!>M?Ki';'ir!n 
 
 i 
 
 (MUntilKllttlUItlllti 
 
 HE QUES 
 
 ►NDER, 
 
 Mjni«f|»Hnj^ 
 
 LYNN HAROLD 
 HOUGH 
 
 I 
 
Class 
 Book 
 
 BT ( 5 
 
 Gwrightl^"- 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 
 
OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR 
 
 THE MEN OF THE GOSPELS 
 
 16mo. Net, 50 cents 
 
 THE LURE OF BOOKS 
 
 12mo. Net, 25 cents 
 ATHANASIUS: THE HERO 
 
 12mo. Net, $1.00 
 THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER 
 
 12mo. Net, $1.00 
 
The Quest for Wonder 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER PHILOSOPHICAL AND 
 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES 
 
 BY 
 
 LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 
 
 Professor of Historical Theology in 
 Garrett Biblical Institute 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 

 Copyright, 1915. by 
 LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 
 
 APR -6 1915 
 
 ©CI,a;J98233 
 
*7 
 
 TO MY FRIEND 
 
 DR. HENRY M. WILSON 
 
 A SOUTHERN GENTLEMAN 
 
 OF THE OLD SCHOOL 
 
 THIS VOLUME IS 
 
 AFFECTIONATELY 
 
 INSCRIBED 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 A Word to the Reader 9 
 
 I. The Quest for Wonder 11 
 
 II. The Preacher as a Student of Phi- 
 losophy 43 
 
 III. Bergson, as Seen from a Preacher's 
 
 Study 73 
 
 IV. The Religion of a Scientific Man. 101 
 V. The New Orthodoxy 129 
 
 VI. BUSHNELL AND "ThE ViCARIOUS SAC- 
 RIFICE" 155' 
 
 VII. Robert William Dale and His The- 
 ology, W^iTH Special Considera- 
 tion OF His Theory of the Atone- 
 ment 187 
 
 VIII. The Theological Situation Regard- 
 ing THE Atonement 217 
 
 IX. The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl 247 
 X. The Eschatology of the Book of 
 
 Revelation 275 
 
A WORD TO THE READER 
 
 After about sixteen years in the pastor- 
 ate the author of these studies finds himself 
 entering upon the work of a theological 
 professor. He has published much in the 
 periodicals of his church and in book form 
 during this time, and those interested are 
 not imfamiliar with his general position on 
 philosophical and theological matters. The 
 volume, The Theology of a Preacher, in 
 particular sets forth in an informal and 
 untechnical way his attitude toward the 
 significant matters in the realm of Christian 
 doctrine. 
 
 The present, however, seems an appro- 
 priate time for the publication of a number 
 of studies which express in a somewhat 
 formal way the results of investigation and 
 grapple and thought regarding the funda- 
 mental problems which confront the Chris- 
 tian thinker. The separate discussions are 
 published in the form in which they were 
 written at different periods, and this will 
 account for some repetition and for some 
 
 9 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 difference in mental atmosphere. Although 
 the studies touch upon a variety of themes, 
 they reflect one general point of view and 
 one set of principles applied to numerous 
 problems. Thanks are due to the publishers 
 of the Methodist Review, the Methodist 
 Quarterly Review, and the Bible Magazine 
 for permission to reprint material which has 
 appeared in these periodicals. 
 
 Lynn PIarold Hough. 
 Evanston, Illinois. 
 
 10 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 A SERIOUS and thoughtful man once had 
 a singular dream. He dreamed that a race 
 of men arose gifted with a strange power 
 to experiment with the fundamental char- 
 acteristics of the natural world. They could 
 change the qualities of the soil. They could 
 rearrange the laws of physics and chemistry. 
 They could separate things which have al- 
 ways been united and unite things which 
 have always been separated. They could 
 take qualities from the thing to which they 
 have always belonged and give them to other 
 things. Nothing was beyond the reach of 
 their manipulations. 
 
 For a time this powerful race greatly en- 
 joyed its unusual activities; but by and by 
 it became evident that the new race was 
 spoiling the world. The soil was tampered 
 with until its fertility was affected. Rays 
 of light were so treated that the illuminating 
 gnd warming power greatly decreased. At 
 
 13 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 last a new world was produced in which 
 everything was haphazard. Men gradually 
 adjusted themselves to a dwarfed and im- 
 poverished life. The race lost its power to 
 experiment with nature and settled down to 
 live in a dull, gray, hardly tolerable world, 
 the product of its own mistaken energy. 
 
 Fortunately, such fundamental tamper- 
 ing with nature has never been within the 
 reach of human power, though John Ruskin 
 would probably have said that many a great 
 city in its loathsome conditions represents 
 very much this sort of thing. But what is 
 impossible physically is quite possible intel- 
 lectually. We live in the physical world 
 God has made. We live in the intellectual 
 world men have made. 
 
 Now, the actual meaning of human life 
 as a personal experience is very largely 
 determined by the mental outlook of the man 
 who is going through the experience. What 
 he believes, what he hopes, what he fears, 
 what he unconsciously assumes — the whole 
 range of his thoughts about life — make up 
 the vital part of his world. The physical 
 world is only a background, and for the 
 
 14 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 purposes of the deepest meaning of joy and 
 sorrow, hope and fear, often a very inci- 
 dental background of the personal life. 
 
 This world of the mind men make and 
 destroy and remake. They can manipulate 
 it in all sorts of ways. They can make it 
 good or bad, beautiful or ugly, glad or miser- 
 able. And this is the world of destiny into 
 which all of us are born. Superstition has 
 filled air and earth with evil spirits. The 
 fact that they had no existence save in the 
 minds of those who believed in them, did not 
 lessen the tragedy of believing in a devil- 
 haunted world. Every religion had pro- 
 vided a mental environment for its wor- 
 shipers. And thus many a religion has 
 cramped and destroyed some of the fairest 
 things of life. 
 
 Civihzation is another name for the 
 mental environment humanity creates as it 
 moves onward for succeeding generations. 
 You are born into its sanctions. They are 
 offered to you as a suit of clothing you must 
 wear if you are to have social relations with 
 the men of your time. Of course you may 
 refuse the suit of clothing. But you will 
 
 15 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 become an outcast if you do. And we must 
 frankly confess that the suit is not always 
 made of the best material, nor is it always 
 a good fit. The scholars and the philoso- 
 phers and the great leaders have used their 
 energies modifying the mental environment 
 of the race, and often they have taken 
 oxygen out of the mental atmosphere and 
 have made it very difficult to breathe. There 
 has not always been an adequate realization 
 on the part of the intellectual leaders of the 
 race of the fact that it is a very responsible 
 thing to provide mental food for men. 
 
 To be sure, vast and wonderful are the 
 achievements of the himian mind. Splendid 
 is the tale of human progress. But it is by 
 no means a one-sided story, and the man 
 who would make the most out of life as a 
 personal experience must learn to be a critic 
 as well as a disciple. He must enlist in the 
 most subtle warfare in the world, the 
 struggle for an intellectual background 
 which constantly enlarges life and never 
 causes it to shrink. The point of view which 
 saps the vitality from existence has no right 
 in the world, and the slavery to a point of 
 
 16 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 view which dwarfs humanity is the most 
 intolerable slavery on the planet. 
 
 In the light of these facts we want to 
 make a survey of certain intellectual tenden- 
 cies which have moved very deeply in the 
 life of men. We want to see their strength 
 and their weakness, their tragedy and their 
 hope, and to reach some practical conclu- 
 sions which a careful and analytical inspec- 
 tion will suggest. 
 
 The two fundamental characteristics of 
 the mind are the desire for stability and the 
 desire for wonder. To put it in another 
 way, they are the desire for unity and the 
 desire for diversity. 
 
 The Greeks found the two characteristics 
 coming to clenched antagonism when the 
 substance of the Eleatics faced the moving 
 procession of Heraclitus. Whenever men 
 become really reflective one of these desires 
 is likely to become paramount. The desire 
 for stability with one thinker casts out the 
 desire for wonder. In another the desire 
 for a world full of initiative and surprise 
 and movement casts out the desire for a close 
 and coherent and unified view of life. 
 17 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 There have been periods when men's view 
 of hfe and the world has made full room 
 for wonder and surprise, but has sadly 
 lacked in making any provision for the in- 
 tellectual stability of the world. 
 
 This is true especially of primitive and 
 barbarous peoples. And this accounts for 
 that naive and beautiful poetry which is so 
 characteristic of them. The Indian on the 
 plain, the Xegro in his cabin, the backward 
 races of the world everywhere, live in a world 
 with amazing and beautiful and torturing 
 possibilities of surprise. The folklore stories 
 of the world, the myths fresh from the child- 
 like heart of humanity; the religions of 
 nature with their astonishing reflection of 
 the quality of primitive human experience 
 and desire — all these belong to the unreflec- 
 tive, believing, wonder ages of the world and 
 the stages of human experience which cor- 
 respond to them. At their best they repre- 
 sent the fine flower of the superstition of 
 the world; at their worst they represent a 
 brutal and lawless and terrible expression 
 
 18 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 of the most degraded and wildest things in 
 human life. Hawthorne's Donatello in The 
 Marble Faun lived in this world of nature's 
 marvel and bewildering surprise until the 
 shock of the awakening and disillusionment 
 came. 
 
 The ethnic rehgions had made it a point 
 to preserve the reign of wonder. Often they 
 have done it partly by means of the grossest 
 and most vicious types of superstition. The 
 wonder-world of the Arabian Nights is an 
 illustration of what can be done when 
 imagination is allowed to take long flights. 
 If you do not like it, you can call it a gam- 
 bler's world. But at least it is a world where 
 lethargy is impossible. You are not likely 
 to go to sleep or be bored in any of its scenes. 
 Something is always going to happen, and 
 you never know quite what it is. But not 
 only Mohammedanism, but practically every 
 ethnic faith has its throne of wonder sur- 
 rounded by rainbow colors of astonishment 
 and surprise. 
 
 One of the distinguishing characteristics 
 of Roman Catholicism has been the entire 
 preservation of the reign of wonder. To dip 
 
 19 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 into the life of a Roman Catholic saint is 
 like suddenly dropping into another world 
 where no one has ever heard of the reign 
 of law. The marvelous lures and beckons 
 and you live in a country where all the charm 
 of fairyland is called into play as an asset 
 of religion. 
 
 The limitations and inadequacies of all 
 this kind of interpretation of life are clearly 
 visible to the careful thinker. Wonder is 
 preserved at the expense of rationality. Sur- 
 prise and glamour and charm and the beat- 
 ing of fairy wings are secured at the expense 
 of an ordered and coherent and lawful uni- 
 verse. This kind of a paradise of wonder 
 is a paradise of the ignorant. Knowledge 
 drives away the spirits and the fairies and 
 the gnomes. You must pay for these, the 
 experiences of childlike belief in the myths 
 of many an ethnic religion, by remaining in 
 some degree a barbarian at heart. 
 
 Then the reign of wonder in these realms 
 is an unethical thing. A brilHant theolo- 
 gian once made an observation to the effect 
 that whenever you have a profound belief 
 in the supernatural without a deep and com- 
 
 20 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 manding ethical sense you have superstition. 
 In the primitive peoples and religions and 
 the survivals of the primitive wonder- feeling 
 you have exactly that situation. And with 
 all the subtle charm of many a bit of folk- 
 lore and legend, the other side of the story 
 reveals a capricious, lawless, undependable 
 universe. You pay for your fairies by mak- 
 ing room for demons. You pay for your 
 endless miracles by accepting a universe 
 which has no firmly grounded unity and 
 consistency and stability. You pay for your 
 glad surprises by the possibility of very 
 deadly surprises. There is nothing you can 
 depend on, and life is reduced in one way or 
 another to a matter of magic and incanta- 
 tion. The wildly and terribly dramatic 
 features triumph at last. The leering devils 
 drive away the fairies, and one day you 
 awake to find your religion a devil-worship. 
 Thus it has happened in more than one 
 ethnic cult. 
 
 II 
 
 There have been periods where men's 
 view of life was based on the unity and co- 
 herency of the universe, when there was a 
 
 21 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 firm intellectual stability in the interpreta- 
 tion of the world, but where the sense of 
 wonder was all the while being driven 
 farther and farther away. It is a great 
 relief to turn from the futilities and absurdi- 
 ties of barbarism to the careful use of the 
 inductive method of reasoning and the rise 
 of modern science. At every stage of the 
 process some hoary superstition has van- 
 ished. A thousand terrible and torturing 
 phantoms have been driven away as the 
 triumphant armies of science have moved 
 forward. One realm after another has been 
 invaded. Its materials have been analyzed 
 and classified. All has been reduced to sub- 
 serviency to the reign of law. Cause and 
 effect have become the regal words of the 
 language, and the widening ranges of the 
 application of great scientific principles have 
 been sources of delight to the investigator 
 and to the man who was building large 
 philosophic generalizations on the returns of 
 science as they come in. 
 
 Now, it is easy to see that the superstitious 
 religions of the world created an artificial 
 and unreal universe. They tampered with 
 22 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 men's thoughts about Hfe, and in many cases 
 caused them to inhabit a world made ter- 
 rible and unhappy by thoughts which were 
 the product of human imagination. The 
 mental environment of the ethnic religions 
 is a human creation, and to a large degree 
 a creation having no relation to the reality 
 of things. All this is quickly conceded. 
 But now we come to another matter, 
 equally true, and yet not nearly so easy to 
 see or appreciate. When the reign of law 
 was substituted for the reign of wonder, 
 and modern science began to be turned into 
 scientific philosophy, once more there began 
 the creation of an artificial mental environ- 
 ment. The synthetic philosophy is as far 
 from the reality of human experience as 
 would be a philosophy attempting to include 
 as real all the features of Arabian Nights. 
 The scientific explanation of the universe 
 has been so busy with things and forces that 
 it has never faced the meaning of person- 
 ality. It has been so busy with physical 
 coherency and uniformity that it has never 
 understood that freedom and initiative and 
 movement which belong to the personal 
 23 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 mental life. Barbarism made the mistake 
 of attempting to explain all impersonal 
 things in the immediate terms of personality. 
 Much scientific philosophy has made the 
 mistake of trying to explain personal ex- 
 perience in impersonal terms. 
 
 To follow the logic of the scientific ap- 
 praisal when it leaves its proper task of 
 being bookkeeper to catalogue physical 
 uniformities, and puts out its sign as a 
 master in philosophy, is one of the most dis- 
 appointing things in all the world. 
 
 The rise of modern science, to be sure, is 
 like a sudden sunrise. The victories over 
 hoary superstition are good to witness. 
 Endless vistas spread out before us. New 
 worlds lie all about us ready for the con- 
 queror. This was the situation in the middle 
 of the nineteenth century and for some time 
 after. Then there came a strange change. 
 A dull lethargy began to settle down upon 
 the world. Doors were closing with a bang. 
 Vistas which had seemed infinite contracted 
 and disappeared. The spring and enthusi- 
 asm of the youth of modern science were 
 transformed into a premature old age. The 
 
 24 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 warmth and brightness of Hf e began to wane. 
 The new world, it began to appear, was not 
 a world in which men could be happy. 
 Matthew Arnold's Scholar Gipsy is a fair 
 expression of the new mood. The wisest 
 man takes his seat dejectedly upon the intel- 
 lectual throne. 
 
 What has happened? Why this dullness, 
 these heavy eyes, this lethargy which seems 
 likely to become despair ? The answer is that 
 the men who by too hasty generalizations 
 were transforming science into philosophy 
 had tampered with the intellectual life of 
 the world. They had built a system smaller 
 than life. They offered a stone when per- 
 sonality must have bread — and this quite 
 literally — for they were in fact attempting 
 to reduce the organic to the terms of the in- 
 organic. Men woke up to find that they 
 lived in a world from which initiative and 
 movement and freedom were gone. The 
 wonder of the world had been cast out for 
 the sake of uniformity. Freshness and 
 surprise had been trodden under the foot 
 of stability. The trouble with barbarism 
 is that under its sanction anything can 
 25 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 happen. The trouble with the scientific 
 appraisals of which we are speaking is that 
 under these sanctions nothing in a personal 
 sense can happen at all. 
 
 This situation accounts for the wide hear- 
 ing of the men who are crying out, "Back to 
 the mediaeval.'* Celtic romance, Gilbert 
 Chesterton's brilliant paradoxes, all the cry 
 for a return to fairyland — these are the in- 
 evitable reaction from an interpretation of 
 life which reduces the universe to a system 
 of pigeonholes — everything fastened so 
 tightly that not even a worm could crawl 
 from one hole to another. How new and 
 different the intellectual situation is, is sug- 
 gested by the fact that Newman went to 
 Rome to find intellectual rest. Gilbert 
 Chesterton finds the world of modern science 
 so deadly dull and commonplace that he 
 seems in a fair way to go to Rome to find 
 excitement. 
 
