BL 240 .H68 1923 Howard , Henry, 1859- The church which is 1 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/churchwhichishisOOhowa THE CHURCH WHICH IS HIS BODY THE CHURCH WHICH IS HIS BODY STUDIED IN THE LIGHT OF BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH By HENRY HOWARD PUBLISHED FOR THE FERN LEY LECTURE TRUST LONDON THE EPWORTH PRESS J. ALFRED SHARP ACKNOWLEDGEMENT My warmest thanks are hereby given to Sir Charles Sherrington, C.B.E.,D.Sc., LL.D.,F.R.S. (Oxford) ; to Professor J. S. Haldane, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S. (Oxford) ; and to T. B. Heaton, M.A., M.D. (Oxford), who have graciously accorded me privileged and prolonged consulta¬ tions, giving me most generous assistance in the way of suggestion, checking my scientific refer¬ ences, and permitting me to the extent of my ability to help myself from the rich stores of their highly specialized knowledge, harvested from many years of scientific study and research. First Edition, July, 1923 Made and Printed in Great Britain h Southampton Times Limited, Southampton CONTENTS Prologue . 7 Introductory .... 14 I. Organization ...... 20 II. Metabolism 1. ANABOLISM 40 2. KATABOLISM 71 hi. Development . 82 iv. Differentiation of Function ... 93 1. PROPHECY ..... II4 2. MINISTRY ..... 122 3. TEACHING I PARTS I AND II . . I32 4. EXHORTING .... 155 5. GIVING ..... I70 6. LEADERSHIP .... l8o 7. CONSOLATION .... I9O v. Reproduction ; or, The Missionary Im¬ perative . . . . . .198 vi. Epilogue . 211 ‘ Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on ; but when He ascended and His Apostles after Him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down, gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, lords and commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master’s second coming ; He shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.’ ‘ Areopagitica ’ : A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. — John Milton. PROLOGUE Biological research has noted certain outstanding characteristics which physical life everywhere exhibits through all its multiplied manifestations. These char¬ acteristics have been variously formulated by different workers in this field, but as to their existence and persist¬ ence all are agreed. This lecture is an attempt to provoke inquiry as to whether, and to what degree, the corporate life of the Christian Church bears the selfsame marks as distinguish life in other fields, thereby vindicating its right to be classified as a living organism, and to be construed as the veritable body of Christ. Whether what we are accustomed to call ‘ The New Life ’ or ' The Second Birth ’ is to be interpreted as indeed a quite new and plus quality of life, requiring to be generated in the soul from above, by a specific act of divine impregnation, or whether we may regard it as being simply a lifting up of what we already possess of life to a higher tide, and the consequent flooding of hitherto unvisited, unvitalized areas, whose inhibited forces and functions it straightway releases, and relates to consciousness within, and to service without, we may not stay to discuss. But the more deeply one studies these great themes the stronger grows the conviction that while for con¬ venience sake we may continue to speak of life as physical, intellectual, moral, or spiritual, as the case may be, yet 7 8 PROLOGUE care must be taken, lest, in the use of such terms, we should imagine there is anything approaching to scientific accuracy in the classification they are employed to denote. Between these realms no real boundaries can be fixed. Indeed it is a question whether the time may not come when we shall have so to recast our definition of life as to obliterate the distinction hitherto set up between ‘ organic ’ and ‘ inorganic/ and thus to turn the tables so completely on the old materialistic position that even so-called dead matter may have to be construed and expressed in biological terms. ‘ The idea of life/ says Professor Haldane, ‘ is nearer to reality than the ideas of matter and energy, and therefore the presupposi¬ tion of ideal biology is that inorganic can ultimately be resolved into organic phenomena, and that the physical world is thus only the appearance of a deeper reality which is as yet hidden from our distinct vision, and can only be seen dimly with the eye of scientific faith/1 Professor Arthur Thomson, in his Gifford Lectures, 1915-16, complains that ‘ those who are convinced ol the apartness of living creatures are apt to fail in apprecia¬ tion of the inorganic domain/ He quotes Professor Enriques with approval when he objects to what he calls the ‘ false antithesis involved in opposing the spontaneity and change of everything that fives to the inertia and immutability of matter/ 4 The view seems far more adequate/ he says, ‘ which holds that everything around us is living and active, save for a difference in the intensity or rapidity of the changes, and in the relative importance of the internal and external factors for the course of the 1 Mechanism, Life and Personality, pp. 104-5. PROLOGUE 9 phenomena/ It is useful, however, says Thomson, to keep a term like ' living * for organisms only.1 In view of these possibilities it would appear that the so-called ‘ inorganic ’ may be potentially alive, with vital forces keyed down to so low a note as not to respond to the tests by which life, as we are familiar with it, is commonly discerned. It may very well be that what we term matter is really spirit in suspended animation, and only waiting for the mystic word of adoption that will break the spell of its enchanted sleep. The distinctions we draw, then, between these realms, be it remembered, are purely arbitrary, like our divisions of time and space. We map out, for example, what we call the ‘ Seven Seas/ determining their respective latitudes and longitudes and giving them different names. /Eschylus speaks of the ‘ multitudinous laughter of the waves/ but how the fountains of the great deep must heave and hold their sides with merriment at our attempts to pack their mighty waters within meridians and parallels, and thus seek to put asunder, if only by name, what God Himself has joined ! The oceans constitute a great and indivisible unity, their currents freely intermingle, and one vast tidal movement sweeps through and controls them all. So that what is Pacific to-day may be Atlantic next week, and later still, after mingling with the Indian, may be rushing through the ‘ Roaring Forties ’ to wash the Southern Pole. In like manner we cannot split human life into self-contained compartments. They all interlock and interact, and thus it comes to pass that a purely physical happening, in the way of a lesion of the brain, 1 The System of Animate Nature, vol. i, pp. 70-71. 10 PROLOGUE may induce a condition of mental disturbance, which, as often as not, emerges and finds expression in a serious moral lapse. Or, as sometimes happens, the order is reversed, moral deterioration so reacts on mental states as to set up degeneration of brain tissue. But as to where one stage ends and the other begins, or by what subtle process of interchange they unload their freight on to one another, is in the present state of knowledge beyond our ken. The results of research and experiment in psychotherapy, conducted in this field with proper safeguards, promise to be exceedingly fruitful, and much that was hidden is being revealed. Enough has already been discovered to confirm what has always been held by the higher spirits of the race, that the real world is the thought- world ; that to rule there is to have dominion, not only over self within, but to a large extent over circumstance without. Whether, however, we hold spiritual life to be a kind of renascence or inner quickening, brought about by the play of mystical forces which hover round the soul, rous¬ ing it from torpor as the Spring sun wakes the sleeping seed, stirring already existent but dormant energies into activity ; or whether we regard it as something additive, a quite new and original endowment entering into and possessing the soul as its rightful Master and Lord ; whether it wells up from within like a released spring whose frozen fountains have been set free and flowing under the warm beams of the Infinite Love, or whether it rushes down from above, a river of life from the throne of God and of the Lamb, to flood and fertilize the soul — does PROLOGUE ii not lie within the scope of our study. This much, how¬ ever, may be said, wherever and whenever it takes place it results from and is graduated to human response. It is on the interplay between the divine will and the human will that the experience turns. Action and reaction between organism and environment, constitutes, according to Thomson, the condition of living. These are his words : ‘ Living is a twofold relation between organisms and their environment ; at one time the organism is relati vely the more active, at another the environment. Living is a continual adjustment between these two relations.' How this new and wonderful force is generated in human lives is, in this context, of quite secondary importance. The method may remain a mystery, but the fact is un¬ deniable. It is a perpetually recurring fact in human history, attested by a great and growing cloud of witnesses, and it is with this fact that we are concerned. Dispute as we may as to the roots, we cannot deny the fruits. There have always been those who, with absolute finality of assurance, could say ‘ We know that we have passed from death to life,' and have vindicated their claim by their works. These are among what William James calls ‘ The twice-born/ and their knowledge of the fact is first-hand. It is the most tremendously real and significant thing in their experience. For them to question it would be to doubt the validity of their own senses, to distrust the most fully accredited experience in their history, and to despair of any such thing as certitude in the deepest things of life. The fact is they have seen and recognized Christ. He has become as real to them as they are to themselves. The evidence of this reality is 12 PROLOGUE direct, personal, specific. It is a conviction which Christ Himself, by the power of His Spirit, has wrought. They know Him and the dynamic of His resurrection, and that knowledge has changed for them their whole conception both as to the content and context of life. It is because this experience is continuous in the history of the Church that she is qualified to bear perpetual witness to the Resurrection of her Lord. This experience is an infinitely greater and grander thing than to have seen and handled Christ after the flesh. The Church witnesses to a living experience here and now of her living Lord. He has become alive for evermore in her consciousness. Even in her darkest days she has been able to show the miracle of pure and saintly souls, who, amid all the corruptions of a society, debased in thought and diseased in heart, were able to walk in stainless robes, with the flame of a great love burning in their hearts and the light of a great purpose shining in their eyes. This unbroken chain of witness to first-hand experience, by both words and works, is not only the most outstanding fact in human history, but its most creative factor, because it is really the Incarnation extended and augmented. It is the * law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus * working itself out on the stage of time, and thus fulfilling the Saviour’s promise, ‘ Lo, I am with you all the days, even to the end of the age.’ ‘ Because I live ye shall live also ’ is Christ’s word to His Church, and fife is its own all-sufficient credential, or nothing can accredit it. A living Church has no more need to put in affidavits as to her vital and vitalizing power, than has a living man to produce a birth certificate to prove himself in being. PROLOGUE 13 The Church’s best defence lies in attack. If through all her ranks she will but drop argument and gird up her loins for service, she will achieve by the logic of life and work what she can never accomplish by tAe logic of words. For her, as for every living organism, the way of work is the way of continued life and the solvent of doubt. The living Christ wears upon His girdle the keys to all mysteries, whether of life or death, or of the underworld : I say, the acknowledgement of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it, And has so far advanced thee to be wise. Wouldst thou unprove this to reprove the proved ? In life’s mere minute, and with power to use that proof, Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung ? Thou hast it ; use it and forthwith, or die ! INTRODUCTORY If the mere layman as to science, who has to take all his facts at second-hand, finds biology so fascinating a study, then what strange spell must it work about the initiated, who are privileged to pass within the veil and freely move among its holy mysteries ! We dwellers in the outer court await with wistful longing every syllable that is spelt out concerning the wondrous potency that dwells behind appearances, the mystic force that throws the shuttles and weaves the flowing, ever-changing robe in which life’s ceaseless pageant is displayed. In a recent lecture before the British Medical Association on ‘ The Fundamental Conceptions of Biology,’ Professor Haldane claims for biology, that it is an ‘ independent science,’ by which, as he explains, is meant ‘ not that the physical sciences and biology are distinct from one another because they deal with spatially distinct parts of the world, but because they employ different working conceptions or axioms in interpreting their data.’ In Professor Haldane’s judgement the mechanistic theory of life is wholly discredited. The mathematical and physical terms into which it has been sought to resolve life have proved inadequate. They will not go into life without leaving a remainder. In any case, the mechanistic theory is merely modal and not causal. According to Professor Haldane, ‘ the time has arrived 14 INTRODUCTORY 15 for examination of our axioms, and a strict inquiry as to how far they are valid and consistent with experience. We should begin to realize more clearly that what we perceive is a working hypothesis which we adopt as consistent with our observations.’ He concludes his lecture by saying, ‘ In the course of this examination the spiritual interpretation, as the supreme interpretation of the universe, is coming again to its own, and a funda¬ mental step seems to me to be an inquiry into the differ¬ ence between the axioms of biology and those of the physical sciences.’ Even Roux, whose philosophy has been mechanistic throughout, nevertheless is forced to the following confession : ' The too simple mechanistic conception on the one hand, and the metaphysical conception on the other, represent the Scylla and Charybdis between which to sail is difficult, and so far by few satisfactorily accom¬ plished ; it cannot be denied that with the increase of knowledge the seduction of the second has lately notably increased.’1 Sir Charles Sherrington, President of the Royal Society and of the British Association, in his presidential address before the latter body in September of last year, chose for his subject ' Some Aspects of Animal Mechanism.' Sir Charles explained that his theme was chosen partly at the suggestion of the late William Rivers, the eminent neurologist, and a member of the psychological section of the Association. Now the suggestion, coming from such a quarter, while of course leaving the President perfectly free to treat his subject in his own way, yet 1 Form and Function, p. 318 (Russell). i6 INTRODUCTORY affords a strong presumption that in the mind of Dr. Rivers there was no doubt as to Sherrington’s attitude toward the mechanistic theory in general, or that in his hands the psychological side of things would have fair play. As a matter of fact nothing could be finer than the President’s carefully reasoned discrimination between what he calls the ‘ why ’ of the living organism and the 1 how ’ of its working. The ‘ how ’ is the problem of the physiologist, but the ‘ why ’ belongs to the psychologist, and it is in the synthesis of these two, with all they connote, that life must be studied if it is to be seen as a whole. ‘ If,’ says he, ‘ we knew the whole “ how ” of the production of the body from egg to adult, and if we admit that every item of its organic machinery runs on physical and chemical rules as completely as do inorganic systems, will the living animal present no other problematical aspect ? The dog, our household friend, do we exhaust its aspects if in assessing its sum total we omit its mind ? A merely reflex pet would give little pleasure even to the fondest of us. To pass from a nerve impulse to a psychical event, a sense impression, percept, or emotion is, as it were, to step from one woild to another and incommensurable one. It is to the psychologist that we must turn to learn in full the contribution made to the integration of the animal individual by mind/ Again, speaking of the further integration of the social organism he says : ‘ The biological study of it is essentially psychological ; it is the scope and ambit of social psychology.’1 Put alongside ot this Haldane’s assurance that ‘ Biological interpretation provides us with a bridge 1 ‘ British Association Presidential Address,' 1922. INTRODUCTORY 17 towards psychological or spiritual interpretation/ and verily here we have the ground of a sure and certain hope that all the physical sciences will yet find their synthesis in biology, and that while she may not be possible of interpretation in terms of them, they may, and must to be fully understood, be construed through her. The very distinction between her and them thus constitutes her the new and living way along which their relativity can alone be successfully sought. Even that apparently hard and fast science of Economics, with its rigid adjustments of supply and demand, is shown by Professor Marshall to be capable of coming to sweetness and light under the vivifying breath of biological science. Speaking of what he calls ' the mathematico-physical group of sciences/ he points out that while at the beginning of the nineteenth century they were in the ascendant, yet as the century wore on the biological group were making their influence felt, till ‘ At last the speculations of biology made a great stride forward ; its discoveries fascinated the world as those of physics had done in earlier years. And there was a marked change in the tone of the moral and historical sciences. Economics has shared in the general movement, and is getting to pay every year a greater attention to the pliability of human nature and the way in which the character of man affects, and is affected by, the prevalent methods of production, distribution, and consumption of wealth/1 ‘ The autonomy of biology/ says Thomson, ‘ is not inconsistent with its correlation imperium in imperio — with chemical and physical science/ 1 Principles of Economics, Appendix B, p. 764 (Marshall). 2 i8 INTRODUCTORY Because, then, life is the liege lord of all natural forces, biology must be the queen of all natural sciences ; dis¬ cerning them all although herself discerned of none. True we see not yet all things put under her, but she bides her time. She can well afford to wait, for the eternities are on her side. The time- process must needs work itself out : With thousand shocks that come and go. With agonies, with energies, With overthrowings, and with cries, And undulations to and fro. But life initiated the process, life conducts it, and life will crown it. This is why life alone can construe it. A true science of life, paying due regard to all the facts from every field, will be seen to carry the keys to all the great economic, social, industrial, and religious problems which are pressing for solution the whole world round, and challenging the highest powers of heart and brain. The Apostle Paul, in his Letters to the Romans and Galatians, stresses the personal note in Salvation. He shows that it is a transaction between the individual soul and its redeeming Lord, and as though nought else existed but itself and God. In Romans he works through the individual to the corporate idea which finds expression in chapters xii -xiv., but the corporate note is made second¬ ary and subordinate to the personal. In his letters to the Ephesians and Colossians, however, this order is inverted, for in both of these he is dominated by the corporate ideal. It is this corporate conception, struggling for realization, and with more or less success at different periods of its INTRODUCTORY 19 history, that we are confronted in the Christian Church. According to Paul’s view the Church is a living organism with Christ as its Head. If, therefore, it is to follow the analogy of life’s processes elsewhere, it may be expected to exhibit certain strongly marked characteristics which, as we have said, biological research has disclosed. According to Professor Arthur Thomson, ‘ the best statement of these characteristics is that of Roux,’ whom he quotes as recognizing five elementary functions. 1. Self-disassimilation. 2. Self-preservation, including assimilation, growth, movement, feeding, &c. 3. Self-multi plication. 4. Self-development. 5. Self-regulation in the exercise of all functions, includ¬ ing self-differentiation, self-adjustment, self-adaptation, and in many organisms distinctly recognizable psychical functions.’1 These features have been differently stated by different workers in this field and in different order. The purpose of this lecture is to apply these criteria to the organized life of the Christian Church. Accepting generally the above classification, we propose to deal with the question under the following heads : 1. Organization. 2. Metabolism (including Anabolism or building up, and Katabolism or breaking down). 3. Development. 4. Differentiation of Function. 5. Reproduction. 1 The System of Animate Nature (J. A. Thomson). I ORGANIZATION In order that life may fulfil its functions, exhibit its powers, and pass on the torch, it must assume form. No man hath seen life at any time. We have always to deal with its expression through form. Moreover, it is only as it comes to manifestation in material structures that we can become aware of its presence, grow familiar with its processes, or deduce its laws. We can observe it only as it clothes itself in visible and self -woven raiment. As to what it is in itself, in its naked and elemental essence, science can as yet predicate nothing. It dwells and moves and has its being for ever behind the veil. Whatever may be true of Absolute Being, for being that is derived, in order to maintenance and reproduction, some form of incorporation would seem to be a necessity. We cannot picture life in the abstract and as unorganized. If as Christ declared ‘ God is spirit,’ then all life, whether embodied in higher or lower forms, must be the self¬ projection and self -manifestation of that Spirit upon the stage of time, and working under time conditions. The moving and many-coloured pageant of animal and vege¬ table life, with all its wondrous laws, its marvellous adaptations, its gracious adjustments and utilities, its inter-relations, and its inexhaustible types of rich and rare design, is simply the forth-flowing of that creative energy which is forever clothing itself in new and wondrous 20 ORGANIZATION 21 forms. It is the invisible and eternal unity for ever breaking up and flowering into visibility and infinite variety, which, after working through its earthly cycle of birth, development, and reproduction, is for ever retiring into invisibility, to recover again its unity in Him a * who is and who was and who is to come.’ This creative energy is everywhere self-limited by the medium through which it elects to come to expression. It has reached its highest form in man, through whose self-consciousness and free choice of goodness it seeks to express itself in terms of moral character, ‘ with power on his own act, and on the world.’ Starting as we do, by assuming the fact of spiritual life, and whether or not adopting the view that it is a distinct and supplementary endowment — a veritable gift of God bestowed upon the believing soul that surrenders itself to Christ — it is only fair further to assume that this new life principle will observe the selfsame conditions as con¬ trol life’s movements and manifestations in other fields. In brief, it must take on form and build up structure. It may very well be that everything we work outwardly, and through the medium of matter, is being simultaneously and reflexively wrought inwardly in terms of spirit, so that a replica is being retained in the body-spiritual of all the deeds done in the body-physical. It would be a fascinating study to speculate on the body-building power of this new life principle within the individual, uprearing behind the veil of his flesh a fairer and more finely organized structure, ‘ for there is a natural body and there is a spiritual body.’ This spiritual body, when the veil of flesh is rent, will stand 22 ORGANIZATION revealed in more or less completeness and symmetry, according to the degree of loyalty with which the laws of the spiritual community to which it belongs have been observed. That the great Apostle regarded this edifica¬ tion as actually in progress here and now, and as being analogous to life's processes in other fields, appears again and again from His teaching. Everywhere then, and always, fife precedes and pro¬ duces form. Even among the ‘ spirits of just men made perfect ' it is difficult to conceive how distinctness of being can be perpetuated without some embodiment, however ethereal, which serves as a boundary fine between per¬ sonalities, and so preserves the integrity of individual selfhood from becoming blurred out, or being re-absorbed into the Universal Principle of Being out of which it has come. Dean Inge shows that Plotinus, that great Neo-Platonist, held strongly to this view. * Souls are Logoi of Spirits, and each represents a distinct entity in the spiritual world. This distinctness can never be destroyed. But the distinctness of souls, though not lost is latent in the world of spirits. . . . Spiritual existence has an infinite richness of content ; the eternal world is no undifferentiated jelly. And this rich fife implies reciprocal action among souls. ‘ They see themselves in each other.' They have then characteristics of their own which are not merged in the unity of spiritual fife. We may further assume that since every fife in this world represents a unique purpose in the Divine mind and since all psychic ends, though striven for in time, have their source and consummation in eternity, this, the inner meaning and ORGANIZATION 23 reality of each individual life, remains as a distinct fact in the world of spirit/1 It is, however, with the organization of the individuals in whom this spiritual life has been begotten into a corporate body called the Church, that we are seeking to deal. Not that there is necessarily one set of laws for the individual and another for the community, but that, as we shall find, it is only through the community and the fulfilment of corporate relations thereto, that the great laws and forces of the spiritual kingdom can come to fullest human expression and efficiency. Life involves relations. Isolation spells death. The relation into which the new-born soul is introduced is twofold — first to its risen Lord, as the Head of the Body which is the Church, and secondly to all its members, consisting of those who in every age and country have heard His voice, and come out at His call. These are the true ‘ Ecclesia/ whatsoever name they bear, or whether they be named at all. But they have not merely been * called out/ they have been likewise * called in/ As we have seen it is a call with a double objective. The first is private, personal, specific, as between the individual soul and God. Stripping itself clear of all relations, entanglements, and environments, the soul must come first of all in the naked essence of its own personality, face to face with the Personality Divine. In that private audience relations are set up that are primary. Spirit meets with spirit. The heart frankly tells its own story of moral failure, defeat, and deficiency, to be met by the word of full absolution and moral reinforcement. ‘ Your sins which j 1 The Philosophy of Plotinus (Inge), vol. ii., pp. 22-23. 24 ORGANIZATION were many, are all forgiven; go in peace and sin no more/ From that interview it rises a new creature with a new nature, and committed to a new career. But the second objective is relative, and communal, in which the soul is introduced to a new social order which, however, is as old as humanity — a great spiritual fellowship of all saints, an organized society of spiritual entities which God has been instituting and constituting from the beginning of days, informing it with His Spirit and conforming it to His purpose — a community of which the integrating and structural principle is love. This is the eternal society, to membership with which all sentient being has been predestined in the redeeming will of God. It is a destina¬ tion toward which, under the conduct of the risen Christ, the whole creation is moving, and the consummated glory of which will infinitely outweigh all the agony and desolation through which the suffering ages have been called to pass in their upward way. Of this invisible and eternal order the Catholic Church is the visible expression, and into fellowship with it, through its unifying Head, every individual life is called, that thereby it may not only promote its own private and personal development, but make its public contribu¬ tion to the corporate efficiency of the whole. ‘ It is by its government that the Church is organized for the perform¬ ance of its three cardinal functions : self-manifestation, self-propagation, and self -purification. Organization being a means and not an end, must be sufficiently elastic to correspond to the varying needs of different ages. It must embrace the ideal side, viz., that of Christian con¬ sciousness or doctrine , and the actual sides, viz., that of ORGANIZATION 25 practice in its self-manifesting, its self-propagating and its self-purifying action. The functions of teaching, governing, and ministering are of divine institution ; not so the form of their administration, and still less the individuals who perform them. The Church, with its organized offices, must also leave room for voluntary exertions and Christian associations in many varying forms.’1 Souls are saved to serve, so that forgetful of self they may function their powers on behalf of others. Function, however, works through form. But form, according to Russell, ‘ is not something fixed and con¬ gealed, it is the ever-changing manifestation of functional activity.’ We shall have occasion to deal with this question later and under another head, but let it be noted here that form, while secondary to function, is quite necessary to it, and life that is not permitted to express itself through form simply declines to carry on. The Church in its manifold forms and functions is the organized body which spiritual fife has built up for itself, and by means of which it seeks so to react upon the world of living men as to bring them into the know¬ ledge and love of God. Professor Royce complains that ‘ the ways that are just now in favour in the philosophy of religion seem to end in leaving the individual equally alone with his intuitions, his lurid experiences of sudden conversion, or his ineffable mysteries of saintly peace.’ Now, whether this interpretation does full justice to the present-day philosophical attitude in regard to religion may be fairly questioned, but in as far as there is any justification for 1 Dorner, System of Christian Ethics, p. 604. 26 ORGANIZATION the criticism, the attitude is one which requires correction. Of course the insistence that religion is nothing if not personal, and that the first grand necessity to inherit eternal life is a clear-cut consciousness of one’s own individual selfhood, is of supreme importance. But while this is the first step it is not the last. There are vast social implications in religion, and the man who fails to appreciate and render them explicit, the man who bends his thought inward upon the salvation of his own soul, and never thinks about the souls of others, will, by his very self-centredness, lose the life he seeks to save. If over-organization be the peril of the social order, over¬ individualism is the peril in religion. In all our great centres of population the tendency is more and more for each to pursue a lonely and independent career. We have large congregations that have come into no sort of working combination — groups of professedly Christian people who never join for the purpose of lifting their own personal life to a higher power, in order that through association they may more efficiently serve a common cause. In many of our Churches we have nuclei of organized life, but they are bounded off from one another, so that instead of presenting the appearance of a federated commonwealth of mutual interests, and com¬ bining for mutual service, they resemble rather a sort of spiritual archipelago, with each little island in the group jealously cherishing its own isolation, instead of reaching out friendly hands to its fellows, and through sharing in a common life, co-ordinating for common work. The false and selfish communism that is sought to be set up in the State can only be corrected by the true and ORGANIZATION 27 unselfish communism which springs out of a common life derived from Him * who pleased not Himself.’ The first disciples were bound together by many ties, a common faith, a common hope, a common love, but the greatest of these was love. Indeed, the very word ‘ body ’ in its etymological signification stands for a community. It has its root in a Sanscrit word, ‘ bandha,’ from the root ‘ bhadh,’ to bind. It is literally a banding or binding together of mutually related parts, each of which can retain its own individuality or specialization only as association with its fellows is sustained. It can neither become nor achieve its best excepting in relation. Every organ, and every cell of every organ, was made for fellow¬ ship, which it feels after that it may find. In the New Testament expression * the bond of love,’ the word * bond ’ is the translation of a Greek word * sundesmos/ which stands for the ligamentary tissue which binds the various parts of the body into a unity. Indeed the very word comes into the science of human anatomy, and the term ‘ Syndesmology ’ is employed to describe the articulation formed by the bodily ligaments in the human frame. But ligament ary tissue is vital. It is a bond which life itself creates and sustains. It is not something super-imposed upon the living body from outside, and detachable from it without damage to its parts. It is life’s own product and provision, woven from within for the very purpose of safeguarding its functions and securing the effective working of all its parts towards the ends for which the organism exists. Any rupture or strain of a ligament, unless repaired or relieved, will induce a permanent weakness of the parts involved, and thus 28 ORGANIZATION reduce the efficiency of the whole. So with the ties that bind into a corporate body the members of the Christian Church. They are neither outward nor artificial, but inward and vital ; so much so, that either to rupture them by violence or to weaken them by failing to function them is to imperil the organism which they assist to unify and to threaten its life. We are sharers in a common fife which holds us all in its vital grasp, and is ever seeking by baptizing us into a common love to beget in us a common mind. In his ‘ Lowell Lectures ’ Royce points out that ‘ When love of the community, nourished by common memories and common hope, both exists and expresses itself in devoted individual lives, it can constantly tend, despite the complexity of the present social order, to keep the consciousness of the community alive.’1 ‘We are one because of our common past and future, because of the national heroes and victories and hopes, and because we love all these common memories and hopes ; so it is that in the ideal Church, each member not only looks back¬ wards to the same history of salvation as does his fellow, but is even thereby led to an ideal identification of his present self with that of his fellow member that would not otherwise be possible.’2 The ideal Church presents the very highest form of communal fife. It knows no distinctions of rank or race or colour, they are all submerged in the deep full tide of a love which is the very fife of God, and of a fife which is His love. The fundamental thought, then, underlying the New 1 The Problem of Christianity, vol. xi. p. 92. * Ibid., p. 94. ORGANIZATION 29 Testament idea of the Church, is that the Christian life is a related life. Paul's analogy drawn from the body and its members is profoundly scientific. In a normal human body all the limbs and organs are members one of another. The association is so close and vital that they all play into one another's hands like a well-trained team. They are unified and controlled by the brain, to which organ they have delegated the power of com¬ mand. The theory which at present holds the field is that the human body represents a real democracy, inasmuch as the brain has come to be elected as the governing centre by the consent, gradually handed in, of the various powers. According to this theory the local control in the course of evolution has in some direc¬ tions tended to grow less and less, and the central control more and more. There are still certain functions which communicate with one another directly and without engaging the brain, just as in a telephone system one may be able, without troubling Exchange, to get into touch with certain departments of his business ; but for the most part the various members of the body have to ring up * central ' in order to be put in touch with one another and to act in concert. It is significant to remember that this rule from above is by consent of the members below. At first sight, and to the uninstructed, it looks as if the government of the body were a despotism, in which the brain simply lorded it over the members and brought them into subjection. But according to those who have studied this question most deeply the autocratic interpretation of the situation is not tenable. It has to give way in favour of the democratic idea, which 3<> ORGANIZATION regards the brain as the constitutionally appointed executive of the body, and as legislating by its full and free consent. This democratic idea finely sustains the analogy which the Apostle sets up between the relation of Christ to His Church, and that of the head to the body. Under the despotic idea it would have to break down, because the only sovereignty which Christ can undertake to exert in the exercise of His moral government is that which is conceded to Him by the voluntary surrender of man's will. In the establishment of His Church, Christ has sought to create an organism which will express universally what His earthly body expressed locally, of the mind and heart of God. That earthly body must have come to full efficiency of co-ordination in quite normal ways, and by a gradual process in which time was a requisite and ruling factor. Supposing Him, accord¬ ing to tradition, to have worked at the carpenter’s bench, we must assume that He came to proficiency and skill in the use of His tools by practice, and through many a failure and mistake. In any case, whether He laboured in this way or not, the harmonious working of His bodily powers must have come about, in His case as in ours, as the result of bringing them into mutual play ; all of which, as we have seen, must have involved a time-process. But if the single body through which His will flowed freely and unchallenged thus took time to come to perfection of organized efficiency, what wonder that the complex corporate body which is His Church, embracing so many minds and wills, should take time to come into ORGANIZATION 3i full working order so as adequately to articulate the purpose oi His mind and the love of His heart ! Just as the various functions of the human body presuppose each other and were made to act in concert, so with the members of Christ’s Church. They are not merely related to Him, but to one another through Him as their Head. The over-individualism of which we are in peril is the price we have to pay for our Protestantism. With a great sum obtained we this freedom, and at every cost it must be maintained. At the same time, how¬ ever, the right of private judgement must be so construed and exercised as to subserve the corporate good. With the obligations, private and personal, which the individual owes to himself as a member of the spiritual community we must deal later, but the fact that the Christian life is a richly-related life must be firmly held, and its requirements frankly faced, or the personal life will be by so much impoverished. It is true that we have to be recovered as individuals from the mass, but only that in turn, as we have seen, we may be organized into a corporate fellowship which, while it carries corporate privileges, makes them all turn on loyalty to corporate duties, and the contribution of mutual effort for the good of all. The Christ-controlled man very soon discovers, under the culture of the Spirit, that God has a will for him which outruns the limits of his own personality, and is infinitely broader than his own individual life. It is a will that takes him up and treats him not merely as an end, but as a means to large, divine, immeasurable ends, graduat¬ ing him as an initiate into a universal society, which. 32 ORGANIZATION when complete, will articulate the perfect will of God. No single life, however rich and many-sided, could provide an adequate field for the manifestation of the divine purpose in humanity. That purpose requires myriads of personalities, with diverse qualities and innumerable occupations, in order that the length and breadth of its infinite scope may come to expression. This is the eternal purpose toward which God has been working from the beginning. It is the One far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves. It is this for which Paul beseeches in his sublime intercession : For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man ; That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith ; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love. May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height ; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God. Now the preposition ' with * in this passage is all- important. It is only ‘ with all saints ’ — only in con¬ junction with all who in every age have been obedient to the heavenly vision, and responded to the upward call, that we shall be able to comprehend the vast dimensions of Redeeming Love. Not in isolation, but ORGANIZATION 33 only in association, can its all-embracing purpose be either realized or expressed. Our danger, as we have said, is that of over-developing the individual at the expense of the corporate idea, and in a Church that succumbs to this peril there can be no such thing as esprit de corps. Only through self-subor- indation can we reach the highest co-ordination and make the Church of Christ on earth what he intended it to be — the instrument of the Kingdom of God for redeem¬ ing the Kingdom of man. For this the Spirit of unity is for ever working in the mind and heart of the Church, making for the healing of division and the fulfilment of the Saviour’s prayer : ‘ That they all may be one, as Thou Father art in Me, and I in Thee, that they may be one in Us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me/ The supreme and unanswerable apologetic for the Christian Faith is a united Christendom, an undivided Church, ‘ one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one Faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in you all/ Clearly, then, until the Christian Church consents to submerge the accidentals which divide her in the deep full tide of the essentials that make her one, she is with¬ holding from the world the most convincing demonstra¬ tion that Christ was the sent of God. The ‘ Bond ’ that binds together the Church of God may thus be very rightly designated the ‘ Bond of peace/ But just as in the physical body, dislocation does take place, to the straining and damage of the parts, involving the whole system in distress, so in the body ecclesiastic 3 34 ORGANIZATION there have been dislocations and ruptures, which have plunged the Church into misery, and sadly reduced her efficiency as a working force. You cannot have disloca¬ tion without discomfort, and you cannot have discomfort without diminished utility. We are not arguing for uniformity. In the human body, which serves Paul for an illustration of the Church, there is endless diversity of form and function, but all unified and controlled through the co-ordinating brain. The science of embryology reveals that this partition of the body into its different organs and functions begins at a very early stage in its life history. In the process of development one part of the embryo evolves into an eye, another into an ear, and another into a hand ; and nothing could be more diverse in structure and function than these different powers, just as nothing could be more beautiful than their perfect correlation. They work together with such delightful reciprocity, with such mutual sympathy and understanding, as to present the very highest expression of corporate unity. And not only do eye, and ear, and hand differ from one another, but eye differs from eye, ear from ear, and hand from hand, in the same body. So that absolutely there are no duplicates. There are no two eyes in any one head that see exactly alike. And yet, in spite of this diversity, where will you find such unity, such perfectly adjusted and sympathetic relation ? From all of which I desire to show that there is no need in the Church for uniformity in order to unity. On the contrary, there is not only plenty of room, but absolute need, for variation in form, structure, and function in the Church, which is the ORGANIZATION 35 Body of Christ, if she is to fulfil her manifold relations and stand in the world of men as the organized will of God — the working plant, or, if you will, the standing army, whose business is the annexation and federation of all the kingdoms of man in a world-wide kingdom of God. Now, as we have said, the differentiation of function in the human body takes place very early in the history of the embryo, and long before there can be any possible co-ordination of the powers ; and if the Church is to follow this analogy, while there may be abundance of hope in the ecclesiastical out-look, there is a call to let patience have her perfect work. For example, in the case of a normal child of a few weeks old, there are all the functions of body and brain. There is the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the tasting tongue, and the tiny hands and feet. But while these are all present, and in the right position, proportion, and relation, the mutual relation is rather latent than patent, for these powers have not yet ‘ found themselves/ so to speak. They have not yet discovered their corporate unity so as to work together for a common end. Indeed, to develop this fine communion to its highest proficiency will, under the most favourable conditions, be a matter of years of interaction between body and brain. Even then, how¬ ever, in the most fully developed and harmonious natures, there will always be some functions that remain imper¬ fectly unfolded, while others never seem to come into the circle of fellowship at all, but remain outside, to become a possible point of inflammation and menace to the whole. 