 cil, 133-4 
 
 Resurrection of the body, 68 
 
 of Christ, 75 
 
 attested by St. Paul, 76 
 
 Retranslation of religious 
 words, 174 
 
 neglect of this by critics, 
 
 179 
 
 Revelation, 4, 43 
 
 Sabatier-Auguste, 59 
 Sacraments, 92, 183 
 Salvation, negative and posi- 
 tive, 155 
 
 Sectarianism, 140, 169 
 Sin, its universality, 161 
 Socrates, his prayer, 30 
 Spencer, Herbert, 6, 19 
 
 Theists, 5 
 
 Toleration Act, 126-7 
 Trinity, the, 27 
 Tyrrell, Father, 9 
 
 194 
 
INDEX 
 
 Virgin birth of our Lord, 64 
 Virginity, excessive cult of, 69 
 
 W 
 
 Westcott, Bishop, 5, 58 
 Williams, Sir Monier, story 
 recorded by, 71 
 
 Word, The, in Egypt and 
 Palestine, 23 
 
 in the fourth Gospel, 25 
 
 as the Light of all men, 27 
 
 Zeller, critic of St. Luke, 44 
 
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