 A new appeal of the Roman Catholic 
 Church, of which farsighted ecclesiastics 
 will not be slow to take advantage, is this 
 preserving in a scientific age of an emphasis 
 on that wonder of the world of which the 
 
 26 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 human heart will not be robbed. The nine- 
 teenth century saw the maturity of a system 
 of reducing all life to the mechanical on the 
 side of materialism, which robbed the world 
 of freedom and stir and wonder. So much 
 was the net result at this point of the syn- 
 thetic philosophy. It saw the maturity of 
 an intellectual interpretation which reduced 
 life to a mental mechanism and so destroyed 
 freedom and initiative and wonder. This 
 was the Hegelian outcome. In each case 
 logic attempted to shut the door in the 
 face of life. It would be the supreme 
 delight of Rome if Protestantism should 
 so completely ally itself with these forces 
 of mechanical thought, or at least so im- 
 bibe their atmosphere, as to lose its sense 
 of wonder entirely. A rationalistic Prot- 
 estantism is the greatest hope of Rome, for, 
 with all its faults, Rome has preserved the 
 sense of freedom and movement and wonder 
 in the world. 
 
 If it is true, on the one hand, that bar- 
 barism creates a false and deadly mental 
 environment because it preserves wonder at 
 the expense of stability, it is true, on the 
 27 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 other, that much modern thinking has 
 created a false and deadly mental environ- 
 ment by preserving stability at the expense 
 of wonder. A universe of mere mechanical 
 interactions is an impossible universe for a 
 wholesome growing human life. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In this whole situation we can appreciate 
 the quest for wonder as a fundamental char- 
 acteristic of present-day life and thought. 
 Very often it is a partly subconscious quest. 
 Men are dull and restless. They feel 
 cramped and hedged in. There is something 
 suffocating about their mental atmosphere. 
 Instinctively they begin to fight for room 
 and space to breathe and for a larger life. 
 Some men, in sheer despair, stop thinking 
 and fall into physical indulgence. Here at 
 least they find a counterfeit of that wonder 
 their souls desire. If they cannot have a 
 world of spiritual glow and freshness, they 
 will at least have a world of physical sensa- 
 tion. To nobler spirits, of course, such an 
 alternative is impossible. They live in moral 
 loyalty to ideals which, so far as they can see, 
 
 28 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 have no foundation in the system of things. 
 They reahze as they think more clearly and 
 accurately that their view of life logically 
 pronounces the death warrant of personal 
 freedom and power of decision, of that per- 
 sonal initiative in God or man which makes 
 wonder and surprise and freshness of life 
 possible. They see at last that their point 
 of view is incompatible with the validity of 
 morals and religion. Their deepest intui- 
 tions are in direct antagonism with what 
 they conceive to be the facts of life. Such 
 a man as Arthur Hugh Clough felt the 
 torturing pang of this dilemma, and to many 
 a man of science whose thinking has moved 
 along these lines the whole experience has 
 been a personal tragedy. 
 
 But such a state of disillusionment de- 
 veloping into despair could not be the last 
 word. The quest for wonder was bound to 
 become more than a subconscious movement. 
 Life, like a great river, was sure to rise and 
 overflow the embankments of cold, hard 
 logic. As a matter of fact this has already 
 happened. The pragmatists in England and 
 America are prophets of an interpretation 
 29 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 of life where there is room for wonder, where 
 in a fresh and vital way things can really 
 happen. The pragmatists are sometimes 
 superficial, and sometimes they seem to treat 
 some facts in a cavalier fashion, and some- 
 times they seem to mistake a method for a 
 philosophy. But this is to be said for them : 
 they have seen that life itself is more com- 
 manding than our thoughts about life. They 
 have seen that our experience is more mas- 
 terful than the logical systems by means of 
 which we try to interpret it. They have 
 declared in no uncertain tone that life itself 
 has the right of way. And this declaration 
 brings in again the wonder and the surprise 
 of the world. 
 
 Henri Bergson, whose brilliant work at 
 the College de France is known to all the 
 world, is another prophet of the reaction 
 from the mechanical view of life. The Crea- 
 tive Evolution is a sort of philosophers' 
 Magna Charta of the wonder of the world. 
 Freedom, vital movement, the full recogni- 
 tion of the place of the unexpected; the 
 glow, the freshness, the stimulus of living 
 in a world where everything has not hap- 
 
 30 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 pened, and where the great unknown future 
 beckons — all of this is preserved and de- 
 fended in masterful fashion in Professor 
 Bergson's work, by an intellect of almost 
 uncanny acuteness. 
 
 Professor Rudolf Eucken, at Jena, is 
 another prophet of the reaction from the 
 reign of mechanics in human thought. Not 
 so brilliant as Professor Bergson, he has 
 more spiritual depth, more richness of inner 
 life, more feeling for the deep moral and 
 spiritual meanings of experience. He has 
 waged a long battle for a universe fit to be 
 a dwelhng place for a man with a soul. 
 There is a vein of rich mysticism in his think- 
 ing, and the deep spiritual currents of ex- 
 perience are as real to him as any facts of 
 hfe. In the name of the spiritual life, with 
 its wonder and surprise and creative energy, 
 he repudiates the reduction of the inner life 
 of man to a subtle kind of chemistry. With 
 him too life, the highest, most palpitating, 
 most regally free life, has the right of way. 
 
 The whole pluralistic movement is a re- 
 action from the unity of a universe which 
 secures stability at the expense of movement 
 31 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 and banishes the play of Hving and free 
 energy from the life of the world. It would 
 rather rest with unsolved mental problems 
 than sacrifice the richness of life. It would 
 be daring enough to accept a sort of phil- 
 osophic polytheism rather than a lifeless 
 universe which made real movement im- 
 possible. 
 
 All of these aspects of present-day think- 
 ing demonstrate that the nineteenth centmy 
 has actually passed and that we live in a new 
 world. There is much that is topsy-tur\y 
 about it all. Sometimes the quest for 
 wonder seems the quest of an infant with no 
 language but a cry. This infant, however, 
 has good, strong lungs and it cries very 
 lustily. The whole situation reveals a mass 
 of seething forces very vital, very full of 
 energy, many of them untamed but all zest- 
 ful and eager and moving violentl3\ One 
 feels that it is good to be alive in such an 
 age. 
 
 To be sure, such a period has its dangers. 
 
 The passion for wonder, for richness of life, 
 
 for movement may be a destroying as well 
 
 as a constructive force. Elements in the 
 
 32 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 Nietzschean view of life may work to tear 
 down ancient sanctions of unspeakable 
 value to the race. Panting for freedom, we 
 may get too much freedom. Fighting for 
 liberty, we may degenerate into license. 
 The man who would revise the Ten Com- 
 mandments and repudiate the sanctities of 
 the home is the particularly dangerous devil 
 of the new movement. The solid foundations 
 of things may be tampered with b}^ enthusi- 
 astic amateurs in the name of progressive 
 thinking, and from the mechanical uniform- 
 ity of the nineteenth century we may pass 
 into a wild lawlessness in the twentieth. The 
 syndicalist represents a spirit which does 
 not promise good to the practical industrial 
 life, and the brothers of the syndicalist are 
 ready to speak in many avenues of modern 
 activity. The danger is that from one ex- 
 treme of the pendulmn we will swing to the 
 other. 
 
 IV 
 
 The goal of our discussion is now in sight 
 
 and has doubtless already become clear to 
 
 the thoughtful reader. Stability without 
 
 wonder gives us a dead and mechanical 
 
 33 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 universe. Wonder without stability gives 
 us a universe undependable, incoherent, at 
 last chaotic. Somehow these two elements 
 must be so combined that unity and move- 
 ment, stability and wonder, simplicity and 
 diversity are united in our view of life. In 
 a larger and more adequate way the task of 
 the old Greek philosophers of reconciliation 
 is ours. 
 
 We may make a few suggestions as to the 
 lines along which this philosophy of united 
 stability and wonder must move. 
 
 1. It must begin with personality and not 
 with things or forces. All the experience 
 of which we know anything at first-hand is 
 personal, and from this vantage ground we 
 must survey the world. Such a survey will 
 save us from all sorts of intellectual and 
 practical confusions. It will assmne free- 
 dom, initiative, and the power of personal 
 choice and purpose. It will not attempt to 
 make a recipe for freedom or to construct a 
 formula for personal choice. It will mider- 
 stand that these things are beyond the reach 
 of formulas, and that whenever a man tries 
 to make a formula for personal activities he 
 
 34 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 simply proves that he does not understand 
 the problem. It is as if he would insist on 
 knowing the color of one of Beethoven's 
 sonatas, or the sound of one of Turner's 
 paintings. He understands that personality 
 as a matter of free movement in rational 
 choice is not a conclusion but a necessary 
 assumption. It is the major premise of the 
 validity of experience. He does not try to 
 go behind this necessary assmnption. He 
 sees that the inevitable result would be 
 reasoning in a circle. Critical insight may 
 discover what are life's necessary assump- 
 tions, but it cannot demonstrate them by 
 formal logic. The task of philosophy is to 
 see what tools must be used in hfe's activities 
 and then to polish them. There will be many 
 mysteries, but the tools can be made very 
 sharp and effective. 
 
 2. It will be seen that all the impersonal 
 activities and energies must be referred at 
 last to a personal source, or they lose all 
 genuine meaning. A force or a law is only 
 a figure of speech unless it is a description 
 of a person acting. And you cannot explain 
 anything by an empty abstraction. The 
 35 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 whole range of uniformities in the universe 
 must be referred at last to a conscious per- 
 sonal intelligence or they will hang empty 
 in the air. This insight lifts the thinker 
 from the thought of human personality, 
 with which he began, to the thought of divine 
 personality. He sees that the only way to 
 give any definite meaning to an ultimate 
 force is by seeing that it is the activity of 
 an ultimate Person. 
 
 3. This final commanding personality is 
 not a caretaker in the palace of the universe. 
 He is not a furtive servant in his own world. 
 He is not the slave of the system of things. 
 He is an imperial master and moves right 
 royally through the world. He is the highest 
 expression of freedom. He is freedom 
 divinely alive. At this point the Calvinists 
 had noble insight. They did not understand 
 the freedom of man, but they did under- 
 stand the freedom of God. They knew that 
 an uncoerced Deity on the throne of his 
 own freedom was the necessary background 
 for all true meaning to life. This concep- 
 tion of divine freedom and personality and 
 of natural law as just a name for the way 
 
 3G 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 in which a free person acts, secures for all 
 time the wonder and movement and sur- 
 prise which must be preserved in our thought 
 and experience of life. If the ultimate fact 
 is a free personal God, rigid mechanics are 
 forever driven from the throne of the world. 
 We are saved from the tragedy of a mental 
 mechanism like Hegelianism. We are saved 
 from the tragedy of a material mechanism 
 like the synthetic philosophy. We live in 
 a world where the freshness and the joy 
 and the stimulus which only freedom at the 
 heart of things can give are forever assured. 
 A personal God lordly in liberty is the 
 security of the wonder of the world. 
 
 This freedom, however, is an ethical free- 
 dom. It is always mastered and dominated 
 by the character of God. It is not the 
 freedom of a superape. It is the freedom 
 of a righteous and holy Deity. This is the 
 basis of the uniformity of nature. God does 
 not play tricks with his world. His imi- 
 verse is orderly because he is an orderly 
 God. The stability of the whole vast system 
 of things rests at last, not in any rigid or 
 mechanical necessity, but on the character 
 37 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 of the Almighty. At this point natural 
 science and ethics meet and science is trans- 
 figured. The nineteenth century tried to 
 bring ethics down into the categories of 
 natural science. The twentieth is to lift 
 natural science into the categories of ethics. 
 Thus the very conception of a free personal 
 God which secures the wonder of the world 
 because of his character as a righteous and 
 holy Deity also secures the stability of the 
 universe. Unity and diversity have met to- 
 gether. Monism and Pluralism have kissed 
 each other. 
 
 The character of God also secures wonder, 
 while at the same time repudiating super- 
 stition. It is always an ethical wonder which 
 is preserved. Thus with one stroke the 
 crass and wild imaginations of the ethnic 
 faiths and all the puerilities of Roman Cath- 
 olic superstition are destroyed. Rome has 
 paid a dreadful price for wonder by admit- 
 ting superstition. The view we are analyzing 
 admits movement, freedom, and wonder 
 made ethical in such a fashion that the primi- 
 tive gladness is preserved in the midst of 
 modern knowledge, the childlike surprise is 
 38 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 preserved in the intellectual life which is the 
 highest product of civilization. 
 
 In conclusion some observations must be 
 made about the relation of the Christian 
 religion to these fundamental matters. 
 Right on the face of our discussion it is 
 clear that the God who is the synthesis of 
 the two movements we have been discussing, 
 who holds secure the unity and diversity, 
 the stability and the wonder of the world, 
 would have just the characteristics of the 
 Deity whom Christians worship. Christi- 
 anity is a religion which unites stability and 
 ethical wonder in the interpretation of life. 
 
 To be sure, Christian thinkers have not 
 always been conscious of the strategy of 
 their position. But all the while the per- 
 sonal holy God revealed in the life of which 
 the Old and New Testaments are the literary 
 record, was the possessor of the character- 
 istics capable of being made a solvent in 
 respect of this most difficult problem of 
 philosophy and life. And in a practical way 
 Christianity has preserved stability and 
 39 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 wonder in many an age when its own 
 thinkers were not fully conscious of what 
 was going on. 
 
 The philosophy to which our deepest 
 needs will drive us is, then, in a very pro- 
 found sense a Christian philosophy. What 
 the Christian religion brings as a revelation, 
 philosophy will translate into an interpreta- 
 tion of life. 
 
 But more than this. What philosophy 
 can state as a matter of principles, Christi- 
 anity translates into deeds. The incarnation 
 of the Son of God, and his human life divine, 
 are the very expression in concrete activity 
 of that for which we have been contending. 
 The mighty deed of sin-bearing, by which 
 the Son of God in profound spiritual fashion 
 took upon himself the burden of the sin of 
 the world, is the very crystallization into 
 one act of infinite significance, of that moral 
 wonder and moral stability which are funda- 
 mental in God and in his ruling of the world, 
 and must be made fundamental in the life 
 of man. In all ages the facts of the 
 Christian religion have been enriching the 
 thought, redeeming, transforming, and en- 
 
 40 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 larging the life of men, because Christianity 
 is a rehgion of stabihty as complete and sure 
 as the character of God, of wonder and 
 surprise as amazing as his infinite freedom 
 and his exhaustless love. Deeds speak more 
 loudly than intellectual interpretation can 
 ever speak. Bethlehem and Calvary are the 
 security of the stability and the wonder of 
 the world. 
 
 41 
 
THE PREACHER AS A STUDENT 
 OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PREACHER AS A STUDENT OF 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 The fascination of many human contacts 
 may rob the preacher of a philosophy. He 
 has learned that life has no thrill like the 
 meeting of soul with soul. To go through 
 the world sensing the inner quality of men's 
 struggle and pain and fear and bringing to 
 them the gift of understanding sympathy 
 and divine hope has become an experience 
 of constant richness and wonder. It is true, 
 as Browning says, that it is "an awkward 
 thing to play with souls," but to deal at 
 first-hand with palpitating human lives is 
 so strangely compelling an experience that 
 everything else is likely to seem common- 
 place when compared with it. When human 
 life and sin and salvation are constantly un- 
 folding themselves before a man's surprised 
 and wondering eyes, in dramas of which he 
 is the one intimate spectator, this kind of 
 experience is likely to become the engrossing 
 
 45 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 matter of his life. In all this he may have 
 merely an artistic and dilettante interest; 
 even a preacher may be caught by this snare. 
 But if he comes to it with a consuming pas- 
 sion for souls and a commanding sense of 
 God in his own life, the whole experience 
 will be lifted into high moral and spiritual 
 quality. The preacher will discover that this 
 is what it means to be a pastor, and being 
 this kind of pastor makes him a true 
 preacher and gives to him his most powerful 
 and effective sermons. Such a man is often 
 tempted to be impatient with his study. Its 
 lamps seem dull and cold beside that fierce 
 light which falls upon human life as he sees 
 it at first-hand. He is tempted to be par- 
 ticularly impatient of such a subject as 
 philosophy, feeling as if hours spent in its 
 study are robbed from human beings and 
 given to mere mummies of thought. 
 