36 ORGANIZATION If the history of the Body ecclesiastic is to follow this order, then the differentiation of function which expresses itself in the various branches of the Christian Church must be interpreted as divinely purposed and planned, but only, as in the case of the individual body, that this diversity of function and allocation of field may be succeeded by their ultimate co-ordination in an organic and harmonized unity. And, of course, the more highly organized the spiritual body-corporate becomes, the longer will the work of co-ordination be delayed. Now it is vain to profess belief in the corporate ideal, and to be for ever affirming our faith in the unity of the Church, without working towards its visible realization. How can we justify our attitude of aloofness and suspicion, our policy of push and self-assertion, our wasteful over¬ lapping, with its expressed or implied discredit of our sister churches’ claims? What a spectacle must Christen¬ dom present to the onlooker — with its rival camps, its clashing interests, its divided aims ! Forgetting the far-reaching and imperial ends for which she has been organized, in the pursuit of narrow, exclusive, and sectarian ends of her own, she has either lost or never caught the vision of the ideal ; she has been taking a part for the whole. Field Marshal Earl Haig, in a striking address de¬ livered soon after the Armistice had been signed, said : ' I have seen in my own sphere of activity the working of a General Staff. I understand how without interfer¬ ing with the discretion of those on the spot, in matters that concern them and them only, it is yet able to give singleness of purpose to diversified operations in many ORGANIZATION 37 theatres, yet more particularly how it is able to instil life, energy, resolution, and drive life into the actions of all, inspiring all with the feeling that they are working to a common end ; that their efforts are interdependent, their failure involving more than their own ruin, and their success guaranteeing the victory of others. ‘ I want to see established a general staff for the Christian Churches of the Empire, some body at least analogous in the ecclesiastical sphere to the position held by the Imperial General Staff in the military or¬ ganization of the Empire. There need be no interference in the internal economy of the Churches, whether on their spiritual or their temporal side. What, it seems to me, is needed at once, is a strong representative body not too large for energetic action, which can direct the general policy of the churches, infuse them with new energy and strengthen their resolution in the great crusade of brotherhood on the long road on which the war has set our feet. This central body must proceed to the further development of an organization suited to the needs of the Empire. We are entering, we hope, upon an era of peace bought by vast sacrifice. The object of every one of us is to make that peace secure and permanent. To my mind the one means by which that era can be achieved is to develop, not merely in Scotland and England but throughout the whole of the British Empire and the whole world, the spirit of brotherhood. . . . For that work we need the active help of a strong, vigorous, national Church — a Church which has risen superior to the forces of disruption, and is in itself a living embodi¬ ment of the principles of fellowship and unity.’ 38 ORGANIZATION Assuming the analogy to be sound, that each great division of the Christian Church has been divinely created and ordained to bear witness to some particular aspect of the Truth, it must at the same time be in possession of the whole. It may feel itself called to specialize in some particular direction, just as a medical man may be called to specialize in some particular department of his profession. But a doctor must become master of the human constitution as a whole before he can venture to particularize. Indeed, any specialist will tell you that his success in any specialization has been determined by the breadth and accuracy of his knowledge of the human body as a whole. That is to say, every specialist, whether of eye, ear, or throat, would be capable of diagnosing and prescribing for any of the countless ailments of the human body, for the simple reason that he has had to come up to his special forte through the common gateway of general practice. So with the different Churches, their differences are simply specializations which have been either developed by thought from within, or necessitated by the exigency of adaptation from without. Special circumstances call for the assertion of certain teaching and the insistence of certain practice, all of which, however, must be done so as to regard the proportion of faith, that the due perspective of doctrine shall not be lost. If we are to keep the ' unity of the Spirit/ we must as Churches multiply points of fraternal contact. The frequent and familiar intercourse of mental and moral affinities provides one of the best checks to the perils of over-individualism. We are all in danger of lop-sidedness. We require to exchange and compare ORGANIZATION 39 opinions and experiences. This is true in every depart¬ ment of life. Men with common aims find it necessary to confer, that they may take corporate action to secure common ends. The personal equation can be measured and dealt with only by comparison, and fellowship with kindred souls is the best cure for ‘ cranks/ If we could but revive the Church idea in this corporate sense, and by the fulfilment of mutual relations bring about a more vigorous constitutional life, many of our private and personal weaknesses would disappear through our sharing in a strength that can come to us only through association with the organized body of which we are the members. II METABOLISM i. Anabolism or Assimilation ‘ Metabolism has two great purposes to fulfil. First : the maintenance unimpaired of the substance of the tissues, and secondly, the conservation of bodily energy. The former consists in the replacement of the waste of tissue substance, which the stress and strain of vital activity entails. It is, therefore, essenti¬ ally anabolic in nature. The conservation of bodily energy on the other hand is achieved by the breaking down of food com¬ pounds, and the liberation of their potential energy in the form of heat and work, and is, therefore, preponderatingly “katabolic.” ’ — Hutchison's Applied Physiology. ‘ The cells of the body lie bathed in lymph, which, though at times tending to stagnate locally, as in the muscles during rest, may be regarded as more or less continually on the flux, flowing both through and around them. The lymph-flow to the cells carries the oxygen, proteins, carbo-hydrates, fats, salts, and other substances necessary for the bio-chemical changes that constitute cell-life. The lymph-ebb carries away from the cells the waste- products such as carbonic acid and ammonia. ‘ The composition of this “ lymph " is essentially determined by the composition of the blood-plasma. This is a highly complex fluid — the most complex in nature, containing an endless variety of substances — food-stuffs, oxygen, hormones, ferments, opsonins, which defy the most careful and delicate methods of chemical research ; and let it be remembered that it is in a fluid of this kind, that from the beginning to the end of its career, every cell in the body lies bathed and is through it subjected to an endless variety of influences both good and bad.’ — H. Campbell's Aids to Pathology. 40 METABOLISM 4i * The part played by food among the higher animals is indeed extremely complex. In the first place it serves to repair tissues, then it provides the animal with the heat necessary to render it as independent as possible of changes in external temperature. Thus it preserves, supports, and maintains the organism in which the nervous system is set, and on which the nervous elements have to live. But these nervous elements would have no reason for existence if the organism did not pass to them, and especially to the muscles they control a certain energy to expend ; and it may even be conjectured that there, in the main, is the essential and ultimate destination of food.’ — Creative Evolution, p. 127 (Bergson). The physiological availability of the foodstuffs we consume is measured by their heat-producing and tissue¬ building value. The Church, which is the Body of Christ, requires to be fed. Like the individual organisms which go to make it up, it expends energy and sustains waste, and occasionally damage in the functioning of its powers. This has to be made up, and it can be made up only by the intake of appropriate food. This foodstuff has to be broken down by vital processes and sorted out according to its nutritive worth. Churches, like individuals, suffer from malnutrition, though probably here as elsewhere, there are often conditions induced through the over¬ feeding and underworking of the organism. It has been laid down by ‘ Flack and Hill ’ that : ‘ In these days of adulteration and separation of natural foods, it is quite possible that errors may arise in man’s diet ; but it is safe to conclude that if the general public devoted as much attention to keeping itself fit by proper muscular exercise in the open air as it does to the question of diet, the latter would cease to be of such importance.’ There is surely a hint of this in the Saviour’s reply to 42 METABOLISM His disciples when they were urging upon Him the food they had just purchased in the Samaritan village. Although wearied by His journey and physically indis¬ posed to conversation, He had been busy drawing the heart of the woman of Samaria away from the failing waters of time to those eternal springs that upleap to the level of their heavenly source. He had turned her thought from the visible ceremonial of a formal and merely local system of worship to that spiritual and universal inter¬ course with the everlasting Father, which He showed to be not only possible but necessary. Instead, however, of being further exhausted by His effort, He found Himself not only spiritually but physically reinforced. He met the invitation to food with the significant reply, ' I have meat to eat that ye know not of. My meat is to do the will of My Father which is in heaven.’ Now meat is the generic term which stands for nutri¬ ment. Our physical life is sustained by the appropriation and assimilation of certain nutrient qualities enfolded in the fruits and grains of the earth. When these are fed to the life principle for its nourishment, they are straight¬ way seized upon by the invisible chemists of the body and made to surrender their life-sustaining qualities. These inherent qualities represent the will of God in terms of nutriment. The morning loaf when thus interpreted is God’s will made bread, and it is only as this word is made to render up the spiritual qualities expressed by that will, and which are sought to be mediated through a visible and material substance, that life can be sustained. So that it is literally true that ‘ man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the METABOLISM 43 mouth of God.’ What goes into man’s mouth thus depends for its efficacy on what comes out from God’s. The bread that did not carry this spiritual quality, that was destitute of the living will of God, would be powerless to sustain life. If life alone can beget life, life alone can sustain it. What a word is to the thought it seeks to carry and make current, that bread is to the life-giving potency with which it is charged. It enfolds a secret energy. Just as the words we employ in daily speech must be received by the hearer into his mind and there made to deliver up their contents, before there can be any traffic in ideas, so bread or its equivalent has to be received, broken down into its different elements, and assimilated, if its constituent properties are to become the servitors of life. In this connexion there is a striking passage in Hebrews, ‘ The word spoken to them did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.’ Here there is a distinct recognition of the fact that there are important subjective conditions requiring to be fulfilled in the body, if the full food-value of one’s meals is to be secured. The fact is that our food consists of protein in various com¬ binations. These combinations have to be broken down, that the nutritive qualities they hold may be yielded up. This is done through the action of certain secretions, which, so to speak, unlock the cupboards and take delivery of supplies which are thus made available for absorption and distribution throughout the community by the blood-stream, which performs the double function of bringing nourishment to each and every part of the 44 METABOLISM body in appropriate and properly proportioned quantities, and taking from it its waste products for elimination by the various methods of exit. The value of food is thus seen to be determined, not by its inherent qualities alone, but by the ability of the recipient to make it yield up those qualities on demand. Any deficiency in this ability results in non-assimilation and consequent non-nutrition, so that the richest building material may be taken into the body with no more advantage to it than the contents of packets that we post are to the office through which they pass. Now the word ‘ Faith ’ in this connexion may be interpreted either as trust or as trustworthiness — either as confidence felt by us in another, or as deserved by us from another. Indeed, both of these conceptions of reliance and reliability are gathered up and expressed in this single term. But whichever way we construe it in this passage, the underlying idea that is common to them both is that some quality of mind or heart is requisite on the part of him who hears the word of truth if he is to be enriched mentally or morally by him who speaks it. This faith quality stands, then, as the medium of exchange between two worlds. As truly as ' good faith ’ is an essential element in the traffic of the market-place, so in any transactions between the soul of man and the Spirit of God, faith is a fundamental requirement. It is the determining factor of value. Upon its freshness and vigour will depend whether the verbal currency of thought, in the shape of words, can be cashed at its face value, or must suffer discount. Let faith become a withered METABOLISM 45 faculty, then whatever moral wealth may be put within its reach, will never be passed into our account and placed to the credit of the soul. Or keeping strictly to biological analogy, faith, fresh and strong, functioning as the condition of vital transport, may be regarded as standing to the life of the spiritual community as the green leaf stands to the physical life of the world. When the Psalmist likened the godly man to a tree, whose leaf should not wither, he was probably building better than he knew. But be this as it may, in fixing attention on the greenness of the leaf, he seized on the one and only gateway through which life in all its myriad forms can be sustained. One wonders as to how much he did know of the functions fulfilled by the leaf. Having shown that the roots of the tree are struck deep into the well-soaked river-bank, it really seems, at first sight, unnecessary to affirm anything in regard to the perennial greenness of the leaf. That surely might have been taken for granted under such favourable conditions as are named. Moreover, after stating that the tree brings forth its fruit in its season, does it not seem super¬ fluous and rather in the nature of an anti-climax to refer to the leaf at all ? So indeed, on a surface view, it might appear, but aided by investigators in this field we come to a better knowledge as to the functions fulfilled by the leaf in the life-history of the tree. Biological research has revealed that upon the leaf as on a pivot the whole fortune of the tree structure has been made to turn. Whether the Psalmist made this reference wittingly or otherwise, the fact remains that when he did so he was giving the leaf the due place, to which, according to the 46 METABOLISM most advanced scientific knowledge, it should be assigned. As a matter of plain fact, there is only the thickness of a green leaf between the whole world of physical life and the silent realm of death. This is not poetry, but simple, downright prose. Scientific investigation reveals that the greenness of a leaf is due to the presence of what is known as chlorophyll — a substance that appears to be the product of a union between sunlight and the proto¬ plasmic fluid which the leaf contains. Under the action of the sun’s rays little granules of this chlorophyll bunch themselves together into masses called chloroplasts, each of which, on examination, is seen to be a manufacturing centre of the nutriment upon which the fife of the tree or plant depends. This is the tiny hinge on which the door of fife for man and beast has been made to swing. Accord¬ ing to Professor Huxley, the vegetable Kingdom is the only one that really works. As for the animal Kingdom, all its members from man downwards to the amoeba, are only consumers of manufactured products, non-producers, mere hangers-on ! The green leaf is the whirling seat and centre of ceaseless activity. In considering the life of a tree we have been accustomed to stress the importance of the root. This, however, in the fight of what we have seen, is a case of misplaced emphasis, and it is the leaf upon which the accent must fall. It is true that the root is responsible for supplying the water-power without which the machinery of assimila¬ tion, development, and reproduction could not be run. Upon the root also devolves the duty of extracting and passing on certain salts from the soil which go to the structure of the tree. These are, however, so amazingly METABOLISM 47 small in proportion to the trees bulk as practically to be a negligible quantity. Timiriazeff, Professor of Botany in the University of Moscow, conducted a most interesting experiment in reference to this fact. He planted a willow wand weighing five pounds in a pot containing exactly two hundred pounds weight of soil. He watched and watered this wand for five years, after which he carefully lifted it out, removing every grain of adhering soil, to discover that it now weighed one hundred and sixty-nine pounds three ounces. But so little had it drawn from the soil itself, that when the latter was weighed it was found to be but two ounces less than the original two hundred pounds. Instead, then, of the root, it is the leaf that represents the point where the real business of the tree is carried on, and the most vital relations are set up and sustained. When a seed is cast off by the parent tree it is started out clad in a suitable case, under cover of which are packed up all its requirements, including a measure of manufactured and concentrated nutriment for setting up housekeeping on its own account. Should it find suitable soil it straightway responds and lets loose its latent energies. Once the wondrous machinery of life is thus set going it is run for a time on inherited fuel — the portion of goods falling to it, so to speak, upon leaving home, and which is enough to start it in life for itself with a fair chance of success. By the time the root has struck down and the shoot thrust up, the plant’s capital, in the way of inherited stores, is used up, so that it now requires to take its hands out of its pockets and work for its daily bread. These hands are its leaves, and the 48 METABOLISM independent life of the plant begins from the moment that the first ray of light falls upon its unfolding leaf. Until the ray of sunlight thus falls upon the leaf’s surface its activity cannot begin. This activity is directed to extracting and assimilating the carbon that is stored up in the atmosphere. In the atmosphere it is in combination with oxygen, but the chlorophyll in the leaf breaks down this combination, absorbs the carbon and releases the oxygen. Upon the leaf is thrown the entire responsibility of keeping up the food supply for the tree’s support. It becomes the centre of exchange, the transforming station where inorganic matter is changed into organic and thus the life of the tree maintained. The green leaf, according to biology, is the one and only medium whereby solar energy becomes translated into vital force, and is made available for use by man and beast, for without the green leaf there is absolutely nothing that could live. Now that which in the spiritual life, whether individual or communal, corresponds to the function of the leaf in the way of appropriating and assimilating the forces of another and a higher world, is, according to the whole teaching of both scripture and experience, the function of faith. Unless by a living faith we are in account current with the spiritual forces that are banked to our credit, we must blanch into anaemia and fall into spiritual decline. Or to retain the metaphor of the Psalmist, instead of being like a tree planted by the rivers of water, we shall be merely a drift of dried and driven leaves. Nor is it merely that the spiritual life in such a case becomes dwarfed and diminished. There results an all-round depreciation of values. Every METABOLISM 49 department of life, physical, intellectual, and moral, depends for its reinforcement on the soul. We do not dream how deeply central is the religious factor, nor how powerful it is in determining our social, political, and industrial values. We can do our best work in this world only as we draw on that world for our supplies. What the sun is to the leaf, that and infinitely more is God to the soul. Only in correspondence with Him who is the Life of fife, the Light of light and the Fountain of all the forces that sweep in and around us, can we discover either our greatest bliss or our highest efficiency. To shut ourselves up in this material world, with no outlook or outreach toward another, is to stultify our being and defraud it of its flower and crown. Never was the need so great as at the present to hold fast to moral values. In these days when everything is being cast into the melting-pot, the utmost care must be taken lest through want of due discrimination the pure gold of truth should be rejected in mistake for its alloy. We must beware lest in proving all things we let slip that which is good. In our reaction from the tyranny of tradition there is danger of our being snared by our own self-sufficiency and conceit, in which case instead of gaining freedom we shall merely have changed masters. ‘ Conscious action/ says Professor Haldane in a fine contribution to the Hibbert Journal of April last, ‘ is not just the fleeting activity of the moment but directly involves the past and the future. Organic unity of what is present is implied in unconscious life ; but organic unity of present, past, and future is implied in conscious life. The reason why each generation has to rewrite the history of the past is 4 5o METABOLISM that the present is making, just as much as it is being made by, the past/ Though then, like the tree, our roots may be struck deep into the soil of the dead past, our leaves must unfold in the living present, if we are to fulfil our spiritual trust to the expectant future : Becoming cs is meet and fit, A link among the days, to knit The generations each to each. / Life, then, must itself seize upon fife, try it out, and extract its uttermost good. But its uttermost good is the will of God, and it is in appropriating that will as the Law of its being that fife can alone come to efficiency as a working force whether in the individual or the Church. Thus alone can it become armed : With Power on this dark world to lighten it, And Power on this dead world to make it five. There is a deep suggestiveness in Christ’s declaration that in obedience to the will of His Father He found refreshment and reinforcement. As a matter of fact all man’s power, whether in the world of matter or of spirit, is derived from obedience. Everywhere he is required to line up with law. All the forces of nature bend their necks to the obedient. We are powerful only as we get into step with nature. To enlist her help we must go her way. We talk in our arrogant fashion about our subjugation of her forces, but the whole history of our applied sciences is simply the story of how we have learnt to obey. Our meat in a physical sense is won by doing METABOLISM 5i the will of our Father which is in heaven, a will that is expressed in the laws and forces of the material order under which we have been placed. Now despite the fact that scientific men repeatedly warn us against the practice, we are for ever confounding the words ‘ law * and * force ' as though they were inter¬ changeable terms. We have to remember that laws cannot do anything. The laws of navigation never steered a ship. The laws of arithmetic never solved a problem. The laws of grammar never constructed a sentence, neither did the law of gravitation ever move an atom or a world. Laws are simply the uniform methods by which forces have been observed to manifest their presence and power. But the persistence with which we go on using these two words interchangeably suggests that their association is a necessity of thought, and that we cannot think of them apart. Indeed, in his Reign of Law , Argyll says: ‘An observed order of facts, to be entitled to the rank of a law, must be an order so constant and uniform as to indicate necessity, and necessity can only arise out of the action of some compelling Force. Law, therefore, comes to indicate not merely an observed order of facts, but that order as involving the action of some force or forces of which nothing more may be known than these visible effects; so that Force is the root idea of Law in its scientific sense/ Now if it can be shown that Force is the root idea of Law in its moral and spiritual sense as well, an immense gain in comfort and assurance will be secured. For example, there is the law ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God/ &c. Now if by putting our will in fine with this 52 METABOLISM formula we discover that instead of being a dead counsel of perfection standing aloof and inoperative over against our lives it is really a live wire which by induction charges our will with its own mighty dynamic, we begin to under¬ stand the reason for the rapture of the godly life. The delight in the Law of the Lord described by the Psalmist is seen springing, not from the contemplation from without of a cold set of statutory regulations, but from the con¬ sciousness of being caught up, possessed, and swept along by a stream of spiritual force running on concur¬ rently with the regulation, and of which the regulation is merely the recognized and registered expression. The godly man is the man who has gained the true spirit of the law. He has incorporated within himself that persistent energy that never fails nor flags, but flows through all things and creates the harmony which every¬ where prevails throughout the world of things. It is the spirit of Duty which Wordsworth perceived and com¬ munion with which he loved. But it may be asked, Does not Law mean restriction, and how can any one delight in restriction ? One can understand the feeling of respect for law, reverence for law, resignation to law, or even of acquiescence in law, but ‘ delight ’ and ‘ law ' seem to be mutually exclusive terms. Well, that all depends upon how the restriction is interpreted, and that again upon the amount of intelligence that is brought to play upon its study. Indeed, it is the absence of intelligence to which must be attributed the attitude of many minds to the whole question of law and order as it stands incorporated in the State. When one takes the trouble to penetrate to the inner meaning of restrictive legislation in any METABOLISM 53 direction, he will presently be face to face with the spirit of beneficence. Instead of some arbitrary rule instituted for the purpose of imposing vexing limitations on one’s freedom, it turns out on examination to be the very last word in the way of matured experience, clever device, and solicitous desire for securing human safety and well¬ being. That is to say, the vital principle which prompted the framing of the law stands disclosed, and once a man grasps this his whole attitude towards its requirements and restrictions is changed. Law thus construed is seen not to limit but greatly to enlarge the freedom of one’s action. He who imagines that there would be more freedom if all laws were abrogated has not learnt how to think. Let him shift his home and his business to a land where every man does what is right in his own eyes, and he will very soon discover that escape from law means escape from hberty. All law runs back into a mind that thinks and plans for us and a heart that feels and loves. True blessedness, then, according to the Psalmist, lies in putting one’s self and keeping one’s self in the stream of the divine purpose. That purpose is expressed in His law, and that law is, as we have said, likewise a living force that makes for righteousness. Every divine command thus becomes a divine pledge. The words ‘ Thou shalt ’ contain a prophecy, for whom God commands He likewise empowers, and the force to obey will be found streaming along the fine of the law and empowering the will to obey. Nature is simply God’s will working through matter, Grace is God’s will working through personality. Each 54 METABOLISM demands obedience and co-operation to come to full expression on the field of human affairs, and both together represent the organized love of God. What the blood- plasma is to the body personal, that the love of God may be regarded as being to the body corporate. According to science this blood-plasma is the richest fluid known, so much so that many of its properties are as yet un¬ guessed. So with the love of God it is rich with all the untold wealth of the divine nature. Indeed it is the divine nature, for God is Love. But love has been degraded in the minds of men, and so soiled by all ignoble use that it has come to stand for mere sentiment, and that not always of the most virile and healthy type. But the love of God must be held as the gathering up of all His attributes into one all-inclusive and compendious term. Through love they come to perfection and break into bloom. To love they are all subordinate, casting their crowns at its feet. Excepting through love they are not to be conceived. ‘ No man cometh unto the Father but by Me,’ said Christ, which is only another way of saying that the key to the knowledge of God is Love. Indeed there is no problem to which love does not hold the key. One in essence, love breaks up into myriads of manifesta¬ tions. It is the moral ether enfolding and interfusing all worlds. On its bosom they are all afloat. In its strong and tender keeping the universe swings and sings. Because love is the essence of God’s mysterious nature, it is necessarily the structural principle of His Creation — its innermost, uttermost law. It has been conceived by love, created by love, redeemed by love, and from the first-born seraph before His throne to the lowest creature METABOLISM 55 on His footstool all being is encircled by its tender and protecting embrace. In this divine love then as a nutrient element, charged with all the qualities of the divine nature, the Church, which is the Body of Christ, must keep itself bathed. Love gathers up and coalesces all the ethical and spiritual forces which we have been taught to associate with our conception of God. His holy love must not be construed in sentimental terms. It is really the sum of all His attributes. It is their full explication. They reach their focal point in love. Through love they are administered and controlled. Every attribute of God is thus the servant of His love. As Martensen points out, ‘ The three principles to which all reflection on existence turns as being the ultimate — the physical, the logical, and the ethical — must in the unity of the divine will be eternally united as one indissoluble life, in which there is a relation of supremacy and of subordination, so that the ethical, or love, is the subject, the others its predicates.’ In discussing the first article of the Christian creed, the same writer shows that ‘ it is expressly said that God as Creator is the unity of love and power ; and if it is not expressly said it is undoubtedly implied that Almighty love creates with wisdom, that is to say teleologically, or with certain ends in view ’ ; again, * All the divine attri¬ butes are combined in love as in their centre and vital principle. Wisdom is its intelligence, might its produc¬ tivity ; the entire natural creation and the entire revela¬ tion of righteousness in history are means by which it attains its teleological aims.’1 1 Christian Ethics, p. 66 (General). 56 METABOLISM God is love and God is light, and just as white light breaks up into the sevenfold glory of the rainbow, so Holy Love may be regarded as breaking up into the many- hued splendour of the divine attributes and displaying itself in wisdom, power, truth, righteousness, justice, mercy, and wrath. For even wrath, when displayed by God, is not to be conceived of excepting as a manifestation of His love — it has a moral purpose behind it and a moral goal toward which it works, in front. God cannot punish for punishment’s sake but for love’s sake, and with righteousness as an end in view. His wrath is His love, burning with indignation against everything that would thwart or hinder the realization of its beneficent desire. His righteousness is His love, seeking to achieve the highest good of His creatures through writing the eternal law of rectitude within their hearts. His truth is His love, making its appeal to the intelligence of man, commanding the homage of his mind, and becoming the structural principle of the spiritual community into which he is being organized. So important is this question of truth to the edification of the ‘ Body of Christ,’ that it will be well for us to dwell for a while on its necessity. It is so emphatically the first grand requirement among those who desire to live in fellow¬ ship, whether spiritual, social, or national, that it is well worth while to see its bearing on the present crisis in world affairs. God’s truth is ‘ the Truth as it is in Jesus,’ and that is love’s challenge to the social instinct to fulfil itself and thus enable the individual to come to fullest self-realiza¬ tion in this finest of all fellowships. Every one that is of METABOLISM 57 the truth, hears the voice of truth, attracts truth, as¬ similates truth, grows into it and becomes so one with it as to work hand in hand with it against all falsity and pretence. Truth is the fundamental condition of cor¬ porate life. It is the integrating principle without which no co-operation is possible. Hence says the apostle, ‘ Wherefore putting away falsehood, speak ye truth each one with his neighbour ; for we are members one of another. * The Church, which is the Body of Christ, should present to the world the very highest expression of this truth-speaking and truth-doing law. The love of truth is a tradition of our Anglo-Saxon race, and this tradition is a trust that the Church is mainly responsible not only for preserving from desecration, but for reinforcing both within her own ranks and in the larger life of the State. Her business, of course, is not to control the State, but to inspire and control the men who do. Who can doubt that had the Christian Church in Germany stood for simple, downright truth, preaching it from all her pulpits and teaching it in all her schools, the cataclysm from which the world is staggering to-day would never have occurred ! When the Psalmist affirmed that the man who, having sworn to his own hurt and changed not, should never be moved, he was laying down the funda¬ mental condition, not only of individual but of national security. And it is because the truth-speaking function is so vital, not only to the well-being but to the very being of the community, that the Church of Christ should stand as its generating and radiant centre, insisting on its translation into national and international terms. The nation, of course, is merely the individual multiplied, 58 METABOLISM and what is true of the units is in this case true of the mass into which they are merged. A proper regard for one’s pledged word, even according to the more primitive morality of earlier ages, was the mark of a stable, because incorruptible, manhood. By implication, disregard for private probity was the sure precursor of displacement from public confidence and power. Nationhood and manhood are alike subject to the selfsame laws, the violation of which must bring the selfsame penalties. These penalties are inflicted, not by some stroke of direct and divine interference, still less by any automatic action of blind and unintelligent force. They are administered normally and through the pressure of the corporate conscience of the com¬ munity, which, mediated through its properly constituted authority, insists in calm and magisterial terms that the individual or the company that is guilty of repudiation and corruption shall be dealt with as a public enemy, and reduced by force, if necessary, to a condition and position in which it will cease to be a menace to the common weal. It was in pursuance of this principle, and as represent¬ ing the affronted conscience, not merely of Britain, but of the world ; it was in the administration of retributive discipline that in August, 1914, Britain’s troops massed on the Continent, and her fleet swept the sea. The righteousness or otherwise of that interference turns on the question as to whether a nation’s obligations are exhausted when she fulfils her own obligation in regard to the observance of treaty bonds, or whether she is in duty bound to enforce a corresponding recognition and METABOLISM 59 discharge of covenant compacts on the part of other mutually contracting Powers. This matter may, of course, be subject to complication by the further question of ability. A weak woman, for example, may witness some glaring piece of injustice or oppression inflicted on a neighbour, and though her blood be boiling with indignation, she may be utterly powerless to prevent or redress the wrong which, with all the intensity of her moral nature, she resents. In such a case, of course, the mere verbal denunciation of the wrong might meet all the immediate moral necessities of the case, much as she would rejoice in bringing restraining and even retribu¬ tive measures into play. Thus if Britain had been in the position of a second or third-rate power, she too might have been compelled in this instance to be content to stand by, and simply record her protest against any unjustifiable breach of treaty engagements on the part of a contracting continental power. But when her sense of outraged international honour was found coupled with the power to insist that covenants should be either kept or the truce-breaker brought to book, there was but one alternative. The solidarity of nations, like that of individuals, carries with it corporate as well as in¬ dividual responsibilities. Every relationship of fife is thus counterpoised. The advantages arising from federated interests are balanced by corresponding obliga¬ tions, and to accept the advantages of the one while defaulting in the duties of the other is to range the defaulter among the morally unfit. As a nation we had no personal antipathy to Germany . Unlike the French, we had no deep-seated and long- 6o METABOLISM cherished resentment to appease, no old-standing grievances to redress. We had cultivated the friendliest relations, and so far at least as our protestations were concerned, it is sufficient to say that they were ‘ made in England/ and bore the brand of British sincerity. Nothing, therefore, but the sternest sense of international duty could have set in motion Britain’s machinery of war. Our presence on the field, then, rightly construed, meant not enmity to Germany but love of truth, not opposition to a nation but resistance to a policy of persistent lying and intrigue, not envy of the strong but chivalry for the weak. It was not that we were jealous of a rival power, but zealous for international honour and fair play. This motive, that prompted not only the men in high places, who dictated the policy of the nation and shaped the whisper of the throne, but also inspired the men of the day’s march who had caught the chivalrous spirit of Kitchener’s charge, lifted this conflict clean out of the category of war for the extension of territory, national aggrandizement, or even the avenging of a purely national wrong, and made it a sternly judicial act, under¬ taken with all the solemnity and deliberation of a legal tribunal, and with an overwhelming sense of both responsibility and regret. Even King Arthur’s knights of the Round Table were not sent forth more straitly bound than were our troops, when Kitchener charged them to fear God, to honour the King, and to refrain from liquor, loot, and licence amid the fierce temptations of the camp and field. It was simply Arthur’s stately charge translated into the modem Briton’s ‘ straight-flung words and few.’ METABOLISM 61 Now a nation cannot take this lofty stand and assume the part of arbiter among her sister nations without making herself the focal point for the eyes of all the world. Though her purpose be as chaste as ice and pure as snow, yet will it not escape calumny. She, how¬ ever, must not be deterred by any such dread. Of one thing alone must she be assured in her own conscience, and that is that her own eye is single, her own intention pure. For the rest she must simply trust and not be afraid. Now Britain's action in that crisis ought to have at least this reflex moral result upon all of us her children. It should lead to great searching of heart. It is one thing to wax indignant over other people's wrong-doing. It is quite another to attack and correct our own. It is one thing to gather ourselves up for a crisis ; it is quite another to play the game in common life, behind the counter, at the bench, in the office, the factory, the market, and the exchange. There is not one standard of honour for a man at the front and another for the man at the back. When a nation judges others as our nation judged Germany, she challenges judgement on herself, and woe to her if the standard she sets for them be higher than she herself attempts, especially if, as in the case before us, she acts as judge and executioner in one. The stand she took really put every Britisher on his trial, and thus fulfilled the Saviour’s words, ‘ With what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged.’ It threw every man and woman of us back upon our national traditions and confronted us with our national ideals. But national honour is after all only the sum of our personal, domestic, social, and commercial honour, and 62 METABOLISM any falling off in departmental morality must reappear and register itself in corporate deterioration. Of course, we may keep up our window-show long after our shelves have been depleted, but it will be only a question of time as to when the hollow” mockery will be laid bare. Look at it this way. Let us suppose that we have been doing business with a house that combines both a wholesale and retail trade. Our relations have been limited strictly to the retail department. After a few months we discover that we have been the victims of systematic fraud, sometimes in the way of underweight, sometimes in overcharge, sometimes in adulteration, and other methods of misrepresentation too well known to need description. We approach the manager with our com¬ plaint, with the result that, while admitting irregularities in the direction we mention, he advances, by way of extenua¬ tion, the extraordinary plea that in the opinion of the house retail immorality is amply atoned for by the strict moral censorship which is exercised over all its wholesale transactions, which he claims are above reproach. Now, apart from the difficulty we should have in see¬ ing how this could in any way recoup us for our losses, we would find it hard to believe that a house that was so utterly unscrupulous in its over-the-counter dealings could suddenly become so scrupulously conscientious immediately it came to deal with goods in bulk. So with regard to private and national honour. It is idle for us to think that we can preserve our truth-loving, truth-speaking traditions in all their ancient strength and purity if we seek to limit their exercise to occasions of international exhibition and diplomatic display. METABOLISM 63 Once we reserve to ourselves as a people the right to play fast and loose with truth and honour within the circle of what may be called our retail relations, we sentence our wholesale honour to death. In reality the two are one. Our international fidelity is simply the thousand and one fidelities of common fife aggregated, expanded, and finding expression in more spacious terms, while on the other hand our private honour must be the perennial source and fount by which all the streams of international fidelity are fed and reinforced. Now if these cataclysms do nothing else for us but reveal that, after all, the great basal principles upon which civilization rests are moral rather than material considera¬ tions, and that to ignore or override them is to court national defeat and displacement, we shall have learnt a lesson, the value of which will far outweigh only merely material loss. The keeping of troth between nations is an obligation so sacredly binding that there are no words sufficiently strong in which to reprobate so black a scandal as its violation would be. International fidelity is an absolute condition of the world’s peace ; perfidy must inevitably lead to rupture. There can be no inter¬ course where there is no confidence. In any contest between truth and falseness, whether in the case of individuals or communities, whether it has to do with simple over-the-counter transactions or great and com¬ plex international treaties, the he, whether personal, social, commercial, national or international, must suffer defeat and condemnation. When the man in the street stigmatizes a mendacious statement as a ‘ damned lie/ though he may speak in heat, he is simply uttering a 64 METABOLISM cold fact. Every lie is damned, utterly and hopelessly. It has not a chance of survival, the whole universe is against it, and nothing will be found to give it shelter. All things conspire to betray and curse it for the cowardly thing it is. Francis Thompson's great lines might well become the lips of the liar as he speeds from the spirit of truth : I fled Him down the nights and down the days ; I fled Him down the arches of the years ; I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind ; and in the midst of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter, Up vistaed hopes I sped ; And shot, precipitated Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong feet that followed, followed after, But with unhurrying chase. And unperturbed pace. Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, They beat, and a Voice beat, More instant than the feet, ‘ All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’ Truth, then, is the first grand necessity ; it is the greatest personal or national asset. The truth-loving, truth-speaking, truth-doing peoples of the earth alone have the right of survival. They build themselves into the permanent structure of the moral order, which nothing can shake. Forms of government perish, customs change, and generations come and go ; but truth keeps its ancient seat unmoved. Only, then, as we are true and faithful to the best traditions of our race can we be deemed worthy of continuance as the custodians of that faith and freedom which we hold in trust for all mankind. METABOLISM 65 Thus each of the divine attributes in turn could be shown to be subservient to Holy Love. It gathers them all into itself and administers them in the spirit of long-suffering patience, of recov¬ ering, re-instating, and morally re-inforcing grace. The out-pouring blood from the heart of the Crucified is the divinely selected symbol of that overflowing love, which like a mighty river swells and sweeps about the souls of men, breaking its secret of salvation, and whisper¬ ing its wondrous message of healing for their wounds, and pardon for their sin. This love-stream, which is the life- stream, corresponds to the blood-plasma of the human body in the richness of the qualities which it carries in solution, and like that blood-plasma, supplies the potency by which every unit in the organized body of Christ is bathed in nutriment and baptized with power. It is the very nature of God in process of eternal output and circulation. It holds all the vital and vitalizing principles and potencies which go to the making of a godlike char¬ acter, and by which we may become partakers of the divine nature. When Paul speaks of the love of God being ‘shed abroad ’ in our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us, the same Greek word is employed as that which is used to describe the ‘ shedding ’ of Christ’s blood for the sin of the world. In the one case it sets forth God’s universal love pouring itself out in all the fullness of its redeeming grace : in the other it is that selfsame love personally appropriated and pouring itself into the individual heart, where it generates and sustains the ' hope that maketh not ashamed.’ ‘ The Blood of Christ ’ thus interpreted is redeemed 5 66 METABOLISM from the materialistic conception with which it has been associated in so many minds, and in which it produced a reaction of revolt. Indeed, until the recent war we had grown so exceedingly superfine in our sentiment, so fastidious in our taste, that the very mention of the word ‘ blood ’ had become a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. We did not like to refer to it in our prayers or sermons. The hymns that made reference to the ‘ Blood of Jesus ’ were either deleted from our psalmody, or if sung at all, it was with a shuddering protest against what we felt to be at discord with good taste. But the war wrought for us a wondrous change. During those woful and wasting years of agony and desolation, the scales dropped from our eyes. We saw things in true perspec¬ tive. We began to revise our values, to re-cast our definitions, and we have been glad to call back quantities and qualities that we had so aesthetically dismissed. Great elemental truths which we had either despised, or thrust into the background of our thought and speech, we have been compelled and even proud to recover and re-assert. The fact is many of us have been driven from under the cover of our trivialities, our artificialities, our superficialities, and made to stand out in the open, face to face with the stern and majestic facts of life. Thus it comes to pass that we are glad to welcome back into our vocabulary words which through careless handling had become gross and materialized, not through any fault of the words themselves, but through the coarse and vulgar conceptions of those who employed them. These great words we now discover, some of us it may be for the first time, have been always standing quietly METABOLISM 67 waiting for their hour of approval and appropriation. They could afford to wait, for ‘ When all that seems shall suffer shock ’ their content will abide. If the war did nothing else for us but drive us back upon the naked and elemental truths for which our great symbols and watch¬ words stand, it will have wrought for us an everlasting good. Let us but construe the word * blood ’ in its New Testament sense as the symbol of supremely spiritual and spiritualizing energy, and at once it will be redeemed from its gruesomeness, and sing itself over again as sweetest music in our ears. For the members of Christ’s body to he bathed in this love is not merely to be nourished, it is to be cleansed. The lymph stream in the human body, as we have seen, is not merely the bearer to the cells of nutriment but the bearer from the cells of waste, as well as the agent in effecting repairs. Christ’s earthly body hungered and thirsted, grew weary, required sleep, and stood in need of recuperation. In like manner the corporate body of His Church cannot fulfil its functions without expenditure of energy which has to be made up. According to Royce, ‘ A community is not a mere collection of individuals. It is a sort of live unit that has organs, as the body of an individual has organs. A community grows or decays, is healthy or diseased, is young or aged, much as any individual member of the community possesses such characters.’1 Hence the necessity for what Paul calls, ‘ the renewing (that is the repairing ministry) of the Holy Ghost.’ Haldane has pointed out that ‘ the environments of the 1 The Problem of Christianity . 68 METABOLISM individual cells in any tissue or organ are not merely a general internal environment common to all the cells, but special environments dependent on the influence of neighbouring cells and even of cells in distant organs. . . . It is on the special environments that establish themselves round individual cells that the specific structures of organs and tissues must ultimately depend/ Here, then, we have one of the most important fruits of fellowship, and one which is full of suggestiveness for the members of the Body of Christ. There is a contribu¬ tion that each makes to the others in association, which is altogether wanting in the event of such association failing to take place. From Christ as Head, as the Apostle shows, ‘ all the body fitly framed and knit together, through that which every joint supplieth according to the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body, unto the building up of itself in love/ Nor does proximity appear necessary in order to this contribution. Organs distant from one another act and react toward each other. All that seems to be necessary is mutual and sustained relation to the head, and that the receiving cells shall not be idle. They must be in full work, if they would enjoy full use of the reinforcements that are being perpetually proffered for their appropriation. The responsibility is theirs to see that they each get their quantum suff. of nourishment, whether general or specific, that falls to their share, for ‘ these specific environments depend on the activities of the cells themselves just as does the general internal environment / 1 1 The Fundamental Conceptions of Biology. METABOLISM 69 So must it be in the Church. The individual, however closely associated, must retain his own distinctiveness of character, and not allow it to be blurred out or merged into that of another. Only as he maintains his specific features can he make his corporate contribution. And only as he makes his corporate contribution can he retain his specific features. ‘ Hence/ says Royce, * on Paul’s own showing it is better for the life of the community if the individual member, instead of being himself “ in a mystery,” kept his own individuality in order to con¬ tribute his own edifying gift to the common life/ Accord¬ ing to the teaching of both science and Scripture the individual can be in poverty through sheer idleness, although untold riches are at his door. Such a disposi¬ tion of sloth, however, will lay him open to disease or arrest of development, for, as Haldane points out, ‘ Any¬ thing that interferes with either special or general environ¬ ment results in cell changes, which render them subjects of study for the pathological anatomist/ Have we not here a quite sufficient explanation of the many low and rudimentary types of Christian fife, which are the despair of the Church and the derision of the world ? In a healthy human body, as we have seen, the lymph, carry¬ ing in its stream an untold variety of provisions, is tapped in turn by each cell or group of cells for the particular quantity or quality of nutriment required for its specific needs. This flowing tide of sustenance passes by every door, displaying and offering its goods, and the alertness with which its clients avail themselves of its visit and take delivery of their requirements is proportioned to their hunger, which in its turn is measured by the fidelity 7 o METABOLISM with which they have fulfilled their several functions. It is because these functions are so infinitely various that the food-stuff must be so rich in different elements, and one marvels at the unerring accuracy with which its different customers detect and select their own. The fact to be noted and stressed even at the risk of re¬ petition, is that the maintenance of all this traffic and exchange of commodities depends according to biologists on all the faculties being fully employed. For them to feed without functioning would be to invite disease, or arrest development. METABOLISM 7i 2. Katabolism or Dis- assimilation As we have already seen, the life-process, wherever we meet it, is attended by waste-products and used-up matter, that, having served its purpose, has to be discarded and dismissed. The cells of the human body are for ever changing and passing and being replaced. Nor does the visible Church, regarded as the Body of Christ, present any exception to this rule. Not only are its individual units perpetually passing, and their places being taken by others, but the very organism itself changes and grows, here undergoing modifications of structure, and there multiplying fresh methods of functioning, according to the calls made upon its resources and the new conditions it is required to face. This power of adjustment and adapta¬ tion on the part of the Church, so that she can speak at all times and to every man in his own tongue wherein he was born, this readiness to ‘ become all things to all men, that by all means she may gain some,’ involves such subordination of form to spirit, such discrimination between organism and life, as she is but slowly and with great reluctance coming to realize and display. While it is true, as we have seen, that life declines to function apart from form, yet, on the other hand, it demands, in order that it may be free to adapt itself to changing conditions and perpetuate itself from generation to generation, that its form shall be elastic. Its limitations must be such as serve the purposes of expansion and 72 METABOLISM reproduction. Once form becomes so rigid as to withhold this provision, life simply withdraws from it, refusing to be entombed. These vacant forms however, in which spiritual life once functioned, are frequently retained long after the vital force has fled. But when religion deterior¬ ates into a system of mere mechanics, when its outward and visible signs no longer stand for inward and spiritual grace, sincere and earnest souls, rather than keep up the semblances of reality in public worship, prefer to abandon their use, and to retire into the privacy of their own souls, there to wait for the still small voice of God. This however results, as we have seen, in a double loss, first to the individual soul itself, which cannot ‘ find itself ' except in fulfilling its corporate relations, and then to the Church, in being defrauded of that contribution to its efficiency which is required from all saints and all souls. There seem to be only three possible courses in such a case open to honourable men. They can adopt the course just indicated and let everything outward go, making the vacant form follow the vanished spirit. They can attempt to recharge the ancient forms with their old-time life and power, so that they may stand again as the symbols of spiritual and spiritualizing force. Or they can throw the system wholly or in part into liquidation with a view to its reconstruction in terms of present-day thinking and experience. This last course would seem, in proper hands, to be the more excellent way. We can have no sympathy with those who are perpetually changing front, and who, in order to get the outside in, are prepared to turn the inside out, surrendering on demand everything distinctive of the Christian faith in METABOLISM 73 order to make peace with its foes. They style themselves * Liberal/ but it is easy enough to be liberal with what does not belong to you. And the free-handed generosity of men who betray the cause they are pledged to defend, and give away positions which millions have died to retain, positions which are not a possession to be squan¬ dered but a trust to be administered, answers to Sydney Smith’s definition of charity as being A’s insistence that B shall contribute to C's necessity. John Morley, in his Voltaire, has scorched this sort of thing with withering scorn : * The strange and sinister method of assault upon religion which we of a later day watch with wondering eyes, and which consists in wearing the shield and device of a faith and industriously shouting the cry of a Church, the more effectually to reduce the faith to a vague futility, and its outward ordering to a piece of ingeniously reticulated pretence ; this method of attack might make even the champions of prevailing beliefs long for the shrewd thrusts, the flashing scorn, the relentless fire, the downright grapples with which the hated Voltaire pushed on his work of “ crushing the infamous.” The battle was demoralized by its virulence. True ; but is this worse than to have it demoralized by cowardice of heart and understanding, when each con¬ troversial man-at-arms is eager to have it thought that he wears the colours of the other side, when the theologian would fain pass for rationalist, and the free-thinker for a person with his own orthodoxies, if you only knew them, and when philosophic candour and intelligence are supposed to have hit their final climax in the doctrine that everything is both true and false at the same time ? ' 74 METABOLISM (Voltaire, p. 9 ; John Morley). Yet while all this is true, we cannot, on the other hand, fail to admire and seek to encourage every attempt to adjust and harmonize the truths of science and revelation, the facts of life and consciousness, and thus meet the claims of both intellect and heart, That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before. But vaster. Where there is life in full force and flow, it must seek and find the newest and most effective modes of expres¬ sion. The first grand necessity would seem to be the standing in with loving loyalty to all one’s relations, in a spirit of self-effacing service for others. For the rest, life may be allowed to assume its own forms of embodi¬ ment, act out its own generous impulses, and make its own contribution, in its own way, to the general weal. The spirit of life is the spirit of love. Life and love are, in their nature, essentially one and the same. They both find their unity in Him whom we call God. They both stream out from His infinite heart and break up into infinite richness of variety in expression. They both have infinite capacity for ingenious device in the way of helpful and healing ministry. Both have endless powers of adaptation, patient persistence, unwearying search, and unquenchable hope. Neither life nor love can ever be stereotyped ; they cannot be restricted or prescribed. Bonds and imprisonment they laugh to scorn. Born of the Spirit, they are free as air. Unfettered as the wind, they flow where they fist. They are never baffled or baulked. If one approach be blocked to them METABOLISM 75 they try another, and yet another, till they win through and prevail ; for in the long run neither life nor love can ever fail. It is the attempt on the part of a narrow dogmatism to imprison the free spirit of life within certain fixed formulae that has so often driven good men into open revolt. Through confounding form with spirit, and identifying organism with life, the Church has often been guilty of repudiating her own most promising children. She has driven them into the wilderness to seek the freedom denied them at home. Life, as we have seen, is for ever breaking down and rebuilding structure, for it must needs employ some form of embodiment in which to exhibit its powers, and through which to per¬ petuate its kind. The mode of this embodiment may, and often must, change with the changing conditions under which it is called to function. As soon as any form ceases to be of service to life it must needs be shed in favour of one that will lend itself to the furtherance of life’s ends. For life to find itself ‘ bricked in/ so to speak, by the very structure it has reared for the purpose of self-dissemination becomes a tragedy. It is true that Paul enjoins us to ‘ hold fast the form of sound words/ but it is to be held ‘ in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus/ This provision secures it from contracting into narrowness or drying up into sterility. A ‘ form ’ that is in vital relation, through faith and love, with the Lord of all life and love, will be free and flexible, because it will itself be alive. The very phrase ‘ sound words * has a biological significance. It is a metaphor borrowed by St. Paul from medical science. It means ‘ in good health/ But a thing that is 76 METABOLISM in good health must be alive, and this idea of livingness, in the words that gather up and express the faith, is their safeguard from inelasticity. They will share the qualities of the life they are employed to express because, in truth, it is through them alone that the life can be reproduced, for ‘ The seed is the word/ ‘ The words that I speak unto you/ said Christ, ‘ they are spirit and they are life ’ ; so that here emerges the supreme truth that the Christian faith has not to do with a dead creed, but with a Living Person — the ever-living, ever-loving Christ. That the historic facts about Him have to be expressed in words is one of those necessary conditions which spring out of our earthly limitations, and this at once opens the door to all sorts of misinterpretation. Even in the hands of those who know how to use them most wisely words are dangerous things to handle, and often work precisely opposite results from those which they were employed to effect. It is the peril of all langu¬ age that words after repeated use cease to stand for realities of thought and feeling. It is a strange paradox that what at one stage is a necessary means of advance, if too long retained becomes a fatal hindrance to develop¬ ment and must be withdrawn. Browning employs this well-known fact to account for the cessation of miracle : I cried once, ‘ That ye may believe in Christ, Behold, this blind man shall receive his sight ! * I cry now, * Urgest thou . . . “ Repeat that miracle and take my faith ? ” ’ I say that miracle was duly wrought When, save for it, no faith was possible. So faith grew, making void more miracles Because too much ; they would compel, not help.1 1 * A Death in the Desert.’ METABOLISM 77 The very vitality of truth requires that it should be embodied in ever-changing forms. Life is for ever shedding outworn garments. Its upward path is strewn with discarded forms. But though the forms perish and pass, life holds on its victorious way. In the life- history of every organism there is this casting aside of that which, because it no longer helps, becomes a hindrance to its growth. In the case of the lobster, the crayfish, and the common crab, we have a very fine and visible illustration of this process. In their case is achieved suddenly, and, so to speak, while we wait, what is going on invisibly, by insensible degrees and at different times, in all forms of life. In the case of the lobster, for example, he grows as to his body, but his shell is inelastic and gives him no scope. He has, therefore, no hope even of survival, to say nothing of growth and development, excepting as he can clear himself and cast his shell. This is precisely what he does, and does so frequently that, according to those who have observed these changes, a lobster only two inches long has moulted ten times, and a ten-inch lobster has changed his outward form no less than twenty-five times. But through all these changes the lobster himself has not changed his essential nature, though his form has expanded and his embodiment has altered in accordance with the requirements of his growth. Moreover, in every case his protective covering was secreted from within and not imposed from without. It was fife’s own product for the purposes of maintenance and defence. In like manner the truth, knowledge of which is the life of the Church, is ever taking to itself fresh forms of expression. As the thought of the Church expands, so credal forms 78 METABOLISM either have to be discarded in favour of a fresh statement of truth, or else be historically interpreted, with the risk of some essential element being dropped out. It would seem that, just as in the case of Crustacea, some protecting covering is necessary even in its most advanced stage of development, lest it should fail to function or fall a victim to predatory birds or fishes, so whatever stage of growth the Christian Church may reach, it would seem necessary that she should stand in some sort of organized life, and that her evangel should embody itself in some form of words if it is to become reproductive, and pass from man to man and from mind to mind. Truth is the same yesterday and to-day and for ever, but the forms of its embodiment, the methods of its incorporation, may change, and must from time to time. The Church’s love for truth itself, however, must always be greater than her love for any form of words in which it may stand expressed. Truth is coming in to-day as never before from all quarters — from the laboratory of the chemist, the observatory of the astronomer, the dissecting-room of the anatomist, and sometimes, let it be hoped, from the study of the theologian. But wherever it comes from, as long as it is truth, and however much its coming may disturb our preconceived notions or conflict with our old-time theories, let it come, though much that we cherished may have in consequence to go. For no man who loves father or mother, wife or child, or even his own life, more than truth is worthy of her. Wherever she may lead we must follow, expecting and being willing to bear reproach for her name. There can be no conflict between truths themselves, but only in our imperfect METABOLISM 79 co-ordination of them. It has been frequently said that the study of medicine is particularly perilous to the student, and that young doctors, more than most, are susceptible to agnostic attacks, from which they but seldom or slowly recover. In this connexion the closing words of one of the greatest physicians of our time, as he addressed his outgoing students, may form a fitting close to this chapter. Professor A. R. Simpson, M.D., D.Sc., was retiring from the Chair of Obstetrics in the University of Edinburgh. That retirement coincided with his handing to the successful men their diplomas of efficiency as medical men. Taking a review of the fifty years which his professorship had covered, he said : ‘ Man is continually putting off his mortal vesture and replacing it with a better fitting garb. The seven pounds weight of matter that was laid in the infant balance passes all away, every atom of it ; and if he reach the Mosaic term of three score years and ten he is told, though he may not have noticed it, that he has ten times changed the fabric of the frame his spirit tenants. If he be wise he will long ere then have pondered how the latest fashion of his vestment will be put off — whether in one way or another. “ Not that I would be unclothed/’ ‘ In one way. One of the heroes of my opening man¬ hood, one of the most lovable of men, was so great a naturalist that when he died in his prime Sydney Dobell wrote me a note, suggesting these four lines for his epitaph : He courted Nature for his mistress ; wooed her so He won her, till, by love made bold, She showed him more than mortal man should know — Then slew him, lest her secrets should be told. 8o METABOLISM ' A few hours before his passing a friend came to his bedside and asked him, “ How do you feel now ? ” and was answered, “ I feel just like a creature carried down a river.” * In that way, or in this ? When I went to practise in Glasgow the man at the top of the profession, though still in middle life, had resigned the Chair of the Practice of Physic in the Andersonian University, being somewhat delicate in health, and had reached that busy eminence where his fellow citizens could not let their sick friends die till he had seen them, and where his professional brethren were not quite satisfied that medicine had done its last and best till they had had a consultation with him. When Dr. Andrew Anderson was on his deathbed one of his fellow elders who was also ill sent to inquire how it fared with him. “ Tell him,” said Dr. Anderson, borrowing from Hopeful in the Pilgrim s Progress, “ I’m in the very middle of the river, but I feel the bottom, and it is good.” ' It may chance that some July day, • far down the century, when I have been long in the ether, one or other of you will talk with child or grandchild of the years when the century was young. Among its unforgotten scenes there will rise before your mind the memory of the day when at last you burst the chrysalis shell of pupilage to lift free wings into the azure. You will recall the unusual concurrence of the simultaneous leave-taking of the University by the graduates and their promoter. “ We came away,” you will say, f< a goodly company, all together, through the gateway that leads to the rosy dawn. He passed out, all alone, through the door that METABOLISM 81 looks to the sunset and evening star. He was an old man, like me,” I forehear you say. “ Not a great man. He had been a friend of great men, and came out of a great time in the nineteenth century, ‘ when there was mid-sea and the mighty things/ and it looked to the men of his generation as if old things had all passed away and a new world begun. And he told us that the great lesson he had learned on his way through life was the same that the disciple who leaned on Jesus’s breast at supper taught to the fathers, the young men, and the little children of his time when he said, ‘ The world passeth away, and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.’ ” Farewell/ 6 Ill DEVELOPMENT According to Roux there are two stages of development in an organ, the first covering the period from generation to a point where it is called into fulfilment of co-operative relations and functions, and the second from thence onward. Now this is finely suggestive of the need which exists for close and reciprocal action between the different members of the Christian Church, if it is to resemble and express in any adequate way the community idea for which the human body stands. The individual Christian life can come to only a certain measurable distance in development, by itself. Under the impulse of those great laws of the new inheritance by which it has been born again, it is carried forward to a certain stage, variable as to time of course, in different individuals, but without dependence upon any stimulus from association with its fellows. Even this individual unfolding, however, would seem to proceed under the direction of a pre-determining purpose, deeply inlaid, a sort of inwritten prophecy of the corporate end for which it has been marked out, towards which it moves, and without which it can never come to fullest self-expression. By fulfilling its relations to its fellows and discharging the functional obligations which 82 DEVELOPMENT 83 these relations involve — by subordinating the personal to the corporate ideal — it can alone make its just contribu¬ tion to the general upkeep of the Body of Christ which is His Church. It is this ‘ discerning of the Body/ which, as Paul points out, is so fundamental both to individual and corporate efficiency. Through failure at this point certain members of the Corinthian Church fell into spiritual decline, and some were sleeping the sleep of death. * For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep/ The Body of Christ consists of many members, whose duty it is to be not only co-ordinate but co-operant. They must function, and they must function in concert under one High Command. Only thus can they reach the finest results in Christian character, and attain the greatest efficiency in Christian work. Every cell in the human body has first of all a duty to itself in the way of self-maintenance, by putting in its claim for nutrition. But in the second place it has a duty to its fellows in the way of mutual give and take. All this means the maintenance of a fine balance between the fulfilment of personal and corporate relations. In an article on ‘ The Biological Problem of Cancer/ Dr. J. A. Murray, of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, says : ‘Two remarkable properties of the living body have been noted. First : the individual cells of the various tissues are not independent, self-contained units, each going its own way. They are subject to a general controlling influence, the nature of which is still obscure, which limits their rate and amount of growth, so that a fairly uniform proportion is maintained between the 84 DEVELOPMENT different organs and parts of the body. Proof is seen in the average size that animals reach, also their various organs. ‘ In cancer this controlling power is wanting, so that cells reproduce at a more rapid rate. The problem lies in the discovery why the cells in the cancer area are started on their altered tempo of growth, and why they are unaffected by the restraining influence which normally holds the cells of the rest of the body within proper bounds. They have undergone a change in becoming cancerous by which they no longer respond to the influences which restrain and regulate cell-division and growth in the body. Whether this change is a real increase in the energy with which the cells take in food and grow, so that the restraining influence is powerless to hold them in check, or whether it is a loss of sensitiveness to restraint, cannot yet be said with certainty/1 Sir Charles Sherrington, in his address before the British Association, already quoted, says that Professor Champy of Paris ' describes how epithelium, that in the body is not growing, when it is removed from the body starts growing. If freed from all fibrous tissue its cells not only germinate, but, as they do so, lose their adult specialization/ If, however, the epithelium cultivated outside the body is kept in touch with its connective tissue, then both grow and retain their specialization. From this Sherrington concludes ‘ the evidence seems to show that the mutual touch between the general cells of the body is decisive of much in their individual shaping and destiny/ Through the courtesy of Dr. Heaton of 1 Discovery , March number, vol. i., p. 71. DEVELOPMENT 85 Oxford, I have been permitted to see the results of these experiments of tissue-growing in nutrient media, at various stages of its growth. These results are full of suggestiveness in this connexion as to the control that is requisite in the growth and development of the Christian Church. For example, if a portion of any organ of the body, say a piece of a kidney, be removed from its con¬ nective tissue and placed in a test-tube with a nutrient medium it will immediately commence growing. While in the body its growth was regulated because it was under supervision and thus kept within limitations. When thus started on its own, however, and unchecked by the restraining hand of the central control, it at once begins to increase in size. As it grows, however, it changes its specific nature, becoming quite featureless so that it is * kidney ' no longer. As a result of dissociation it has degenerated into unspecialized tissue and lost its dis¬ tinctive kidney quality ; maintenance of which depends absolutely on its continuance in corporate fellowship. So with the individual member of Christ’s Church who deliberately falls out of communion with the spiritual body to which he belongs. The attempt to live in isolation results not only in unregulated development, but in degeneration of the specialized function which he was divinely ordained to discharge. Just as the cells of the individual body then are regulated, as Murray indicates by some governing principle which makes for balance and symmetry, and, according to Sher¬ rington, depend upon ‘ mutual touch ' for becoming and achieving their best, so with the units which constitute the membership of the Church. They, 86 DEVELOPMENT too, can find their fullness of life and service only in association, under central supervision and control. Nor is this all ; there alone can they be safeguarded from the peril of overestimating both themselves and their abilities. The idea of proportion must be maintained. As in the case of individual life, so in the case of corporate life, balance is of supreme importance, and where this require¬ ment is not met, time and strength are consumed in checking preponderances, and thus force is lost to the working value of the combine. A refractory horse in a four-in-hand not only fails to contribute his due share to the draught of the coach, he subtracts from the efficiency of the other three by breaking up the unity of the team, so that, instead of the whole force of the combination going into the traces, part of it is expended in keeping the objector up to his job. This law of proportion in distribution is the all¬ controlling condition of well-being and well-doing in all the kingdoms of life. So dependent upon this law is our physical health, that the chemistry of the body cannot diminish or increase the production of any required secretion beyond a certain point without disturbing the balance of forces and introducing an element of discord, which in this connexion spells disease. Hence Paul’s warning note against over-individualism : ‘For I say through the grace given unto me to every man that is among you, not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.’ The great twofold necessity is, first, to find our place, and secondly to fill it. Now to find our place we must DEVELOPMENT 87 follow our aptitude. There is always one thing that we can do better than any other. It is a fairly safe and sound working principle upon which to proceed, that what we can do with the least amount of friction and waste is that for which we are responsible. It is our particular piece of work. This is the thing that calls, and its call is our * calling.’ We shall not merely do it best and with the greatest satisfaction because it fits in with our particular genius, but it will prove the most valuable contribution that we can make to the common cause ; for under the supreme directorship of the controlling will of Christ it will be timed and placed both when and where it will count the most. This gives a distinction to every worker, however obscure, and a distinctiveness to his work, however apparently trivial, from which nothing can detract. Such a view of our life-work redeems the commonest task from vulgarity, and stamps the homeliest labour with dignity and worth. For the most part we shall find our sphere at hand, and, even should it be distant, our progress toward it will have to be made through the faithful discharge of duties which lie at our feet. Instead, therefore, of striving after some out-of-the-way and fancy achievement, let us do the thing that stands next us. There is a common defect in human vision which goes by the technical term of hypermetropia. It is a structural defect of the eye, the sufferer from which is unable to see things clearly when they are near at hand. This defect would seem to have its analogue in spiritual vision. Our eyes are often ranged for distant fields whose beckoning hands are visible to us, while opportunities for near and immediate service 88 DEVELOPMENT either fall outside the picture altogether, or are seen so out of focus that they are blurred in fog. The old conception that a thing must be the will of God for us, so long as it violated every natural wish, and outraged every pre-disposition of our nature, was a slander on the loving Father of our spirits, a wicked indictment of His wisdom and love. Christ declared His yoke to be easy and His burden light ; and if this means anything, it means that our nature, as a whole, really finds the line of least resistance in its full acceptance of, and concurrence in, the will of the Divine. To find that will, and work with it heartily and enthusiastically, is not only to be filled with joy unspeakable ourselves, but to broadcast it among all we meet. Christianity, then, is distinctly social. The spiritual life is a related life and cannot be sustained in isolation. Fellowship both expresses and promotes the organic unity of the Church. It is in the fulfilment of these fraternal relations that the grace of sympathy can alone be touched to its finest issues. In the case of the human body it is a well-established fact that all its members run up and find their keyboard in the brain. The localization of function is a recognized truth. The relation of limbs and organs to one another is not direct but mediate. The connexion, say between the right hand and the left, is established through the central nervous system, and the falling out of either with head quarters means the falling out with his fellow. In the event of perfectly established and harmonious relations between the centres and all the members, there is perfect unanimity and reciprocity between the members themselves. It is the DEVELOPMENT 89 guarantee of mutual help and sympathy. For example, let a speck of dust enter the eye and at once the hand flies up to minister. Let a man slip in the street and sprain his foot, and the other foot will do double duty all the way home. But all this fine fellowship and fealty springs out of perfectly sustained relations with the head. In like manner, when the hearts of men are right with God, when we are all standing in loyally to our relations with Jesus Christ our Spiritual Head, we are in kindly love and fellowship with one another. Then if one does happen to slip and fall, the others do not draw off in proud and self-righteous isolation, but they run in with a beautiful and helpful sympathy, ‘considering themselves lest they also be tempted ' ; while on the other hand let one be advantaged in any way, and the others are not jealous and resentful at his promotion but are rejoiceful in his joy. Thus, as we have said, each is for the other and all are for God. The hand of the working man toils for the food in which his whole body shares and not his hand alone. That is its contribution to the common store which is distributed for the general good. What is true of the hand is true of every other bodily function. Each has its own contribution to make, and its participation in the profits will be graduated to the loyalty with which its obligations are discharged. Were any power to go out on strike because of having thus to contribute to the good of the community, such disloyalty would straight¬ way react upon the power itself. Under-functioning of any faculty results in the withholding from it of nourishment, for even here the principle holds good ‘ he 9o DEVELOPMENT that will not work neither shall he eat.’ In order to get a harmonious and well-balanced life there must be a spirit of self-subordination to the corporate good on the part of every one of the millions of cell-units which go to make up the structure of a single body-form. That all this self-subordination and co-ordination is as unconscious as it is compulsory in no way detracts from either its beauty or its utility. Obedience to this law may be blind, it may be necessitated, but all we are concerned with just now is that it exists. That the necessity is grounded in the ethical character of God, that there is a cosmic imperative that runs through all life in all worlds, conscripting it for mutual service may very well be, but we are not yet ready for its consideration. Sir Charles Sherrington gives a wonderful illustration of what might be called the solicitude of a nerve for the muscle or skin which it functions, and from which it has been severed by a wound. These are his words : * The fibres of nerve-trunks are, perhaps, of all nerve-structures those that are best known. They constitute, for example, the motor nerves of muscle and the sensory nerves of the skin. They establish their ties with muscle and skin during embryonic life, and maintain them practically unaltered throughout the individual's existence, growing no further. If severed, say, by a wound, they die for their whole length between the point of severance and the muscle or skin they go to. Then at once the cut ends of the nerve-fibres start re-growing from the point of severance, although for years they have given no sign of growth. The fibre, so to say, tries to grow out to reach to its own far distant muscle. There are difficulties in DEVELOPMENT 9i its way. A multitude of non-nervous repair cells, growing in the wound, spin scar-tissue across the new fibre’s path. Between these other cells the new nerve-fibre threads a tortuous way, avoiding and never joining any of them. This obstruction it may take days to traverse. Then it reaches a region where the old dead nerve-fibres he altered beyond ordinary recognition. But the growing fibre recognizes them. It joins them, and, tunnelling through endless chains of them, arrives finally, after weeks or months, at the wasted muscle-fibres which seem to have been its goal, for it connects with them at once. It pierces their covering membranes and re-forms with their substance functions of characteristic pattern resem¬ bling the original that had died weeks or months before. Then its growth ceases as abruptly as it began, the wasted muscle recovers, and the lost function is restored.' Now this beneficent seeking until it finds the lost, on the part of the nerve-fibre, finely illustrates and enforces the necessity on the part of the body-corporate, which is the Church, to seek till it overtakes those who have been severed from its communion. What the nerve-fibre does blindly we are called upon to do intelligently, and with a love that no coldness can chill, no difficulty discourage, no opposition break down. Just as there can be no rest for the seeking nerve till it finds its estranged muscle and sets up old-time relations with it to the intent that it may be saved, so there must be no rest for the members of the Body of Christ till they are in vital touch and loving association with each other through Him who is their Head, and under whose inspiration they are to be for ever seeking that they may save. The Church probably loses 92 DEVELOPMENT more members through leakage and breakage resulting from her want of sensitiveness to loss than from any other cause. She seems to lose interest in souls that have once joined her ranks, and allows them to fall out with careless unconcern. Her zeal to make new converts is often in strange contrast with her treatment of those she already has in hand. No folly, or indeed insincerity, can be greater than that which fiercely engages in a campaign against the Kingdom of darkness abroad while it views with indifference the disintegration of its forces at home, and stretches out no hand to save. IV DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION It would take us too far afield to follow the long succession of steps through which biology has traced the progressive differentiation of functions as life has moved from its simplest to its most complex forms. Thomson tells us in his Gifford Lecture that ‘ Differentiation may be compared to the extension of an empire, and to the complex division of labour that is established in different parts of its integration and the binding of the whole into harmonious federation and unified control.’1 Keith has elaborated this idea in his Royal Institution Lectures* The passage is somewhat lengthy, but is well worth quoting. ‘ The high degree of specialization seen in modern machines has been rendered possible by inventors who discovered methods of improving communication. A modern nation could not move as a machine if it were deprived of its roads, its railways, its steamers, and its cable, telegraph, and telephone systems. In recent centuries one improvement followed fast upon another, each serving to fink the individuals of a nation more closely together, so that they could act as a single machine. In early days paths beaten by the feet of British natives had 1 The System of Animate Nature, p. 396. %The Engines of the Human Body , pp. 265-6. 93 94 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION to serve the tribal messenger ; roads and mail-coaches came in due season ; railways and telegraphs followed, and quite recently appeared the all-pervading ramification of the telephone system. We have seen that the human machine has passed through corresponding phases, from the slow postal traffic carried in the blood circulation to that triumph of rapid communication — the nerve system. There is one striking difference, however, in the organiza¬ tion of a national machine and a human machine. The government officials of a nation, as well as plain citizens, use freely both telephone and telegraph systems in carrying out their duties. But in the human body the whole system of rapid communication has been made a government monopoly. All its telephone exchanges are manned by government officials. The humble units which carry on the productive industries of the body may dispatch messages which are intended for another set of workers, but these messages have to be submitted to the central government and duly approved or censored before they are passed on to their destination. If the transport units which conduct the alimentary traffic go on strike and wish to call out the units which prepare the supply of fuel for the body, they cannot send their message direct : it has to pass through the government telephone exchanges. To modern minds it may seem that the administrative units take an unfair advantage of the monopoly controlled by them. Nothing can happen in the commonwealth of the body without it coming to the knowledge of the central administration. And yet the population of living units included within the human body far exceeds in numbers the total population of the DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 95 earth. And they are ruled with unmatched ability. Is the administrative system of the human machine the ideal towards which the modern national machine is tending ? There are signs that this is the case/ Now the Church which is the Body of Christ has fol¬ lowed this analogy. It has complexified its organization as occasion required. Beginning in a very simple way, it gradually developed function after function, till when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, it already pre¬ sented the great apostle with the picture of a very complex community, as yet, however, but indifferently co-ordinated, and calling for beseeching entreaty.1 In speaking of ‘ Progressive Differentiations and In¬ tegrations ’ Thomson says, ‘ As we ascend the series we see organ added to organ in a way that suggests inex¬ haustible resources/ * Now this same impression of inexhaustible ‘ resources ’ being at the disposal of the Church in the differentiation of its spiritual functions, seems to have been present to Paul’s mind. It comes to expression in two finely complementary passages, one from Eph. iv. 7, ‘ Unto each one of us was the grace given according to the measure of the gift of Christ ’ ; the other from Rom. xii. 6, ‘ Having then gifts differing, according to the grace that is given to us.’ In the first of these we have force graduated to faculty, in the second, faculty graduated to force. Before we proceed to elab¬ orate the differentiation of function as catalogued by the apostle in Rom. xii., let us ‘ compare spiritual things with spiritual,’ and see how these two great passages play into one another’s hands. We cannot understand the 1 Rom. xii. i. 2 The System of Animate Nature, p. 392. 96 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION full force of either of them, unless we remember that the key-note of all the apostle’s thinking is service, constant unremitting service. To this all his mighty arguments are made to bend, and to this every Christian disciple without exception is called. Discipleship must pass into apostleship or renounce its claims. Each individual follower of Christ is under the obligation to contribute to the maintenance and extension of the body-corporate, which is the Church. To make the Church co-extensive with the world, to make the kingdom of God inclusive of all the kingdoms of man, this is the patriotism of the new kingdom with which every true soldier of the Cross must be fired. Whom He thus calls to service Christ likewise qualifies, so that with the gift of eternal fife are bestowed corre¬ sponding gifts through which that life may express itself in terms of work. Hence it is written, ‘And He gave some to be apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the per¬ fecting of the saints unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ.’ The nature of our individual contribution will depend upon the special gift or qualification we personally possess ; and its extent will be measured by the force and flow of spiritual energy which is permitted to find expression in our lives. This spiritual energy is here covered by the word ‘ grace,’ a rather spacious and elastic term as used by Paul, and requiring always to be construed through its setting. * Grace ’ and ‘ Gift ' must be regarded here as standing in the relation to each other of vital force and vital faculty. It is only as they are related that either can be of service. Force without faculty would be as futile as faculty without DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 97 force. Of what possible utility would it be to collect and store electrical energy at a power station were there no means of expending it in light and heat and motion ? On the other hand, what use would be the thousands of feet of insulated installation, or the million vacuum globes throughout the city, were there no available energy when the switches were turned ? Or to put it another way : A man’s working value to the community depends, not merely upon the fineness of his faculties, whether bodily or mental, but upon the amount of physical energy which he has stored, and upon which his faculties can draw without depleting the supply. Similarly a man’s service to the spiritual community will turn, not merely on the faculties he possesses but on the forces of the new life of which he has been made the recipient. These forces must be in perpetual flow through the faculties if the latter are to be kept up to the highest point of efficiency. Unless the grace be thus drawn upon by the gift, it will be a pent-up, useless, and therefore finally confiscated force ; while the gift itself will be dormant and defective, dying down into the doom of extirpation through disuse. We know how manifestly this principle declares itself in daily life and work. Let vitality get low through neglect or abuse, and it matters not how splendid the gifts with which a man is endowed, they will lose their brilliance and be starved into inefficiency. The brain-worker, through diminished quantity or quality of blood, finds his thinking power impaired ; and the self¬ same cause will reduce the skill of the craftsman at his bench, the quickness of the clerk at his desk, the grasp of the statesman in the Cabinet, and even the courage and 7 98 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION resourcefulness of the soldier on the field. In like manner the gifts that accompany the grace of salvation will depend for their successful functioning on the continuous upkeep of that spiritual and spiritualizing force which streams from the life of the Risen Lord, to empower even the least of the little ones that believe in Him. What the blood is to the functions of body and brain, that grace is to the gifts of the new-born soul. For the blood is the fife. Grace both feeds and functions the gifts. It supplies at once both driving and directing power, so that the gift may both find and work its fitting field. We are called to work. Whatever shirkers may be tolerated in the Kingdom of man there is no admittance except on business to the Kingdom of God. Service is the law of the universe, and the person or thing that does not serve actively is made to serve passively. Everything pro¬ claims this law. Everything inanimate, from the motes that swing in the beams of a summer’s noon to the stars that muster in millions on the field of night ; and every¬ thing animate from the tiny infusoria that live but a day to the first-born seraph before the throne. Here is a cosmic conscription, embracing all in its compulsion to serve. Even the Highest life of all is not exempt from service. — * My Father worketh hitherto,’ said Christ, * and I work, for the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister.’ Here, then, is the end to which all life with more or less acquiescence is being steadily drawn. Wherever the gift of eternal life is received it will be found to include certain provisions whereby its recipient is empowered not oniv to contribute his quota DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 99 to the consolidation of the New Kingdom, but to increase the number of its subjects. Indeed this is the condition on which we retain our citizenship. For this have we each been commissioned and empowered with gifts differing according to the class of work to which we are severally called. We have been saved to serve. Only as we live to serve do we deserve to live. There is absolutely no limit to the power we may have, if the end to which we use it be the service of our fellow men. ‘ All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth ; go ye therefore,’ said Christ. The power to go waits on the willingness to go. The implication is that the propagandist of the new order is not responsible for the force, but only for fidelity in its use. Here a most important truth emerges, but upon which we may only touch, and that is the Peril of Power. This peril seems inseparable from its use, in whatsoever form it may be manifested. It is the peril of either misuse or misdirec¬ tion ; and the greater the power, of course, the greater the peril lest it should get out of hand. Look again at the power of electricity. If you simply generate sufficient force to tinkle a door bell, you may conduct it by means of a naked wire and run no risk. But should you require enough power to drive an engine, or to light a town, then you must have it safeguarded up to the most complete insulation before you dare handle it at all. The protec¬ tive measures, that is to say, must be proportioned to the risk incurred. Now spiritual power has its risks, and* as I interpret this verse, it carries an assurance against these risks, and the assurance lies in the fact herein declared, that grace will be given ' according to the 100 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION measure of the gift/ Only in the co-ordination of grace and gifts can we find the way of maximum service with minimum risk. Let none of us regard our gift in any other light than that of a trust, for the faithful administra¬ tion of which we shall be held accountable as the stewards of the grace of God. We are called to service, called to the exercise of the noblest powers of the soul in the service of our King. Let us have no confidence in our gifts apart from the Giver. The more capable we are, the greater is the danger of misdirection, and the less are we disposed to look above and beyond for guidance and control. Even when the possessor of power himself escapes the peril of self-confidence, there is the danger lest others should trust in his merely human brain for wisdom, and in his merely human arm for strength. May this not be the reason why, just when we seem to need them most, the great and wise are often taken from our midst ? If we can only be thrown back from trust in great men to a greater confidence in the God of great men, we shall prove that though the captains and the kings depart, ‘ the Lord of Hosts is with us and the God of Jacob is our refuge/ Now this general principle of relatedness between force and faculty which is laid down in the letter to the Ephesians is shown in the letter to the Romans in its practical application on the field of spiritual work. This is ever Paul’s method. He must show the working value of things. He can never leave them at a loose end. The practical utility of any principle he might lay down, or of any doctrine he might teach, was to him if not its sole, yet its all-sufficient vindication. In order to satisfy DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION IOI Paul’s mind the thing must work. Force must come to expression through faculty to accredit itself ; and faculty must draw on force or be starved into impotence. In this great chapter the consecration enjoined in the first verse is being urged upon a people already possessed of a Christian experience, and whose ‘ faith was spoken of throughout the whole world.’ Moreover, the deeper we look into it the clearer it becomes that this injunction is a call, not to a personal but to a corporate consecration, in which the whole Church is to combine, that it may be sanctified and unified for corporate ends. This sub¬ ordination of the individual to the collective ideal is the ruling thought in Paul’s mind, and we can justify our inclusion in the society only as we make our contribu¬ tion in the way of work. Paul knows the value of association, and if he can only organize the Christian Church on the divine model of the human body, with all its harmonious and reciprocally responsive members, which find their co-ordination and seat of legislation in the all-controlling brain, then indeed will all the innumer¬ able types of personal character, and the endless varieties of personal gifts in the Church, find their unification and inspiration for service in the Head, which is Christ. Paul was always thinking and writing in these comprehen¬ sive and corporate terms. He saw things in their widest relations. Redemption was to him the all-inclusive term, beyond whose recovering reach nothing could be conceived. It was the great reconciling principle, embrac¬ ing all things in heaven and in earth and under the earth, re-instating them in righteousness, conducting them stage by stage in spiritual culture, and converging them 103 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION all to an ultimate and crowning unity which should at once express and control their infinite variety. This twelfth of Romans is remarkable for its combination of mystical and practical elements. In the first verse one feels that he is standing on holy ground, and that it becomes him to uncover and bow down. The vision that the historic imagination conjures up on reading these words is that of the ancient Temple ritual, in which the High Priest, bearing in his hands the unresisting victim for sacrifice, lays it upon the altar and offers its life as a burnt-offering for the remission of the people's sins. In like manner are we instructed to bring our bodies, placing them in full surrender on the spiritual altar, not to be consumed, but to be fired with the passion of a new love, that shall bum out every love that is base, and purge of its earthliness every love that is lawful, in its pure and purifying flame. This new and wondrous love, however, does not exhaust its potency in the purification of the merely individual personality. It becomes a great social dynamic, working contagiously and reconstruct! vely throughout the communities in which it lives. For goodness is as contagious as badness, and the social value of a clean-living soul is that of a preservative from national corruption and decay. Paul relies on the reproductive power of Divine Love to induce the spirit of surrender which he enjoins. He beseeches ' by the mercies of God.’ It is love’s appeal to love, and because love is essentially social, this divine expression of it is always prompting its individual possessors to association, so that, organized by its vital and constructive principle, they may be unified and intensified for service DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 103 by the pooling of their gifts. This corporate ideal seems to be always at the back of Paul’s brain, as a governing concept. It finds fine expression in this chapter. * For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office, so we who are many are one body in Christ and severally members one of another.’ Then follows the declaration, * having gifts differing according to the measure of the grace given unto us,’ a passage that is in fine correspondence, as we have seen, with that in Ephesians. Now let us place these two passages side by side. * Unto each one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ,’ thus he writes to the Ephesians. ‘ Having then gifts differ¬ ing according to the grace given unto us,’ thus to the Romans. Now in the first of these passages the grace is said to be measured by the gift. In the second, the gift is measured by the grace, but the constant in these variants is the principle of proportion that is maintained. In the one, prominence is given to the vital force ; in the other, to the vital faculty, the force having been provided for by the directions previously laid down. But the proportion between the two pairs of terms is equally affirmed in both letters. There is, however, an encourag¬ ing suggestion in the verse that we are now considering, that our gifts may be heightened in quality and increased in quantity according to the draughts that we are prepared to make upon the grace which has been placed to our credit. f He giveth more grace ’ as we are prepared to take it up and translate it into terms of character and work. There is absolutely no limit to the power on which we draw ; the only limitation is in our own carrying 104 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION and transforming capacity. Just as the electric power that girdles the city must be graduated to the carrying capacity of the wires lest it bum its way through and be dissipated into space, so the spiritual energies that stream into human life have to be measured in their force and flow by the mental and even physical condition of the recipient, or else the soul, becoming too intense in its spiritual potency, would rend the veil of flesh in twain and accomplish its escape. It is in the fine balance and orderly proportion of these various forces to the medium of their expression that the maximum efficiency of life, whether individual or corporate, is reached. It may be well for us later to deal with the question of heightened capacity and augmented talents, following on loyal and diligent use of one's original endowment, but the abstract proposition will be immeasurably heightened in force if the principle can be shown at work in human life, and illustrated in the concrete terms of human history. In the early history of the Christian Church, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, there are two notable instances, one of which, at least, it will pay us to consider for a moment, before pass¬ ing on to deal with the elaboration and application of the principle which we have been laying down. We refer to the cases of Stephen and Philip, two men who were taken in on the ground floor, so to speak, of Christian service, but who by loyally using the grace in the exercise of the gift, found both to increase in such ratio as to demand and discover yet broader fields of service, commensurate with their augmented powers. Let us take the case of Stephen for a moment, by way of illustrating the principle which determines that the loyal functioning of one's DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 105 gifts leads not merely to the heightening of their efficiency, but also to their multiplication. Stephen was started at a point which did not call for any very specialized or oustanding gift. Just good, sound common sense, coupled with scrupulous honesty and baptized into the Spirit of Jesus, was equal to the requirements of the deacon’s office. These Stephen possessed in a high degree, and they were placed at the disposal of the early Church, thus relieving the pressure that had hitherto fallen on the apostles themselves, and setting them free to work exclusively on spiritual lines. This allocation of duties on departmental principles was a recognition of the need for specialization if the best work was to be done ; and it speaks well for the sagacity and foresight of these apostles that they both saw and provided for this necessity. What they did not see, however, was, that though they might place a man in the deacon’s office, they could not keep him there. Having let him loose for service they could not restrict his movements. He speedily got out of hand. He no longer kept step, for he was marching to the beat of another drum. It was little wonder that such a character should have carved out a corresponding career. It was simply the working out of the great law of development and multiplication, that he should thus have overflowed the narrow limits of a mere deacon’s office and found a wider sphere. It may be suspected that even from the first he was too great a man to be packed within so prescribed a course. But that he consented to begin thus on the bottom flat, and bide his time for promotion, marked him out as a man that could be trusted with success. Even to those, io6 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION however, who knew him best, the rapidity of his develop¬ ment must have come as a startling surprise. Clearly all this man needed was opportunity, simply a fair field and no favour. For the rest, he himself would be respons¬ ible. He had not sought the position to which he was assigned, but then neither had he declined it. He construed the Divine Will for him through the Divine Providence, accepting the call of the Church as the com¬ mand of God. Doubtless with his accession to office had come an accession of power, that is to say, he had been granted ‘ grace according to the gift * ; for whom God calls He qualifies and equips, whom He commands He empowers. What a means of self-revelation this ministry became to Stephen ! How his work educated him ! It is ever thus when a man finds his sphere and fills it to the utmost of his power. It is a supreme moment in his history when a man thus comes to the knowledge of him¬ self and his mission. At what precise moment this consciousness flashed upon Stephen, or whether it broke gradually like the dawning of the day, we have no means of ascertaining. But it came without a doubt, along the line of lowly duty, loyally performed. Here is the great principle for which we are contending, a universal principle holding good for all time and for every man. The way to the greater is ever through the less. Fidelity to the duty in hand is the ‘ open sesame * to ampler trusts and wider fields. To be tumbling over real duties which lie unregarded at our feet, in order to compass fancied ones at a distance, is a fatal disqualification for stewardship, for he that is faithful in that which is least can alone be entrusted with much. Stephen so filled the deacon’s DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION office that it became a stepping stone to higher things. There may have been a fitness in the principle laid down by Peter that it was not reason that the apostles should leave the word of God and serve tables ; but while apostles might not graduate down to be deacons, there was no reason why deacons should not graduate up to be apostles. And this is precisely what Stephen did. ' Full of grace and power he wrought great miracles among the people/ Here as always the inner determined the outer. Doing is the expression of being. What a man is sets the limit to what he can achieve. He himself must always be greater than any task he can perform. We ourselves may be better than our work, but our work will never transcend ourselves. There was no stopping Stephen, nor, we may be sure, was there any desire to, for there was no jealousy among these Spirit-filled men. They were too full of zeal for the common cause to envy one another’s success. This is as it should be. Joffre’s success in the war was Haig’s and Haig's was Joffre’s. Beatty’s achievements were Jellicoe’s and Jellicoe’s Beatty’s; and there is nothing finer on record than the unstinted praise which each accords the other, or more impressive than the splendid co-ordination of our Allies on all fronts against the merciless tyranny that would have enslaved the world. Each one’s glory was the other’s because all were fighting for the faith and freedom of mankind. And so Stephen’s achievements were Peter’s and John’s, because they were all for Christ and His Church. So too, to-day, the true spiritual success of the Roman Church, the Greek Church, the Anglican or the Presbyterian, the Independent or the Baptist is io8 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION as truly ours as it is theirs, and makes us glad, because we all serve a common Master and fight a common foe, for in the Kingdom of God there is neither Roman nor Greek, Anglican nor Presbyterian, Baptist, Congrega¬ tional, nor Methodist, but Christ is all and in all. From what we have seen it is clear that a gift is not merely heightened in efficiency by being fully functioned in its appropriate sphere, but that it tends to multiply and ramify into other and even more reproductive fields. It is important to remember that in the distribution of spiritual gifts no one is overlooked. As surely as grace is universal and without respect of persons, so are gifts. The human body which Paul employs here as an analogy finely illustrates the variety of functions which are to come into exercise in the Christian Church as the organized body of Christ. In that body we have each a place to fill and a duty to perform. To find that place and then to fill it, to the utmost of our capacity, is to present to the world a perpetually recurring incarnation of the Christ- spirit in the world of living men. If, as Paul affirms, the Church is Christ’s body, then the human soul is to the human body what Christ is to His Church. It becomes His mode of continued self¬ manifestation. Thus it carries on the Saviour’s ministry. That is to say, wherever there is a true Church, by what¬ soever name it may be called, it becomes a point where God and man may meet and come into fulfilled relation. This is the true function of the Church, to bring the race into this fellowship, to make fresh annexations to the kingdom of God, acquiring continuously new territory in the way of surrendered human wills. DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 109 Thus to breathe about men an atmosphere of loving welcome, to weave about them sweet and wholesome bonds of affection, to represent God to them, displaying His solicitude, expressing His tenderness, reaching out to the farthest away and down to the lowest sunk, including all men everywhere in our saving purpose and pursuit, this is to know the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and to be made conformable unto His death. Now we come into the fine fellowship of this Body oi Christ through the gift of spiritual life, and not into the gift of spiritual life through fellowship with the Body. So that here Paul's analogy appears to break down. A member of the human body comes into being only through the body, and is maintained only as it is related to the body. It cannot survive separation from it. Excepting within certain clearly defined limits it is not given to any function or organ to have life in itself, and independently of this corporate relation. Only in association can it continue to be or do or suffer. Its life is not inherent, but derived and dependent. Indeed, a limb may be even in the body organically, and yet be a perished function, but out of the body altogether it is simply nought. The Body of Christ, however, consists of members, each of which is a radiant life centre in itself, not indeed in¬ dependent of Him, but frequently found independent of any realized relation to others who are partakers of like precious faith. The true idea of the Church, then, as a spiritual organism, is not an assembly of individuals, who, by virtue of such assembly, come into the possession of spiritual life. It is the drawing together into a structural union of those who have already received the no DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION grace and gifts of the new life, and the organizing of them into a corporate unity for the purpose of more effective service than they could render individually and apart. Hence there are vast numbers who have been made partakers of spiritual life, who have never yet come into this mutual relation, and it was to these that Paul in this chapter referred. As we have seen, the consecration spoken of in the first verse is not individual. That has already taken place long before, as the previous chapters indicate. No, it was concerted consecration that was enjoined. Just look at the concluding verse of the preceding chapter, where, speaking of God, Paul declares ‘ Of Him and through Him, and to Him are all things/ This cosmic view filled and thrilled the imagination of the apostle, and his supreme desire was to see it expressed in moral terms of voluntary service. It must be voluntary. Hence the tone of beseeching entreaty and tender persuasion. But though thus voluntary, it is of paramount necessity, if even the highest personal efficiency is to be reached, to say nothing of the corporate requirements of the case. Paul saw the Divine Will flowing freely through all things and harmonizing them all into a federation of mutual service. This will was seen linking the flower of the field with the timeless courses of the stars. But when Paul looked at the Church he found no such linkage. Every one was think¬ ing of himself and for himself. Hence the call ‘ For I say through the grace given unto me to every man that is among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think/ Each had to think, in order that he DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION hi might act, in corporate terms. It is this community idea, then, for which Paul pleads. Unless the law of relation be fulfilled there can be no such thing as organic unity in history, and humanity to be understood must be historically considered and construed. The centuries reach back and forth and interlock through all their busy days and quiet nights. The generations are linked together in spirit as well as flesh. Their thoughts, their feelings, their aspirations, the ideals for which they wrought and fought did not perish with them, they persist and pursue their victorious way through shine and storm, through peace and war, by daylight and by dark. Of the world of thought and insight, it must be affirmed as of the world of matter by Galileo. ‘ Yet it moves ’ ! The community idea, rooting itself in the social instincts of the race, breaks into fairest flower and ripens into richest fruit in the fellowship of the Christian Church. There it is placed under culture and graduated for that organized unity in which all souls shall come through Christ into that all-world society in which each shall be for the others and all shall be for God. A community, then, grows in power of mutual adjust¬ ment, understanding, reciprocity of spirit, clearness of perception, corporate action, centripetal force, social self- consciousness and power of re-acting on the surrounding world of thought and practice so as to work it up into its own likeness. It evolves a spirit of loyalty among its members, and a sense of obligation more powerful than any written statute ; and to this they instinctively respond. We have no single English word to express 112 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION this, and there is something ironical in the fact that in 1913 Lord Haldane, visiting Canada as Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, addressed the American Bar Association only nine months before the war, on ‘ Sittlichkeit/ which is the German word for the thing we mean. In the course of that address he said : ‘ There is a more exten¬ sive system of guidance (than legality on the one hand and the dictates of the individual conscience on the other) which regulates conduct and which differs from both in its character and sanction. It applies, like law, to all the members of a society alike, without distinction of persons. It resembles the morality of conscience in that it is enforced by no legal compulsion. In the English language we have no name for it, and this is unfortunate, for the lack of a distinctive name has occasioned con¬ fusion both of thought and of expression. German writers have, however, marked out the system to which I refer, and have given it the name of “ Sittlichkeit.” In his book Der Zweck im Recht, Rudolph von Jhering, a famous Professor at Gottingen, with whose figure I was familiar when I was a student there nearly forty years ago, pointed out in the part which he devoted to the subject of “ Sittlichkeit,” that it was the merit of the German language to have been the only one to find a really distinctive and scientific expression for it. “ Sitt¬ lichkeit ” is the system of habitual or customary conduct, ethical rather than legal, which embraces all those obligations of the citizen which it is “ bad form ” or “ not the thing ” to disregard/ Now without waiting to show that if we have not the ‘ Name * we have what is infinitely better than the name in the thing itself, let it be pointed DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION ii3 out that the Christian Society is organized in love, its structural principle is love, and love never fails. Because the Church stands as the organized love of God in re¬ deemed personalities that have made His will their law, no weapon that is formed against it can prosper. It will abide ‘ when all that seems shall suffer shock,’ for its life is hid with Christ in God. 8 H4 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION i The Function of Prophecy * Whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith.’ — Rom. xii. 6. In a previous chapter we have seen grace and gifts running side by side as concurrent streams of the divine bene¬ ficence, and that the recipient of grace was simultaneously endowed with a corresponding gift, through which the grace might find expression in terms of service. The amount of grace appropriated and utilized, it is clear, determines the position of each recipient in the graduated scale of endowments. The steps in their order of prece¬ dence are enumerated by Paul in his letter to the Corin¬ thians, ‘ First apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helps, governments, and divers kinds of tongues/ At the same time, as we have seen in the case of Stephen, there is nothing to prevent those even in the seventh class from graduating up to the first, the way from the lowest to the highest being open to all, from whatever level they may com¬ mence the ascent. From the position that prophecy occupies in the apostle’s scale of values, it is clear that next to apostleship itself, it is in and through this gift that grace comes to its highest power of expression. But here let it be noted that we must beware of putting too prescribed an interpretation on the term ‘ prophecy,’ lest, by narrowing its scope, we limit its application to that few and almost negligible number of persons who THE FUNCTION OF PROPHECY 115 in every age have been able to forecast future events, either by direct inspiration or by reading the portents of the moral sky. This faculty for prediction was unques¬ tionably possessed and displayed by the Hebrew prophets, but its exercise was only occasional and did not by any means represent the whole nor even the greater part of their work. It was, however, the part that most power¬ fully appealed to the popular imagination. Thus in the general estimation it came to bulk out of all proportion to other and far more important though less dramatic contributions which the prophets made to the moral and intellectual life of the nation. It gave the prophet a prestige that was absolutely unique, taking priority to even royalty itself, for again and again the prophet in his mantle confronted and abashed the monarch in his purple, and flung the charge of falseness in the very face of kings. The precedence thus universally accorded to the prophet was not without its corresponding peril. Such power, as we have seen, always has its risks, and its possession, coupled with the popular demand for some convincing sign from heaven, whether in the way of miraculous intervention or some uplifting of the veil between the present and the future, created a temptation which they were not always able to resist. This was only natural, for they were but men of like passions with ourselves, and the temptation must at times have been overwhelming to meet the clamour of the hour by simulat¬ ing the prophetic gift. Jealousy for their own reputation took the place of jealousy for Jehovah, so that they substituted the forecasts of their own prescience for His inspirations, and were found speaking more than they n6 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION knew, and foretelling further than they foresaw. One cannot but feel as he reads the warning note of our text, that this attendant peril of the prophetic gift in its New Testament sense of power to unveil the mysteries of the Gospel must have been present to the apostle’s mind. The danger of being wise above what has been written always threatens the mystical mind. This great apostle claims for himself and his colleagues that they were ' stewards of the mysteries of God/ from which he passes on to declare that in handling this supreme trust, the first grand necessity is fidelity. Compared with this nothing else matters. Either to survive the judgement of man or to fall under his condemnation is in Paul’s estimation of the least possible consideration. The supremely important thing is to stand clear at the judge¬ ment seat of Christ from whom they held their commission and to whom therefore they must give account. This fact of accountability, coupled with the sense of it, exerts a twofold influence It is at once a stimulative and a regulative force. Of these two the chief danger, as he hints, would seem to lie in the direction of deficient regulation. It is a gift that tends to get out of control and to create the temptation to go beyond the things that are written ; thus its possessor is in danger of losing the sense of proportion which, according to Paul, it is of supreme importance he should maintain. The faculty of spiritual insight, like every other power, can be abused. The safeguard lies in comparison, ‘ comparing spiritual things with spiritual.’ Hence the necessity for setting up and sustaining corporate relations that the private and personal equation may be duly checked. Here, then. THE FUNCTION OF PROPHECY ii 7 are the two perils which attend the prophet’s gift. First, lest its possessor should through any self-consideration hold back the truth as he sees it, or so cushion its impact as he says it, as to neutralize its force and thus frustrate the purpose for which it has been divinely disclosed. The need of that, and this, and every age is for men who can see and seize and say the truth unhesitatingly, unequivo¬ cally and with absolute courage and candour, and yet with kindness of heart. To go beyond the terms of his commission, however, is for the prophet to abuse his power, and the tendency to abuse is inseparable from its use. But to yield to the pressure of this perpetually recurring temptation is to betray a want of faith in the power of the truth itself to win its own way unless artifici¬ ally enforced. In such a case positions are taken up which cannot be maintained, and the subsequent abandon¬ ment of which reacts with disaster and discredit on both the man and his message. Hence the caution against going in speech beyond what faith can acquire and sustain ; because to say from mere human sagacity or desire that for which there is no divine authority is to find one’s self driven to defend positions which ought never to have been assumed and for which there is no adequate moral support. It is through faith that prophecy becomes possible, that is to say, the mysteries of spiritual truth yield up their secrets only to those whose purged vision can push behind and beneath the veils of sense and interpret the hidden meanings of the things we touch and see. ‘ The words that I speak unto you,’ says Christ, * they are spirit and they are life.’ But words at best are but imperfect exponents of thought, they only half n8 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION reveal and half conceal the truth they seek to express. The prophetic gift leads behind the veil of words and enables its possessor to dwell among those mystical realities for which the verbal symbols stand. But to guess merely where one should know, to create where one should simply interpret, to imagine where he should merely report, is to take leave of faith and to fall under the power of presumption. Thus every virtue can be pushed to the extreme where it passes into a vice. An illustration of this truth on the practical plane is seen in the story of the Lord’s temptation. The first temptation was a test of faith. ‘ Command these stones that they be made bread.' In other words ' Look after yourself, your trust in God has befooled you and led you into this wilderness of hunger and peril. It is time you took a hand in your own deliverance.' Faith rose to the occasion, surmounted the dark doubt that had been suggested, and gazed with steady vision on the changeless love which dwelt behind the changing years, and felt no fear. But that very perfection of faith became its point of peril lest it should pass the limit that divides it from presumption ; and to push it past that line, to strain it, so to speak, to its breaking point, was the dark and devilish purpose of the second temptation. It was as though Christ’s very victory put a fresh and powerful weapon into the adversary’s hand. This is the force of the second temptation : ‘ Oh, you trust in God absolutely, do you ? Well, that is very beautiful and commendable, but this proof after all is only negative at the best. I will show you the way of positive proof, in which there will be a daring and dramatic demonstration of your THE FUNCTION OF PROPHECY 119 faith in your Heavenly Father’s care. From this temple’s height cast yourself down, for it is written, “ He shall give His angels charge over thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.” ’ But there was no insanity about Christ’s trust. Here was no wild unbalanced fanatic who had lost the sense of proportion or perspective ; and though the devil had quoted Scripture, yet with one dexterous counter¬ quotation Christ thrust to the very heart of the tempta¬ tion, and showed that such an act of defiance would be faith no more, but a presumptuous tempting of the Lord His God. From all of which we see how extreme is the necessity for safeguarding these gifts of God from abuse lest the very privilege which exalts us to the Heaven of opportunity should be so abused as to thrust us into the hell of disappointed expectation and unrealized desire. To maintain the true proportion of things seems to be the burden of the apostle’s message, and one feels that there must have been a history behind this injunction which made it necessary for the early Church. The word 4 proportion ’ in our text suggests working to a scale, it pre¬ supposes a standard. In the original it spells ‘ analogy,’ which is a purely Greek word. It is a noun of course in our text, but in its form as a verb it signifies to ‘ keep up to, as to a standard, to be conformable to, as to a pattern or type.’ The use of this term, therefore, by the apostle implies that even if there were as yet no formulated system of doctrine expressed in * Articles of Faith,’ there was nevertheless an unwritten but clearly understood and accepted body of belief which had gradually grown 120 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION up and become current in the shape of tradition, by which any claims to new inspiration might be tested, and with which any fresh interpretation of what had already been revealed might be compared. When ‘ faith/ understood as the soul’s act of trust, breaks its bounds and becomes presumption, then the ‘ faith/ understood as a system of belief, undergoes corruption, and by an inevitable logic works out into corruption of life. When wrong-doing is practised thus under a religious sanction, the lowest deeps of depravity become possible, for it has passed into a proverb ' that the best things when corrupted become the worst/ This relation between belief and behaviour is everywhere recognized. Harmony between them is the test of rationality. This principle displays itself in every department of human activity and in all the working days of life. If you ask a man why he embarks on a certain enterprise, it is a quite sufficient reply if he says, ‘ I believe in it/ while on the other hand that you do not happen to share his faith is a good enough reason to you as a common-sense man for keeping your money in your pocket. Were you each to reverse your policy without exchanging your creed, you would be regarded as qualifying for mental treatment. A man who would claim in business that it did not matter what he believed in the way of commercial honour as long as he ran straight in practice, is a man to keep your eye on. It is true that he may run straighter than his creed, but that will be either because of inherited moral integrity or the outside pressure of public opinion which stands embodied in laws and enforced by penalties. But where the motive for going straight lies outside the man THE FUNCTION OF PROPHECY 121 in the shape of police and prisons, instead of inside of him in the shape of moral convictions and compulsions, the inevitable tendency will be to curve from the straight in order to correspond with his warped opinions, instead of keeping to the straight by running counter to them. Where the fear of punishment is the only motive to right conduct, ingenuity will for ever be addressing itself to the problem of how not to be found out. The fact is, one cannot keep up an incessant struggle of this kind. He must weary of the contest and seek the point of compromise. Conviction and conduct must come to an understanding, or one’s life will be in perpetual discord. When a man is not prepared to make bad conduct conform to a good creed, he will seek to degrade the good creed to conformity with bad conduct. He may choose either to level up or level down, but level he must, because nature abhors any tilt in the scale-beam and everywhere works towards balance. So that here we see the practical bearing of the apostle’s injunction. It is not merely a speculative truth he is uttering, having only an academic value and suited merely to those who deal in metaphysical abstractions ; it is profoundly practical, and has a working value for every man and woman of us, for what is thought to-day is wrought to-morrow. As we believe so we achieve. This it is, as we shall see, that gives the teacher his supremacy as the shaping force of the age. The man who determines the manner of a people’s thinking orders the course of the nation’s life. 122 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 2 The Function of Ministry * Let us wait on our ministry.' — Rom. xii. 7. This is the working end of things ; the practical side of the religious life. It is that which constitutes its supreme vindication. The word ' ministry * has come to have a much narrower meaning in many minds than that which it was originally employed to denote. It requires to be rescued and reinstated. There is practically no end to its multiplied meanings and applications. This command¬ ment is exceeding broad, and when Paul enforces it, there is no fear of its dimensions being curtailed. Nothing pleased him better than to see and show the service¬ ableness of the truths he preached. Even in dealing with the doctrine of the Resurrection when writing to the Corinthians, it was not for the purpose of establishing it as a merely speculative truth, or even that the bereaved might be consoled, that his mighty argument was constructed. He achieves this, of course, but he had more strenuous ends in view. He employed the doctrine as a mighty driving-wheel to which he geared up ' the work of the Lord.’ He allows logic to burst into flames of rhetoric, but only that, through it, he may kindle in others the passion for service that glowed in his own heart and mastered his life. He had shown these Corin¬ thians in an earlier chapter how in order that service might be constant and overflowing in manifold ministries THE FUNCTION OF MINISTRY 123 it must draw on some perennial fount of energy. The Triple Dynamic which he had disclosed as surviving when every other power would have become a spent and perished force was Faith and Hope and Love. So that here we have unveiled as a guarantee of abiding and abounding service, the power of an unshakable trust, the power of an unquenchable hope, and the power of an undying love, and the greatest of these, he tells us, is the last. In like manner the practical injunctions in this twelfth of Romans are all found running their roots back into the soil of fulfilled relations with God and man as set forth in verse one. Ministry, then, in the sense of the gift of administration, is the specialized function that is indicated here. The word employed is that which is used to mark the office of the deacon in the early Church. It served to dis¬ tinguish between ministry in what Peter called ‘ the word of God * and the ministry of secular affairs, in organizing the financial and business department of the Church, and not only of the Church, but likewise of the State — for as Paul shows in the thirteenth chapter of his letter to the Romans, those who administer the affairs of the realm are ordained of God, and must be held in rightful re verence on account of the commission they hold. Now that there are men specially qualified for administra¬ tive work is too patent to require proof, and it is as truly the ‘ work of the Lord * as that of prophet or priest. We have to be careful in using the phrases ‘ spiritual work ' and ‘ secular work ’ lest we come to regard them as necessarily antithetical terms. As a matter of fact neither spirituality nor secularity can reside in the work 124 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION itself. They can exist alone in the mind and motive of the worker. Even the sweeping of the streets may thus become sacred and the preaching of a sermon most basely secular. The kingdom of God and the kingdom of man are not to be held as mutually excluding one another. More mischief than can be measured has been wrought by failing to recognize that the kingdom of God roofs in all that is legitimate in the kingdom of man. Those who guard the sanitary interests of London by attending to the underground sewage system are as truly servants of the Crown as those who are clothed with legislative functions at Westminster, and unless the former do their work satisfactorily there would presently be very little use for the latter. In like manner those who are endeavour¬ ing in the fear of God and for the good of this country to administer the affairs of State are as truly ministers of God, as those who have been ordained to preach His Word. This is their special function, and to this they have been called. And here let me say, on behalf of this ministry in public affairs, what I could wish might find a wider audience than this lecture is ever likely to command. The cares of public office in these days must be pressing very heavily upon conscientious men. All their best gifts of heart and brain are being taxed to the limit, in dealing with the problems which the war has either created or accentuated, and made more difficult to solve. Now, it is easy enough to perceive the overstrain all this imposes on our public men ; but it is not so easy to indicate the line of possible and permanent relief. Indeed THE FUNCTION OF MINISTRY 125 how many of us ever give the question a single moment’s thought ? Too many of us simply take all the sacrifices that are made for us, whether in peace or war, as a mere matter of course, sitting down and enjoying all the fruits of sacrificial toil on the part of others, without a thought as to whence or how they came, or what they cost. We seem to forget that these public men are our own represent¬ atives — that it is our responsibilities they are facing, our work they are doing, our burdens that they bear. It may be true that they are paid for their services. But such service when rendered by high-principled citizens, such toil of heart and brain as is called for in the conscientious service of the State, can never be paid for in coin of the realm. Such service outruns all market values. Its worth can never be assessed or expressed in terms of currency. It belongs to another category — to a realm where gold is not the medium of exchange. Nay, the only way to pay for sacrificial service is to pay in kind, by becoming sacrificial in our turn. To the monetary remuneration which we offer our Parliamentary represent¬ atives we must, as a community, add becoming respect for their office, and heartfelt appreciation of their work. We cannot justly make moral demands upon these men while we withhold from them our moral support. We cannot expect them to take their position seriously, when we, as we so often do, indulge in cheap and shallow wit at their expense, forgetting that all the time we are discounting them we are really belittling ourselves. More¬ over, we cannot treat our Parliamentary personnel with scant courtesy without bringing the entire Parliamentary institution itself into contempt ; and this is precisely 126 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION what we have done, and yet we marvel at the want of reverence for law and order, the flouting of authority, the disrespect for tradition, and the general air of irresponsi¬ bility prevailing in our midst. We have passed on to these men the cares of government, the problems of public finance, and the general responsibility of safe¬ guarding the interests and well-being of the State. Surely, then, the least that can be expected of us is to stand solidly behind them, securing them as far as possible from all needless friction, and seeing that they are enabled to do their work, which is our work, with the maximum of sympathy and the minimum of strain. Of course, it may be replied that for the extent to which sympathy and support have been withheld from them, and for any discredit into which politics generally may have fallen, politicians have only themselves to blame. We shall be told that members of Parliament have produced the impression on the public mind that all they are out for is simply to better their own position ; and that, in short, politics is simply a game with the assets of the country as a stake, existing only to be exploited in the interests of those in power. This being the case, and the period of power being necessarily not only limited but precarious, they must needs secure spoil while it is day, for the night of dissolution cometh when no man can gather graft. Now this is an unfortunate estimate, and, concerning the majority of our representatives, let us not hesitate to say most cruelly unjust. It is a hasty and careless generaliza¬ tion from particular and unhappy instances. But the worst of this sort of reputation is that, once it becomes established in the public mind, it begets a tendency to THE FUNCTION OF MINISTRY 127 live down to its level. It lowers the ideal of the public service. It creates an atmosphere, not so much of suspicion as of altogether settled conviction, that nothing is to be looked for or expected, on the part of public men, but political jobbery. It thus tends to produce the very type of corrupt adventurer which it deplores, who turns positions of public trust into means for promoting private or party ends. Once it becomes generally understood that as soon as a man gains a seat in Parliament it is a foregone conclusion that he will forget his steward¬ ship, and make his high place a vantage-ground for personal enrichment ; once let it become an established tradition that the temptations of office are admittedly irresistible, that no man is expected to stand out against them, that in the public mind he is foredoomed to fall, that once he enters Parliament the general and regretful verdict is ‘ Alas, another good man gone wrong ’ — then, of course, there will be nothing for it on the part of weak men but to fulfil expectations, based only on the cupidity of human nature and the universal lust for power. Thus the default of a corrupt few begets a common distrust of the many, and lowers the standard of public expectation for all. Such a condition of things applies, it will be seen, a very crucial test to those in power. Under its acid the weak man will keep on repeating to himself the lying formula, * Oh, well, they all do it, and I am expected to follow suit/ which he forthwith does, and casts principle to the winds; whereas the strong man takes a tighter grip of himself, stiffens his back, and resolutely refuses to conform to a custom that would make Parliamentary representation and parasitism interchangeable terms. 128 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION We are hard on our representative men, tardy in our acknowledgement of their merits, and with an eye trained to the finding of faults. We expect great things of them, and then withhold the atmosphere of confidence in which alone great things become possible. We do not take them seriously. They are the butt of our jokes, in season and out of season. They have always been regarded as fair game for the caricaturist, and the stock subjects for cartoon. The member of Parliament shares about equally with the parson in providing raw material for the comic artist, who makes free use of his licence to lampoon. As long as there is no venom in this featuring, not only is no harm done, but often a powerful lot of good. Unfor¬ tunately, however, it does not always stop at this. Vile aspersions are cast on public men, and sinister motives imputed. Deadly slanders are whispered round, and the assassin’s knife is plunged into reputations by a man’s political foes, till — in order to survive in the walks of public fife, and keep his nature sweet and wholesome — one requires to possess or develop an epidermis like to some scaly old saurian of prehistoric times. Frank and free criticism no upright man resents. Indeed, it is the thing he invites, and is prepared at all times to challenge. This is not the kind of thing that hurts. It is the pinprick policy of the ‘ thousand peering littlenesses ’ with the poison of asps beneath their tongues. It is the gross misrepresentation that no amount of after-explanation can correct. It is the lie that cannot be overtaken and disproved — the reckless assertions flung around by irresponsible persons, who do not know the value of words, and who, when remonstrated with on account of THE FUNCTION OF MINISTRY 129 the pain they cause, retort that public men are public property — by which they mean that they may be treated with brutal disregard, all their feelings violated, and their most sacred rights trampled underfoot. These are the things that not only wound, but rankle, and fill the victim with a burning sense of injustice, which he is often powerless either to redress or avenge. These are the things, too, that tempt high-spirited men to turn a deaf ear to the call of their country for public service, and to let the business of the State take its own devious course, rather than expose themselves to misunderstanding and abuse. It is a matter for profound gratitude, however, that, in spite of the unpleasantness that so often attaches to the position, so many men of sterling worth consent to assume the cares of government in addition to their own. But it is a thankless job at best, and he who goes in for it in the hope that by firm adherence to principle and unswerving allegiance to all that is highest and best, he is going to become the people’s darling, and draw upon himself the blessings of the crowd, had better be disillusioned at the outset. Let him be assured that for any satisfaction to be derived from the faithful discharge of duty he will have to look within his own breast ; and that the supreme thing, compared with which everything else is but dust and chaff, is to stand right with himself, no matter what the many-headed beast of popular opinion may think or say. The plaudit of the crowd is as fickle as the wind, as changeful as the changing sea. A man may go ninety-nine miles out of a hundred with those who are clamouring for some kind of social or industrial reform ; but if he puts down his foot and 9 130 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION declines to go the hundredth, they will forget all that he has done. They will turn and rend him in the fierceness of their rage, and curse him by all their gods, till he who was regarded as a deity in the morning, to be crowned with flowers, is held to be a devil in the evening, to be pelted with stones. In the name of Christ and His Church, I claim, on behalf of those who are at the helm of affairs, the prayers and sympathies of all who have the future welfare of our empire at heart. There are grave problems, material as well as moral, to be faced ; and they are strangely inter¬ woven. We have ordained these men to the task of assisting in their solution, and we have no right to send them forth and then withhold from them our sympathy and support. They are not infallible. Many of them, as must happen under a democratic system of government, have not had the educational advantages of those whom they have been selected to represent. In many instances they have had to depend upon the position and work to which they have been sent, to educate them into any kind of legislative or administrative efficiency. It is the defect of the system that, in choosing men from among the people, the choice must fall at times on candidates who, when elected, find themselves for the first time in their lives loaded up with grave responsibility. Many of them have hitherto only had to manage their small farm or store, where at the most they have had to handle but a few hundred pounds. Suddenly, however, they are called upon to deal in hundreds of thousands. To a conscientious man this must become a matter of very grave concern. He recognizes THE FUNCTION OF MINISTRY 131 that as a member of Parliament he is a trustee of the people’s money ; and that, even if they did not require of him a strict account of his stewardship, he would require it of himself. I have no hesitation in saying that this responsibility, too great for those who have never been trained to it, has loaded many of our best public men above the breaking strain. It is the duty of us all to surround our representatives who are conscientiously aiming at great and worthy corporate ends, with an atmosphere of friendliness in which alone they can do their best work, instead of making them the marks for the slings and arrows of a criticism that is seldom con¬ structive, but destructive and depreciatory to a degree that frequently breaks them down and kills them off before their time. 132 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 3 The Function of Teaching Part I ' He that teacheth, on teaching.' — Rom. xii. 7. The supreme importance of the teaching function arises from the necessity for right direction and con¬ trol in the region of thought. Indeed, the wa}/ out from much of our mental anxiety and nervous irritability, as well as of our spiritual inefficiency, lies in the direction of greater mental self-discipline and pre-occupation of mind. Mastery in the marshalling of our thoughts and the training of them on to great themes consonant with the greatness of the mind itself, is an acquirement within reach of us all. For although the outer world of men and things has been created for us, we may create the inner world of thought for ourselves. Every man may thus possess a city of refuge within, into which he can flee at will, to find sanctuary amid high thoughts and fair imaginations from the brawling of the multitude or the dust and din of the street. It is the first business of the moral teacher to bring before his pupils those great truths whose counterparts already exist in their minds, and wait for their completion by the presentation of their objective correlates. The mind of man and the revealed thought of God presuppose one another, and neither without the other can reach its divinely appointed end. What light is to the eye, what sound is to the ear, that truth is to the mind. The THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 133 unperverted mind thirsts for truth as the hunted stag for the water-brook. ‘ Every one/ says Christ, * that is of the truth heareth My voice/ That means that those who live in the truth instinctively recognize it when presented. In the Acts of the Apostles we read ' The disciples continued in the apostles’ doctrine.’ This suggests culture after conversion, so that clearly, conversion is not everything. We must beware of confounding beginnings with ends. Conversion is but initiation, it must never be regarded as synonymous with salvation. Conversion is a crisis which may occupy but one brief moment ; salvation is a process running on concurrently with life, and the end of which is not yet. It is a process, more¬ over, that may be hastened, retarded, or even arrested ; and is a much greater and grander thing than many even Christian people suppose. As employed by Christ and His apostles it is no mere negative deliverance, it is rich in positive elements, the unfolding of which will demand the eternities for their field, and the infinities for their range — elements which can in no wise be shut up and exhausted within the narrow limitations of time. Now it was of paramount importance that these first subjects of the new kingdom should be fully instructed as to the nature of their citizenship, as well as the privileges and obligations which its acceptance involved. All their old ideals had to go into liquidation and become reconstructed around a new centre. They had to jettison a vast amount of mental cargo and unlearn a great many things, before the positive work of Christian education could commence. If they were to become the means of 134 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION propagating the new kingdom, then clearly they must be so instructed as to be able, as Paul said, to give every man a reason for the hope that was in them. So that from the beginning it was recognized that the intellect had its claims which could not safely be ignored. It required to be furnished with material which it could fashion into a system of thought. We cannot live on our emotions, nor could a mere set of emotions be transmitted. But one of the fundamental conditions of Christian citizenship is that it shall be passed on. Now we cannot pass a thing on intelligently unless we ourselves have a mental grip of it. As long as it merely exists in the mind without form and void, it can neither satisfy us nor persuade others. While truth remains in the abstract its currency is impeded. It must assume form and be stated in intelligible terms before it can pass from man to man or from mind to mind. Here is where the function of the teacher comes in. He gives the rationale of the process as far as that can be supplied. Of course there will always be unknown quantities that refuse to analyse, indeed, if there were not, we might well suspect a religion thus devoid of mystery, and dismiss it as a man¬ made thing. But while it has heights and depths into which it shades off and baffles the intelligence of even angel minds, there are elements which human intelligence can grasp and appreciate, because, as we have seen, their counterparts have been deeply wrought into the mental and moral constitution of man. There will thus always be a place for the teacher, but alas ! there has not always been a teacher for the place, and the failure of this function in the Church must account for the low and THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 135 rudimentary types of Christianity which so abundantly prevail. They are the product of an atmosphere exhausted of religious instruction. These are the types which so readily adopt any new doctrinal craze. It does not matter what wild and weird theory may be advanced, there will always be some people who will subscribe to it. Uninstructed in the things pertaining to the kingdom of God, they are caught by every wind and wave of doctrine, they are of the opinion of the last speaker, and the easy victims of the latest fad. Of course to continue in the apostles’ doctrine implies more than the mere intellectual perception and reception of the truth, it means its whole-hearted assimila¬ tion and translation into life and character. Herein he all the wondrous possibilities of development to which the higher life is heir. All the fine emotions that are kindled at conversion are thus intended to be taken up into the realm of our thinking, and there woven by the hand of a resolute purpose into the permanent structure of our character, which in its turn will become the determining factor of destiny. Who will dare to limit the possibilities thus enfolded in the new-born soul ? Has it not been born again for deathless being, and with eternal life shall there not be eternal development, and ever-growing similarity to God ? We need not fear to apply the principle of evolution to the realm of spiritual being, for this is the law that governs all life, from the lowest to the highest. Let us then continue patiently at school, passing from stage to stage of spiritual attainment, under the culture of that 136 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION * Spirit who searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God/ What the ultimate goal may be, who shall say ! For * it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is/ In connection with the teaching function to which the apostle here refers, we have already seen the great under¬ lying assumption implicit in this passage, which is that the Church needs instruction which it is the express function of the teacher to furnish. Immediately a child is bom into the world, if not sooner, its education begins. I say, if not sooner, for there are many psychologists who believe in the possibility of so adjusting prenatal conditions that the child may start the quest for know¬ ledge and the battle of life with a transmitted advantage in the way of mental and moral equipment, due entirely to the atmosphere of thought and feeling in which the mother has chosen to dwell. But without denying or asserting this, let it be said that for all practical purposes the child’s education commences at birth, and it very speedily begins to learn. It looks and listens, it touches and tastes, till it gradually grows accustomed to the world of persons and things into which it has been born. The impressions it receives sink into its receptive mind, so that by the time its reflective faculties wake up, its perceptive powers have already stored up countless experiences from which the young mind forms its con¬ clusions. Thus long before its formal education has commenced it has been learning from its elders and its surroundings, so that when its tutors come upon the field they discover that field already in possession, so THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 137 that they have by no means virgin soil in which to work. Thenceforth almost everything depends on how the boy or girl is handled, as to what its education will mean. How a lad is taught to use his perceptives and reflectives will, of course, turn very largely on the quality of his teachers and the ideal of education that they hold. Indeed, our children are frequently made or marred for life entirely by their school treatment during these plastic years. Hence it comes to pass that there is no higher or more sacred function than that of the teacher. In spite of all appearances, it is the teacher who shapes the course of history. Ideas rule the world, and what is thought to-day is wrought to-morrow. Hence the importance that attaches to education, and the necessity that it should be in the hands of men and women of the highest type, if our children are to grow up with a proper knowledge of the world in which they live, its history, its laws and forces, its calls and claims upon their service, and the contribution they are required to make to the mental, moral, and material wellbeing of their time. The end of all education is of course conduct, and unless it issues in wiser and better reasoned behaviour it is but a broken road. Now the importance of all that we have been saying will be fully and frankly conceded in its relation to the child as it is born into the kingdom of man. But when we come to the question of birth into the kingdom of God, the importance becomes heightened a millionfold. Whatever our theory may be as to the necessity for education in divine truth, our practice hopelessly breaks down. But if the new birth means anything, it means the awakening of a new set of faculties 138 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION which are related to a correspondingly new set of facts and forces — a world of thought and feeling, of sight and sound, which eye has not seen nor ear heard nor the unregenerate heart conceived — a world whose laws and forces are as real and realizable as any with which our bodily senses have to do. Now, clearly, it cannot be enough merely to be bom into this new world. To what end have these new and wondrous faculties been unsealed if not to find their correlates ? and if ignorance pertaining to the kingdom of man be regarded not only as a disqualification but as a disgrace, how can we justify our failure to train our spiritual perceptions into their appropriate field, and thus come to a knowledge as personal and progressive of that world as we do of this ? Measured by our years in the kingdom of God we ought many of us to be teachers ; measured by our attainments we ought to be committed to some home for spiritual defectives. The inmates of institutions for mental treatment, of course, are blame¬ less, for their arrested development is due to congenital defect. But there are no congenital defectives among the twice-bom. Wherever there is arrested develop¬ ment in the spiritual realm it is self-induced and there¬ fore without excuse. The method by which we come to our knowledge of the physical world need not be renounced when we come to deal with the spiritual realm. Indeed, when you come to think of it, the method is and must be the same, though the instrument may differ. The instruments of our physical knowledge are our five senses, the instrument of spiritual knowledge is our faith, a name given to a kind of fivefold spiritual super¬ sense by which we arrive at our experience of the THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 139 things which lie beyond the range of our merely physical ken. But these facts of the spiritual order, like those of the physical, have a twofold meaning. They are the expression of both mind and heart, so that to gain access to them and induce them to yield up their sacramental meaning is to achieve a double result. It brings us face to face with the Infinite Personality who dwells behind all mere forms and semblances of life, and relates us to the ‘ Life Indeed.’ It assures us that behind all things there is order and not chaos, purpose and not caprice, and that spite of all setbacks and apparent retrogressions all things are being carried grandly forward to the goal of God’s infinite desire, so that we endure ' as seeing Him who is invisible.’ The visible thus becomes our conductor to the invisible, the material is the thoroughfare to the spiritual. That we frequently get detained in it is not its fault but our own. There is not a single visible object that is not the expression of an invisible force which has no other way, in our present state of being, of reporting itself to our consciousness excepting by producing visible, audible, or tangible effects — that is by setting up certain vibrations which, through stimulat¬ ing our sensory nerves, convey their impressions to our minds. The invisible has need of the visible, for it is only through the visible that its presence can be detected or proved. Take the force of gravity, for example. It is operating through every square inch of space, but for the knowledge of its presence and power we are absolutely dependent on the things we see. For example, if some one were to assert that between my book-rest and the floor the law of gravitation was suspended, how could we i4o DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION refute it ? There is but one way, and that is by introduc¬ ing a visible object between the desk and the floor and releasing it. Then will the invisible force visibly demonstrate its power. In the same way magnetism is invisible, and the only method of proving its presence is to introduce an affinity into the field of its attractive power and to watch how it behaves. Steam is invisible, and cannot prove its presence but by its output in the way of visible effects. Life is invisible, and we can only detect its presence by its visible phenomena. Indeed the visible seems to be everywhere but the working manifestation of the invisible, and it is to this invisible that we are introduced by the crisis of the new birth. Its forces are related to our faith nerve, just as the force of light is related to our optic nerve, or that of sound to our auditory nerve. It is by training our physical senses that we come to the power of accurate observation, and thus to our science of the physical order, so by the train¬ ing of our spiritual senses do we collect and arrange our reports from the spiritual order and build up our science of things unseen. The more numerous the facts elicited and recorded, the wider will be the generalizations that can be made, and the richer the experience enjoyed. But the enjoyment of the experience does not depend in any way upon the power to express it in terms of thought. Of course, it is very pleasing to have our feelings and thoughts expressed for us in such a fashion, but for every one who can thus express them there are millions who possess them, and rejoice in them ‘ with joy unspeak¬ able and full of glory/ The great thing is to keep ourselves under training, cultivating the teachable THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 141 disposition, the childlike openness of mind and heart, the willingness to accept truth from whatever quarter it may come, and to give it house room and hospitality. If, as we have seen, every dead piece of matter represents and expresses some invisible force, what possibilities of expression must be open to living mind ! Thus to express truth, to embody it in life, character, and con¬ duct, to be transmitters of its light and life to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, this is the end for which we have been born again. Thus and thus only can we vindicate our claim to be followers of Him who declared ‘ To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I might bear witness unto the truth.' The inner world of our thinking must inevitably be¬ come creative of an outer world of fact upon which it cannot but react. We are what we think ; we are what we would be if we could. Nothing is in heaven or on the earth or in the waters under the earth that was not first of all a thought, and that is why it can be resolved back into terms of thought. According to this view the whole universe is a literature ; it is the thought of God expressed in terms of matter and motion. So that matter and motion, laws and forces, colour and form rightly regarded, represent the ' Word of God ' as far as such a Word can articulate the thought of His mind and the feeling of His heart. This is no mere modern view of the universe. The ancients held it as a sacred article of their faith, and it is finely endorsed by the Psalmist in the memorable words, ‘ The heavens declare the glory of God ; and the firmament sheweth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth 142 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION knowledge. There is no speech nor language ; their voice cannot he heard.' Thus to get nature to yield up her secret is to know the mind of God. Form, colour, fragrance, feeling, flavour, sound, are all tones of His voice, parts of His speech, methods by which He would unfold Himself to the mind and heart of man. Hence what to some might seem a poet’s exaggeration in Tennyson’s well-known lines is simple, sober fact. Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower — but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. Paul said the same thing in different words when he wrote, * The invisible things of Him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity.’ From the stability of the structure with all its wondrous laws, its infinitely wise adaptations, its gracious utilities, we pass inevitably by a logic that is irresistible to the stability of the character, and the wisdom of the mind, whose creative thought thus expresses itself in all the multitudinous forms of strength and beauty, from the solid mountain standing fast in its quiet strength to the frail snowdrop that trembles at its foot. These are the terms in which God thinks, and the quality of His thinking stands expressed in His works. The indivisible unity of the Divine nature becomes in Creation what we understand by the term ‘ Universe.’ That is THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 143 God’s unity translated into cosmic terms, and it en¬ courages us to look forward to a period when all the discords and dualities of time shall have worked them¬ selves out, and resolved themselves back into That God who ever lives and loves. But just as, in the case of the Creator, this innermost thought is evinced by His work, so with the creature, as he thinks so he is, and as he is so he does. Any defect in the proper sense of proportion or perspective within the mind will register itself in our output in the way of words and work. There is thus a system of double entry kept, because the brain holds the record mysteriously stored of all the mental processes in which it has been employed. By what mental physiologists term ‘ brain- tracks * the paths of thought are visibly delineated in the brain-structure itself, so that it presents an internal road-map of our thinking. So fearfully and wonder¬ fully are we made that so immaterial and elusive a thing as a thought can record its ramifications from brain- centre to brain-centre in distinctly traceable lines, so that the history of a man’s thinking, whether as to its quality or quantity, its simplicity or complexity, its occasional character or its persistence, its lethargy or its intensity, stands disclosed to the trained and instructed eye. Here, then, within one’s own personality, according to the most advanced science, is a judgement-book com¬ piled, in which all the things are written which have been thought and purposed, though in many instances they may never have found expression in deeds. This auto¬ registration process makes every man his own recording 144 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION angel, the story of his thought-life being kept by an unerring and automatic system of stenography, so that every voluntary action in which the will has been engaged is recorded even before it has been done into history. This surely must be the ground of Christ’s teaching that there is no difference between the will to transgress and actual transgression itself, so that he who has willed in the illicit direction, though he may have been thwarted in his purpose, is held to be guilty of trespass, and to have done the forbidden thing ; while on the other hand, he who has willed in the right direction, but has been de¬ feated, is credited with the good that he would have done. Now I have been led to speak thus on the relation between our thinking and our character in the hope that I may induce a greater mental oversight and self-control. If I could get my readers to resolve that they would quietly think for a few moments every day on some great truth, it would make all the difference between shallowness and depth in their religious life. Thus periodically to detach the mind from the petty details of life and let it sink into the depths of some great thought of life itself, till it be¬ comes saturated with it, and, indeed, becomes so one with it as to swing responsive to its heaving tides, is to find an inner contentment and repose that nothing out¬ ward can ever vex or disturb. To start the day thus, spending the first few conscious moments in the contem¬ plation of any great elevating theme, the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Christ, the universal Spirit, the majesty of law, the sanctity of life, the veracity of nature, the claims of conscience, the imperatives of duty, and underlying all, upholding all, suffusing all, the great THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 145 and solemn eternity which everywhere underspreads the things we touch and see, this is to escape from the fetters of the local and find the freedom of the universal to which our spirits belong, out of which they have come, and into which they haste. Here too lies the cure for all fretfulness, irritability and want of trust, in these healing restful regions of quiet thought concerning God and things unseen. The reason that we are so neurotic is not physical but spiritual. We have not acquired control in the region of thought, but are the victims of emotion. Our lives are too frequently swept by passion, too seldom held in poise by prayer. The cure for most of our modern ills lies so near to our hand as to be over¬ looked. At any moment we can effect our escape from the tyranny of time by thinking ourselves into the eternal. This is a change of air and scene that means health to both body and soul. Life is never blase to the dweller in two worlds. When the roots of our being are struck deep into the eternities, we can laugh at the droughts of time. Those waters of quietness are accessi¬ ble to us all, and as we drink we forget our care. We realize that we are other than mere children of time, that we are related to the eternal order, and that our destinies are linked with the powers of the world to come. 10 % 146 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION The Function of Teaching Part II In the midst of working at the previous chapter the call came from the Student Christian Movement for world-prayer that the nations of the earth might be federated in the bond of a permanent peace. Now we have many calls to prayer from time to time, but this, from University students the whole world round, possesses a character and a significance all its own. Back of it you have to postulate hundreds of thousands of the keenest intellects of our time, those whose impact upon the thought-life of the world will do more than any other merely human force to shape the history of their own time, and through it the generations that are to come. As the world thinks so it is, and as it is so it does. The Spanish proverb is as true of nations as of individuals, * Sow a thought reap an act/ Everything can be resolved back into terms of thought. Without thought was not anything made that was made. The significance of a thing consists in the thought that dwells behind it, that throbs through it, and of which it is but an expression and effect. Until we have penetrated to this inner and sacramental meaning of things we are mere outsiders, or at best in the kindergarten stage of education. Kepler said long ago that all our human science was simply a thinking of God’s thoughts after Him. According to this view, the whole universe is an illuminated literature, a pulsing, beating, burning word of God. Only to the THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 147 morally pure and lowly in mind does the universe surrender its secret. Nature is the expression, not only of mind, but of heart, and the mental is everywhere subordinate to the moral, and therefore must be construed through it and by means of it to be rightly understood. This accounts for the position so stoutly maintained by Professor Huxley when he said : ' True science and true religion are twin sisters, and the separation of either from the other is sure to prove the death of both. Science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious, and religion flourishes in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firmness of its basis. The great deeds of philosophers have been less the fruit of their intellect than of the direction of that intellect by an eminently religious tone of mind. Truth has yielded herself rather to their patience, their love, their single-heartedness, their self-denial, than to their logical acumen.’ Even the microscope and the telescope yield different results according to the moral character of the observers. What it means, therefore, for the future of science, to say nothing of religion, when the best thought and the ripest scholarship are definitely Christian, can be more easily imagined than foretold. It is the thinkers who hold the keys of the new era and who will determine whether it shall be iron, lead, or gold. Certainly no age can reach a higher level than that of the thought of its highest men. Hence the significance of the fact that the great seats and centres of learning throughout the world, from Japan in the East to America in the West, thus annually through their myriads of students call us to prayer. 148 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION That we may see the golden thread of a divine purpose running through the dark pattern woven by the war ; that we may not give way to hysteria or pessimistic despair, but possess our souls in patience as we wait the clearer light, — these are the objects for which we as Churches are called to pray. Now to those who can recall the attitude of scientific men and the atmosphere of university life in the seventies and eighties, this world-wide student movement, encour¬ aged as it is by hundreds of university professors, cannot fail to appear as one of the most potent of the plastic forces of the century. What it means for the Christian Church, and, through the Church, for the world, he would be a bold man who would venture to measure or forecast. St. Paul, himself a university man, would have hailed such a movement with unspeakable joy. It was the one thing needful, the thing at which he aimed, to rescue the intellectualism of his day from the barren waste of fruitless debate in which it had become lost, and to link it up with the fertilizing power of the Holy Ghost. If he could only have baptized the intellectual forces of that ancient world into the spirit of the Cross they would have been born again to a vivid and virile life, a life which would have reacted with irresistible dynamic against every hostile cult — atheistic, materialistic, agnostic, philosophic, or theosophic — which exalted itself against the Crucified. This university student movement then represents the wedlock of intellectual and spiritual life, thus constituting one of the most powerful combines against the kingdom of darkness that has ever been formed. As long as mind and heart can be kept apart the world THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 149 will be torn with strife. From the very first the spirit of evil has sought to corner, and by cornering to pervert, the world’s thinking power. This in its final analysis is the essence of the first temptation. Pushing behind and beneath all the symbolism of the forbidden fruit, the one clear fact which confronts us is the injection by the tempter of mental disquiet into the woman’s mind, by putting a note of interrogation after what hitherto had been an unquestioned fact. He made her doubt as to the gracious intent of the divine prohibition. He suggested that the limitation placed on human freedom had behind it a sinister motive ; that it was imposed to check the spirit of inquiry, thus keeping the race in ignorance ; and by the successful insinuation of this doubt into the mind of Eve he made a false division between knowledge and obedience. This suggestion, that continuance in loyalty meant discontinuance in mental growth, made God appear to be the enemy of intellectual advancement, and thus, wherever this damnable doctrine has been accepted, God and religion have become discredited from a scientific point of view. Such teaching places morality and mentality in opposing camps, and this divorce effected, there at once became possible the whole catalogue of human sin and shame that stains through all history and turns human life into a hell. The way of return is through the reunion of these two that should never have been disjoined, heart and brain, piety and knowledge, morality and mentality, and these thus reunited passing on and up through surrender of the human to the divine into spirituality, and recovered DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 150 status in the paradise of God. Once the mind of the world turns again toward God the rest will be easy. It was in the mind that the trouble commenced, and it is in the mind that it must be treated and cured. Here lies the work of the great evangelical thought-leaders of the race, and this is why these federated university unions through¬ out the world mean so much for the future of mankind. In them this harmonization of mentality and spirituality has set in, and the finest feature of their association lies in the fact that their forces of heart and brain are federated, not merely for the cultivation of the highest Christian fellowship, but for the promotion of the most effective Christian work. They are not content merely to affirm their faith and to let it go at that, grand as even this would be. But they are banded together for aggressive work. Their union, therefore, is not an end merely, but a means to promote ends as wide as the needs of humanity, and as far reach¬ ing as the redeeming purposes of Christ. Another great source of its power lies in its catholicity, by which, irrespective of all the narrowing bonds of creed which hamper the churches of Christendom, it dwells among the permanent and universal principles which are the heritage alike of all the churches. A return to these principles in their primitive simplicity would do more to bridge the intervals between the churches, and thus give force to their evangel, than all the resolutions of church councils that could be stacked between the earth and the moon. The reunion of Christendom is quietly realizing itself in a most effective way through these university unions. The merely accidental and temporary elements THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 15 1 are being forgotten or ignored, and only the essential and abiding are taken into account. This means a great contribution to the bringing together into one of all the scattered flocks of Christ’s fold. To have the most alert and thoughtful minds of all lands meeting together for prayer in our great halls of learning, searching in the Scriptures together under the guidance of the same text¬ books, and seeking thus by concerted thought and study to fit themselves for impressing the mind and heart of the world with the need of Christ and His message, means more for the coming in of the kingdom than the work of any church organization that can be named. Once we get the thought of the Church unified, every¬ thing else will follow. It is the thinkers to whom we must look to put us right. Unless men see the truth, they cannot do the truth, and truth is a thing to be done as well as seen and known. But once we have the will to do we shall have the light to see and understand. But truth is many-sided, and it is the half-truths that have divided the Christian Church and reduced its force. Even the so-called heresies are half-truths, and hence their mischief-working power. A lie that is wholly a lie may be met and fought outright. But a lie that is half a truth is a harder thing to fight. It is among these young and earnest thinkers that our half-truths will have a chance of orbing into their perfect spheres and thus of meeting the claims of both mind and heart. There is nothing in the way of Christian organiza¬ tion that is resting on so broad a base as this students’ 152 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION federation. It includes scholarly men and women of all lands. It has representatives under every sky, and it is seeking to relate Christianity to the indigenous thought of all non-Christian creeds. Thus it holds the promise of the larger union of Christendom pretty much in its own hands. This movement demands, therefore, a large place in the prayers of those who are working for the healing of division between the sects, as well as for the further reason that the very best gifts of the Church Universal are now in demand for dealing with the post¬ war problems that clamour for solution on every hand. In this regard we have had no experience, and we are utterly without precedent to speak a guiding word. To whom should the world look at such a time if not to the men of light and leading whom our seats of learning have produced ? This war was largely generated and made possible by University influence. The lectures of Pro¬ fessor Treitschke delivered from the chair of a German University did more than anything else to disseminate false views of Britain and inflame the German mind. It is ‘up to ’ the Universities, therefore, to help to heal the great world’s wound, which this class of teaching has made. To what end is education unless it can guide us aright in perilous times of national and social strife ? To have no message of light and leading for us in these supreme moments is to discredit the entire system and to confess that in the evolution upwards of the race the intellect must be counted out, and all our hopes be placed in ‘ blind forces building better than they know/ But surely seeing that the mind of man, lining up with nature, blending her laws and utilizing her forces, has THE FUNCTION OF TEACHING 153 been able to perform such miracles in the world of science and invention, there must be something more than mere passive self-surrender to spiritual forces if the world of living men is to move forward to its God- appointed goal. Surely in the kingdom of God heightened intelligence must make for finer efficiency. Here, then, is the task that is challenging the best thought of the age, to change the spirit of the world, to displace the will-to-power by the will-to-serve. Christ claims to control the dynamic by which alone this change can be wrought. But even He can mediate it best through cultured minds. That He can do without human learning is, of course, true, but He can do a great deal better with it, and to discredit intellectual power does no honour to Him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. The teaching function of the Church must be kept up to the highest degree of efficiency. Christ has yet many things to say to His Church which through her want of attention to the laws of her development are necessarily withheld. In the letter to the Hebrews the author of that Epistle found himself hampered by the backward condition of those to whom he wrote. He had advanced truth to impart. He was burdened with his message. It burned like a fire in his brain. It struggled for expression through his lips. It trembled on the point of his pen. But he was compelled to repress it, because those for whom it was intended were still loitering in the elementary stages of spiritual culture. He rebuked them roundly for their infantile condition. He draws an analogy from the nursery, and rallies them for not having cut their 154 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION spiritual teeth, so that they still have need of milk and cannot manage strong meat. He challenges them to activity. ‘ Be not sluggish ! ’ The word translated # sluggish ' here is very full and suggestive. It carries a twofold meaning, and indicates sloth in both the mental and the moral realm, as well as in the domain of conduct. It is a word frequently used by classical writers as an epithet for an ass, and combines the double idea of stubbornness and stupidity. The specialists in brain troubles assure us that the slow-witted man is a slow¬ footed man. These two qualities are intimately related. Sluggishness of life has its counterpart, and, more than probably, its cause, in sluggishness of thought, and both are due more or less to deficient vitality. For this condition of things in the spiritual realm the apostle holds these Hebrew Christians responsible, and by calling them to ‘ imitate those who by faith and patience inherit the promises ’ he was showing them the finest door of escape from the lethargy of an overfed and underworked Christianity ; ' patience * meaning in this connexion large¬ heartedness, issuing in overflowing ministries of liberal¬ handed charity. Thus the efficiency of the Church as the instrument of the New Kingdom will be found turning on the quality of its teaching staff. It has to be admitted with shame that she has never yet explicated to her own mind, much less translated into action, the full content of the gospel that she holds. THE FUNCTION OF EXHORTING 155 4 The Function of Exhorting * He that exhorteth, to his exhorting.’ — Rom. xii. 8. The word here employed to indicate this further specializa¬ tion of function in the Christian Church has come to be associated in our minds with that particular type of service which is specifically known as ‘ Evangelistic.’ Among Methodists the office of exhorter has come to mean a more or less irregular order of service whereby the Church utilizes the overflowing zeal of those whose gifts of public speech enable them to give clear and forceful expression to their religious convictions and experience — men whose hearts the Lord has touched, and who in free, unconventional speech bear their witness to what God has done for their souls. As Paul used the word, however, it had probably a much wider connota¬ tion. It is the same word as is translated ' beseech ' in the first verse of this chapter, elsewhere it has been variously rendered as * comfort,’ ‘ entreat,’ ‘ constrain,’ as though the exhorter were one who possessed the gift of inciting others, reviving their hopes, kindling their enthusiasms, waking up their dormant desires, and encouraging the despairing to try again. If the work of the ‘ teacher ’ be the impartation of truth, then that of the exhorter is to make truth opera¬ tive — to get men to do what they know. This power of appeal, of moving men to action, is a 156 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION quite distinct gift. Every great evangelist possesses it, and it will be found that every great revival has been wrought through confronting men with truths already known, truths so familiar that they had lost their force, and, as Coleridge says, ‘ lay bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.’ Here, then, is the Scriptural warrant, if one be needed, for the office of the evangelist as a distinct and separate department of church work. He is undoubtedly a specialist ; but specialization in any one department becomes permissible and of practical value, only as all other departments are being sustained in full working efficiency. It is the very efficiency of the all-round man that creates the necessity for the specialist, and the coming in of the latter must in no sense be interpreted as discredit¬ ing the former. It is the fidelity to detail on the part of the average man which makes the specialist possible, releasing him from the thousand and one duties which press upon the ordinary practitioner in order that he may concentrate on his particular bent. It is only when and where the general practitioner’s work has been of the highest quality that the specialist can be seen at his best. Thus it is that an evangelist will always be found achieving his greatest success where the ordinary work of the ordinary minister has been well and faithfully done. It is doubtful whether an evangelist who knew his work could be induced to take on the responsibility of a great mission in a city where the churches were asleep and no preparation work had been done. By the very THE FUNCTION OF EXHORTING 157 nature of his task he has to enter into other men’s labours, taking up and working to a finish what they have com¬ menced, but have not been permitted to complete. They have cleared the ground, ploughed it up, sown it down, and harrowed it in. They have in some cases even seen the blade, the stalk, and the ear, but when they fain would have thrust in the sickle, they have been withheld. The harvest just falls short of ripeness, waiting for some mystic touch, the breath it may be of some new voice, the enfolding warmth of a new atmosphere, the strange hush of some vast audience, bowed in silent, united, prevailing prayer, to turn its green of promise into the golden glory of ripened purpose and fulfilled desire. Now, this is where the work of the exhorter or evangelist comes in. It supplies the last link in a succession of causes running back, it may be, through years. Christ may still be regarded as saying to those whom He sends forth to this work, ‘ I have sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour.’ This is true of every great spiritual awakening, whether in the first century or the twentieth. It is not too much to say that even Pentecost would have been impossible anywhere outside the Jewish nation. It would have been simply unthinkable at Antioch or Corinth or Rome. It required centuries of spiritual preparation, education, and impreg¬ nation. As a matter of fact it was contributed to by prophets, priests, saints, and sages whose grey dust had been sepulchred for centuries before Jesus was born. It was their work that made Christianity possible, and Christ does not withhold fiom these great spiritual path- makers their just meed of praise. Let the evangelist 158 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION ever bear this in mind lest he be exalted above measure, and thus thrust a knife into his own usefulness. Perhaps nowhere in the corporate society is there such peril of friction through misunderstanding, or such need for the admonition not to think of one’s self more highly than he ought to think. The exhorter viewed as an evangelist is exposed in a very special way to the temptation of over-estimating himself. Of necessity he is much in the limelight. He acquires a reputation, he is ‘ billed ’ and ‘ boomed ’ for weeks before his advent. All the churches unite to give him welcome and co-operation, sinking all their differences and suspending all their ordinary operations that they may afford him free and unimpeded course. His wishes are deferred to, his methods endorsed, what he says ‘ goes/ as our American cousins would say, and altogether he is the man of the hour. When he speaks men and women by the score, who have held out against the most faithful and heart-searching appeals in their own churches, yield themselves unreservedly to Christ, while all the workers in all the churches from the ministers down are found in the inquiry-room directing, under his bidding, those who are seeking the way of life. Having concluded his mission in one city, amid the prayers and praises of the people, he moves on to the next where a repetition of similar scenes and conditions awaits him, and unless he be a man of strong common sense, or what is more to the point, living in close communion with his Lord, he will be in danger of yielding a willing ear to the suggestion of the enemy, that really he is the man, and if not the ‘ entire works ’ at least the pivot on which they turn. THE FUNCTION OF EXHORTING *59 Thus here again the point of power becomes the point of peril, and where a man is strongest he runs his greatest risk. Now, from what we have said, it will be clear that the exhorter appeals to the feelings in order that he may provoke thought into action. In these days we are disposed to discount the emotions and to regard any display of deep feeling as being ‘ bad form/ Hence, however enthusiastic we may feel about a matter, we must not on any account betray it. The most extravagant praise that is permissible in these superior days is that a thing is f not too bad/ all of which is a piece of affectation as hateful as it is hurtful to mind and heart. To ignore the feelings is unscientific, to crush them out and deny them expression, is to run a double risk, either of explosion through over¬ repression or of such reaction on the seat and centre of emotions as must impair if not destroy its power of response. There is, of course, a healthy control of the emotions, by which they can be made to subserve the highest mental and moral ends, and at which every one should aim. Their inevitable tendency to get out of hand and take the bit into their mouths must not deter nor discourage us from their proper and legitimate use. We owe this at least to the war, that it has delivered us from the falsehood of this extreme of frigid self-repression which tended to freeze our feelings at their fount. It may be safely said that there can be no true psy¬ chology of Christianity which does not assign to the feelings a large and important place. While mere emotionalism that never issues in practical expression of life and service, but expends itself in rapt devotion or pious expletive, is always to be deprecated, yet on the i6o DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION other hand care must be taken not to chill feeling at its source lest we lower the vitality which alone can make our own spiritual life a rapture, or our personal contact with the lives of others effective. It will be remembered that what is known as the ' Welsh Revival ’ evoked at the time of its occurrence considerable criticism, for the most part kindly even when keen. But that was only the shallow interpretation of spiritual incompetence which sought, like the Lancet, to resolve the whole question into what that journal described as ‘ a mere debauch of emotionalism.’ An emotionalism that displays itself in the settlement of old-time feuds, in the payment of long¬ standing debts, in the purging of the social life, in the rectification of the commercial conscience, and the purification of the home, exposes the shallowness of a criticism that traces such ethical results to so inadequate a cause. Certainly a wave of emotionalism that would make people pay their debts would be hailed by business people generally with a satisfaction too deep for words. The fact is that any attempt to study this or any other revival by first of all isolating it from the history of Christian preaching, teaching, and living preceding it, and dealing with it as a thing apart, must prove abortive. No great movement of this sort can ever be rightly interpreted excepting in and through its context. What took place in Wales would not have been at all possible excepting for what had for years preceded it and prepared its way. It could have taken place nowhere but under an atmo¬ sphere charged with spiritual oxygen, and in a field richly strewn for generations with spiritual seed. The Welsh Pentecost was the harvest of unstinted sowing in what THE FUNCTION OF EXHORTING 161 must for many years have appeared an unproductive field — a sowing under leaden skies and by hands now still in death, and a sowing plentifully watered by the weeping of eyes whose tears have long since been dried. It would, then, be utterly unscientific to cut this thing out and away from its past ; that past which alone could have made it possible, and out of which it sprang. Hence the folly of all such talk as that in which some folk indulge in every great spiritual awakening about what they call the * pitifully weak personality/ the ‘ educa¬ tional limitations/ and the ‘ mental inadequacy ' of the evangelist. What is all this to the point? It is a ‘piti¬ fully weak ’ spark that bridges the distance between the harmless heap of dead dynamite on the floor of the sea, and the crashing explosion which rends to rags the mighty ironclad of 20,000 tons. But there is no denying the effect. And when all the factors are taken into account the apparent inadequacy disappears. Many who read these words will remember the incident con¬ nected with the removal of Hellgate rocks from the entrance to New York harbour. These rocks had for many years been a menace to the shipping of that port. Many a gallant vessel and many a brave fife had been sacrificed before the United States Government resolved that they must be removed. You will remember the ‘ pitifully weak * personality selected for the task of moving these hundreds of tons of submarine rock. It was the tiny hand of a frail girl that cut the fairway through the deep for the commerce of the world. But again the apparent inadequacy of the means disappears when we remember the years of work which 11 162 differentiation of function preceded it, — how thousands of men by night and day with pick and shovel and drill had toiled, till at length the rocks were honeycombed with explosives and netted with electric wires, till all the child required to do was to press the key that completed the electric circuit, and in one swift moment the subtle force flashed its message of doom against the ‘ Hellgate ’ that for so long had wrought destruction and death. So in every great revival, all the chosen agent has done has been to establish the connecting links between the available power and the work that required to be effected. The results in such a case must always prove a judgement on the preparatory work performed. Just as the pressure of the electric key linked up and unified the work of thousands, from the last connexion made by the electric engineers to the first shovelful of earth thrown out by the navvies’ hands years before, so the evangelist’s work becomes simply the last link in a chain of causes that run back through the years and knit into a splendid unity the work of agents who had lived and loved, and laboured and died, before he was born. What matters it, then, that he is intellectually unfurnished or theologically unequipped ? It is a spiritual quality that is needed for the conduction of spiritual power. It was this very absence of mental training, you remember, on the part of the apostles which staggered the rationalists of that day. ‘ When they perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men they marvelled, and they took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus,’ that is to say, they were thrown back by the sheer inadequacy of the merely human agency, upon a Divine explanation of THE FUNCTION OF EXHORTING 163 the accomplished and admitted facts. Specialization necessarily involves limitation. The evangelist’s limita¬ tions are his strength. lie requires to drain all the forces of his life into practically one channel. As Paul dictates, * He must keep to his exhorting/ In view of the appalling forces of evil that are organized against him and his work, and at the risk of being charged with narrowness, it is absolutely essential that he hold fast with iron strength to two fixed and fundamental articles of faith. The first is : An indestructible belief in the reality of sin as a moral disorder, requiring moral treatment ; and a steadfast refusal to identify it with physical weakness or mental defect. This at once lifts it out of the category of ills that legislation or medical science can cure. One of the most popular and persist¬ ent fallacies of the day is the fiction that the legal order can effect moral reform. The immediate and logical effect of accepting this fallacy is to weaken the sense of individual responsibility by transferring it to the State. Of course it is easy enough to frame laws, but laws cannot administer themselves. They require to be administered. A law to be effective must be the creation of moral senti¬ ment, and its successful administration must ever depend upon the permanence of the creative sentiment of which it is the expression. Wherever that sentiment becomes too weak or too indolent to insist upon its administration, then the inefficient law serves only as a moral watermark to indicate from what height the ethical feeling of the community has receded. Such laws, unless indeed they act as a moral challenge or rebuke, are better erased from the Statute-book, for any law that can be violated with 164 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION impunity reacts with disaster on moral conduct. The Parliament that seeks to improve public morals by legal enactments which do not represent the feeling and determination of the community will find the very public it is seeking to improve taxing its ingenuity in discovering methods of evasion, and addressing itself to the problem of how to enjoy the profits, and at the same time escape the penalties of wrong. Even at the best that which is legislative is merely palliative, and the peril is lest the Church should abdicate in favour of the State, and by discrediting her own place and power find too late that she has forfeited them both, gaining the whole world of dead machinery in the way of legisla¬ tion without dynamic, and in the process losing her soul. Let every evangelist, in the second place, swear unswerv¬ ing allegiance to the truth that the Christianity of the New Testament alone supplies the moral dynamic by which society can be redeemed. The Church stands for this impregnable position, that there is no hope for man, either individual or collective, apart from Jesus Christ. It is this belief that feeds the fires of her missionary zeal, and sends her out everywhere seeking that she may save. It is because Jesus Christ stands before the wrorld as the Supreme Expression of the moral order, because His Cross is a twofold revelation of everlasting righteousness and everlasting love, that a people’s attitude to Him becomes the key to their character and the forecast of their destiny. It is idle to think we can ignore Him ; He will not be ignored. He insists on being taken into account. A house-builder might as well think of ignoring the law of gravitation, as the builder of character think THE FUNCTION OF EXHORTING 165 of ignoring Jesus Christ. The builder in brick and stone is confronted with the law of gravity at every step. It is always in evidence, silently and secretly testing his work. He cannot find a square inch on the face of the earth where he can escape from its rule, and he must choose as to whether he will have it with him or against him. It is an everywhere pervasive force which insists on being reckoned with, an inspector of public buildings that is never off duty and can never be bluffed — a clerk of works that no builder has ever yet been able to blind with a bribe. So with Jesus Christ and the builder of character, Christ demands to be dealt with. He stands for the law of moral gravity ; indeed, in the Sermon on the Mount, He employed the law of physical gravity to illustrate the action of its moral counterpart in relation to the contrasted fortunes of those who obeyed His com¬ mandments, or rebelled. Listen : * Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of Mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock : ' And the rain descended and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house ; and it fell not : for it was founded upon a rock. * And every one that heareth these sayings of Mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand : * And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house ; and it fell : and great was the fall of it/ Now, what is true of the individual is true of every system of organization or corporate body of men. The 166 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION fortunes of every institution will turn on its relation to Jesus Christ. ‘ He must abolish all rule and authority and power, for He must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet.’ Men may build themselves into guilds, fraternities, federations, chambers of commerce, and boards of trade, in fact into any and every kind of sodality ; they may join forces so as to present a solid front against attack; but unless the structural principle of their edifice be obedience to the laws of Christ, they will be building upon sand. It is not that Christ remains neutral ; He is positively hostile. He ‘ consumes with the spirit of His mouth and destroys with the bright¬ ness of His coming/ He refuses to be counted out. Come in He will, either as a building up or a disintegrating force, and any social, political, or economic system that exalts itself against Him is foredoomed to fall. Listen to this exposition of Socialism by Moses Baritz, one of its Canadian exponents, in the columns of the Toronto Globe : Dear Mr. Editor, Permit me as the accredited organizer for the Socialist party of Canada for the province of Ontario, to give a repudiation of the statements of the Ivev. George Chown that Socialism is founded upon the teachings of Jesus. The Socialist position is founded upon Science, both sociological and economic. As such it is opposed to all religions, which, we maintain, were products of given social conditions. With the establishment of a social regime, Christianity, Judaism, and all supernatural ideas clinging to mankind will be abolished. The Socialist party of Canada is opposed to the unscientific worship of Christ, Buddha, or Mohammed. We do not believe in the salvation of the Church. We are opposed to that idea. It is far better to have the people understand this now than let the confusion exist or let it be disseminated in the pulpit. Socialists cannot believe in any supernatural God. If they do, they are not Socialists. The THE FUNCTION OF EXHORTING 167 pamphlet issued by the Socialist party of Great Britain on Socialism and Religion is the only attitude we can take up. The Church will find in us its unrelenting foe. Christianity, with its superstitions, must be submerged before the workers obtain their complete emancipation. That is our slogan, that is our challenge. Far better let it be known now, and so avoid misconception in the future. Finally, a Christian cannot be a Socialist, and a Socialist cannot be a believer in Christ or God. Now in common fairness, it ought to be said that there are many schools of Socialism, some of them closely affiliated with the Christian Church, and many of which would indignantly repudiate the claims set forth in this excerpt as representing the general socialistic trend. Still there remains the ominous fact that a widely-spread and highly organized socialistic system with destructive aims has been framed with the deliberate design of antagonizing Christ and His Church, and all that they stand for in the individual, family, social, commercial, and political life of the State. That is to say, the Christ who has created the freedom, the civilization, the intel¬ lectual life, and the most potent moral forces of the world, the Christ who lived and loved, who laboured and suffered and died, that He might make men brothers the whole world round, this Christ, who is the best friend ever possessed by man or woman or little child, is repudiated by this Socialistic school. Now what kind of a school that must be which requires as a prelude to its operations the denial of God and the rejection of Christ one hardly dares to think, much less to say. Does any one dream that emancipation is coming along such lines as these ? The structural principle of such a combine is the utter¬ most selfishness, and selfishness is anti-social all the while 168 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION and every time. The structural principle of the Christian Church is self-sacrifice, and this is the winning force in history. Christ's gospel expresses this, His death attests it. It is the force to which every other force will yet yield allegiance and bow the knee. It is the force of Love Incarnate, suffering, bleeding, dying, that it may save. This is the ultimate force of the universe, that gathers up every other force into its pierced hands. Listen to this Supreme Personality in whom this force concentres, and from whom it radiates through all the courses of the suns, through all the lands of time, and through all changes of history : ‘ All power ' — that is every imaginable kind of power — * is Mine. Therefore go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.' The gospel of the Son of God is the only hope for society ; it is the only way of freedom for the working man. What was the Renaissance of the fifteenth century ? It was the emancipation of the individual from ecclesiastical fetters so that he came to himself and the consciousness of his power. According to Professor Hudson, that movement originated in industrial Florence. There it gathered force and flow. It was the working man of that age who threw off the tyranny of a monstrous ecclesiasticism that, like ‘ the old man of the sea,' threatened to crush out the spirit and strangle the fife of both the Church and the world. Is the working man going back into tyranny ? Is he going to substitute a socialistic for an ecclesiastic yoke ? I venture to say that a society built upon the Christless and godless lines of Moses Baritz must prove fatal to the development of the individual life. It must prove THE FUNCTION OF EXHORTING 169 destructive of all initiative by bruising all its manhood into one common mould of anonymity. It represents the supreme incarnation of despotism. It appeals to the independence of the working man, only to coerce him into a slavery as unreasoning as it is tyrannous. Under its rigorous regime he dare not do his best. He must stultify himself ; he must violate his own self-respect by becoming the mere instrument of a force which robs him of the right of self-expression. Against all this, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only defence. It must be remembered that all the ferment we witness in Society to-day, which is disturbing the labour markets of the old world and the new, is a ferment that New Testament Christianity has created and which a whole¬ hearted acceptance of its teachings alone can allay. It is the little leaven cast by Christ into the heart of humanity, and which is destined to work out its beneficent results in history till all class conflicts are harmonized in a world-wide brotherhood. If we teach men that they are brothers, it is no matter for surprise that they should expect some practical expression of it in the working days of life. That they should be found adopting rough- and-ready methods to see it realized is perhaps not to be wondered at. Men who are struggling for their admitted rights are not to be judged too harshly if at times they prove guilty of the falsehood of extremes. The call of the time to the Church is to interpret this movement correctly, not in any narrow and merely local sense, but historically, and to gather up and guide this elemental force by yoking it to noble and unselfish ends. 170 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION md D The Function of Giving 4 He that giveth, let him do it with (simplicity) liberality.’ — Rom. xii. 8. It might be thought that as the function of giving is in a measure common to all the members of the Christian body- corporate it is difficult to regard it in any way as a special office. But while it may be true that each is permitted and even required to make contribution according to his ability to the maintenance and propagation of the truth for which Christianity stands, yet at the same time there are those whose ability in this direction is so marked that it amounts to a specialized function. The special ability to give springs normally out of the special ability to acquire. The money-making gift has its own particular peril. Of course every gift has to be safeguarded lest it get out of hand, and by over-development frustrate that ideal harmony and symmetrical proportion, which is sought to be realized in the body-corporate, which is the Church. Now the qualities commonly developed in the normal acquisition of wealth are hardly identical with those which we associate with its liberal and unostenta¬ tious distribution. Yet the word translated ‘ simplicity 7 enfolds both these ideas, so that sometimes it is rendered by the one and sometimes by the other term. Now if we think for a moment of the men who have been most successful from a business point of view, the men who have ‘ made by force their merit known, and lived to THE FUNCTION OF GIVING 171 clutch the golden keys/ we shall agree that * simplicity ’ is hardly their outstanding feature. If we were asked to sum them up in a word, * simplicity' is not the exact term we should select. And yet there is a sense in which it might well be used, namely that singleness of aim or unity of purpose which focuses all the forces of life to one shining point of success and will not be denied. But the kind of man that our modern system of business turns out, when, as too often happens, it has its way, is not of the highest type. Instead of emerging as he had hoped the undisputed master of the system, the tables have been so dexterously turned that the system has mastered him. Indeed, to such an extent has it succeeded in mechanizing him that he cannot without peril to body or mind get out of his stride. There are battles daily fought in the market-place and the Exchange where more than blood is spilt. The passion for gain, the subtleties of finance, the secrecy under which negotiations have to be conducted in great transactions, the skill to read and forecast the markets, the scouting for first intelligence, the price paid for secret information, the control of one’s features so that the fiercest competition is masked under the blankest indifference of demeanour or casualness of manner, the universal tendency of the buyer to under- value and affect to despise what he would compass sea and land to acquire, these and a thousand other devices that the unscrupulous adopt in order to gain their ends, provoke corresponding reactions. Thus even among the most scrupulous, methods suggest them¬ selves for adoption which, while they may be deplored and resisted, yet result in developing a certain hardness of 172 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION heart, and keenness of brain, together with a general doubt of good faith, which prevent business from being the pure pleasure it might be if conducted on a loftier plane. All this sort of thing tends to produce general deterioration of character and conduct, so that too often the making of money means the unmaking of men. Of course this is only another way of saying that the great world of business furnishes a moral gymnasium for the development of those imperishable qualities of personal character — truth, probity, conscientiousness, considera¬ tion for others — and all that goes to make a man, and of which the material currency is merely the perishable sign. The methods a man adopts to acquire wealth will necessarily be controlled by the place it occupies in his scale of values. If it be the 4 be-all and end-all * of existence, then, of course, there is nothing tangible or intangible, personal or relative, practical or sentimental that he will not sacrifice in its pursuit. His estimate of it will determine the qualities he will call out and enlist to make it his own. It is this side-by-side acquisition in the way of character-quality that really matters, and which is of infinitely vaster importance than the money which is merely its material and visible symbol. It is what a man becomes himself during this process that fixes his place in the moral scale, and determines whether his gains are to be counted as ' weal-th ’ or * ill-th.’ The value of the personal equation must never be forgotten. Indeed the more we look into it the clearer it becomes that personality is the supreme factor of value. Apart from it there can be neither weal-th nor ill-th. Of what value was all the gold of Australia or the diamonds of THE FUNCTION OF GIVING 173 Kimberley until the advent of man ? And even then it had to be man plus knowledge and power of appreciation and appraisement. To the native tribes they had no significance or worth. Minus personality then, gold, silver, copper, diamonds, rubies, and the rest are simply worthless earth. Yet this worthless earth, which owes everything in the way of value to personality, can so react on personality itself as to deteriorate it and depre¬ ciate its worth. Thus there comes to pass this strange thing, that man in heightening the value of matter so often lowers the value of mind. In personalizing it he perceives that virtue has gone out from him, and that it has de-personalized him. Through constant use certain acquisitive faculties are sharpened to an almost uncanny keenness, while others are correspondingly blunted into dullness by disuse. Clearly any kind of action or manner of life that thus threatens with deterioration the finer qualities of the soul must result in one of two things. It will either, through the successful resistance it provokes, heighten the power of the soul, or through being suc¬ cumbed, bring about an all-round depreciation of character and conduct. There is only one way of escape from this materializing process, only one way in which to stamp the perishable currency of earth with an imperishable value, and that is by making it serve great moral ends. Then though it has borne the image of the earthy it will be made to bear the image of the heavenly, and thus be stored up as treasure in that land where no moth nor rust can corrupt, nor thief break through and steal. We are assuming, of course, that in Paul’s mind there was a class of persons within the early Church whose 174 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION wealth marked them out as being specially fitted to finance its needs. These persons presumably could not preach. They had no teaching power ; no outstanding capacity to stand for the defence of the gospel and its institutions. But they had the power to stand financially behind those who could, and surely the next best thing to being able to do a thing one’s self is to enable it to be done by some¬ one else ! This is the power of wealth, and that which gives it the peculiar advantage it possesses, of being convertible into almost every other class of power with the least possible loss. If a man have only labour, or literature, or music, or art to offer in exchange for what he needs there may be no demand for these things, so that he is compelled to hold on until there is, or part with them for considerably less than their worth. But the holder of current coin can command all that the markets have to offer, because he possesses the most convenient and universal medium of exchange. If this were true in Paul’s day it has an infinitely wider sway and significance in our own. The cause of God is capable of a much broader interpretation to-day than then. Many of the great movements for political freedom, for social betterment, for intellectual emancipation, together with all scientific investigations pursued for making this world a healthier, happier place in which to live, may be classed under this category. Hence the wealthy patrons of science, art, music, literature, education, and social reform generally become ‘ labourers together with God.’ What they thus spend they really save, and not merely save but heighten in value to an immeasurable degree. But such an incre¬ ment is gained only as it is not sought. ‘ For My sake THE FUNCTION OF GIVING 175 and the gospel’s ’ is the one and only motive which carries Christ’s sanction and ensures this end. This must be the simple and unadulterated purpose that prompts the giver in bestowing his gift. Else it by so much ceases to be a gift and becomes merely a price paid for some personal end that is sought to be gained. Once we are found giving simply for the purpose of winning a reputa¬ tion for generosity, or under the pressure of a popular movement, or for fear of being thought mean, or for advertising purposes either personal or commercial, our gift is stripped of all moral significance and worth. This does not mean that we shall not get what we paid for. We probably shall. Christ, speaking of such givers in His day, declared that they got their reward. But having got our money’s worth in one market, do not let us imagine that we can collect it over again in another. We were out for certain worldly ends, we paid our money, we got the goods, and there the transaction ends. This is a judgement from which there is no appeal. Our text, then, is a searchlight of a passage. It puts us all on trial. Measured by its test it is to be feared that most of our so-called giving would have to be discredited as a spurious thing. It is not a question of the amount subscribed. That does not come into it. The threepenny-bit, as well as the million, has to submit to this test because principles take no account of size. It is the vital principle by which the gift is motived that matters. This is the question which comes up for judgement, and this alone. Nothing else is of concern because it belongs to the temporary and accidental order. Money given to any cause is or ought to be an outward and tangible expression of some 176 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION inward feeling of sympathy with the ends sought to be served. Where, however, there is absolutely no corre¬ sponding feeling, but simply a carefully calculated and cold-blooded investment of cash for the sake of some personal advantage, do not let us fool ourselves into supposing that under cover of a seeming benefaction we shall ‘ win the double ’ and make a profit in both worlds. The administration of the spiritual realm will not only repudiate as spurious every coin that is given with a mercenary motive, but it will debit the giver with the wrongful intent, thus making it better for him if he had given nothing at all. Instead, therefore, of piling up moral assets by such offerings he is contracting moral liabilities, and exposing himself to the shame of final unmasking before all worlds, ‘ for there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed, nor secret that shall not be known.’ Better that we should bring ourselves to judge¬ ment here and now, than that we should be brought by another to judgement yonder. We are not left in ignor¬ ance, neither shall we be able to plead that we were work¬ ing by a different standard from that which is to serve as a criterion in the final test. Sincerity is the one and only requirement. It is the supreme factor of moral value, so that measured by this test, scale is of no moment and may be counted out. Thus it comes to pass that the widow’s mite, touched by this acid and found to possess this quality, is declared to transcend in moral worth the most lavish disbursement from which it is absent. Of course, on the merely com¬ mercial plane the purchasing power of a pound is un¬ touched by the question of motive. Suppose that I THE FUNCTION OF GIVING 177 give five guineas towards some charity, and do it en¬ tirely for self-advertising purposes, my ulterior motive will not in any degree detract from its purchasing power. Judiciously spent it will go just as far as a similar donation given by another from the purest and most unselfish motive. But as these deeds register themselves on the moral scale they will be separated in value by all the distance that divides nought from five, and that is infinity ! Now this is where Paul's teaching leads us. He makes simplicity, that is sincerity, the supreme test of worth, and as he is writing in social terms and dealing with men in their corporate relation to each other in the body of Christ which is the Church, it follows that any insincerity must be fatal to that fine co-ordination of function to which the whole of his logic and persuasion moves. No society, whether political or religious, can be held together excepting by truth. Insincerity renders association impossible, and the false man tends more and more to become a lonely man, because his gains invariably mean someone else’s loss. It does not matter whether he deals in money or words, they have to suffer discount by his handling. Such a man degrades business into a trick, social life into pretence, friendship into convenience, and liberality into a he. But before closing this chapter let it be fixed fast in the mind of the reader that the teaching of the apostle bears no reference whatever to the amount that is given. The scale of the gift does not in any way affect the principle which Paul lays down and which deals exclusively with the spirit of the giver. Now this statement may seem to run in the teeth of the revised reading which substitutes * liberality * for ' simplicity,’ 12 178 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION and thus seems to make Paul take into view the scale of giving rather than its motive power. But this is only in appearance, for strange to say, the word ‘ liberality ’ in its true and proper significance has nothing whatever to do with magnitude, but entirely with the good faith of the giver. It comes from the same root as the word ‘ liberty/ and, according to Professor Skeat, its essential meaning is to * give as the free man gives/ So that, according to the revisers, what Paul really means is that Christian giving should be the glad spontaneous output on the part of God's free man — under no pressure or compulsion, not influenced by public opinion, not controlled by any considerations of what others may say or do, not requiring to be prompted by any exterior or ulterior motives, but the full, free, unconsidered forth-flowing of love's own offering to the object of its regard. Liberality, then, has primarily nothing whatever to do with the scale of one’s giving. It is a qualitative and not a quantitative term. And it is a remarkable fact that the synonyms of liberality such as ‘ kindness ' and ‘ generosity ’ have likewise this same significance. ‘ Generosity ' is literally the act of the 4 gens ' or gentleman. It is the sign of the gently born, and an expression of high breeding, so that to give generously is to give as a finely-grained or sensitive soul would give, when feeling for another’s pain and want. ‘ Kindness ’ again is the love that flows towards one’s kind or kin ; the root idea being that of affinity, from which every notion of pressure or compulsion must be withheld. Both these words, ‘ generosity ' and ‘kindness,’ find their common origin in a Sanscrit word which carries the idea of ‘ birth,’ in the sense in which we THE FUNCTION OF GIVING 179 use it when we say such and such a person is a ‘ man of birth/ meaning thereby that he is the product of good breeding and noble generous blood. From all of which it will be clear that our giving will be judged on its quality rather than its quantity, and that inasmuch as to love sincerely is within the reach of the least and lowest of Christ’s followers, the offering of the very poorest, by the possession of this quality, may outstrip in true liberality the munificence of the multi-millionaire. 180 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 6 The Function of Leadership * He that ruleth (let him do it) with diligence.' — Rom. xii. 8. We are now faced with the function of leadership, for this the true meaning of the word which is here translated ‘ Rule. ’ In Dr. Way’s translation, we have it rendered : ‘ If your department be the direction of others’ labours, stimulate them by being energetic yourself.’ Now it is very manifest from this teaching of Paul’s that the Kingdom of God is not administered on the false assumption that all men are equal. Here, of course, he is simply repeating the great principle enunciated by his Master and Lord, and which Christ illustrated and enforced in one of His parables. The kingdom of Heaven, he declared, was like a man about to take a journey into a far country, who called his servants and allocated among them his capital, not in equal proportion because the men were not equal in capacity. ‘ To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his several ability.’ And the inequality in ability disclosed and declared itself in the inequality of returns, thus justifying his estimate of his men. In the kingdom of God then, as in the king¬ dom of man, there is an order of graduated trust cor¬ responding with graduated capacity. God is the God of things as they are, and things as they are have an order of precedence which has to be recognized and observed. There are rulers and ruled, there are leaders and led. Nor is the supremacy of the Divine Rule in any way affected THE FUNCTION OF LEADERSHIP 181 by this admission, because all rule and authority of man over man is divinely delegated, and, therefore, whether recognized as such or not, is a trust for which the earthly ruler must finally give account to Him from whom it has been derived. The mutual recognition of this principle, could it be induced, would preserve the ruled from resent¬ ment, and the ruler from abuse of his position and power. As we have seen in previous chapters, every special gift is attended with its special danger and requires to be safe¬ guarded with special grace, and lest the leader should be tempted to shirk the hardships of those whom he leads, or the director prescribe one rule of conduct for himself and quite another for those whom he controls, the apostle lays down the injunction of our text. Here the leader is clearly required to set an example of endurance and in¬ trepidity, of initiative and courage. The word translated ‘ diligence 5 is a much stronger term than our English word diligence implies, that is to say, as it is ordinarily under¬ stood. Though if the Latin word diligentia were made to yield up all its meaning, it would be found much fuller and intenser than many people dream. Its root-meaning is ‘ to select/ ‘ to single out/ ‘ to fix upon/ hence some¬ times * to love ’ and so ‘ to make the supreme object of desire/ But the word Paul used is stronger even than this. It has in it the note of passionate urgency, the quality of enthusiasm lifted to its highest power. It is a word expressive of that which throbs and burns with vital energy, it signifies the very whitest heat of intensity. So that the leader is enjoined by Paul to be a veritable flame of fire, a burning and a shining light. In short, he is to be so surcharged with radiant energy as to be able to fire 1 82 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION all his followers with the same devotion and fuse them into a glowing fellowship of service, in which all their personal aims and interests shall be subservient to his, which are quite other and corporate ends. The faculty of leadership is a dis¬ tinct endowment. The man who possesses it wields a sort of power, which for want of a better term we call ' magnetic.’ It is born with such men, it grows with their growth and strengthens with their strength. It is potent in every look of the eye, in every word of the mouth, in every act of the life. Other and merely ordinary men yield to it straight away, glad to range themselves under the banner of one who knows not only where to go and how to get there, but is prepared to show the way. The true leader must combine these great qualities. He must know, and do, and dare ; indeed, knowing and doing are not only logically but etymologically related, for the word ' can,’ to be able , springs from the same root as the word ‘ cunning,’ to know. It is the man who knows who in every age has held the sceptre of rule. He may not always have been the nominal, but he has always been the real, king of men. For as we have been often re¬ minded, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, it is the thinker that rules the world. The leader is more than a thinker, he is a man in whom thought has passed into feeling and flashed into action. So contagious is his personality that all who come within its magnetic field become so polarized that their wills are set to achieve the ends he seeks. Therein lies the tremendous power of the leader for evil or for good. He may be a light to illumine, he may be a blast to destroy. He may win his way upward and prevail, till, standing on the topmost THE FUNCTION OF LEADERSHIP 183 crag of duty, he draws men up, and out, and away from all thought of self in the passion of heroic sacrifice and in the cause of freedom or of faith ; while, on the other hand, he may head the way to the abyss, perverting the thought and exploiting the emotions of men, using all his splendid powers simply to lead them like sheep to the shambles, that he may wade through their blood to the goals of his illicit desire. From all this it is plain with what a supreme gift the leader of men is endowed. It is the gift of being able to project his more dominant personality upon the mass, to make it think as he thinks, to feel as he feels, to follow as he leads. He voices for them what they have often felt. He enables them to envisage their own hitherto vague and indefinable ideals. He articulates what they believe but cannot express, so that they forth' with surrender themselves to him and accept him as the exponent of their innermost feelings and desires. The true leader, then, does not merely draw the thoughts and feelings of the multitude up into himself and embody them, he sends likewise his own thought and feeling down amongst them to mingle with theirs so that he unifies, organizes, and directs them at will. A mere crowd- exponent differs from a crowd-leader, just as a news¬ paper that merely mirrors opinion differs from one that shapes it. Now, according to Paul, this gift of leadership is one of the distinct functions to be exercised within the Christian Church. It is given to some pre-eminently to shape the thinking, and, through the thinking, the practice of their fellows. Such a power as we have seen carries tremendous risks, both personal and social — personal to the thought-leader himself, in the way of developing an 1 84 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION over self-consciousness, with an accompanying self- inflation, and also in creating a temptation to turn his advantage to selfish ends, which if yielded to must issue in self-defeat. Because after all leadership presupposes a common end to be served, a common purpose to be achieved, a common good to be gained. This principle lies so deep as to be absolutely fundamental to the ques¬ tion we are discussing, so that here the corporate ideal with which the apostle set out appears in the most natural manner as the all-con trolling thought. The function of leadership depends for its existence and exercise on three great working principles : the principle of inter-relation, the principle of co-ordination, and the principle of destination to some great crowning and justifying end. Never in its history was the world more in need of wise and capable leadership both in spiritual and political spheres than it is to-day. The substitution of party for great national ideals and the pursuit of personal in place of public aims is one of the most grave and menacing evils of our modern civilization. It is eating like a cancer into the body-politic and threatening the entire fabric with corruption and decay. The shocking waste and mis-appropriation of national funds in political jobs, the exploitation of the public purse in unproductive works, the reckless borrowing and still more reckless spending of public money, and the piling up of national debts that must saddle the future with burdens too grievous to be borne, are all due to blind leaders whose eyes have been dimmed with dust of gold. What is needed supremely is straight, clean, unselfish men, utterly clear of craft and graft, who will couple with unclouded THE FUNCTION OF LEADERSHIP 185 vision of the nation’s needs, a whole-hearted determination to rescue it from the pathless jungle in which it wanders hopeless and perplexed. There is nothing more pathetic than the sight of a man, born to lead his fellows into larger liberties and ampler fields of service, renouncing his early ideals and trailing his high commission in the dust. Robert Browning has expressed the feeling of all true lovers of reform as he mourns the defection of Words¬ worth in f The Lost Leader,’ through which there throbs the pain of what was felt to be a personal as well as a national loss. We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him. Lived in his mild and magnificent eye. Learned his great language, caught his clear accents. Made him our pattern to live and to die ! Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us. Burns, Shelley, were with us ; they watch from their graves. He alone breaks from the van and the freemen. He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves ! There is an international side to this question which the great war has thrown into strong relief. One of the issues involved in this far-flung strife is the leadership of the race, — whether a truculent and conscienceless might, that will bruise all nations into a common mould, for¬ bidding them the right to treasure their own traditions, evolve their own types, and work out their own destiny, shall bestride the world ; or whether a beneficent alliance that shall guarantee to all nations, even the smallest and most backward, the privilege of living and developing along their own lines, shaping their own history, and making their own distinctive contribution to the common 1 86 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION store, shall guide the destinies of the race. To this leadership we believe the Anglo-Saxon race has been called of God and ordained, and as long as we continue loyal to the great principles of truth and righteousness will our commission be kept in force. It is Britain’s outstanding gifts of leadership, colonization, and admin¬ istration, coupled with her strict regard for honour, that have placed her in the van of nations and entrusted the keys of world- wide empire to her hands. She has won the reputation among all peoples for integrity, and her name is the synonym for straightforwardness and candour in all the markets of the world. But a reputa¬ tion can be lost whether it be that of a nation or an individual. We of this generation did not achieve this record, we simply inherited it. It was our fathers who won this name and fame. But though we did not win it, we can lose it, though we did not make Britain’s name we can mar it ; and the call to-day is for loyalty to all that is best in our traditions, lest we forfeit our leadership. Better, as Seeley points out, * that we should recede commercially than default morally.’ This is the leader¬ ship we should covet, daring at any and every cost to do the right, and showing to all peoples the ‘ things that are more excellent ’ : The grace of friendship — mind and heart Linked with their fellow heart and mind ; The gains of science, gifts of art ; The sense of oneness with our kind ; The thirst to know and understand A large and liberal discontent. These are the goods in life’s rich hand. The things that are more excellent. THE FUNCTION OF LEADERSHIP 187 We as a nation know these truths ; we confess our faith in them ; they are among the common-places of our creed. The moral qualities which have thrust us into the fore¬ front of history alone can keep us there. Let it be seen that when all is said and done, these are the things in which we glory most. Not in our literature, in our science, our art, or our commerce, not in the strength of our armies, the efficiency of our navy, the extent of our territory or the breadth of our sway ; but in this, that, as a people, we love righteousness and hate iniquity. According to the Oriental Press these moral qualities are the things that have most deeply impressed the minds of our far-eastern allies the Japanese, whom may God bless and save. Here is an extract from a Japanese judgement on the British nation, as published in Shimpo Fuji, a Tokio journal, by Baron Iwanaki, on his return from a visit to Europe and America. Discoursing on the theme that Japan is still far behind the nations of the West, the Japanese statesman remarked : ‘ Let us take the English people as an example. The individuals of the upper and middle classes are distinguished no less for their strict morals than for the dignity and propriety of their manners. Whatever may be the work they are engaged in, they bring to it a keen sense of responsibility and attention, together with honesty and faithfulness. They are likewise remarkable for their strict observance of dis¬ tinctions between public and private matters. The most noteworthy characteristic about them is that when once they engage in an enterprise they pursue their object with such dogged perseverance that they never know rest 188 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION until, brushing all difficulties aside, they finally achieve success. Such being the character of the English people they have a high sense of honour, and regard a breach of promise, be the matter important or trifling, as the height of enormity. Even in England, with its millions of in¬ habitants and a multitude of large and busy towns immoral and abandoned characters are, of course, to be found, not only among the people of the lower classes, but even among those occupying high positions in society. What I mean is the prevailing moral tone among the middle and upper classes is so healthy, and constitutes such a powerful influence as a social sanction, that any¬ body falling under the general standard forfeits the esteem and society of his fellow men, before whom he can never again hold up his head. This is now the moral tone prevailing among the upper classes, and it has extended its wholesome influence to the other sections of society/ The Baron then moralizes to the disadvantage of his fellow-countrymen, and concludes : ' England is reputed to be the freest country in Europe ; and yet English gentlemen are not noted, like the Japanese, for any want of restraint in their conduct. The characteristics of the English as already described, are their dignified carriage, the purity of their private life, their love of truth and honour, and their amenableness to discipline and law. These characteristics also constitute the essence of free¬ dom. Japan has taken England as her model in the progress of the material side of civilization, and why should we not follow England's example in matters of the spirit ? ’ THE FUNCTION OF LEADERSHIP 189 Why not, indeed ? Who will not pray that our alhance with Japan may lead to her wholehearted acceptance of Christ ? It is for work of this kind that we have been so richly dowered, that we may plant out the great principles of truth and righteousness, of honour, and fair-play among the backward nations of the earth, so that with our moral meridian there may come the freedom and blessedness of universal man. DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION 7 The Function of Consolation * He that showeth mercy, with cheerfulness. — Rom. xii. 8.' The showing of mercy, or the administration of conso¬ lation and relief, whether bodily or spiritual, is here assumed by Paul to be an integral part of Church work, a definite function of the organized body of Christ. At first sight it might appear as if the apostle were a little inclined to the over-specialization of function in thus making a distinct department of what should be a general practice. But while it may be true that the showing of mercy is a business in which each individual is expected to bear a hand, just as we saw that in the function of giving every one should have a share, yet in this case as in that, there are those who are specially gifted by temperament and disposition to minister to distress and soothe the troubled in heart. Without doubt the apostle had witnessed the more or less clumsy attempts at consolation by well-meaning but tactless people who had succeeded only in aggravating the grief they sought to allay. Of all classes of Christian work this requires to be handled with the greatest delicacy of feeling and tender¬ ness of touch. It is the easiest thing in the world so to proffer help or sympathy as to embitter the feelings and positively alienate those who are sought to be relieved. Even where these dangers are avoided there is often such an absence of atmosphere in the act of showing mercy, such mere machine-like contact with the case, that it THE FUNCTION OF CONSOLATION 191 really becomes a case rather than a personality , and its treatment blesses neither him that gives nor him that takes. It may therefore be gathered from the place Paul assigns to this function, that in his opinion it should not be left to be exercised promiscuously by any and every member of the Church, irrespective of personal fitness for its discharge. Thus while every one may be expected to contribute in the way of providing means of relief, yet its administration should be confined to those whose personal qualities of sweetness and light generate such an atmosphere of hopefulness and radiant good cheer, as will not only heighten the value of the gift to an immeasurable degree, but reinforce the recipient who through misfortune or fault has fallen on evil times. There are those who by reason of their strong faith in God have a boundless faith in their fellow-men. Their courage in facing the problem of poverty and distress rises in the scale of the difficulties they present. Such are the souls to whom this duty should be assigned ; men and women overflowing with sympathy, whom no cold¬ ness can chill, no indifference dishearten, no insolence rebuff, no ingratitude sour, no suspicion dismay. Nor is it merely sufficient to possess this daring hope, this unflinching courage, this buoyant faith ; these must dis¬ play themselves in a cheerful alacrity of service, a positive hilarity of feeling and manner, because these accom¬ paniments of the gift are often of infinitely more value than the gift itself. Courage is as contagious as cowardice, health is as communicable as disease, and the worker in this depart¬ ment requires qualities that will so react on those whose 192 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION moral or material betterment he is seeking to effect, as will wake up every slumbering ally in their nature, and rally it to the flag. Now it is exceedingly significant that the Greek word employed by the apostle in this passage, and which is here translated ‘cheerfulness/ is one with which the people would always associate the festivals which cele¬ brate the return of Spring. It was finked up in their minds with the re-birth of nature and her emergence in beauty and fragrance from the grave of winter in which she had been entombed. It was therefore charged with all the happy auguries and hopes which we associate with this season of the year. But these festivals were also deeply religious and were celebrated by the Greeks out of gratitude at their acceptance with the gods, of whose favour the springing grass and budding trees were merely the outward and visible sign. Indeed the deep, underlying meaning of the word for cheerfulness is the rapture that springs out of conscious reconciliation with the Supreme. This is clear from the fact that it is derived from the same word which is translated * propitiation ’ in the passage ‘ He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world/ From this it will be seen that the cheer¬ fulness here indicated is not a mere emotion, still less is it something merely put on or assumed; it is a deeply inward, spiritual quality, a well-spring within the heart, which, because it has its source in the great Heart of Christ, rises like a fountain night and day, till it fills and floods the whole personality with a tide of great goodwill which flows forth wave on wave to bless and enrich the THE FUNCTION OF CONSOLATION 193 barren lives of men. Or to change the metaphor, this innate cheerfulness irradiates the whole personality with a new and beauteous light which comes to its focal point in the countenance, making the face to shine with such a gracious and sunny hopefulness, that by its very winsomeness it prevails against the powers of darkness and despair. This must surely be the reason for Dr. Way’s singularly happy translation of our text : ' If you come with sympathy for sorrow, bring God’s sunlight in your face.’ This is no mere figure of speech, this outward radiance which is generated by the inward spirit of goodwill is one of the profoundest psychological facts. Spenser, in his Faerie Queen, when he would show the inward truth and beauty of Una’s soul, describes how From her fair head her fillet she undight And laid her stole aside. Her Angel’s face As the great eye of heaven shyned bright And made a sunshine in the shady place. Dante in his imaginary journey through the Paradiso describes how the goodwill of one of the angels was con¬ veyed to him through this outshining of the inner radiance : Another of those splendours Approached me, and its will to pleasure me It signified by brightening outwardly, As one delighted to do good ; Became a thing transplendent in my sight. As a fine ruby smitten by the sun. Thus, then, to be able to resuscitate in the man that is down and out, a belief that even for him there are still 13 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION possibilities of recovery, to kindle anew the flame of endeavour in those who have given up the struggle, to bind up the broken-hearted, to awaken determination in the men and women whose wills have been paralysed into torpor, this is a function reserved for those whose stream of hopeful joy is running so deep and full as to overflow into the empty and desolate wastes of human life, and make them fragrant and fruitful as the Garden of the Lord. No man had better touch this work unless he has this divine hopefulness, and can see the possible good in men however far from God, else he will only reduce the work¬ ing efficiency of his comrades by his forecasts of failure, while the already despondent, with regard to whom he has lost heart, will be driven into deeper depths of despair. Paul says elsewhere ‘ We are saved by Hope / he speaks of God as the ‘ God of Hope/ and those who have drunk most deeply of His Spirit and entered most fully into His redeeming purpose can never give way to despair. Moreover, as we have seen, their hope will shine in their faces and radiate from their entire personality, creating an atmosphere of moral hygiene, so that in their presence and company men will feel that to be possible which, in the company of other and less courageous souls, nothing could ever induce them to attempt. Personalities are stimulative or depressant, dynamic or static, locomotives or dead-weight trucks ; and while each class may be helpful in its time and place, neither can be substituted for the other, and your depressing dead-weight brother must not be assigned the task of lightening the burden of those who are oppressed and THE FUNCTION OF CONSOLATION 195 heavy of heart. He will only succeed in weighting them with lead, where your happy-hearted, buoyant brother will wing them for joyous flight. Now if ever there was a call for this ministry of comfort and encouragement it is to-day, when the heart of the world is tom with anguish and millions of homes lie under the shadow of death. While it may be true that we are not all gifted in giving inspiration to others and making them feel that in spite of failure and defeat life is still worth while, yet we can at least refrain from dis¬ couraging them. The burden that the world is bearing is quite heavy enough without having it increased by the gloomy forecasts of pessimistic and dispirited souls ; while those who are seeking to hearten the world and cheer it on to fresh attempts might at least be spared the critical depreciation of their Christly work. Let us give our blessing to every labourer, of whatever designation, who is honestly striving to make the little bit of earth whereon he lives the better for his stay. But there are those who are humanly fitted to do this work of cheering up and on, whose gifts have been allowed to fall into disuse, with the result that many a lonely soul has missed the kindly word or the helping hand, when its timely offer would have made all the difference between victory and defeat. Now the English word * mercy ’ in our text springs from the same root as the word ‘ miserable/ and this is deeply suggestive. It looks as though the evolution of the word ‘ mercy ’ from ‘ misery ’ marked in etymology the path of the process in psychology by which the merciful man has become merciful, through putting himself 1 96 DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTION in the place of the miserable man, till by thought and feeling he has become one with him, and thus made his less fortunate brother’s griefs his own. Now it is only the strong and joyous soul who has strength and buoyancy to spare that is fitted for this work. I do not mean, of course, that such a soul should not itself have suffered, but it must not have gone under, and because of this it is able to help. The submerged cannot help the submerged to rise, though they may help them to endure. Two depressants will not evolve a stimulant, and work of this type will make such a drain upon the sympathies and courage of the worker that it is little wonder the apostle should have specialized this department in the Christian Church. It is a class of work which not only must not be left to chance, but should be committed to the very choicest souls. Some people, well-intentioned enough, spoil every¬ thing they do by a singular ungraciousness of manner. In such a case it would be infinitely better for this class to make some loving and pleasantly dispositioned personality the channel of their distribution. Some people are temperamentally cold and distant, some abrupt and off-hand in manner, others again are awkwardly self- conscious, making every one with whom they deal feel ill at ease. Indeed there are very few who are able so to approach a wounded and sensitive soul as to minister healing and hope. But the Church has a distinct mission to the mourner. For what else has she been anointed to her high office, if not to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the broken¬ hearted, to follow in His steps who bore the world’s sorrows and carried its grief ? The Church that does not THE FUNCTION OF CONSOLATION 197 multiply points of contact with the sorrowful, dejected, and defeated, to open up for them a way of hope through the gate of the gospel, will soon be put out of commission. But it must seek to raise men by putting them on the highway of holiness. Mere bodily relief after all is only a palliative, it does not touch the seat of the trouble. It is not anodynes that the world requires, but to be brought into touch with God as He reveals Himself in Jesus Christ. Those who discharge this function of showing mercy must never stop short of this, for when all is said and done, what mercy can compare with that of bringing the troubled soul into the presence of the Eternal Mercy Himself, that there it may be taken to His heart, and like a tired child he back on the bosom of the Infinite Love ! V REPRODUCTION ; OR, THE MISSIONARY IMPERATIVE The Church that does not reproduce, that is not mission¬ ary, is weaving her own shroud. The first great impera¬ tive imposed upon all fife in the beginning of days — ‘ Be fruitful and multiply ' — is laid upon her, and where she ceases to function as a self-propagating force, she is found to perish. Bushnell has pointed out that there should be two methods of growth proceeding in every healthy Church, growth by conquest from without and by popu¬ lation from within.1 Any organism that refuses right-of- way to fife by denying it facilities for transmission com¬ mits a breach of trust. Nowhere is life a possession simply to be enjoyed. It is a stewardship to be sacredly worked so as to be a centre of transmitted vital energy. An organism is a temporary foothold employed by life for the purpose of self -propagation. Through loyalty to this law of reproduction it is enabled to pay its debt to the past in the only possible way, by endowing the future. Every living unit thus stands between the past and the future, with obligations to both which it cannot evade without being guilty of default. It was this default of which Israel was guilty, and whose consequent 1 Spiritual Nurture (Bushnell). 