 Many a man of this type is rather proud 
 of the fact that he has no philosophy. He 
 pronounces the word "metaphysical" — when 
 he does deign to pronounce it — with a de- 
 tectable accent of scorn. He is busy with 
 actual life while the philosopher is engaged 
 
 46 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 with intellectual puzzles. By all means let 
 the philosopher go on piecing together his 
 tiny fragments of thought to make the com- 
 plete picture. If he finds it interesting, there 
 is no harm in it. Still, there are weightier 
 matters with which he might well be en- 
 gaged. Such is his attitude. This superior 
 feeling which the practical preacher often 
 shares with the man on the street, as regards 
 this matter of philosophy, will not bear close 
 inspection, as natural as it is. Just because 
 he is so close to life the practical preacher 
 is often its victim rather than its master. 
 He lacks largeness of view, proportion of 
 thought, mental discipline — the very quali- 
 ties which philosophic study would give. 
 And again and again life simply sweeps 
 him along in a current of vital and master- 
 ful feeling whose real significance he does 
 not understand. He is alive to the finger 
 tips, but he is not capable of farsighted or 
 dependable leadership. And he is not ca- 
 pable of seeing life calmly or in the widest 
 relations. He has never caught even as an 
 ideal the thought of seeing life steadily and 
 seeing it whole. 
 
 47 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 There is some explanation and a measure 
 of excuse for this type of preacher, how- 
 ever, when we compare him with the man 
 who has nothing but a philosophy. He 
 himself has made the comparison, and, 
 though he is fairly modest, he knows that 
 the result is all in his favor. The man with 
 nothing but a philosophy has gone with 
 Ezekiel into the valley of dry bones. He 
 has made wonderful collections of bones. 
 He has fastened them together properly 
 with little wires so that he has a nimiber of 
 skeletons, instead of a mass of separate bones 
 lying about. He surveys his work with 
 pride. It is scrupulously correct and is 
 really very wonderful. But it has never 
 occurred to this man that he has still only 
 a collection of bones. The result is fit for 
 a museum but not fit for the tasks of life. 
 It was his business to prophesy to these 
 bones, so that they would live, with vital 
 organs and muscles and nerves, with flash- 
 ing eyes and quick hands. That would have 
 been a mighty work indeed. And it would 
 have answered all criticisms. As it is, he 
 found bones and he has bones still, only care- 
 48 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 fully classified and fitted together, according 
 to a thoughtful scheme. The vital, dynamic 
 preacher instinctively feels a certain amount 
 of scorn for the man who is only capable 
 of classifying bones. 
 
 The picture we have painted is not over- 
 drawn. There are men who have quite lost 
 contact with life, in the midst of philosophic 
 speculations. They ring the changes on 
 great names in their sermons, but they have 
 no power to relate what they are thinking 
 to living men and living issues in a living 
 way. 
 
 There can be no greater mistake, however, 
 than to judge the significance of philosophic 
 study for the preacher by this partly arti- 
 ficial, partly academic product. His faults 
 have cast a shadow on a noble and important 
 study, but they do not follow organically 
 from its pursuit. We must judge of any 
 study, not by what it does for the block- 
 heads, or the dilettantes, or the polarized 
 specialists, but by what it does for real men 
 living real lives and relating them to large 
 and far-reaching and vital issues. 
 
 Let us take a quick survey of the work 
 49 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 of a masterful and magnetic man, a true 
 preacher of the gospel with a living faith in 
 Christ, and a passionate interest in men, 
 and let us see by a few glimpses earnest 
 and discriminating, even if in a sense fleet- 
 ing, what the study of philosophy will do 
 for him. 
 
 I 
 
 He is a student of philosophy, first as a 
 means of mental discipline. He has learned 
 that he cannot take his mind as a matter of 
 course. At least if he does, it will run away 
 with him. It is like a wild and spirited 
 steed which he must tame and master. 
 It has all sorts of odd tricks and strange 
 ways, and every one of them he must under- 
 stand if he is to use his steed for long 
 intellectual journeys. It will draw a great 
 load of thought if it is properly trained, but 
 it must feel the bit in its mouth and the 
 hand of the master on the rein all the while. 
 
 Now, for the revealing of what the mind 
 is like, of what it is capable, what are its 
 limitations, and how it ought to be used, 
 there is no study like philosophy. Some- 
 times, it is true, the student feels that he is 
 
 50 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 watching Don Quixotes fighting imaginary 
 battles with immense zest and confidence, 
 but even then he is learning much about the 
 ways of the mind and the character of 
 thought. The failui'es of philosophy have 
 ahnost as much to teach men as its successes. 
 If poetry is a revelation of the human heart, 
 philosophy is a revelation of the human 
 mind, and the close and intimate knowledge 
 of how the mind has worked for thousands 
 of years, as it has attacked the ultimate 
 problems of existence, is of the greatest 
 value to the preacher. Emerson once de- 
 clared, "All that Shakespeare says of a king, 
 yonder boy reading in a corner feels to be 
 true of himself." It is also true that many 
 of the things a preacher learns about the 
 movement and work of the mind in his philo- 
 sophical study wdll have the most practical 
 application to his own congregation. Said 
 a thoughtful but not widely read farmer to 
 Wliittier, "That JNIr. Plato had a good many 
 of my ideas." But, more than this, not 
 simply the contents of active minds have 
 these unexpected relations, so that Hera- 
 chtus reappears in Bergson and Democritus 
 51 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 reappears in a modern scientist, but even 
 more the habits of the mind have a universal 
 hkeness. The man who knows philosophy 
 in a free and understanding way knows how 
 the mind works. Then the mental elasticity 
 and sympathy required to understand the 
 various movements of philosophy and the 
 habits of mind expressed in them are all the 
 while making the mind of the student a 
 keen and sharpened instrument for clear 
 and coherent and dependable thought. He 
 is not only learning more about other people 
 so that he can deal with them more ade- 
 quately. He is learning about his own mind 
 and is becoming skilled in using it. Many a 
 mistake which would once have been very 
 natural now becomes impossible. JNIany a 
 complex situation is easily dealt with by 
 means of his new powers of thought. Many 
 a difficult feat of mental achievement comes 
 quite within his scope. He has a new mental 
 and practical mastery because, in some 
 measure, he is lord of his own mind. 
 
 II 
 Then the preacher studies philosophy for 
 52 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the methods of thought he may learn. Some 
 men have scorned philosophy because 
 philosophers so violently disagree. As a 
 matter of fact, that is one of the great things 
 about philosophy. A distinguished pro- 
 fessor of theology has said that if a man has 
 one commentary on a book of the Bible, he 
 is in a sense its slave ; but if he has two com- 
 mentaries, they are sure to disagree, and 
 then he will have to think for himself. The 
 same thing is true in philosophy. The very 
 disagreement will stimulate the student to 
 a closer scrutiny of the methods by which 
 such diverse conclusions were reached. And 
 all the while he will be unconsciously mas- 
 tering the utensils of a variety of intellectual 
 approach and appraisal. As the reader of 
 Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, 
 which tells the same storv from ten or twelve 
 different points of view, is startled out of 
 mental provinciality, so the student of 
 philosophy finds himself changed from a 
 man of one or two tools and a limited in- 
 tellectual horizon into a man with a great 
 collection of utensils and a knowledge of how 
 to use them effectively. Often he will use 
 53 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 his tools in a way of which the originator 
 never dreamed. Aristotle did not know that 
 he was preparing a mold into whose forms 
 Thomas Aquinas would fit the theology of 
 the Middle Ages. The modern pragmatist 
 does not know how deft an instrument he 
 has forged for the justification and interpre- 
 tation and proper placing of Christian ex- 
 perience in an adequate philosophy. In all 
 the schools of thought there are tools wait- 
 ing for the use of alert minds, and there are 
 methods whose possibilities have never been 
 fully worked out. As Bauer applied the 
 Hegelian thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to 
 New Testament criticism, so many a philo- 
 sophic principle is yet to be applied to con- 
 crete problems. Even when the result is 
 not final it is sure, because of the fresh ap- 
 proach, and new placing of the material to 
 throw light — sometimes a veritable flood of 
 light — upon old problems. As long as a 
 man is taking fresh tools from the foundries 
 of philosophy he will be in no danger of 
 that deadly dullness which carries so many 
 men to their intellectual graves. To his 
 sight he will add insight. 
 
 54 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 He will be making discoveries and grow- 
 ing all the while. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Coming nearer to the heart of the matter, 
 we may say that the preacher studies phi- 
 losophy in order that he may learn how the 
 great thinkers have interpreted the miiverse 
 and life. He comes to examine conclusions 
 as well as to learn methods of thought. 
 From the Ionian school of Greek thinkers, 
 who studied things rather than minds or 
 morals ; from the Sophists, who so interpreted 
 minds as to loosen all sense of moral values ; 
 from Socrates, who rose from facts to "prin- 
 ciples"; from Plato, who set going the 
 processes of transcendental idealism; from 
 Aristotle, who arranged the first finely 
 articulated mental cabinet with pigeonholes 
 for the classification of all forms of knowl- 
 edge — from these and from many others all 
 through the history of philosophical thought 
 the preacher is learning how to look at life 
 through vastly different eyes from his own 
 and to see what is involved in all these differ- 
 ent world-views. At first the experience 
 55 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 seems somewhat kaleidoscopic, but as the 
 preacher becomes more at home in the high- 
 ways and byways which lead through the 
 City of Philosophy, he finds a deep human 
 meaning in every system, and a palpitating 
 heart, as well as a ticking mind, expressing 
 itself in what at first seemed hard, cold 
 thought secreted from man's mind. He 
 takes his stand at various spots in various 
 ages and waits until the masters come to 
 tell him what they think and how they feel 
 about life. He watches the grating wheels 
 of Schopenhauer's pessimism and surveys 
 the vast synthetic movements of Hegel's 
 mind. He sees how some men have been 
 essentially critical in their sharpest work 
 from the time of Zeno. He sees how some 
 men are born builders, like Plato construct- 
 ing a house for the mind. A new sense of 
 the vastness and wonder of life comes home 
 to him as he surveys these glacial movements 
 of far-reaching thought. He feels the need 
 of various types, and as he examines system 
 after system, each having some contribution 
 to make, he develops an eclectic mood, feel- 
 ing that the final system must be large 
 
 56 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 enough to include the truths which have been 
 seen and proclaimed by all these men. He 
 also develops a sharply critical mood. The 
 final system must repudiate many a false 
 principle and many a false conclusion. A 
 man is forced to discriminate as he studies 
 philosophy. Looking over the past, the 
 preacher sees that some men have never 
 gotten beyond things — here the early Greeks 
 began, and here they remained; some think- 
 ers have never gotten beyond substance — 
 the Eleatic mood persists as an inspiration 
 and in a measure as a danger in every 
 monistic scheme; some men have never got- 
 ten beyond movement — Herachtus has still 
 his votaries; some men have never gotten 
 beyond the individual — the relativists are 
 still in the land; some have never gotten 
 beyond principles, not realizing that a prin- 
 ciple per se is an abstraction which itself 
 must be explained — on this rock the Hegel- 
 ians came to grief; some men never get be- 
 yond forces, and with Herbert Spencer are 
 in danger of reaching what only seem ulti- 
 mate ideas when they are actually carrying 
 words farther than the words can carry 
 57 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 meaning. At a certain point very noble 
 philosophies become verbal miless they rise 
 from principles and forces to an ultimate 
 person. It is when he reaches personalism 
 that the preacher lifts his head. Here is a 
 system large enough when properly con- 
 strued to make room for all sorts of facts 
 and experiences, and to set all in the light 
 of an infinite Person of moral, mental, and 
 spiritual perfection, the Lord of life. The 
 preacher is interested in all the systems, but 
 his philosophical journey leads to a grand 
 terminal at last, and he is glad when his 
 train rolls into the station and he has reached 
 his journey's end. There is still room for 
 no end of study. But it is in working out 
 the implications of a personal philosophy 
 and not in finding a substitute for it. 
 
 IV 
 
 Furthermore, the preacher studies phi- 
 losophy because of its influence on life. The 
 great systems are not merely interpretations 
 of life. They are powers in life. They are 
 dynamic. They set in motion new machin- 
 
 58 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 eiy. The buzzing wheels and moving belts 
 of life are connected with a philosophical 
 dynamo far more frequently than we reahze. 
 And even the man in the street is often un- 
 consciously expressing the implications of 
 the thought of some philosopher, of whose 
 name he may never have heard. If j^ou 
 know the philosophical background of his 
 opinions, you understand him better than he 
 understands himself. 
 
 The influence of Aristotle on the Middle 
 Ages was deep and far-reaching. Wlien 
 walking in an American city you sometimes 
 see the large steel framework of a building, 
 standing in striking relief while it waits for 
 each separate story to be built in. Such a 
 framework Aristotle furnished for much 
 that w^as significant of the thought of the 
 JMiddle Ages. The very existence of the 
 United States of America is in one way re- 
 lated to a series of philosophical movements. 
 You must understand deism with its confi- 
 dence in human nature, and you must under- 
 stand the French philosophy of the latter 
 part of the eighteenth century if you would 
 understand the Declaration of Independ- 
 59 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 ence, and some of the most influential prin- 
 ciples which entered into the life of the re- 
 public. 
 
 Sometimes a philosophical system dwarfs 
 the life of the man who holds it. And such 
 a system may take from the vitality and 
 vigor of the life of a country or of an age. 
 When the rigid principles of a system are 
 put on the throne in such a fashion that a 
 man does not dare to do anything which the 
 system does not justify, life is robbed of 
 freshness and initiative and power. Then 
 a man wears his philosophy as a prisoner 
 wears chains. He is no longer a free man. 
 He looks out on the world from behind the 
 bars of his point of view. As the preacher 
 sees these things he comes to understand that 
 principles are to be used as servants and not 
 as tyrannical masters. The}^ are to be used 
 as teachers and not as slave-drivers. And 
 sometimes the best tribute a student can pay 
 to his teacher is to disagree with him. This 
 does not mean that the individual thinker is 
 to be lawless. It means that his loyalty to 
 commanding principles is the loyalty of a 
 free man to whom life is larger and more 
 
 60 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 dominant than the relentless absolutism of 
 formal logic. As Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 so brilliantly suggests in "The One-Hoss 
 Shay," there are times when to be perfectly 
 logical is to be perfectly absurd. Thus the 
 preacher comes to understand the possibili- 
 ties of danger, as well as the possibilities of 
 great good in the influence of philosophy 
 upon life. 
 
 V 
 
 All this leads us naturally to our next 
 consideration, namely, that the alert 
 preacher studies philosophy because the life 
 of any period inevitably creates a philosophy, 
 inevitably eventuates in a philosophical ex- 
 pression and interpretation. 
 
 The scientific developments of the nine- 
 teenth century in large measure created the 
 synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer. 
 Darwin expressed a principle in one field. 
 Spencer made it the ultimate principle of 
 existence, the commanding feature of his 
 philosophy. The pointing out of the defects 
 of such a system never destroys it as long 
 as the system answers to something deep and 
 real in the life of a period. There will be 
 61 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 men whose working theory of hfe is based on 
 the principles of the synthetic philosophy 
 long after Spencer has been discredited as a 
 philosophic master among all adequately 
 critical minds. There is something about 
 the processes of practical scientific work 
 which is caught completely by Spencer. The 
 scientist's use of law as a working hypothesis 
 exactly corresponds to Spencer's sense of 
 law. The stars in their courses seem to fight 
 for the synthetic philosophy. It is only as 
 we realize that life itself is treated cavalierly, 
 that large territories of human experience 
 are ignored by Spencer, that a genuine re- 
 action sets in. It is as the vital streams rise 
 and overflow their banks that philosophical 
 inadequacies are swept away. Thus life is 
 the final critic as well as the creator of 
 philosophies. 
 
 All this is clearly illustrated in the phi- 
 losophy of Rudolf Eucken, in that of 
 Henri Bergson, and in the methods of the 
 pragmatists. In the closest and most power- 
 ful and fully conscious wa}^ life rather than 
 technical logic is master in these newer move- 
 ments. What has often happened, without 
 
 62 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the philosophers' actually understanding 
 what was going on, here happens with the 
 philosophers, full knowledge and consent. 
 These present schools set up the flag of life 
 and will fight under that standard against 
 all comers. They see that majestic systems 
 have sapped life of its vital energies, have 
 proved but parasitic growths, and they 
 bring against them all the weapons which 
 a deep antagonism can procure. Life itself 
 must be given the right of way. Philosophy 
 must be made large enough to fit the facts 
 of life, and life must never be allowed to 
 shrink to fit the capacity of a particular 
 system. By Eucken in particular it is clearly 
 seen that the spiritual vitalities of life must 
 not only be given place in philosophy, but 
 they must determine the character of the 
 philosophy. 
 
 To the evangelical preacher all this is full 
 of a deep encouragement. He knows that 
 his Christian experience is the defining fact 
 of his life, and he feels at once kinship with 
 thinkers who insist that philosophy shall be 
 as large as experience, even if they have not 
 understood the significance and implications 
 
 63 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 of Christian experience. He can use their 
 principles often when he cannot accept their 
 positions. To live in an age when teclinical 
 rules are being made subservient to the pal- 
 pitating realities of life is the supreme 
 philosophical opportunity of a Christian 
 thinker. 
 
 VI 
 
 Then the preacher studies philosophy 
 because even philosophical errors indicate an 
 intellectual need which must be met and 
 satisfied in some more adequate way. A 
 brilliant theologian once said, "A heresy is 
 a genuine hunger eating the wrong fruit.'' 
 This is eminently true of the errors of 
 philosophy. Nature has a way of taking 
 sudden and startling revenge on that which 
 is one-sided. To go against nature in this 
 regard is to court disaster. There comes a 
 sudden cataclysm and the thing we had ruled 
 out breaks in with tyrannous force. This 
 is seen in individual lives, in nations, and in 
 systems of thought. Excesses are produced 
 by the omissions and inadequacies of power- 
 ful and influential systems. The new sj^stem 
 swings to the very extreme of the pendulum 
 
 64 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 with terrific force. Over against an ascetic 
 interpretation of life you have a wild and 
 lawless Sybaritic philosophy. Over against 
 a hard and cold intellectualism comes a 
 philosophy which so emphasizes the practical 
 that it ignores the proper claims of the intel- 
 lect. Whenever a legitimate element is 
 ruled out of one system it is sure to become 
 an excess in the emphasis of another. The 
 thinking of a particular skeptic is often 
 psychologically a protest against systems 
 which did not give rationahty its dues. The 
 extravagances of mystical philosophy are a 
 reaction from a barren and rigid rationalism. 
 These things stand out in sharp perspective 
 in the mind of the preacher as he critically 
 inspects the defects of the various philo- 
 sophic interpretations. There is always a 
 truth waiting to be rescued from the heart 
 of every error. 
 
 The knowledge of these things does not 
 give the preacher a kindly and hospitable 
 feeling toward errors. He knows that they 
 are all the more dangerous because of the 
 truth which they shelter. This makes them 
 respectable and gives them a hearing. Obvi- 
 65 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 ous error would not be dangerous at all. So 
 the careful detecting of the truth in an error, 
 and the separating of the truth from the 
 error, is a moral as well as a spiritual task. 
 It is one which comes especially within the 
 province of the preacher. 
 
 This knowledge of the way in which error 
 and truth get entangled, though it does not 
 make the preacher a friend of error, does 
 give him a new patience with earnest men 
 who become confused and accept views of 
 whose evil consequences they have no notion. 
 He sees how they came to hold these views, 
 and the good thing in them which must be 
 conserved when the views themselves are 
 cast away. And all this enables him to be 
 a pastor of men's minds in a sense which was 
 quite impossible before. He gives men a 
 feeling that he possesses understanding 
 sympathy even when he approaches their 
 beliefs with a surgeon's knife. 
 
 VII 
 
 The preacher also studies philosophy 
 because he knows that Christianity involves 
 a philosophy as well as a hfe. He knows 
 
 66 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 that if Christianity is true, some philosoph- 
 ical systems must be in essence false. And 
 he knows that if Christianity is true, some 
 philosophical positions are permanently and 
 conclusively established. He detects in our 
 time a tendency to believe that you can be 
 a Christian with your heart and your hand 
 without being a Christian with your head, 
 or, to put it in the words of an able theolo- 
 gian, "a tendency to accept the spirit while 
 discarding the philosophy of Christianity." 
 This tendency to establish a dualism in the 
 Christian religion he recognizes as a danger- 
 ous, though often unconscious, antagonist 
 of the Christian faith and life. Christianity 
 must be intellectually commanding if it is to 
 be morally convincing or spiritually satisfy- 
 ing. In this sense there is such a thing as a 
 Christian philosophy, and a sure and definite 
 command of its sanctions and the fashion 
 in which they articulate to form the basis of 
 Christian behef the preacher desires to ob- 
 tain. Here his acutest mental and moral 
 and spiritual insight is required. He has 
 come to grapple with ultimate problems 
 upon which the vastest issues hang. Just 
 67 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 because he is a Christian with a mind which 
 insists on its rights he is driven into phi- 
 losophy. And when he attains a mastery of 
 those final verities upon which morals and 
 religion, and even rationalit}^ hang, he has 
 reached the meeting place of mind and heart 
 and conscience, in a philosophy which makes 
 him have a message as a preacher which 
 combines the elements which nature unites 
 in a man, and religion brings to their full- 
 ness through the power of God. Even 
 Albrecht Ritschl once admitted that if you 
 shut metaphysics out of the front door, it 
 will come in at the rear. The men who have 
 tried to do without metaphysics have had 
 to produce metaphysics in order to justify 
 their doing without it. An unphilosophic 
 Christianity is always in process of commit- 
 ting intellectual suicide. 
 
 Of course philosophy as a substitute for 
 vital experience is one thing, and needs to 
 be repudiated. Philosophy as the crystal- 
 lization of vital experience is another, and 
 must be conserved. The skeleton does not 
 have to be visible to the naked eye because 
 it is a necessary part of the hmnan organism. 
 
 68 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 And philosophy does not need to be on dress 
 parade all the while because it is an essential 
 part of religion. But for all that, the Chris- 
 tian religion without a loyal allegiance to its 
 philosophical postulates is as much of a con- 
 tradiction as is a human body, in perfect 
 health and performing all its functions, 
 without any bones. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Last of all, the preacher studies philoso- 
 phy in order that he may have a philosophy 
 of his own. Dr. Robert William Dale spoke 
 potently of experiencing theism. By a 
 powerful, dynamic Christian preacher his 
 whole philosophy may be passed through 
 his own experience and come forth blazing 
 with the fires of his own life. As Paul said 
 "my gospel," so he becomes able to say "my 
 philosophy.'' His philosophic position as a 
 Christian is not merely a classification of 
 objective truths. It is objective truth be- 
 come real in subjective experience. 
 
 Professor Borden P. Bowne in his per- 
 sonal idealism rendered a service to the 
 Christian thinking of our time of the 
 69 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 utmost value. His trenchant, critical mind 
 bombarded ancient fallacies with a sureness 
 and skill of the most extraordinary char- 
 acter. And his constructive work offers a 
 view of the universe where personality in 
 God and man, moral freedom and responsi- 
 bility, the dominance of the spiritual, and 
 the coherence of physical, rational, ethical, 
 and religious in a rich and roomy monism, 
 with an ultimate person on the throne, are 
 all secured. 
 
 With all his services perhaps Professor 
 Bowne had one limitation. He does not 
 give you the sense of a triumphant experi- 
 ence of his own philosophy. It is splendidly 
 effective in its critical aspects, nobly ade- 
 quate in its constructive work, but it remains 
 objective. It does not become a subjective 
 passion in the mind and the heart of the 
 author. It is correct rather than in the 
 highest sense kindling. All this is said in 
 no spirit of disparagement of Professor 
 Bowne. We owe him too much for that to 
 be possible. It is said as a matter of point- 
 ing out the way in which his own work should 
 be carried on by his successors. Fill his 
 
 70 
 
A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 system with the fire of a noble mysticism and 
 a sharper evangehcal passion, and it will 
 move out to become more commanding and 
 more efficient than it has ever been in the 
 past. 
 
 At any rate, the preacher must take this 
 final step in regard to his philosophy. It 
 must become not merely truth, but truth 
 with summoning eyes, truth with a strong 
 hand, truth with a throbbing heart, and in 
 this triumphant experience of his own phi- 
 losophy, the student, the preacher, the Chris- 
 tian of spiritual passion, the devoted pastor, 
 and the alert practical man meet and become 
 one. The philosophy has become an evangel. 
 
 71 
 
BERGSON, AS SEEN FROM A 
 PREACHER'S STUDY 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 BERGSON, AS SEEN FROM A PREACHER'S 
 STUDY 
 
 I. The Standpoint of a Preacher in 
 Philosophic Study 
 Many a preacher has no attitude toward 
 the study of the course of philosophic specu- 
 lation. He simply ignores the whole sub- 
 ject. He is interested in practical matters. 
 He cares more about men than men's ideas. 
 He cares more about life than philosophy. 
 He is entirely engrossed with the effort to 
 be an efficiency expert as regards the matter 
 of winning and holding men for the king- 
 dom of God, and administering the affairs 
 of his church with skill and success. His 
 laboratory is life; his experiment station is 
 human experience. He gets his sermons 
 from a constant and hearty human contact, 
 illuminating his study of the Bible. He 
 knows how to press the gospel home to the 
 hearts of men. He speaks with the accents 
 of vigorous and robust life. He makes no 
 75 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 pretensions to being a scholar, but he is an 
 effective evangelist as well as a preacher. 
 Scattered over the country you find this 
 type, in quiet hamlets and in thriving cities. 
 The church owes a real debt to this expert in 
 religion, even when he is a man who would 
 soon get lost in discussing ideas about 
 religion. 
 
 It is quite easy to see, however, that this 
 type of man fails of the highest efficiency. 
 To care immensely about everything that 
 pertains to men except their mental life is 
 an incomplete devotion. To be an evangelist 
 for the saving of men's souls without a mas- 
 tering message for their minds is to perform 
 an inadequate service. The man who speaks 
 to less than the whole life can never be the 
 most effective evangelist, and he is sure to 
 be inadequate in the wider ministries of 
 pastoral service. 
 
 On the other hand, many a preacher is 
 more interested in ideas than he is in people. 
 He can outline the course of Greek phi- 
 losophy more easily than he can follow the 
 winding paths by means of which a strug- 
 gling man finds his way to peace. He gets 
 
 76 
 
BERGSON 
 
 his knowledge of life second-hand ; the fresh 
 currents set in motion by actual human con- 
 tact do not throb through him. He has 
 separated the mind from all the rich and 
 diversified experience of the remainder of 
 the life, and so his message is likely to be- 
 come dignified and wise and impotent. To 
 preach only to the mind is as great a mistake 
 as to fail entirely to appeal to the mind. 
 The distrust of the "philosophic preacher" 
 is entirely a repugnance for the type of 
 utterance which has intellect but is without 
 the blood of life. It is one thing to describe 
 the evangel with cold precision; it is quite 
 another to preach it, with intellectual ade- 
 quacy and also with a burning heart. 
 Thought and feeling belong together. 
 
 The most effective preacher has the virtues 
 and shuns the weaknesses of the two types 
 we have been analyzing. He is a man of 
 men and a man of ideas. He is a student of 
 books and a student of people. He is at 
 home in philosophy, and he is at home in a 
 human heart. Deeper than this, the real 
 preacher is always a man of God. He does 
 not leave his piety behind when he picks up 
 77 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 a book of philosophy. He takes all there is 
 of him into every intellectual endeavor of 
 his life. His Christian experience has a 
 position of defining power in every intel- 
 lectual exploration which raises questions of 
 moment as to life and destiny. 
 
 This is a matter of supreme importance. 
 Perhaps we can best put it in this way: 
 When it comes to the study of philosophy 
 the preacher is both the judge and a part of 
 the evidence. The peril and the strategy 
 of his situation lie in this fact. He is the 
 judge, for he must study and weigh and 
 appraise the system. With perfect candor 
 and honesty he must take account of all that 
 it has to say. But he does not approach the 
 task without presuppositions. An open 
 mind is not an empty mind. He himself is 
 a part of the evidence to be considered. His 
 own experience is part of the data to be 
 taken account of. The philosophy he ac- 
 cepts must be big enough to make room for 
 his personal experience of salvation through 
 Jesus Christ his Lord. All the facts and 
 energies which have to do with the new life 
 in Christ must find a comfortable home in 
 78 
 
BERGSOl^^ 
 
 the philosophy which he makes his own. He 
 never tries to make his experience shrink to 
 fit his philosophy. It is the business of a 
 philosophy to organize and interpret the 
 facts of experience, not to change or distort 
 them. And the preacher knows that his 
 Christian experience is as defining as any 
 fact of life. 
 
 This does not mean that he is narrow- 
 minded. It does not mean that he is a bigot. 
 It does not mean that he is unwilling to 
 accept new truth. It just means that he 
 has such a complete sense of the true scien- 
 tific method that he will insist that all the 
 facts must be faced. As an unclassified 
 flower, if it had a voice, might say to a 
 botanist, "You must take account of me"; 
 as a strange insect with bright wings might 
 say to the scientist who scrutinized it, "You 
 must alter your classification to make room 
 for me"; as any physical or chemical fact 
 has the right of way through any speculative 
 theory, so a Christian experience and all the 
 facts and truths involved in it have the right 
 of way. The preacher with the real experi- 
 ence of these things in his life has a perfect 
 79 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 right to say to the philosopher, "No system 
 is adequate which does not make room for 
 me." 
 
 And the making room must be of a char- 
 acter which leaves all the creative power and 
 moral splendor of a Christian experience 
 intact. To explain a Christian experience 
 in such a way that you make its repetition 
 impossible is in effect to deny it. To inter- 
 pret a Christian experience in such a way 
 that the man who accepted the interpretation 
 could never experience the moral invigora- 
 tion and spiritual renewal of such an ex- 
 perience is to distort an important series of 
 facts. It is utterly unworthy of the spirit 
 of candid scientific procedure. 
 
 These things the preacher holds firm in 
 his mind as he approaches the study of 
 philosophy. He sharpens his mind with 
 every discipline in philosophic research. He 
 is open to new truth everywhere. But he 
 never forgets that he has in his own experi- 
 ence some defining truth which must have 
 commanding place in the final philosophic 
 synthesis. He is both the judge and a part 
 of the evidence. And he never forgets his 
 
 80 
 
BERGSON 
 
 significance as evidence while he is thinking 
 of his duties as judge. 
 
 II. The Modeen Philosophic Situation 
 
 When we attempt to get at the heart of 
 the modern philosophic situation a thousand 
 clamorous voices cry for a hearing. Many 
 of them are characterized by loudness rather 
 than by importance, and our task is to find 
 those few defining assertions which gave its 
 quality to the thought of the time. Bent on 
 this quest, we soon discover that philosophy 
 in the nineteenth century was much like a 
 great feast at which a certain Banquo's 
 ghost insisted on appearing just when the 
 guests had settled down comfortably to en- 
 joy themselves. The feast was wonderfully 
 well set out, the viands included every deli- 
 cacy of the mind and much that was sub- 
 stantial as well. But the ghost had a way 
 of taking one's appetite. Sometimes the 
 feast was given by one philosophic school 
 and sometimes by another. But still the 
 ghost would appear at the most disconcert- 
 ing and inopportune times. 
 
 It has not proved too difficult to think 
 81 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 the universe into unity and coherency, but 
 somehow you make it a machine in the 
 process. The ghost is the ghost of necessity. 
 Just when everything is well arranged and 
 properly classified, you find that you do not 
 have a living organism but a dead machine. 
 There is no fault to find with the classifica- 
 tion except that life has slipped through it 
 and escaped. Movement and change in any 
 living sense are forever done for. You were 
 seeking a palace of the mind and you have 
 found a sarcophagus. 
 
 The whole materialistic philosophy of the 
 century just gone is one illustration in point. 
 Expressed with wonderful brilliancy and 
 skill in the synthetic philosophy of Herbert 
 Spencer, it fairly captured the imagination 
 of thousands of men. A far-flung battle line 
 the synthetic philosophy spread out with all 
 of life and all of the universe and all that 
 comes within the range of experience as the 
 object of its mastery. Nobody could deny 
 the power of the brain that worked out the 
 system. Nobody could deny the splendid 
 powers of observation and generalization 
 shown by the system itself. But just as 
 
 82 
 
BERGSON 
 
 everybody was enjoying the feast the ghost 
 appeared. The system was seen to account 
 for everything else in existence by denying 
 the one thing which makes existence itself 
 worth while. Freedom was politely bowed 
 out of the imiverse. Personality was made a 
 mechanical device and not a matter of free 
 intention. There were ultimate forces, but 
 they belonged to a great universal mecha- 
 nism of moving belts and revolving wheels. 
 As far as intention, purpose, and free move- 
 ment are concerned, where the names were 
 kept the reality had vanished. The body of 
 life had been dissected but the soul had 
 escaped. 
 