198 REPRODUCTION 199 condemnation and doom Christ foreshadowed in the parable of the Barren Fig Tree. Here was a structure which life had reared for the express purpose of serving as a receiving and transmitting station. But what was re¬ ceived was not passed on. It was simply pocketed. The tree thereby forfeited its right to continuance just as would any carrying firm that opened and appropriated parcels with which it had been entrusted, instead of for¬ warding them to their respective destinations. Where it should have given unto life facilities to express itself in fruit whose seed should be in itself after its kind, it inter¬ dicted the process, diverting the vital forces from their reproductive functions, so that they lost themselves and perished, veritable ‘ Babes in the Wood/ whose burial place it had covered up with leaves. Life instead of being cradled found itself coffined. It was a case of 'no-exit/ and the tragedy of the situation was that its entrapping foe was of its own household. Its properly constituted guardian became guilty of misappropriation, impounding and turning to its own ends what it held in trust. Thus its dependent ward was robbed of its rights, and thereby disqualified from fulfilling the law of inheritance and bequeathing the estate. Every living organism is intended to furnish a highway along which life shall have a straight and unimpeded path for propagation. Indeed, whatever else may have to suffer, these thoroughfares must be kept open and in good repair. Christ’s indictment of the Jewish nation was based on their failure in this regard. They had been ' planted in a very fruitful hill/ and constituted the trustees of a great faith, which through them was intended by God 200 REPRODUCTION; OR to become the religion of the race. In the seed of faith¬ ful Abraham were all the nations to be blessed. But though Israel thus possessed the true faith, instead of holding it as a stewardship for all the world she failed to propagate it. She put forth no fruit for the passer-by. A few of her prophets struck the universal note, but the nation never rallied to their call. They kept the know¬ ledge of the true and only God to themselves. Conse¬ quently, the idolatries which they failed to influence for good influenced them for ill. Israel had not only a finer ethic than her neighbours, but springing out of it a better social system and sanitary code. Had she laid herself out to universalize the knowledge of God the reflex result on her own character would have been elevating and consolidating. As it was, she became so feebly com¬ promising as to attempt a combination service of Jehovah and the Gods of the surrounding nations. This, of course, was the line of least resistance ; she relaxed her conduct with the loosening of her creed, substituted form for spirit, semblance for reality, and employed the very ordinances of her religion as a subterfuge under cover of which she practised the selfsame abominations against which she was elected to protest. The result was in¬ evitable ; her commission was cancelled and the doom of displacement fell. The faith that is not missionary becomes moribund, and Israel, falling a victim to her own selfishness, like the barren fig-tree of the parable, as a world-power withered away. Trees have from time immemorial been employed to symbolize the ideal life, both individual and social. * The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon/ THE MISSIONARY IMPERATIVE 201 and again, * He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water.' Indeed, so natural does it seem to think of the social organism under this similitude that family lineage and the inter-relations of houses, dynasties, and generations are more often than not set forth under the figure of a genealogical tree. The biological analogy is as beautiful as it is striking, for the roots of the tree, like those of the social organism, are struck into the soil of the dead past, its branches wave in the living present, while its flowers and fruits pass on to the future the promise and the potency of forests yet to be. Scientific investigation has proved that every tree, in spite of all appearance to the contrary, comes to bloom. For a long time it was thought that the yew-tree was an exception to this rule, and it was probably on account of its apparently perpetual gloom that it was selected as the symbol of sorrow, and became the chosen church¬ yard tree. Tennyson finely employs this change of opinion with regard to the yew-tree’s gloom to illustrate the change through which the gloom of his great sorrow passed with the passing of the years. At first his grief at Hallam’s death appeared as if it never could take on a different view, and so he despondently sings : Old yew, which graspest at the stones That name the underlying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head, Thy roots are wrapt about the bones. The seasons bring the flower again, And bring the firstling to the flock ; And in the dusk of thee, the clock Beats out the little lives of men. 202 REPRODUCTION; OR O not for thee the glow, the bloom, Who changest not in any gale, Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand years of gloom. And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee. But as time passed on he had to correct this early opinion about the yew, even as he had to correct his early opinion about the hopelessness of his grief. And so in vastly different mood he revisits the churchyard and addresses the ancient tree in altered terms : Old warder of these buried bones, And answering now my random stroke With fruitful cloud and living smoke. Dark yew that graspest at the stones. And dippest toward the dreamless head, To thee, too, comes the golden hour When flower is feeling after flower ; But Sorrow — fixt upon the dead, And darkening the dark graves of men — What whisper’d from her lying lips ? Thy gloom is kindled at the tips. And passes into gloom again. Blossom, then, here as everywhere, is the symbol of hope, and holds the promise of the future forests in its fragrant hands, for flower and seed are linked up by the great law of succession. The blossom swings as a cradle for the slowly forming seed, and by the rich colouring of its hangings, its overflow of nectar, and its disengagement of perfume, it secures for the seed the ministry of bees and THE MISSIONARY IMPERATIVE 203 other insects whose visits enrich both themselves and the flowers they enter. That the tiny ovule which gathers up and enfolds the vital principle for the purpose of its transmission may thus have all that the season can bring it, not only in the normal way of light and heat, moisture and air, but in adventitious aids through imported pollen, the blossom flies its flag of welcome, in purple or silver or gold, spreads its feast of nectar, and flings abroad its perfumed invitations to the winged wanderers from flower to flower. In the give and take of this happy commerce each is enriched, and thus the summer’s scented bloom serves as a symbol of that ideal social life in which no one’s gain involves another’s loss, but each contributes to the good of all, and the good of all is fully shared by each. The gold and silver glory of the blossoming trees is the beautiful and fragrant expression of life’s loyalty to the law of succession, under the pressure of which the vital principle demands of the organism in which it for the time resides, a right-of-way along which it pours its reproductive powers. Thus, then, as we pierce beneath all this seeming gaiety and wantonness, this riot and revel of feast and fragrance, of colour and contour, we see how deeply serious is the business for which it stands. It is life’s supreme effort to fulfil its stewardship. Every fragrant bloom is a declaration of trust, an acknowledgement that life is what in legal phrase is described as ‘ An estate in tale general ’ — that is to say, it is not a mere possession to be frittered and fooled away at will, but a deposit to be held in trust for posterity and bequeathed unencumbered and unspoiled. Hence the 204 REPRODUCTION; OR endless adjustments, utilities, precautions, adaptations, and contrivances, which are called into play for the purpose of effecting the transmission of the life forces, and in such a form as will secure both their fullest fertiliza¬ tion and their widest spread. Such is the pressure of this law that even at the cost of life itself the tree will die rather than disobey. That is to say, if there be not sufficient vitality for both life and fruit, and the tree has to choose whether it shall live and prove disloyal to the law of reproduction or die in the attempt to pass on the torch of life, it will prefer to die. Yignerons with whom I have spoken assure me that they have taken advantage of this fact in their treatment of vines that have not been doing their best. By making a cincture in the bark they have scared a dilatory vine into the notion that it was about to die, and immediately it has hurried up, and doubled its output in the way of fruit, whose seed was in itself after its kind. In discussing this question some months ago with Professor Perkins of South Australia, he assured me from statistics that he held that the year before the vines perished in France through phylloxera, they appeared to have a premonition of the coming end, and gathered themselves up for a supreme and final effort, as much as to say, ‘ Well, even if we must die, we will at least secure the generation that is to come/ with the result that the vintage of that year far and away surpassed every record previously put up. Here, then, we see the secret meaning of all this lavish output in blossom, bud, and fruit. It is the sacrificial principle at work without which there is nothing here nor anywhere that is of beauty or of worth. In the splendour of the THE MISSIONARY IMPERATIVE 205 grass and the glory of the flower we see the fruit of sacrifice. Victim and priest in one, the fruit or forest tree in bloom lays of its best upon the altar, literally pouring out its life that it may redeem the earth from future barrenness and make the solitary places glad. It is through sacrifice that ‘ earth is crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God/ But though nature annually makes this great renunciation, there is no sadness in her mood. She does not appear unto men to fast. She puts on her beautiful garments and wears a joyful aspect, flooding the air with fragrance from her myriad censers as she offers thus her yearly sacrifice. It is a great and silent act of worship, and as she performs her rich and stately ritual to the music of singing birds, to those who have eyes to see and hearts to understand, ‘ The meanest flower that blows, can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears/ Now it is with these deep-lying thoughts, these mystical and sacramental meanings, that we are concerned. Here is the great obligation which the blossom of the year exemplifies and proclaims : to hand down unimpaired to our successors what we have so richly received. The care with which nature fulfils this law is deeply suggestive of the scrupulous fidelity with which we should guard in their passage the inherited treasures which we seek to transmit. So finely sealed are the precious potencies of life within the seed, and in many cases, so fortified against consumption by forbidding barriers in the way of bitter flavours, that their chances of survival are raised to the maximum. Though some seeds may lie undeveloped in the soil 206 REPRODUCTION; OR for decades, they will not deteriorate. Other growths may dispossess and replace their sires for half a century, but they will bide their time. The fires that destroy their usurpers will but liberate their pent-up forces, so that they may wave in green and golden triumph above the ashes of their foes. Now, what the trees thus do under the necessity of great biological laws, we are called upon to do by choice. We are trustees on behalf of the future. To claim heirship while we default in stewardship is to invalidate our claim, and prove ourselves unworthy successors to the estates we are called upon to administer. The past, instead of placing us in moral credit, casts us in moral debit. Instead of heightening claims, it deepens obligations. We have come into a great inheritance in the Christian Church. She has come down to us baptized with the blood of her martyred sons. There are no pages of our history over which we bend with so profound and reverent a joy, as those which tell of heroic men and brave-hearted women who, for the sake of Christ and the gospel, have in every age dared the scaffold and the stake, or on mission fields have poured out their souls unto death. The whole history of the Church goes to show that the force and flow, the warmth and glow of a progressive Christianity, have always been in proportion to the sacrificial spirit she has displayed. This element is the truest index of her multiplying power, and it is only as it becomes the dominant principle of her life, commanding all her forces, at all times and to all issues, that the beat of her pulse can be strong or the tide of her life run high. But no Church can be THE MISSIONARY IMPERATIVE 207 missionary that is not sacrificial. Through sacrifice alone can she vindicate her right to be called by the name of Christ. She is the product of the sublimest act of sacrifice that the world has ever seen, — a sacrifice so utter and absolute in its self-surrender as to overpower the thought, paralyse the imagination, and smite the ages with speechless awe. Now the Church that is the fruit of so stupendous a sacrifice must, in order to be true to the great law of inheritance, become sacrificial too. Read in the fight of this supreme moral impera¬ tive, the martyr’s death is at once redeemed from its apparent wantonness and waste. It is seen not as a separate and unconnected incident, with no relation to either past or future, not as an accident that might have been foreseen and perhaps prevented. It is rather a necessary part of a divine plan, and makes its contribu¬ tion to that great redeeming purpose which runs through all time and through all worlds to issue in the home¬ bringing of all God’s wandering children to the warmth and welcome of the House not made with hands. Other men sacrificed and we are enjoying the fruits. But we cannot accept the privilege without accepting the obligation with which it is counterpoised. From this obligation there can be no honourable discharge. At whatever cost of personal comfort the Church is bound to seek that she may save. We may not be called to die for our faith, but we are called to five for it, and this will often call for a greater, because more sustained, heroism than that which is required to lead a forlorn hope or win the Victoria Cross — the homely heroism of common fife that will enable us to do justly and love 208 REPRODUCTION; OR mercy, and walk humbly with our God. There are strange forces at work in the social life of our time, forces highly organized and gathering in power and intelligence. But unless these newly-awakened forces, in the persons of those who wield them, are brought to the Cross of Calvary and are there baptized into the spirit of self- sacrificing love, they will work disaster and doom to the empire that we hold so dear. Under the shadow of the great war’s woe, which still darkens so many thousands of our homes, how can we hesitate ? Every drop of British blood that stains the battle-fields of Europe and the East is calling to its kindred blood to render certain that its shedding shall not be in vain. There is no call like that of sacrificial blood poured out in a great cause, and at its challenge there is only one thing for honourable men to do, unless they are to remain under the lash of perpetual self-rebuke, and that is to drink of the same sacrificial cup, and, either by actual personal service, or, if that be impracticable, by such other contribution as the spirit of a self-renouncing chivalry shall dictate, helping to carry to a finish the work that has been so heroically commenced. A man must indeed be pretty low down in the scale of moral being to whom a great act of self-sacrifice does not appeal. The homage of humanity in the presence of such self-surrender is instinctive, universal, unequivocal. In such a case cold reason is simply ruled out. Her calculations as to cost, her suggestions of waste, are resented as an impertinence. She has no status in this court. She is not qualified to plead. The facts are of a kind that she is incompetent to handle. She possesses THE MISSIONARY IMPERATIVE 209 no scales sufficiently delicate to assess such exquisitely subtle values. In dealing with these questions we are moving in another realm from that of pounds, shillings, and pence, a realm whose quantities have no financial equivalent, where ease and comfort, fame and fortune, home and friends, wife and child, and even life itself, must be renounced at duty’s call. It is a realm where the every¬ day maxim, ‘ Each for himself,’ is reversed, and ‘ Each for the other, and all for the common weal ’ is the infallible criterion of worth. Here are principles and values that run in the teeth of all political economy, and laugh to scorn the laws of supply and demand. But, though they thus array against themselves all the worldly wisdom of the market-place and the exchange, they continue to persist and prevail. They are imponderable, and yet, strangest of all paradoxes, when weighed against material things they cause thrones and dominions, armies and navies, gold and silver, wheat and wool, and all the wealth of the world, to kick the beam. The life that is lavish in sacrifice thus becomes rich beyond all the dreams of avarice, and noble beyond the rank of kings. Hence, to measure up the moral value of any professedly noble act, you must ascertain how much of self-sacrifice it involved. This is the infallible test — the unchanging and unchangeable standard of valuation in the moral world — and that, when all is said and done, is the only world that matters. How true this is becomes speedily apparent from the fact that in the presence of any great act of self-sacrifice Mammon stands abashed, lawless ambition is rebuked, pride begins with shame to take a 14 210 REPRODUCTION lower place, covetousness averts her gaze from the object of illicit desire, and even sensuality seeks to hide her burning face. Indeed, not only do the vices cower before the silent majesty of sacrifice, but even the prudential and self-complacent virtues show up pale and bloodless beside the crimson splendour of her altar-fires, even as the morning stars grow dim, — When on the glimmering limit far withdrawn, God makes Himself an awful rose of dawn. The law of sacrifice runs like a scarlet thread through all the grades of life, and glorifies them all. It is the ‘ All- red route ’ along which the lowest may pass to the highest, and the last become first. The strength of the earth is sacrificed to the grass of the field, the strength of the grass to the sheep and cattle on a thousand hills, and the sheep and the cattle are sacrificed to man and his needs ; and it is only as man in his turn pours out his strength, a living sacrifice on the holy altar of God in the service of humanity, that he can reach his highest or achieve his best. This law has thus, as we have seen, a biological and economic value and significance long before it enters the moral world at all. Here, however, it reaches its culmination, finding its highest and most sublime expression in the Cross of the world’s Christ, and it is only as its spirit passes into ours, only as we are prepared even at the cost of sacrifice to hand on the torch, that we can vindicate our right to have and to hold the possessions we enjoy. VI EPILOGUE It only remains to show the ground on which the great apostle bases his appeal for the realization of this cor¬ porate ideal, viz. ‘ The mercies of God/ Now the mercies of God come to expression as nowhere else in the Cross of the world’s Christ, and throughout his whole teaching the Apostle Paul sets the Cross against the dark back¬ ground of the world’s sin. There are many aspects under which sin is set before us in the Scriptures, but there is one factor that is common to them all, and that is ‘ divergence.’ Now this idea of sin as a divergent, divisive, disruptive force, breaking up the unity of life and putting asunder what God had joined together, seems everywhere to underlie the Scripture teaching with regard to redemption. Christ is set forth as the great unifying medium through whom are being gathered into one all the scattered wills and truant affections of this and of every other world. This is the essential idea of our word ‘ atonement.’ It is made up of the two English words ‘ at ’ and ‘ one,’ so that to ‘ atone ’ means to * set at one.’ ‘ This,’ says Skeat, ' was a clumsy expedient, so much so as to make the etymology look doubtful, but it can be clearly traced, and there need be no hesitation about it.’ Now Christ 2IX 212 EPILOGUE claims that this power of cosmic unification is exerted through the attraction of His Cross. * I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.’ There are certain great implications here that it will be well to render explicit before dealing with the main issue. The first is the fact of universal human divergence from the ideal, which divergence Christ set Himself to correct, and the consciousness of which we are accustomed to speak of as ‘ a sense of sin/ There is a remarkable phrase in Eph. i. io in which this unifying idea that is folded up in the term ' holiness ’ finds expression. The passage runs thus : ‘ In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of His grace, that in the dispensation of the fullness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in Him/ Dr. Way’s translation is finer — ‘ to ^-unite.’ Christ’s teaching seems to be this, that through the historic act and fact of His crucifixion a new and centri¬ petal force is let loose upon the world which will every¬ where make for the reversal of that centrifugal force by which men fly off from their God-appointed orbits and seek orbits of their own. In the Ptolemaic theory of the universe this earth was regarded as the centre of the solar system, around which the sun and all the planets were seen to revolve. The Copernican system, which displaced this and which now holds the field, regards the sun as the centre around which the earth and all her sister planets revolve. Now the adoption of the Copernican theory, while it made a revolution in man’s thinking, was attended by no corresponding cataclysm among the EPILOGUE 213 heavenly bodies themselves. Unhasting, unresting, and heedless of all human theories, they keep up their majestic march towards the goal of the divine desire. But the change from a geo-centric or earth-centred to a theo- centric or God-centred theory in the moral world does effect, not only a revolution in man’s thinking, but through his thinking in all his conduct. It has, as Richter finely says, ‘ Lifted centuries off their hinges, turned the stream of history into new channels, and still governs the ages.’ Every force, to be effective, must bear relation to the class of work that requires to be done. Now, inasmuch as the work which Christ sought to effect was moral, every idea of force in a physical sense had to be counted out, because for God to compel man even for man’s good, for Him to override and carry His purpose, so to speak, at the point of the sword, would be for Him to gain a merely physical victory at the disastrous cost of a moral defeat. Now it is in the adjustment of moral means to the realization of His great cosmic and redeeming ends that Christ crucified becomes both the power of God and the wisdom of God. Nowhere is wisdom more required than in the use of power, and nowhere is the wise use of power more in demand than in the treatment of moral beings. Every one knows how, in the administration of the home and in seeking to restore ruptured family relations, great wisdom and discretion are required. The task of adjustment calls for the utmost delicacy, the most consummate tact, that love can suggest or ingenuity contrive. There is in every such case a twofold end to be gained. Not only must the breach be healed and the unity of the home restored, but the parental authority 214 EPILOGUE must be upheld and preserved or there can be no lasting peace. Thus, then, thinking of God, as we are instructed to do, in terms of Fatherhood, and regarding the whole race of men as His children who have broken loose from home and its restraints, the task of restoration will at once present problems calling for the most exquisite blending of affection and wisdom, so that the assurance of pardon and welcome wrought in the heart of the sinner shall be attended with a due feeling as to the awfulness of his sin. Now the Cross of Christ performs this twofold act, achieves this double purpose, meets this dual need. The second implication is the universal moral responsive¬ ness of the human heart to the pull of Christ’s attractive power. The magnetic field, swept by the forces of redemption, is shown to be co-extensive with all time and with all worlds. ‘ For it pleased the Father that in Him all fullness should dwell, and, having made peace through the blood of His Cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself. By Him, I say, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven.’ No one lies outside its reach or range. In some mysterious way Christ acquired through His Cross a vantage-ground from which to reach the farthest away and bring him near. His uplifting means the uplifting of the race in Him. It liberated a force which until then was pent up, or but partially operative, because untranslated, just as the force of a great thought may lie dormant through being imprisoned in an unknown tongue. This was the case with all the power and grace of Greek thought during the Middle Ages. It was a frozen fountain till, under the warmth of the Renaissance, it was set free to cut its EPILOGUE 215 fertilizing way through Italy, France, Germany, and England, making them burgeon into newness of life. Indeed, this analogy between words with their sealed- up forces which have to be liberated to become effective, and the Strong Son of God with all the redeeming energies which His heart of love enfolds, and which had to pour themselves forth and find expression in His Cross, runs deeper than at first appears. Christ is called the * Divine Word/ but a word is the expression of a thought, a feeling, a purpose ; and all God's redeeming thoughts and feelings and purposes, which struggled for expression through history, prophecy, and psalm for centuries, realized themselves in the ‘ Word made flesh/ But they flashed into form only that through form they might flash back into spirit. It is only as the Incarnation is thus spiritually resolved back into its essential elements, only as it is spiritually interpreted and discerned, that it completes its circuit and achieves its end. Just as a word, which is the incarnation of a thought, must be made to deliver up its inner meaning so that the receiving mind may be able to comprehend the transmitting mind, so the incarna¬ tion of Christ — the Divine Word — must be so received into the soul of man as to be made to unseal and deliver up its inner and spiritual significance. That this might be rendered possible it behoved Christ to suffer. Only through suffering and death could all the implicit qualities with which His heart was charged be made explicit and available as a morally regenerative force. It is not the word, but the thought that it encloses, that matters, just as it is not the envelope, but the letter it enfolds, that counts. The former must perish that the latter may be 2l6 EPILOGUE appropriated. The Incarnation was merely a human envelope enclosing the divine message of grace and truth. Through the Crucifixion that envelope was rent in order that its divinely enfolded life might pour itself into history and mingle freely with the life of the world. Just as the Latin inscription on the Cross, through translation into its Hebrew and Greek equivalent, let loose the truth about Jesus of Nazareth so that all might read and understand, so the love of God, through transla¬ tion into terms of sacrifice, found a mode of expression which the wayfaring man, though a fool, could compre¬ hend. Paul speaks about the ' Word of the Cross/ and according to him it spelt something other than it appeared. Humanly speaking, it spelt ‘ weakness * ; divinely speak¬ ing, it spelt ‘ power.' Now, as there is yet no universal language, it comes to pass that the very instrument that serves as a highway of thought between men who speak the same tongue becomes a positive barrier where they do not. Indeed, there is no such effective barrier between men as a foreign tongue. But there is a language that transcends all uttered speech, that overleaps all boun¬ daries of nationality, and is understood alike by all people, learned and illiterate, degraded and refined. That is the language of pity, of sympathy, of brotherly love, a language that discards the clumsy medium of mere words and embodies itself in tender offices and kindly deeds. The writer did not understand a word of Syriac, and the dozen or more lepers that he met outside the Garden of Gethsemane could not understand a word of English, but they understood when he sent over his dragoman to minister to their needs, that he felt for the EPILOGUE 217 misery he longed to relieve. Moreover, their gratitude was expressed in terms that needed no interpreter to translate, terms that proved at once the poverty and superfluity of words. When a kind thought or a loving impulse translates itself into an act of pitying tenderness it finds a universal language of appeal, a language dumb but irresistibly eloquent, mute but majestic in its power to attract, to persuade, to subdue. Such a language is next to impossible of misinterpretation, and this is the language of the Cross. If the everywhere present force of gravitation could be photographed it would probably be found to present the appearance of myriads of hair¬ like lines of force crossing one another at innumerable angles, lines along which the attractive energy would be seen streaming to and from every particle in nature and thus binding the universe into an organized whole. Now what gravitation is in the world of matter the Divine Love may be held to be in the world of mind. It is that out-streaming force from the heart of the Infinite which flows forth to the heart of every finite, drawing it with ineffable tenderness up and out and away from the sin which means division and discord, into the serene heights of that holiness which means unification, where all the clash of divided interests is hushed — or rather harmonized — in that over-mastering love which is the fulfilment of the law. Humanly speaking, of course ; for Paul, in preaching to the Greeks, to base his missionary hopes on what he calls the ‘ Word of the Cross/ was hopelessly to prejudice his case from the outset. It was to court disaster and foredoom his mission to defeat. He knew the inwardness of the Greek mind, and was sympathetic 15 218 EPILOGUE with it. He had been bom and educated in a Greek city. He understood the Greek prejudice against everything that savoured of suffering and physical disability. The Greek could not associate divinity with physical weakness or bodily suffering. Knowing all this, the disposition must have been strong to discourse on the lofty ethic of Christ’s teaching and the moral beauty of His life. One might have thought that in his desire to conciliate them he would have thmst these into the forefront of his message, and that a veil would have been thrown around the tragedy of the Cross. If, however, this was Paul’s temptation, it was manfully resisted and grandly over¬ come ; for both at Athens and Corinth, in spite of Stoic and cynic, sophist and sceptist, he preached a crucified Saviour as the only ground of hope for Greek as well as barbarian, knowing as he did so that in the Cross there was gathered up a power mightier than that which had guided the Caesars to universal empire, and a wisdom richer and deeper than the philosophy of Greece had ever dreamed. According to Paul, the Crucifixion is a challenge to the world’s thought as well as to its feeling. Back of it all, and constituting the ground of its necessity, Paul assumes the awful fact of human sin. The Cross, in his estimate, is the divinely selected method of effecting the re¬ covery, the reinstatement, and the moral reinforcement of the race. According to his teaching, it must not be regarded as a divine afterthought introduced to meet a contingency that unexpectedly arose. This is totally to misconceive the place and work of Christ in the cosmic system. That system included the Cross not merely as a pre-determined fact, but as a pre-determining factor, in EPILOGUE 219 view of which the entire creative process was conceived, conducted, and controlled. As a forethought of the divine mind it shaped the whole method of divine procedure. Until the Cross was ideally set up the scheme of creation, involving man as its culminating point, could not be justifiably launched. The ethics of the case demanded that no creative scheme should be projected that did not safeguard the moral interests of every sentient creature within the sweep of its orbit. By constituting man a moral agent God created the possibility of disloyalty, with all the disabilities which such a lapse would neces¬ sarily involve. By so doing He was morally bound to include as an intrinsic part of His scheme an adequate provision for meeting and correcting any and every deviation which man in the abuse of his moral freedom might pursue. Any other view would require us to suppose that He launched a vast creative scheme carry¬ ing risks which either He had not foreseen, or, having foreseen, had made no provision to meet, so that either His omniscience must be found wanting or His infinite goodness impugned. We are forced both by the intellectual and ethical necessities of the case to assume, first, that all the contingencies which the creation of a race of morally free intelligences involved were present to the divine mind while that creation was as yet only ideally existent, and before a single step had been taken in the great evolutionary process which climbs to its culmination in man. And, secondly, we must assume that ample provision was secured to meet all the necessities which, through the occurrence of any or all of these contingencies, might arise. The Cross of Christ thus conceived 220 EPILOGUE becomes the centre of creation as well as of redemption. Its appearance on Calvary was but the historical com¬ pletion of a transaction the beginning of which has to be dated back ‘ before the mountains were brought forth or ever the earth and the world were made.’ According to Paul, as Christ was the active agent of creation He had of necessity to become the active agent of redemption. This is the clear teaching from Col. i. : ‘ In whom we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins : who is the image of the invisible God, the first-bom of all creation ; for in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers ; all things have been created through Him, and unto Him ; and He is before all things and in Him all things consist (margin, hold together).' Now what can this mean but that, seeing He is responsible for the creation, He thereby becomes responsible for all the moral peril to which by its freedom it is exposed? He could not launch such a system on the ocean of being, with power in itself to become deranged, and then, when that derangement had set in, leave it derelict to drift to its doom. It can only ‘ hold together,' as Paul shows, in Him, and for any disintegration which may result through its own perversity it has a perfect right to look to Him for correction and redress. In providing for our justifica¬ tion God thus makes provision for His own, and in the only possible way, by shouldering the Lability which His creative act has incurred. If, as Paul affirms, God is the Father in whom every family in heaven and earth is named, then the sin of the world is a family trouble and EPILOGUE 221 touches the family honour. In the blame and shame of it, the Almighty Father, by reason of his Fatherhood, is bound to share. He is so mixed in with it that the clearing up of it is as much His concern as ours. The Cross thus becomes a manifestation of divine righteousness and not merely of divine love, for, to quote again the great apostle, in writing to the Romans, ‘ All have sinned and come short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth to be a propitiation through faith, by His blood to show His righteousness’ (not merely His love, mark, but His righteousness), and he repeats it, that there may be no misunderstanding of his meaning, ‘ to declare, I say, His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of him that belie veth in Jesus.’ The conclusion is inevitable that God’s own justification necessitated His own suffering in the person of His Son, and by the assumption of the great world’s sin. ' He was made sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him,’ or, as Dr. Way renders it, ‘ Jesus knew no sin, yet God made Him to be the world’s sin for our sakes, that we whose sin He had thus assumed might become by our union with Him God’s righteousness.’ God had to be right with Himself, and He may be regarded as declaring by the Cross the truth revealed through Ezek. xxxvi. 22 : ‘ Thus saith the Lord God ; I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for My holy name’s sake.’ And so it was that when the sin that His creative act rendered possible had become actual, it completed the circuit and reacted upon Him, hence ‘ it behoved Christ to 222 EPILOGUE suffer, and to rise again from the dead the third day/ Now the perfection of wisdom has been defined as the adaptation of the best means to the best ends, and herein is wisdom made perfect in that the Almighty, before any created being had as yet sprung into existence at the breath of His mouth, anticipated all that would occur, and wrought into the very heart of His creative purpose and process an economy of grace and restoration before there was a soul to be tempted or a law to be disobeyed. Of that economy the Cross is the full and final expression. It is the glowing centre, where all the moral attributes of God meet and find their focal point, thence to radiate in streams of beneficent recovery and reinstating grace. It is a force wisely adjusted to the class of work that requires to be wrought. It has to respect the free agency of the creature, and yet at the same time come clothed with all those majestic sanctions which belong to the Creator. It is in the fine balance of these forces, in the wondrous delicacy of their adjustment and application, in the skilful administration of divine grace so as not to diminish but enhance the true and proper dignity of the recipient, that the wisdom of God is made manifest, so that the soul through His abounding grace may regain not only the forfeited favour, but the long-lost image of the divine. The human soul, however depraved, instinctively demands that any salvation offered to it shall be on terms that will not do violence to its own sense of honour to accept. Before the gift of pardon can be received it must be satisfied that every just claim has been met, and that its release has been honourably obtained. This is EPILOGUE 223 not a false pride requiring to be broken down. It is a divinely implanted and proper sense of justice, to be profoundly respected and jealously preserved. Any so-called salvation that involved self-stultification, or that required a man to become any the less a man through accepting it, would thereby belie its name. The soul does not seek to evade the penalty of its wrong-doing. It rather seeks to endure it. It even hastens to meet it, feeling in its best moments that there could be nothing in the universe so dreadful as impunity. For the normal soul to have an unsatisfied judgement recorded against it is a perpetual distress, and there sets in sooner or later a longing to foot the bill and to get square with the nature of things, which is God. No atonement provided by a pure and holy being could afford to ignore this instinct, and as I conceive and construe the Cross, its purpose is rather to deepen than dissipate the sense of its requirements. The Cross is not a clever device by which we are enabled to escape from our obligations. It is the divinely-appointed dynamic whereby we are energized for their full and fair discharge. The grace of God through the atoning work of Christ makes an advance to the insolvent soul in the way of moral assets with which to cancel its moral disabilities. A man is thus made morally solvent on trust. Because of his faith he is reckoned to be in funds. He is rendered financial as to righteousness. He is placed in moral credit, and as a pure matter of grace, in order that, working on this credit, he may re-establish his moral status and earn a good degree. This is how justification by faith passes into justification by works, and the soul vindicates its right 224 EPILOGUE to have and to hold the advance it has received. A man may not work for his salvation ; that is a free gift ; it is purely of grace. But when he has got it he must work at it and with it, so to speak, as his moral stock-in-trade. The wisdom of thus dividing the onus of salvation so that man becomes, not only a consenting party, but a working partner in the business, preserves the sanctity and self-respect of the individual will, so that in the acceptance of the gift the recipient, through humbling himself, finds the way to truest exaltation. The twin forces of divine wisdom and power thus meet and mingle in the Cross, so that the claims of the human mind as well as of the human heart are met and satisfied by this expression of the mind and heart of God. The problem with which the Almighty was faced in redemption was not so much to provide a salvation as to get it off His hands ; not so much to bridge the chasm man's sin had cut, as to induce man to cross the bridge. The initial movement towards reconciliation has always been from God's side. Let it be dismissed from our minds, if ever it was entertained, that the sacrifice of the Cross was in any way a purchase price of the Divine Love. God does not love us because Christ died for us ; but Christ died for us because God loved us ; and when we see that His love was so great that it was prepared to suffer in its effort to redeem, this it is that conquers us. We cannot hold out against such love. It is simply irresistible. A man never feels so mean as when he discovers that he has wronged a personal friend or pained a loving and generous heart ; and this is the conviction that Christ crucified works in us — that by our sin we have been EPILOGUE 225 wounding a tender and loving spirit and giving Him more than mortal pain ; that He whom we have been working, and planning, and sinning against has all the time been caring for our interests, and seeking in a thousand ways to bless and enrich our lives. Who can express the remorse that must set in upon such a discovery ? Is there anything too great to do or to suffer if we can only wipe out the memory of that wrong ? Can we conceive of a mightier moral force at work in our lives than that which would operate in such a case ? Well, this is the power of the Cross ! It works in us such a conviction of shame and unworthiness that we have no peace until we range ourselves on its side and take our stand against the sin that made it a necessity. This alone is salvation — to be won to a different temper towards sin ; to come to hate it for the disruptive and hatefully contaminating thing that it is, and to pour out our life in seeking to counteract its baleful influence in ourselves and in the world. Herein, then, is made manifest not only the love — as Paul declares — but the power and the wisdom of God. In one of the most notable of His post-Resurrection utterances the Risen Christ claimed that all authority had been given to Him in heaven and on earth. Now the word translated ‘ authority ’ in this passage means more thanmere * power.’ Powermay exist without the authority to use it, and, conversely, authority may exist without the power to back it. But in Christ these both cohere. Into His pierced hands run up all the reins of might and right, as from His mediatorial throne He wields the almighty dynamic of His Resurrection life. He calls to 226 EPILOGUE all the ages, 4 lam He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of death and of the underworld/ According to the Apostle Paul, 'He is declared' — 'horizoned,' as the Greek has it, defined, marked out — * to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.' Nothing can be clearer from the documents than that, in the apostle's view, Christ’s supreme authority and purchase on humanity — His moral leverage on the race — has been acquired through sacrifice. In a passage of tremendous power and majesty Paul reminds the Philip- pians that Christ voluntarily laid aside what pre-existent rights He held as man’s Creator, that through their surrender He might take to Himself a more excellent right as their Redeemer. He loosened His grasp on the forces of physical compulsion that He might close it on those of moral persuasion and constraint. He relin¬ quished the iron rod of His omnipotence in order to assume the golden sceptre of self-sacrificing love. From being the almighty Master He became the all-suffering servant, becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross, that through sacrificial service He might acquire a mastery infinitely superior in its nature, infinitely greater in its grasp, infinitely wider in its sweep, infinitely gentler in its working, than anything He had renounced — a mastery destined not merely to command the homage of universal humanity, but to bend to its authority in adoring wonder all wills, whether they be wills in heaven, or wills on earth, or wills in the under¬ world, till every knee should bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. INDEX Acts of the Apostles, 104, 133 Aeschylus, 9 Anabolism, 40-70 Anderson, Dr., 80 Anglo-Saxon race, 57, 186 Animal mechanism, 15 Argyll, Duke of, 51 Assimilation, 40-70 ‘ Atonement,' the word, 21 1 Baritz, Moses, 166-8 Belief and behaviour, 120 Bergson, 41 Biological research, 7-19, 45 Blood of Christ, the, 65-6 Blood-plasma, 54, 65 ‘ Body,’ the word, 27 ; Paul’s analogy, 29 Brain, the, 88, 143 Britain, leadership of, 186 Browning, 13, 76, 185 Bushnell, 198 Campbell, H., 40 Cancer, 83 ‘ Cheerfulness,’ the word, 192 Child, education of the, 136 Chlorophyll, 46 Christ’s Body, 30, 67 Christ the carpenter, 30 ; His temptation, 118 Christendom, a united, 33 Christianity, social, 88 Citizenship, Christian, 134 Communism, 26 Community, growth of a, ill Consolation, 190- 197 Conversion, 133 Copernican system, 212 Corinthians, Epistle to, 122 Cross, the, 211-226 Dante, 193 Development, 82-92 Differentiation of function, 93-197 Diligence, 181 Dissimilation, 71-81 Dobell, Sydney, 79 Dorner, 25 Economics and biology, 17 Education, Christian, 137 Electricity, 97, 99 Embryo, the, 34 Emotion, the place of, 159 English people, 187-9 Enriques, Professor, 8 Ephesians, Epistle to, 32, 95 Evangelist, the, 155 Eve, 149 Exhorter, the, 155-9 Exhorting, 155-169 Faerie Queen, 193 Faith quality, the, 44 Foodstuffs, 41-4 Forms, 71-8 Galileo, 111 General Staff, the, 36-7 Germany, 57-61, 152 Gifts and grace, 95-8 Giving, 1 70- 1 79 Gravitation, law of, 139, 165. 217 Greek thought, 214, 217-18 Haig, Earl, 36 Haldane, Lord, 112 Haldane, Professor, 14, 16, 49, 67, 69 Hallam, Arthur, 201 Hebrews, Epistle to, 153 Hellgate Rocks, 161-2 Hopefulness, 194 Hutchison, 40 Huxley, 46, 147 Hypermetropia, 87 Inge, Dean, 22 International fidelity, 63 Iwanaki, Baron, 187-8 227 INDEX 228 James, William, 11 Japanese opinion, 187 Jewish nation, 199-200 Jhering, von, 112 Katabolism, 71-81 Keith, 93 Kepler, 146 Law and Force, 51 Law, enforcement of, 163 Leadership, 180-190 Legal order, 1 63 Localization of function, 88 London, 124 Love of God, 54-56, 102 Lymph, 40, 67, 69 Marshall, Professor, 17 Martensen, 55 Martyrdom, 206-7 Mechanistic theory, 14 ‘ Mercy,’ the word, 195 Metabolism, 40-81 Methodists, 155 Milton’s Areopagitica, 6 Ministry, 1 22-131 Missionary Imperative, the, 198-210 Mite, the widow’s, 176 Moral reform, 163 Morley, Viscount, 73 Murray, Dr. J. A., 83, 85 Nerve-fibres, 90 Organization, 20-39 Parliamentary representatives, 124-131 ' Paul, St., 18, 29, 65, 67, 75, 83, 100-3, 108,114 onwards, 148, 174,216, 217 Personal equation, 172 Personality, 173 Philip, St., 104 Philippians, Epistle to, 226 Plotinus, 22 Power, peril of, 99 Prophecy, 114-121 Prophet, the, 117 ‘ Proportion,’ the word, 119 Psychotherapy, 10 Ptolemaic theory, 212 Reconciliation through the Cross, 211-226 Renaissance, the, 168 Reproduction, 198-210 Resurrection, the, 122 Richter, 213 Rivers, William, 15 Romans, Epistle to, 18, 95, 123 Roux, 15, 82 Royce, Professor, 25, 28, 67 Russell, 25 Science and Religion, 147 Seeley, Professor, 186 Service, 98 Sherrington, Sir C., 15-16, 84, 90 ‘ Simplicity,’ the word, 171 Simpson, Professor, 79 ‘ Sittlichkeit,’ 112 Skeat, Professor, 21 1 ‘Sluggish,’ the word, 154 Socialism, 166-7 Soul, the new-born, 135 Specialization, 38, 156 Stephen, 104-7, 114 Student Christian Movement, 146-51 Syndesmology, 27 Teaching, 1 32-154 Tennyson, quoted, 32, 74, 142, 143, 151, 201-2 Thompson, Francis, 64 Thomson, Professor Arthur, 8, 11, 19, 93, 95 Timiriazeff’s experiment, 47 Trees, 45, 201 ; life of a, 46 Treitschke, 152 Triple Dynamic, the, 123 Truth, 56, 78, 147 ‘Twice-born,’ the, 11 Universe, the, 142, 212 Universities, Student Movement at, 146-152 Victoria Cross, 207 Vine, the, 204 Voltaire, 73 War, the Great, 58-61, 208 Way, Dr., 180, 212, 221 Wealth, 172-4 Welsh Revival, 160 Will of God, 88 Wordsworth, 52 Yew-tree, 201 Date Due : ' 1 fr\ F » 4» I 3v a * /<&■ * (A % oaiaiw*^***®®* -.. -.1' . ... .. . ■flpakj; H m f> • •* Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 1 1012 01030 5367