 It was not hard to point out internal con- 
 tradictions in the system. It was not hard 
 to show that it implicitly assumed the very 
 things it later denied. It was clear that you 
 could never account for the synthetic phi- 
 losophy itself on the basis of its own postu- 
 lates. To build such a system required the 
 very free mental movement which the system 
 denied. 
 
 All this was true, but, deeper than this, 
 the system was an attack on life itself. It 
 83 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 robbed men of the sense of freedom and 
 responsibility, of creative energy and full- 
 ness of power. It sapped the roots of morals 
 and religion. In dealing with physical facts 
 it refused to take account of the most out- 
 standing facts of the mental and moral and 
 religious experience of the race. It was 
 unconsciously an attempt to dam up the 
 movement of life itself. Of course the 
 mighty river simply rose above the dam and 
 swept on. There was some devastation in 
 the process, but life could not be impeded. 
 N'o philosophy can survive which lifts a 
 defiant hand in the face of life itself. 
 
 Another characteristic expression of phil- 
 osophic speculation might seem to promise 
 more. The Hegelian philosophy did not 
 begin with things. It began with thought. 
 It entered the sanctuary of the mind and 
 took its own process as its guide. The thesis 
 and antithesis and synthesis of the Hegelian 
 philosophy were an attempt to make the 
 logical movement of the thought process 
 itself the explanation of the problems of 
 existence. Here is surely a lofty idealism. 
 Now the great things of mind and spirit 
 
 84 
 
BERGSON 
 
 will come to their own. Thought is on the 
 throne and the blighting power of material- 
 ism has been overthrown. It is a severely 
 intellectual feast at which the Hegelians sit 
 down. All is moving with lofty propriety 
 when suddenly the ghost appears. It cannot 
 be! Yes, indeed, it is the same old ghost of 
 necessity. We have escaped from the lion 
 to confront the bear. We have escaped 
 physical necessity to find mental necessity. 
 The universe is still a big machine, only 
 now it is a mental machine instead of a 
 physical machine. Thought proves as re- 
 lentless a tyrant as things, and life and free- 
 dom and any real responsibility are again 
 banished from the universe. 
 
 A system built on logic instead of on a 
 logician is sure to prove a system of neces- 
 sity. Hegelianism worshiped logic and left 
 the logician quite out of account. It bowed 
 down before thought and enunciated prin- 
 ciples which made a free and responsible 
 and living thinker forever impossible. 
 
 Here again it is easy to find technical 
 errors and contradictions. But here again 
 the deeper matter is that the system was a 
 85 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 defiance of living experience and not an ex- 
 pression of it. Life was dwarfed; all its 
 facts were not faced. The biggest experi- 
 ences of men were left out of the circle of 
 the truth as it is in Hegelianism. The men 
 who tried to live in the system wore it hke 
 chains. The great currents of life swept 
 past it. Intellectual necessity proved as im- 
 potent as physical necessity to be specu- 
 latively satisfying to men. 
 
 Here, then, we have the typical nine- 
 teenth-century movements as far as the 
 widest influence and power are concerned, 
 and both of them strikingly failing to meet 
 the demands of life. Were there no voices 
 of revolt? Were there no prophets of the 
 currents of life itself? Did the goddess 
 Necessity call and ordain all who spoke in 
 the courts of Philosophy? 
 
 The answer is that there were right 
 vigorous and notable voices of protest. In 
 America Professor Borden P. Bowne, 
 through a long and notable career at Boston 
 University, was a voice crying in the wilder- 
 ness, in the name of a personal interpreta- 
 tion of the universe, with the freedom of a 
 
 86 
 
BERGSON 
 
 personal agent as the final and decisive fact. 
 In England Dr, Hastings Rashdall gave 
 forth a system of personal philosophy with 
 genuine kinship to that of Professor Bowne, 
 and so in the two great English-speaking 
 nations the voice speaking for free and un- 
 coerced personal agency at the heart of 
 things was heard. In Germany Professor 
 Rudolf Eucken carefully worked out and 
 gave forth his philosophy of Activism. 
 Essentially his thinking is another protest in 
 the name of life, it is another voice crying, 
 "Life itself has the right of way." 
 
 In both England and America the prag- 
 matists joined the protesting voices. Prag- 
 matism may mean either a method or a 
 philosophy, or both. But it always means 
 an appeal to life. Everything must go 
 down before life. If logic lies wounded and 
 helpless, the pragmatists will do nothing, 
 providing life goes on its way, full of 
 strength and power, unattacked and un- 
 harmed. Among these voices of protest one 
 of the very most potent is that of Bergson. 
 He is the great leader in France of the 
 revolt from Necessit}^ and his voice has 
 87 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 become one of worldwide significance and 
 influence. 
 
 III. The Philosophy or Bergson 
 
 Henri Bergson is a Parisian by birth and 
 is now fifty-six years of age. Educated 
 at the Lycee Condor cet and the Ecole 
 Normale Superieure, his early interest was 
 mathematics, and he later graduated in 
 philosophy. He spent seventeen years 
 teaching in various schools, and in 1900 was 
 appointed to a professorship of the College 
 de France, which professorship he now 
 occupies. In 1901 he was elected a member 
 of the Institute. 
 
 "To say that his lectures have made him 
 world famous and that men of many coun- 
 tries and races flock to the somber lecture 
 room of the old College de France is to give 
 a fair indication of the tremendous and al- 
 most protean influence of Bergsonism. His 
 is the largest lecture room the college can 
 boast, but not nearly large enough to ac- 
 commodate the polyglot crowd of both sexes 
 that gathers every Wednesday" (E. Her- 
 mann in Eucken and Bergson). 
 
 88 
 
BERGSON 
 
 Bergson's style is a marvel of lucidity, 
 precision, and charm, and his illustrations 
 are of a felicity which fills his hearers with 
 glad surprise. His power of thought is 
 easily equaled by his skill in expression. The 
 following of Bergson's works — and they 
 include his most important utterances — have 
 been translated into English : Time and Free 
 Will, 1910 (published in French in 1888) ; 
 Matter and Memory, 1911 (in French, 
 1896) ; Creative Evolution, his fullest and 
 most thoroughgoing exposition of his phi- 
 losophy, 1911 (in French in 1907) ; Laugh- 
 ter, 1911 (in French, 1901). 
 
 The preacher who wants to know some- 
 thing of Bergson will do well to begin with 
 H. Wildon Carr's little book, Henri Berg- 
 son, The Philosophy of Change (in The 
 People's Books, published in New York, by 
 the Dodge Publishing Co. ) . This he may 
 follow with Mrs. E. Hermann's brilliant 
 and powerful study, Eucken and Bergson 
 (The Pilgrim Press). Then he should 
 plunge directly into the Creative Evolution 
 itself. 
 
 Now, what is Bergson's distinctive posi- 
 89 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 tion as a philosopher, and how does he 
 approach the problems which existence and 
 experience present to us? We may best 
 begin with his conception of time, for here 
 he strikes a distinctive note. The historic 
 conception of time, he tells us, is really time 
 translated into space. When we speak of 
 time we mean the things that happen and 
 not the duration itself. And because of this 
 slipping into one meaning when we use 
 another word, all sorts of confusion arise. 
 Time becomes a contradicting conception or 
 a mere mental form when viewed in this way. 
 But, according to Bergson, the very thing 
 which escapes us when we speak of time is 
 the vital thing not only in time but in ex- 
 istence. The experience of duration is the 
 fundamental fact of life. We experience 
 duration as a movement of which we are 
 deeply conscious in our moments of extreme 
 intuitive sympathy. And this movement of 
 duration with which we are one in our 
 deepest sense of life is the very stuff of which 
 reality is made. Because of this position 
 Bergson has been called the modern 
 Heraclitus. 
 
 90 
 
BERGSON 
 
 The idealist begins with thought, and does 
 not know what to do with things. The 
 reahst begins with things and never success- 
 fully makes his peace with thought. Berg- 
 son begins with that experience of change 
 of which both thought and things are as- 
 pects and so finds a tertium quid by means 
 of which he can deal with both. 
 
 This fundamental movement is infinitely 
 larger than human experience, though by 
 intuition we feel our oneness with it. And 
 this ceaseless, changing duration is the last 
 fact of reahty and the basis of knowledge. 
 This great movement is like a vital energy 
 pushing its way to complete expression and 
 coming out in various ways. The slumber 
 of the plant, the instinct of the animal, and 
 the knowledge of man are various burstings 
 forth of this vital moving energy. The 
 intellect is man's organ for dealing with ex- 
 perience. It takes snapshots, as it were, of 
 the rapidly moving train. These snapshots 
 are very useful, but for philosophic pur- 
 poses they are always misleading. In the 
 picture the train is always standing still. It 
 is of the very nature of the intellect that it 
 
 91 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 must seem to bring creation to a standstill 
 in order to apprehend it. But for all that, 
 the fundamental characteristic of existence 
 is the one which the snapshot does not reveal. 
 
 Is there any way, then, by which we can 
 get at reality? Is the intellect merely a 
 practical tool which leaves us helpless when 
 we approach the great philosophic prob- 
 lems? The reply is that our own conscious- 
 ness is larger than intellect. There is a 
 fringe of consciousness which does not take 
 snapshots but knows itself as one with the 
 movement of life. We must seize this fringe, 
 this intuition of the movement, and here we 
 shall find genuine, if fleeting, knowledge of 
 reality itself. The deep sense of oneness 
 with the changing movement of duration is 
 the fundamental fact for philosophy. 
 
 This movement is an endless creative 
 activity. It does not look ahead. But it 
 does carry all the past with it in the illu- 
 minated action of the present. The process 
 of evolution is not toward a foreseen goal. 
 It is a fresh, creative output, always bring- 
 ing forth something new. After the new is 
 brought forth you can fit it into a scheme. 
 
 92 
 
BERGSON 
 
 But there was no scheme beforehand. It is 
 utterly free, entirely full of creative energy, 
 a great current which perpetually changes 
 and continually creates. 
 
 Reality is the movement. Thought is a 
 snapshot which sees it, or a section of it, at 
 a standstill. Matter is the section we seem 
 to see but is really a part of the movement. 
 Intuition is the experience of oneness with 
 the movement. This mighty vital push, the 
 very self of duration, the very heart of 
 change, is the ultimate reality. It is free, 
 it is creative. 
 
 The intellect is an organ for dealing with 
 aspects of the movement in a practical way. 
 It is of practical value just because it en- 
 ables us to see sections at a standstill, so 
 that we can deal with life; but because the 
 soul of the movement slips away from the 
 grasp of the intellect, it can never in its own 
 strength build up an adequate philosophy. 
 The systems of physical mechanism and 
 intellectual mechanism are what they are 
 because of this fact. The intellect sees things 
 in a mechanical way. But the larger sense 
 of reality which intuition gives us opens the 
 93 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 door to the true philosophy. When we ex- 
 perience our oneness with the creative move- 
 ment we have at last reached the defining 
 fact of existence. We have touched reality 
 itself. 
 
 IV. Features or Bergson^s Philosophy 
 
 or Service to the Christian 
 
 Thinker 
 
 The preacher who reads Bergson soon 
 feels that there is a certain mood about his 
 philosophy which has very real kinship with 
 the mood of the preacher. Deeper than 
 that, again and again there is a ring about 
 the very phrases of Bergson which is like 
 the ring of human experience as is recog- 
 nized in the preacher's mind and heart. The 
 sense of movement, of activity, of stir, of a 
 universe in which things happen corresponds 
 to the deepest knowledge and intuitions of 
 the preacher himself. The trouble about 
 mechanical interpretations of the universe 
 is just at this point. They leave no room 
 for anything really to happen. There is no 
 room for tragedy. There is no room for 
 comedy. It is a closed universe with room 
 
 94 
 
BERGSON 
 
 for nothing but a careful system of pigeon- 
 holes. 
 
 Bergson from the start gives you the 
 feeling that his philosophy strikes the note 
 of life itself. The consciousness of creative 
 energy in a man's soul is answered to by the 
 placing of creative energy at the heart of 
 philosophy. Then the emphasis on freedom 
 is most welcome to the Christian thinker. 
 He is tired of being a practical believer in 
 freedom and a theoretic behever in necessity. 
 The philosophy of Bergson gives a world of 
 initiative, of uncoerced movement, a world 
 where no frowning physical or logical laws 
 leave freedom to perish among the wastes of 
 thought. The kingliness of freedom is recog- 
 nized in Bergson's philosophy as perhaps 
 it has never been recognized before. Then 
 the sense of great things to come is welcome 
 to the Christian thinker. Life is not finished. 
 The world is not completed. The creative 
 energy is now at work. We are not spec- 
 tators, watching the curtain fall on the last 
 act. We are participants, and we may well 
 believe that the great action is yet to come. 
 A splendid optimism naturally flows from 
 95 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 such a philosophy. Again, the emphasis on 
 activity fits the thought of the preacher. It 
 helps a man to believe in effort. It sets free 
 initiative. It sends a man forth to do and to 
 dare. He is a part of a universe in action, 
 and he himself may realize some of its won- 
 derful potencies. Last of all, the emphasis 
 on the sympathetic intuition which puts us 
 within the circle of reality in a sense impos- 
 sible to pure intellect is welcome to the 
 Christian. His own Christian experience 
 has just this quality at its highest, and he 
 is glad to find philosophy recognizing the 
 validity of the sympathetic intuition, which 
 he knows may be the saint's sense of God, 
 as well as the philosopher's sense of oneness 
 with the movement of duration. The atmos- 
 phere, then, and many of the contentions of 
 Bergson's philosophy come to the preacher 
 in his study as assets he is glad to receive. 
 
 V. Features Which Cause the Chris- 
 tian Thinker to Hesitate, 
 Question, and Criticise 
 
 All that we have said is by no means 
 intended to suggest that Bergson is a Chris- 
 
 96 
 
BERGSON 
 
 tian philosopher. He often gives the Chris- 
 tian thinker tools which he himself would 
 never dream of using in the way which im- 
 mediately suggests itself to the Christian. 
 Bergson is very eager about consciousness 
 and creative energy. But does he lift them 
 to the place where he makes them our secure 
 possession? Does he see that these things 
 are only figures of speech unless they are 
 the characteristics of a person ? Does he see 
 that the push of creative evolution must be 
 the conscious intention of a mighty personal 
 agent? Does he know that his own enthusi- 
 astic propaganda hangs ready to fall back 
 into necessity, for all his fine phrases, unless 
 he lifts it clear and clean by recognizing the 
 personal agency which is one with the crea- 
 tive movement of duration? 
 
 We are not able to make an affirmative 
 reply to these questions. Bergson is eager 
 to save freedom and creative energy and 
 fullness of life, but he has not yet been will- 
 ing to find their security in the clear and 
 definite recognition that active personal 
 agency — the activity of God — is the heart 
 of the whole matter. 
 
 97 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 Now, unless we rise from what Bergson 
 gives us to this higher conception, we cannot 
 permanently hold the ground for which he 
 so valiantly fights. Many of his noblest 
 passages become mere figures of speech, un- 
 less we put living, active personality back 
 of them for their support. This hesitancy 
 about personality is united with other fail- 
 ures to discriminate closely. Bergson has 
 what we may almost call a great antipathy 
 to final causes. But a free personal agent 
 may be able to preside over the movement 
 just because he is the movement and makes 
 his intention potent. The freedom of the 
 movement is the freedom of the personality 
 who is the movement, and while a freely 
 chosen goal toward which the whole creation 
 moves may present difficulties to the mind, 
 they are outweighed by the greater difficul- 
 ties attending any other conception. Final 
 causes are not our foes but our friends. 
 
 If we make personal agency in free and 
 self -chosen action the core of the movement 
 of creative evolution, we shall escape the 
 snares which beset the path in which Berg- 
 son is now walking. 
 
 98 
 
BERGSON 
 
 VI. Is There Such a Thing as a 
 Christian Philosophy? 
 
 Of course, there is a sense in which phi- 
 losophy may not be called Christian any 
 more than may mathematics. There are 
 aspects of experience whose interpretation 
 is as much apart from rehgion as the fact 
 that two and two are four. In many a range 
 of its speculations philosophy is dealing with 
 things which do not belong to morals or to 
 religion. But when we come to the deepest 
 matters of life and destiny, Christian ex- 
 perience has implications of which philoso- 
 phy must take account. The metaphysical 
 implications of Christian experience are far- 
 reaching. They include: 1. A personal God. 
 2. A personal revelation. 3. An Incarna- 
 tion of the Son of God in human life. 4. A 
 world presided over by the will of its per- 
 sonal Deity. 5. A divine deed of suffering 
 rescue. 6. A goal for life secured by the 
 character, the purposes, and the will of God. 
 
 Now, a philosophy which makes room for 
 these facts will be transformed by them. It 
 will be dominated by them. They will be- 
 99 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 come the defining facts of the system. In 
 this sense we have a right to speak of a 
 Christian philosophy. And from this stand- 
 point we must say that Bergson offers many 
 materials which may be used in a truly Chris- 
 tian interpretation of the universe and all 
 the phenomena of existence and life. But 
 we must add that his own use of his mate- 
 rials, as thus far seen, leaves out of account 
 many of those supreme facts which the 
 Christian thinker can never ignore. 
 
 100 
 
THE RELIGION OF A 
 SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE RELIGION OF A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 Is science the friend or the foe of reh- 
 gion? It depends a great deal on the science. 
 It depends much on the rehgion. It de- 
 pends most of all on the man who is trying 
 to make a place in his life for the postulates 
 of science and the sanctions of a religious 
 experience. 
 
 That particular scientific views have made 
 religion impossible to some men cannot be 
 denied. That particular religious views 
 have caused some men to refuse to give a 
 candid and open hearing to modern science 
 is equally true. That we live in a period 
 when there is no end of confusion and heart- 
 searching and brain-searching, when the 
 way of faith is often difficult and the way 
 of doubt is often easy, is patent to every 
 thoughtful man. It is also fairly clear that 
 the religious obscurantists add to the diffi- 
 culty and practical perplexity. It is certain 
 that some types of scientific dogmatists 
 103 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 throw dust in the air just when we most 
 need to see clearly. And the mystics who 
 ignore the whole problem, as they go off 
 with their beatific visions, sometimes succeed 
 in saving the beatific visions by a method 
 which makes it impossible for them to help 
 those who feel most the perplexity of the 
 problem. Perhaps we can best analyze the 
 situation and come to see some of the light 
 which is ready to fall on the dark places by 
 following the history of a hypothetical man 
 who goes through the typical experiences 
 as regards science and religion which the life 
 and thought of oui* time are likely to bring 
 about. It may be that no one man has ever 
 passed through all these stages according to 
 schedule, but many men have passed through 
 some one of the typical experiences we shall 
 discuss, and the whole situation will stand 
 out best if we follow an imaginary man 
 through the whole circuit of attitudes which 
 are outstandingly characteristic of our time. 
 
 I. The Period of Unquestioning Faith 
 
 The boyhood memories of many a scien- 
 tific man bring up a time of simple and 
 104 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN^ 
 
 beautiful and undisturbed faith. Mr. 
 Alfred Noyes, in that sharply penetrating 
 poem "The Old Sceptic," describes the com- 
 ing back of such memories as these : 
 
 I will go back to my home and look at the wayside 
 flowers, 
 And hear from the wayside cabins the sweet old 
 hymns again, 
 Where Christ holds out his arms in the quiet evening 
 hours, 
 And the light of the chapel porches broods on the 
 peaceful lane. 
 
 And there I shall hear men praying the deep old 
 foolish prayers, 
 And there I shall see once more the fond old faith 
 confessed. 
 And the strange old light on their faces who hear as 
 a blind man hears — 
 Come unto me, ye weary, and I will give you rest. 
 
 I will go back and believe in the deep old foolish tales, 
 And pray the sweet old prayers that I learned at 
 my mother's knee. 
 Where the Sabbath tolls its peace throughout the 
 breathless mountain-vales, 
 And the sunset's evening hymn hallows the listening 
 sea. 
 
 There are many homes yet to be found in the 
 
 world where the sense of God and Christ is 
 
 105 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 as sharp and clear as the sense of the father 
 and mother, and a great series of homes Hke 
 that which Burns describes with such simple 
 eloquence in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" 
 are to be found in widely scattered lands; 
 and such homes form the golden chain which 
 binds the world about the feet of God. The 
 boy reared in a home like this breathes in 
 piety as he breathes the air. He does not 
 reach after belief as an attainment. He has 
 it as a part of the very structure of his life. 
 The Bible speaks to him with the high and 
 awful authenticity of the voice of God even 
 as it speaks with the winsome tenderness 
 of the Man of Galilee. Prayer is a radiant 
 reality which has been interpreted to him 
 by the shining of his mother's face and the 
 glow of deep communion which he has seen 
 in his father's eyes. The life of the home 
 is all shot through and transformed by the 
 practical power of religion. It is a life as 
 well as a creed, an experience as well as a 
 belief. Mind and heart and will together are 
 seeking to work out the divine behests. The 
 church has a tender and beautiful sanctity, 
 and worship has an alluring summons. The 
 106 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 home interprets the church and the church 
 inspires the home. All is simple and clear 
 and nobly beautiful. The sunset glory and 
 the verdure-clad hills and the power of 
 Christ are all experienced and undisputed 
 facts of life. The early years spent in such 
 a home will give color to all the after time 
 of a man's experience. He may journey far 
 into paths of questioning and doubt, and 
 may even come to dwell in places of positive 
 unbelief, but he can never quite get away 
 from the fact that he has known religion 
 from within. The noblest skepticism of the 
 nineteenth century was characterized by this 
 regretful and pensive memory of the joys 
 and hopes lost to the life for evermore. 
 
 II. The Period When Science Seems 
 TO Make Faith Impossible 
 
 Forth from such a home as this the youth 
 of eager and alert mind and buoyant heart 
 goes to find his place in the intellectual life 
 of the world. Often his home has been a 
 sheltered spot, undisturbed by the mighty 
 tempests beating out their fury upon the 
 sea. The faith of his father and mother 
 107 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 has been as simple and naive as his own. 
 They have never felt the tug and the strain 
 of the age's questioning. In their quiet 
 cove, protected by mountains of strong be- 
 lief, they have never felt the danger of the 
 tempests raging upon the unresting sea. 
 The son goes forth to be a sailor. He leaves 
 the sheltered spot of his boyhood. He feels 
 the wind upon his brow. His ship must 
 meet the tempest. The old mountains are 
 far away. He meets the first crisis of his 
 life. To drop the figure, the keen-brained 
 candid youth comes face to face with the 
 positions of modern science. He learns to 
 know the names and the work of the great 
 scientific leaders of the nineteenth century, 
 who gave out a new universe and a new set 
 of formulas for life. He is introduced to a 
 new appraisal of the facts of the world. He 
 becomes familiar with the reign of law. The 
 new thoughts appeal to his mind and fire his 
 imagination. The vast universe to which 
 scientific investigation introduces him, all 
 held in the steel-like clasp of a great system 
 of law, is a mental spectacle of solemn 
 grandeur. There is an almost religious 
 108 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 thrill in the thought of the far-lying worlds 
 all subject to the control of inflexible and 
 immutable law. If he looks through a tele- 
 scope he sees more law-mastered worlds. If 
 he looks through a microscope, and begins 
 to investigate the infinitely small, here again 
 is a universe in miniature held in the same 
 inescapable grasp of law. Accompanying 
 this study of the reign of law comes the 
 knowledge of those vast generalizations 
 which science has uttered in the attempt to 
 explain the universe. Some form of the 
 nebular hypothesis dazzles his imagination 
 and compels his mental assent as an account 
 of how the worlds came to be. In the cosmos 
 he sees the far-lying grandeur of a great 
 process of evolution. Coming to the earth 
 itself, geology and biology speak out right 
 confidently of an age-long process by means 
 of which the world came to be what it is 
 and the present forms of life developed 
 from forms infinitely more simple. From 
 movements in an inchoate universe of dif- 
 fused substance which evolved into planets, 
 on to the full completeness of civilized man, 
 there is an unbroken process of evolution, 
 109 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 the expression of a completely mastering 
 system of law. The more he knows of vari- 
 ous sciences, the more does this view become 
 all-embracing. He is in a vast system with 
 no place for breaks or gaps. The reign of 
 law is the first and last word. And the 
 process law is working out may be described 
 by one magic word — evolution. 
 
 As time goes on it becomes increasingly 
 evident that this self -working system is not 
 the friend of religion. The reign of law 
 takes the place of the reign of God. Piety 
 is still very beautiful, but it has no founda- 
 tion in the system of things. The old boy- 
 hood faith has all of its early charm, but it 
 has ceased to command mental allegiance. 
 At first the young man with his growing 
 mind struggles against such conclusions. He 
 repudiates their very suggestions. There 
 must be some way to reconcile the reign of 
 law and the reign of God. He tries to 
 believe that at great crises in the life of the 
 universe God stepped in and did something; 
 but more and more he finds the gaps are 
 filling up. The system is like some monster 
 which devours everything in sight. The 
 110 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 day comes when the student faces the fact 
 that his scientific view of the universe is a 
 complete thing with no breaks at all. He 
 realizes bitterly the significance of the words 
 of the brilliant skeptic who desired to take 
 God to the edge of the universe and bow 
 him out, with thanks for past services, be- 
 cause he was no longer needed. 
 
 While all this has been going on, and the 
 young man has been coming into fuller and 
 fuller knowledge of a system of law without 
 any breaks anywhere, from another angle 
 his faith has been weakened. He has become 
 acquainted with the results of modern 
 critical biblical scholarship. He had been 
 brought up to believe in an inerrant Bible. 
 He beholds it lying in fragments at his 
 feet. He becomes interested in the processes 
 of critical analysis of biblical documents and 
 the frank appraisal of all their problems, 
 and soon finds the conclusions of such inves- 
 tigations compelling his allegiance. The 
 Bible and the religion of which it is the 
 literary exponent, become a part of a 
 system of perfectly natural evolution. He 
 has lost God out of the world of nature. He 
 111 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 has lost him out of the Bible. The universe 
 has become a vast mechanism with no room 
 for God anywhere. All this produces heart- 
 ache enough. The world has become very 
 lonely since the Infinite Companion is dead. 
 The system of law whose mighty majesty so 
 attracted the imagination at first has lost its 
 almost religious appeal. It has made the 
 world less lovely, it has brought an autumn 
 sense of loss in the place of the springtime 
 of the soul. Mechanics have taken the place 
 of personality in the universe, and the far- 
 sighted thinker has . as his most dominant 
 emotion a sense of loss. But every step has 
 been taken candidly, and there is no retreat. 
 Faith has become impossible, but intellectual 
 candor is still on the throne. 
 
 Of course many men do not go the whole 
 length we have described. They build them- 
 selves half-way houses in various spots; but 
 they find it increasingly hard to live in the 
 half-way house; and when they are profes- 
 sors in universities they usually find that 
 their most brilliant students refuse to stop at 
 all at the half-way house, and insist on press- 
 ing on to the logical conclusion. God is 
 112 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 still worshiped in the half-way house, but if 
 one takes the whole journey, the Deity is 
 lost before the destination is reached. 
 
 III. The Period When Moral and 
 
 Religious Facts are Recognized 
 
 BY THE Scientific Thinker 
 
 As time passes, however, a dim gray 
 comes to be seen in the darkness. It turns 
 out, after all, that the final conclusion was 
 not the last word. As Alice found it possible 
 to go through the looking-glass, so the stu- 
 dent finds that there is something beyond 
 that materialistic interpretation of the uni- 
 verse which makes it merely a water-tight 
 system of inflexible laws. The new start 
 comes with the recognition that all the facts 
 have not been faced. If there is anything 
 a scientific thinker makes a matter of pride, 
 it is his candid appraisal of all the facts to 
 be found anywhere. What hospitality is to 
 the sheik in the desert open-minded welcome 
 of new facts is to the scientist. So it is with 
 a certain revulsion of feeling that he dis- 
 covers the existence of a whole range of facts 
 which he has been ignoring. The moral 
 113 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 experience of humanity is as much a series 
 of facts as are the defining characteristics 
 of any form of hfe. A rehgious experience 
 is as much a fact as a stone or a bug or a 
 chemical reaction. Knowledge and its classi- 
 fication are as stubbornly a part of experi- 
 ence as any formation which confronts the 
 eye of the geologist, and the interpretation 
 in which the mind can rest must squarely 
 meet and appraise and make room for all 
 the facts of experience. Having set in some 
 such fashion as this to rise no more, it 
 seemed, the sun of religion comes within 
 view again, having risen, it may be, to set no 
 more. Men of science come to feel that thej'- 
 must investigate the phenomena of the reli- 
 gious life. With the same curious interest 
 with which they might scrutinize an unusual 
 insect they turn their eyes upon religion. In 
 such a spirit has been done the type of work 
 represented by the late Professor William 
 James's Varieties of Religious Experience. 
 The earth is ransacked for data. Question- 
 naires are sent out which lead to more or 
 less critical introspection. The secrets of 
 the soul are put under the microscope and a 
 114 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 brave attempt is made to unravel the mys- 
 tery of the power of rehgion. All this 
 represents one great gain. It offers to our 
 young man, lost in the mazes of despairing 
 knowledge, an opportunity to go back to a 
 survey of the precious things which he has 
 lost. It recognizes a series of facts which 
 had been left out of account. It does not 
 sneer at religion. It attempts to under- 
 stand it. It does not deride conversion. It 
 attempts to explain it. 
 
 When the religious world sees the scien- 
 tific world turning a respectful gaze upon 
 religion there is much rejoicing. In some 
 quarters there is an inclination to issue a 
 thanksgiving proclamation. It is felt that 
 at least a prayer meeting might be held to 
 celebrate the event. That a great scientist 
 should devote long periods of time to collect- 
 ing and classifying the data of religious 
 experience suggests the speedy arrival of 
 the millennium. Before the issuing of the 
 thanksgiving proclamation, however, it will 
 be well for us to do a little close thinking. 
 The facts of the case may not be altogether 
 as encouraging as we had supposed. If a 
 115 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 man gives their full significance to all the 
 facts of religion, there is, indeed, a new start 
 and a hope of a brighter day. But very 
 often it happens that the scientific study of 
 religion is merely an attempt to get all the 
 religious phenomena so classified and inter- 
 preted as to fit into the old water-tight 
 system. It often happens that the sun has 
 not risen after all, and that the light which 
 played in the sky did not indicate any de- 
 pendable or permanent illumination. The 
 scientific psychology of religion may easily 
 turn out to be a psychology for the explain- 
 ing away of the very central sanctions of 
 religion. As long as the worship of the 
 water-tight system remains, there is really 
 no hope. As long as the thinker must be 
 loyal to the machine at whatever cost, there 
 is no real gain. To admit that religious 
 experiences have a place in a perfectly 
 mechanical and impersonal interpretation of 
 life is not to help on the cause of religion. 
 It is to make religion impossible to those 
 who accept the interpretation. To admit 
 that belief in a certain series of events and 
 persons and ideas has had a transforming 
 116 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 effect on human lives does not aid in pro- 
 ducing future transformations if in the same 
 breath those events and persons and ideas 
 are discounted and declared without genuine 
 authenticity. The psychology of religion is 
 often an attempt to keep religion without 
 theology, which is very much like an attempt 
 to keep circulation without any veins or 
 arteries. So when our student takes up the 
 study of religion in a scientific way he has 
 found an opportunity, but he is by no means 
 sure of making his escape. He has a won- 
 derful system of pigeonholes, and he will be 
 tempted to insist on getting the facts into 
 the system. He may all too easily forget 
 that it is his business to enlarge the system 
 so that it may fit the facts. The really 
 hopeful thing about this sort of investiga- 
 tion is that the facts simply will not answer 
 to any mechanical formula. If a man once 
 genuinely faces the world of moral and 
 religious experience, his world of mechanical 
 thinking will begin to feel earthquake 
 tremors. The very contact with the deeply 
 personal experiences and transformations is 
 like a series of electric shocks. A man may 
 117 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 go on for a time engrossed in a dignified 
 translation of personal experiences into 
 interpersonal formulas, but it is always pos- 
 sible that the abject futility of this sort of 
 performance will dawn upon him. When 
 that day comes there will be a sunrise indeed. 
 Our sincere and eager student may reach 
 the Great Divide in this fashion. He has 
 spent some time in gathering data as regards 
 religious experience. He has them classified 
 in a clever mechanical fashion. Then he is 
 brought to a sudden stop by this fact: The 
 one thing which made religion transforming 
 was a belief in a personal, supernatural God. 
 The personal trust in the Divine was the 
 point of strategy in the religious experience. 
 Now he has explained the mechanics of that 
 experience. He can produce every factor 
 except the personal trust in the Divine. But 
 without that trust a repetition of the ex- 
 perience would be impossible. He has, 
 therefore, explained religious experience by 
 leaving out its one defining characteristic, 
 and he has explained it in such a way as to 
 make its repetition forever impossible to 
 those who accept the explanation. The most 
 118 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 important fact has slipped through his 
 fingers and escaped. Now he is at the place 
 of critical opportunity. Somehow he must 
 find a larger synthesis. Somehow he must 
 make a place for the Divine. How shall 
 he do this without a break-up of his system? 
 Can it be that the mechanical system is only 
 a part of a larger whole? Can it be that 
 this larger whole makes room for the very 
 things he has so easily discarded? May God 
 and freedom and personality have a place 
 in the larger synthesis to which the candid 
 thinker is driven ? 
 
 IV. The Peeiod Where it is Seen that 
 Science is a Brilliant Classifica- 
 tion BUT Does Not Give Any 
 Answer to the Ultimate 
 Questions 
 
 At this point our candid thinker is likely 
 to meet one real difficulty. All his intel- 
 lectual life has consisted of flights by means 
 of the use of one wing. The other has no 
 power because it has never been used. Our 
 age worships the inductive method of reason- 
 ing, and it is probably reserved for a later 
 119 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 age to bring to its full service the too lightly 
 sacrificed powers of deductive reasoning. 
 So our pilgrim for the truth will probably 
 use enlarged and modified induction in the 
 perilous way to which he has now come. 
 Everything hangs on his ability to see the 
 meaning of one distinction. He has studied 
 many a science ; he has accepted far-reaching 
 scientific generalizations; now he must see 
 that science is only a record of the way in 
 which things happen. It never tells why 
 they happen. Because day follows night no 
 one supposes that one causes the other. The 
 great philosophical fallacy of science is the 
 supposition that, because one thing follows 
 another, the thing which follows must be 
 caused by the thing which goes before. 
 Science is a catalogue of the uniformities of 
 nature. It has never told anybody why they 
 are uniform. It does not know. In a mov- 
 ing picture the earlier films are not the 
 ancestors of the later films. In a musical 
 composition the earlier notes do not cause 
 the later notes. In each case the cause is 
 outside what appears in the series itself. 
 Science is like a careful record of notes with 
 120 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 no reference to the player. It is like a care- 
 ful classification of the separate films with 
 no reference to the cinematograph. Things 
 happen in certain ways; science records the 
 ways; but as to the great question of why 
 they happen science has no answer to give. 
 If our pilgrim after truth is able to see this 
 fact, he is about to receive light which is 
 light indeed. 
 
 A question may be asked about this vast 
 system. Is it self -running, or does it have a 
 great personal ground back of itself? To 
 answer this question our scientist must 
 plunge into philosophy. He must become a 
 student of epistemology. He must enter 
 the world of metaphysics. As he journeys 
 on, light increases. His great discovery will 
 be that he has been using the instruments 
 of the mind without ever critically inspect- 
 ing them. He has never seen what is in- 
 volved in his own rationality. The moment 
 he begins to scrutinize the necessary impli- 
 cations of rationality he finds personal in- 
 tention and freedom and the discarded dis- 
 tinctions of his youth knocking at the door 
 again. As he goes on he discovers that a 
 121 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 self -running mechanism as an explanation 
 of the universe is one mass of contradictions. 
 It would contradict every fundamental 
 postulate of that process of knowing by 
 which it is worked out. It would deny per- 
 sonality and freedom and would make 
 knowledge impossible. If there were such 
 a universe as the mechanical system involves, 
 we could never know it. On the other hand, 
 a universe in which the free activity of a 
 knowing mind is the fundamental fact makes 
 room for everything in that process of uni- 
 formities which science has made known to 
 us, but explains them all by a Cause which 
 expresses itself in these uniformities, and not 
 by making these uniformities self-sustain- 
 ing. 
 
 If our thinker continues faithfully to pur- 
 sue the paths of critical thought, he will come 
 to see that science has its splendidly signifi- 
 cant and important field in observing and 
 classifying the uniformities of experience, 
 but that it must leave their explanation to 
 philosophy, and philosophy must call in a 
 free and knowing person, the Master of Life. 
 The new light focuses at one point. Law 
 122 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 has been considered as something objective, 
 something real, but it is seen that by itself a 
 law is only a figure of speech. As has been 
 wittily said, "A law cannot arrest any one — 
 it takes a policeman." From the standpoint 
 of that description of the way things happen, 
 which is science, a law is simply a formula 
 of uniformity. From the standpoint of 
 philosophy, which asks the ultimate ques- 
 tions, law is the name of the way in which 
 God acts. The laws of nature are nothing 
 but the abstract expression of the coherent 
 and orderly method of the action of God. 
 When all this is seen it is clear to our thinker 
 that his system requires God, and that the 
 last attitude of science, like that of religion, 
 is one of faith. The only assurance for the 
 continuity of life's uniformities is to be found 
 in the character of God. But once allow 
 divine personality to be the ultimate fact, 
 and there is room for all those facts of moral 
 experience which belong to ethics and those 
 facts of history and revelation and the inner 
 life and trust which belong to religion. The 
 larger synthesis explains the physical uni- 
 formities and leaves room for personal free- 
 123 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 dom and all the transforming personal 
 experiences. 
 
 Now the student does not try to make his 
 psychology of religion fit into mechanical 
 molds. He knows that morals and religion 
 belong to that aspect of experience which 
 transcends the physical uniformities of life. 
 When our thinker has set the bounds between 
 science and philosophy, and has followed a 
 critical philosophy to its ulitimate conclu- 
 sions, he finds a foundation for all the faith 
 of his childhood as well as for all he has 
 learned in scientific study. 
 
 V. The Ultimate World View 
 
 Our pilgrim for truth has now found an 
 intellectual destination. He sees that the 
 task of the thinker is to find a view which 
 will give to all a resting place of experience, 
 and that mechanical views fail because ex- 
 perience is not mechanical. He sees that 
 you must begin all adequate thought with 
 a thinker, because that is where experience 
 begins. You cannot begin with things. You 
 can find a place for them only as a part of 
 the experience of living thinkers. He sees 
 124 
 
A SCIENTIFIC MAN 
 
 that in his days of doubt he had allowed 
 the smaller part of life to devour the larger. 
 He had used rationality to prove that the 
 world had no place for rationality. Now he 
 begins with an ultimate person as the neces- 
 sary postulate of experience. He finds a 
 place for all the mechanical uniformities of 
 life as an expression of an orderly mind and 
 a steadfast will, but he knows that God is 
 greater than his system, and if there were 
 sufficient motive God could change any of 
 the uniformities. He is not a citizen in a 
 world whose laws master him. He is king 
 in a world whose laws are just his ways of 
 acting. So in the crisis of moral history 
 there is a place for the miracle. Wlien God 
 does a thing in a different way you have a 
 miracle. When he does it in his usual way 
 you have the so-called order of nature. 
 Really, it is all divine activity, both the mii- 
 formity and that place of crisis, like the 
 resurrection of Jesus, when the uniformity 
 of method is ignored because of a great 
 ethical and spiritual need. With the per- 
 sonal view of the universe, whose orderliness 
 is as steady as the character of God, but 
 125 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 which does not have a dead and mechanical 
 rigidity, there is room for freedom for man, 
 for morals, for the tragedy of sin, for reh- 
 gion, for a real revelation from God to men, 
 for the incarnation of the Son of God, for 
 the mighty deed of suffering rescue wrought 
 by the Son of God on Calvary, for the resur- 
 rection, for the new life, for immortality, and 
 for a world view which includes all the uni- 
 formities of science and all the facts of faith. 
 Such a view is in complete accord with the 
 justified conclusions of modern biblical 
 scholarship. It avoids those extreme con- 
 clusions which are the result of rationahstic 
 presuppositions in the thinkers, but it 
 candidly accepts those positions as regards 
 date and authorship and unfolding revela- 
 tion which have commended themselves to 
 the sober and reverent scholarship of the 
 world. It cannot rest content without a 
 divine Christ. It must be sure of an actual 
 redemption and a divine forgiveness, but it 
 is very comfortable with a composite Hexa- 
 teuch, and is ready to shake hands with a 
 second Isaiah. 
 
 Thus our pilgrim for truth has found a 
 126 
 
A SCIEXTIFIC MAN 
 
 Gibraltar at last. He remains a man of 
 science, but he no longer confuses science 
 with philosophy. He knows that the ulti- 
 mate synthesis is a matter of philosophic 
 appraisal, where the hidden communion of 
 the saint and the formations of the geologist 
 alike are treated with candor. He knows 
 that God is the final postulate of the uni- 
 formities of science as well as of the raptures 
 of the mystic. He knows that science, ethics, 
 and religion have a common platform in the 
 personal interpretation of experience. He 
 knows that ultimate forces are figures of 
 speech and an ultimate Person a reality. The 
 Lord God Almighty is the explanation of 
 the uniformities of nature and the trans- 
 formations of religion. 
 
 127 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 Orthodoxy may mean a number of dif- 
 ferent things. It may mean a man's slavish 
 assent to a formal code which he has never 
 profoundly studied and of whose basis and 
 implications he has no adequate conception. 
 It may mean loyalty to a traditional point of 
 view growing out of a profound sense of the 
 value of the results of human experience as 
 they have crystallized through the ages. It 
 may mean adherence to certain standards 
 through a nervous timidity which is afraid 
 to venture on untried ground and has a 
 special distrust of intellectual exploration. 
 It may be the acceptance of recognized 
 standards after a personal investigation and 
 struggle which has tested every old position 
 as if it were now for the first time offered 
 to the world. It may be the intellectual 
 rest of a man whose deepest intuitions and 
 needs seem to him to be clearly met and 
 satisfied by a particular interpretation of 
 131 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 life which, though old, remains vital. Or it 
 may be that a nmiiber of these different 
 approaches to orthodoxy unite, making it 
 acceptable to a particular thinker. You do 
 not know much about a man when 3^ou 
 merely know that he is orthodox. The 
 orthodoxy must be traced down to its roots 
 in his intellectual life. And even farther, 
 it must be followed, as its roots twine in and 
 out of his moral and spiritual life. When it 
 is the expression of the whole life — the out- 
 come of mental and moral and spiritual 
 vitality — orthodoxy must be taken very 
 seriously. The variety of the meanings of 
 the word "orthodoxy" is not confined to the 
 method by which a man becomes orthodox. 
 It also includes the contents of his belief. 
 What is orthodox in one age has often been 
 heretical in the age before. What is ortho- 
 dox in one scientific or philosophical or 
 ecclesiastical group is often considered non- 
 sense in another. Orthodoxy from this 
 point of view may almost be defined as a 
 fixed standard which is constantly changing. 
 But, while the continued readjustments in 
 human thinking warn us against too rigid a 
 132 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 conception of orthodoxy, it remains true that 
 as far as the Christian rehgion is concerned, 
 there have been large reahns of thought as to 
 which the cathohc faith has kept within cer- 
 tain hnes in a remarkable way. We may 
 claim a right to use the word ''orthodoxy" 
 with some precision as describing Christian 
 thought within these limits. The personality 
 of God, the deity of Jesus Christ, the deadli- 
 ness of sin, the redemption of men through 
 the death of Christ, the new life which is 
 the gift of the Son of God, the resurrection 
 of Jesus, the assurance of a glorious im- 
 mortality after death — these may be said to 
 represent some of the conceptions to which 
 the church has held through the ages, bat- 
 tling for them, repudiating those who turned 
 from them, stating them in the terms of 
 different forms of culture and even of differ- 
 ent civilizations, but always coming back to 
 them, never having done with them, never 
 outgrowing them. These are the corner 
 stones of the orthodox faith. 
 
 While all this is clear as regards the past 
 it is not at all clear as regards the present. 
 In the kaleidoscopic shiftings of present- 
 133 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 day theological thought it is not at all easy 
 to say what conceptions will come forth 
 stamped with the approval of the consensus 
 of Christian opinion. Everything is in solu- 
 tion, and the process of crystallization does 
 not seem to be particularly rapid. New 
 methods of investigation, new conceptions 
 of authority, new scientific postulates, new 
 philosophical theses, new political and social 
 movements, new voices of a hundred types 
 crying in the wilderness of our modern life, 
 give the careful thinker an amount of mate- 
 rial to understand and master and appraise ; 
 and at the same time so tend to rob him of 
 any fundamental standards to use in the 
 whole process of study and appraisal that his 
 task may be said to be one of particular diffi- 
 culty. It is true, however, that certain well- 
 defined currents in the great unresting ocean 
 of modern thought are not hard to discern. 
 A man may fathom the spirit and direction 
 of modernity, while he finds it impossible to 
 speak with complete assurance and finahty 
 about its goal. 
 
 Before attempting some analysis of the 
 general contents of the modern way of think- 
 134 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 ing it will be well to remind ourselves a 
 little more fully of the position and bear- 
 ings of what we may call the Old Orthodoxy. 
 For the sake of clearness let us make a 
 division. The Old Orthodoxy had a certain 
 conception of the Bible and of religious 
 authority. It had a certain conception of 
 the contents of the Christian faith. It will 
 suit our purpose to speak of these separately. 
 First, as to the matter of the Bible and 
 religious authority. To the Old Orthodoxy 
 the Bible was a correct, authentic, inerrant 
 book. If there were mistakes in the Bible, 
 they were the results of translation or copy- 
 ing. The book itself, if you could get back 
 to the originals, was faultless. It was the 
 complete and correct and accurate expres- 
 sion of the will of God. The human element 
 in its composition was not emphasized. The 
 author of a particular book was like a pen 
 in the hand of the writer. God was the 
 writer. He was the real author of the book. 
 This view of the Bible was accompanied by 
 a vivid sense of its imity. You could quote 
 texts from any part of the Bible to substan- 
 tiate a position you were trying to prove. 
 135 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 They were all equally authoritative. God 
 was the author of them all. When you had 
 collected all that the Bible said on any sub- 
 ject, from Genesis to Revelation, 3^ou could 
 fairly say that you had the biblical teaching. 
 This material was all treated as if it con- 
 sisted of different utterances from one 
 author, at one time, in one set of circmn- 
 stances; every utterance as important as 
 every other. The Bible was not thought to 
 be like a continent with mountain ranges 
 and plains, with hills and valleys, with 
 heaven-piercing summits and deep ravines. 
 It was one great level highland — the high- 
 land of the Word of God. Bound up with 
 this conception of the Bible was a certain 
 conception of religious authority. If God 
 had broken silence and given forth an iner- 
 rant utterance, that utterance was the com- 
 manding word to the children of men. It 
 simply left no more to be said. It was a 
 final program for life; a faultlessly correct 
 reflection of the will and purpose of God. 
 Because men had an infallibly correct utter- 
 ance of the infallible God they had a final 
 and unimpeachable authority. This con- 
 136 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 ception required an inerrant Bible. If there 
 was a mistake anywhere, there might be 
 mistakes everywhere. The authenticity of 
 anything in the Bible required the authen- 
 ticity of everything. The belief in verbal 
 inspiration was an attempt to buttress this 
 position beyond a peradventure and a doubt. 
 Besides having the general conception of 
 the Bible and religious authority which we 
 have attempted to reflect, the Old Ortho- 
 doxy had a certain view of the contents of 
 theology. It began as a matter of course 
 with the personality of God. There was 
 no need to argue about that. It bowed 
 trembling before his awful holiness. It felt 
 the heat of his flaming righteousness. Then 
 it had a certain conception of sin. The dire 
 tragedy of breaking with God's law was 
 forever upon its conscience. Sin was not 
 simply dreadful misfortune. It involved 
 guilt. And the torturing sense of awful 
 guilt fairly prostrated men. Sin made a 
 terrible problem. Something must be done 
 about it. Forgiveness could never be a mat- 
 ter of course. The greatest, most perplex- 
 ing problem in the world was this problem 
 137 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 of sin and how it could be forgiven. But 
 something had been done about it. God had 
 sent his own Son to deal with the problem. 
 The Old Orthodoxy had most definite views 
 of him. He was very God. He was not a 
 high angelic messenger. He was God's own 
 Son. It was right to worship him. He 
 was God in the flesh. And the Son of God 
 had dealt with the problem in a very definite 
 way. He had died to save men. In his 
 death he had made possible the forgiveness 
 of sin. However one might explain it, the 
 truth was that he took men's responsibilities 
 upon himself. He bore their burden. He 
 bent under the weight of their guilt. In his 
 great suffering deed he achieved their peace. 
 Then he had rent the veil which made the 
 future dark. He had risen from the dead. 
 His resurrection was the assurance and seal 
 of men's immortality. The Old Orthodoxy 
 had very definite views regarding the future. 
 The moral significance of life was so great 
 that upon it hung eternal issues. To accept 
 Christ and his great sacrificial death was to 
 inherit eternal life. To refuse him was to 
 inherit eternal death. The Old Orthodoxy 
 138 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 had a high standard of Kfe. The Christian 
 was to trust Christ for everything, but he 
 was to live as faithfully as if he had no trust 
 but his own deeds. His life was to be the 
 expression of the will of God. His obedi- 
 ence was to be the complete devotion of his 
 Hfe. 
 
 At this point we call attention to a fact 
 whose full significance will appear later in 
 this discussion. The typical modern Chris- 
 tian with an evangelical experience reading 
 the above summary will have two feelings. 
 The theology of the Old Orthodoxy will 
 greatly appeal to him ; on the other hand, its 
 conception of the Bible and of religious 
 authority will appear quite impossible. He 
 will feel that he could never accept it. 
 
 Turning now to present-day currents of 
 thought, what is the situation which we dis- 
 cover? Again, for the sake of clearness, 
 let us make a distinction: Modernity has a 
 certain conception of the Bible and of reli- 
 gious authority; and modernity has certain 
 clearly defined tendencies as to the contents 
 of its view of Christianity and of life. 
 
 As to the Bible, the modern note is struck 
 139 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 in the words of Coleridge, "The Bible finds 
 me." The note of emphasis in the modern 
 conception of the Bible is its vitality. Here 
 is a book which treats life so prof oimdly that 
 the serious-minded man simply must take 
 account of it. The moral loftiness, the amaz- 
 ing intellectual penetration, the spiritual 
 cogency of the Bible forces it upon our at- 
 tention. Its inner quality is such that we 
 cannot make light of it. The book is the 
 expression of the thought of a large number 
 of different men. It reflects the outlook 
 upon life of different periods, and even of 
 different civilizations. To understand it in 
 any adequate fashion you must be a 
 patient student of history; and in quoting 
 it you must carefully bear in mind not 
 only the context in the book from which 
 you quote, but also that larger context 
 which is the environment of the writer 
 of the book or the speaker of the words. 
 There is a great human element in the 
 book which must never be lost sight of. But, 
 while all this is true, it is also true that 
 no other literature rises to such heights. It 
 bears the stamp of the divine upon it. The 
 140 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 moral passion of the prophets, the spiritual 
 insight of Hebrew poetry, the white and 
 winning and majestic life of Jesus, the whole 
 wonderful New Testament utterance, with 
 its moral energy and spiritual power — all 
 these speak in a language unshared by other 
 books. They lift the Bible into a unique 
 place. They make it proper to speak of the 
 Bible as the Book of God. Corresponding 
 to this conception of the Bible is a certain 
 conception of religious authority. The 
 authoritative is the vital. That which com- 
 pels a man's mind, masters his conscience, 
 and energizes his will has a kind of authen- 
 ticity which is more commanding than any 
 mere technical correctness or verbal iner- 
 rancy. The Bible has this high commanding 
 vitality. It may contain mistakes. It does 
 contain mistakes. Certain parts of the Bible 
 may reflect the thought of people on the way 
 to the truth rather than the thought of 
 people who have arrived at the truth. This, 
 indeed, we must affirm of the Bible. Even 
 New Testament writers may not always see 
 all the implications of the great principles 
 they are enunciating. Even they may some- 
 141 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 times be limited, rather than helped, by the 
 thought forms in which they must utter their 
 message. But when all this is frankly and 
 fully admitted it remains true that the Bible 
 is alone among books in its power to rouse 
 the conscience. It is alone among books in 
 the loftiness of its conception of God. It 
 has a solitary splendor in the morally crea- 
 tive quality of its message. It authenticates 
 itself as the bearer of God's own message 
 to men by its perennial seizure of man's mind 
 and conscience and heart; its perpetual 
 energizing of the human will; its unabated 
 power to bring to men a message which is 
 morally creative. When all mechanical pro- 
 tections have been cast aside, when all merely 
 formal defenses have been repudiated, the 
 Bible stands forth strong in its inherent 
 qualities and vindicates its authority as a 
 vital guide to the heart of God and to the 
 doing of God's will. 
 
 Turning from the modern conception of 
 the Bible and of religious authority, we come 
 to the difficult matter of the theological con- 
 tents of modernity. In this realm general- 
 izations must be made with care ; and it must 
 142 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 be kept in mind that it is a sketch of a situa- 
 tion at large, and not an analysis of the 
 position of some individual present-day 
 thinker, which is being attempted. 
 
 The outstanding contrast between mo- 
 dernity and the Old Orthodoxy begins in the 
 way in which sin is viewed. The haunting 
 sense of the deadliness of personal trans- 
 gression is scarcely to be found in a typical 
 modern thinker in whose thought processes 
 the Zeitgeist has full sway. There is much 
 consciousness of evil to be remedied. There 
 is much passionate eagerness to right the 
 wrong of the world. But the emphasis is 
 rather on evil as a result of environment 
 than on evil as a result of personal intention. 
 Sin has become less a personal tragedy, less 
 a matter of dire personal guilt, and more 
 an unfortunate social phenomenon. It is 
 less a matter of conscience and more a matter 
 of social statistics. It is conceived as so much 
 a matter of confusion and ignorance, so 
 much the deposit of heredity and unpromis- 
 ing environment, that along these lines it 
 seems easiest to think about it. It is easier, 
 to put it bluntly, to think of a man as a 
 143 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 moral ignoramus, or as a victim, than as a 
 sinner. The sharp ethical perception of the 
 personal meaning of sin, then, has in the 
 main departed from modernity. Naturally 
 in the wake of this certain results follow. 
 Without a sense of sin so dreadful that the 
 consciousness of guilt fairly paralyzes 
 human endeavor, the emphasis of the Old 
 Orthodoxy on the death of Christ seems 
 strangely unreal and overwrought. JNIoder- 
 nity can understand the expression of the 
 Father's love in noble self -giving, even unto 
 death ; it can understand the creative potency 
 of this great revelation of the love of God, 
 but Calvary as the deed of a Sin-Bearer, 
 Calvary as a personal act of taking up the 
 responsibilities of sinful men, Calvarj^ as 
 expiation — to the modern view it is simply 
 inexplicable. It seems to consist of words 
 without meaning. It is convicted of un- 
 reality. Then it is easy for modernity to 
 feel that it has no gift for answering meta- 
 physical questions about the person of 
 Christ. If it had so poignant and terrible 
 a conception of sin that only the very Son of 
 God could deal with the problem it might be 
 144 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 forced into making assertions, with vast 
 metaphysical imphcations, about the person 
 of Jesus. As it is, it stands full of awe and 
 reverence before the Man of Galilee, it 
 listens to his teachings, it strives to imbibe 
 the spirit of his life, it learns from him the 
 meaning of the Fatherhood of God and the 
 brotherhood of man, and it goes out to its 
 tasks, its mind preoccupied by this revela- 
 tion. Modernity sounds no great and de- 
 cided note about the Deity of Jesus. And 
 the fundamental reason is not that it has 
 metaphysical difficulties. The fundamental 
 reason is that the modernist has a view of 
 life which does not absolutely require a 
 divine Christ. 
 
 The most attractive phases of modernity 
 have to do with its sense of the immanence 
 of God and its social passion. Modernity 
 may not be very clear as to all the implica- 
 tions of its theism (indeed, sometimes the 
 laws of nature may look so frowningly 
 strong that it seems as if this theism is en- 
 dangered), but at least — without a clearly 
 thought out system — it is sure that God is 
 the Infinitely Near. He is the present 
 145 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 source of all the activity of the world. We 
 do not need to reach out to find him. He is 
 always here. Sometimes this conception of 
 the immanence of God is expressed in such 
 a way that it is difficult to call it anything 
 but pantheism, but its warming and vivify- 
 ing quality cannot be denied. Then the 
 social passion of modernity is a lofty and 
 beautiful thing. It believes in brotherhood. 
 It seriously sets about getting men to hve 
 as brothers should. It is ready to fight the 
 good fight of freeing modern life from 
 its blasting evils. Cleansed countries and 
 cleansed cities and cleansed homes are its 
 goal. It believes that the kingdom of God 
 is the kingdom of good here and now, and 
 right loyally it strives to bring it in. 
 
 Now, the modern man with a typical 
 evangelical experience has two feelings as he 
 faces modernity. The first has to do with 
 its theology. Leaving out of account its 
 view of the immanence of God and its social 
 passion, of which we will speak later, he is 
 not attracted by its theological conceptions. 
 Its view of sin seems to him to lack moral 
 realism. It does not take account of the 
 146 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 darkest and direst facts of life. His ex- 
 perience seems to go to depths of need of 
 which modernity has no apprehension. Its 
 conception of Calvary is beautiful, and it is 
 true, but it is not all the truth and it is not 
 the most important part of the truth. This 
 modern man with an evangehcal experience 
 knows that the deepest meaning of Calvary 
 to him is its answer to the need of a con- 
 science passionately awake. The words 
 "sin-bearer" and "expiation" are great words 
 to him. The very center of his hope, the 
 creative power in his hfe, is the fact that 
 Christ has borne his sins and made possible 
 his redemption. Modernity leaves the Cross 
 beautiful, poetic, and impotent in the pres- 
 ence of life's supremest moral demand; the 
 outcry of a conscience unappeased. Then the 
 modern man with an evangehcal experience 
 is not contented with the Christ modernity 
 has to offer him. He recognizes the truth of 
 much it has to say. He is glad to receive 
 many an illuminating word, but here again 
 he misses the word he most needs. In the 
 crucial need of his life one thing he must be 
 sure of: he must be sure that Jesus is God. 
 147 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 Life's tragic problem to him is of such a 
 character that it cannot be solved by prophet, 
 priest, or poet. It can be solved only by 
 the Son of God. So this man, with his 
 recoil from the blackness of sin, with his 
 hope through the Son of God, who has died 
 to make possible the forgiveness of his sins, 
 feels that the modernist would ask him to 
 live in a smaller world; a world with a less 
 candid treatment of the facts of life, and a 
 world with the deepest craving of his hfe 
 unmet and the outcry of an awakened con- 
 science after peace unsatisfied. 
 
 On the other hand, when our modern man 
 with an evangelical experience reads whdt 
 modernitj^ has to say about the Bible and the 
 source of religious authorit}^ he is much at- 
 tracted by it. To him the Bible is authorita- 
 tive because of its inlierent power of moral 
 mastery. To him it is compelling because it 
 meets the deepest outreach of his life as does 
 no other book in all the world. Like the 
 modernist, he is undisturbed by changes of 
 view as to date and authorship. Like the 
 modernist, he is quite easj^ in the presence of 
 the fact of the human elements in the Bible, 
 148 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 and he is eager to use the Scriptures with 
 due sense of their historic background and 
 the actual standpoint of each author. Like 
 the modernist, he feels that, when all conces- 
 sions have been made, the uniqueness and 
 the moral and spiritual power of the Eible 
 remain. He finds himself in general sym- 
 pathy with the modernist conception of the 
 Bible and religious authority. He finds 
 himself dissatisfied with the central postu- 
 lates of modernity as to theology. Now, we 
 have already seen that this modern man with 
 an evangelical experience finds himself 
 drawn to the theological conceptions of the 
 Old Orthodoxy and repudiating its concep- 
 tions of the Bible and of religious authority. 
 It really seems that if he could combine the 
 modern conception of the Bible and reli- 
 gious certainty with the central theological 
 postulates of the Old Orthodoxy he would 
 find himself satisfied. This, indeed, is the 
 goal of our discussion. This is just what is 
 necessary for us to do. And this we venture 
 to denominate the New Orthodoxy. 
 
 It is no mere artificial combining of parts 
 of two discordant points of view for which 
 149 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 we plead. The fact is that the modem con- 
 ception of religious authority supports the 
 central theological postulates of the Old 
 Orthodoxy and will ultimately be seen to 
 demand them. The pragmatists tell us that 
 the point of view which proves creative, 
 which is necessary to the growth and de- 
 velopment of life, may be accepted. The 
 thing which the growing life of the race 
 must have in order to its growth it has a 
 right to have. That very need is proof of 
 the validity of the thing needed. The man 
 of the New Orthodoxy replies: "Very well. 
 I accept that principle, and I point out some 
 applications of it which do not seem to have 
 occurred to you. The conception of sin as 
 a terrible matter of personal intention and 
 the haunting sense of its dire guilt are at the 
 root of all adequate morals. The view of 
 the cross as a great divine deed of expiation 
 answers the awakened conscience as nothing 
 else does, and frees and energizes the man 
 who accepts it for a full and victorious man- 
 hood. The belief that Jesus Christ was very 
 God gives a potency to the redemptive deed 
 without which it cannot do its full work. 
 150 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 These beliefs as to the deadliness of sin, as 
 to the deed which makes forgiveness pos- 
 sible, as to the deity of Jesus Christ, com- 
 bine into a group of morally creative con- 
 ceptions unparalleled in human thought." 
 So pragmatism becomes one of the chief 
 supports of orthodoxy. In truth, with a 
 belief in a vital, as distinguished from a 
 mechanical, authority, we come to a new 
 emphasis on the theological contents of the 
 Old Orthodoxy. It is just because the Bible 
 sounds such a dire and terrible note in its 
 conception of sin, just because it presents 
 Jesus as the Son of God, just because it 
 sees in the cross the deed of a great Sin- 
 bearer, that it becomes finally authoritative 
 to us; because it deals adequately with sin, 
 and presents us with a victorious Saviour and 
 a deed on the cross which sets the conscience 
 at rest, that it is vindicated to us as the Book 
 of God. 
 
 So the New Orthodoxy is fearlessly 
 modern in its view of the Bible and of reli- 
 gious authority. It welcomes all new light 
 from critical scholarship. It repudiates 
 mechanical and lifeless views of authority. 
 151 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 With a conscience awake it receives peace 
 from God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 and in that experience the Bible becomes 
 authoritative. The Bible is eternally satis- 
 fying because it is the Book of Redemption. 
 The New Orthodoxy builds its theology 
 about a conception of sin as heavy with a 
 sense of its horrible guilt as any theology of 
 the past; it rests in a nobly spiritual inter- 
 pretation of the cross, free from crass and 
 mechanical conceptions of commercial ex- 
 change, to be sure, but unflinching in its 
 insistence that the cross is the deed of a Sin- 
 bearer who made possible the forgiveness 
 of sins. It looks up, and is forever chal- 
 lenged by its conception of Jesus : very God 
 as well as very man, the Son of God who 
 died for us, Lord of all forever. Then the 
 New Orthodoxy finds a place for all that is 
 deeply real in the theological conceptions of 
 modernity, while repudiating its errors. It 
 welcomes the thought of the immanence of 
 God. Its God is the infinitely near, but so 
 interpreted as to avert completely the dis- 
 integrating consequences of pantheism. It 
 accepts the social passion and goes out to 
 152 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 work for the kingdom of God, cleansing 
 modern life, mastering commerce, politics, 
 social life, and home life in the name of 
 Christ. Thus the New Orthodoxy arrives 
 at an organism of belief and a program of 
 activity. It is no matter of intellectual 
 patchwork, but the living union of those 
 truths which belong together and will set us 
 free and energize us for the great tasks of 
 the world. The Old Orthodoxy had a place 
 of definite inadequacy in its view of the 
 Bible and religious authority. Modernity 
 is inadequate in its conception of sin, of the 
 cross, and the person of Christ. The New 
 Orthodoxy, with a modern and vital concep- 
 tion of the Bible, with a morally adequate 
 conception of sin, of salvation, and of Jesus, 
 the Son of God, can gird itself as a strong 
 man to run a race. It is able to face the 
 future unafraid. 
 
 153 
 
BUSHNELL AND "THE 
 VICARIOUS SACRIFICE" 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 BUSHNELL AND "THE VICARIOUS 
 SACRIFICE" 
 
 I 
 
 Horace Bushnell was born in Connect- 
 icut in 1802. He died in 1876. He was 
 reared in the Congregational Church, but his 
 mother had been a member of the Episcopal 
 Church, and his father had learned Arminian 
 views from his mother and objected to the 
 rigid Calvinism delivered where he lived. 
 So religiously varied currents met in Horace 
 Bushnell. His father had two occupations 
 — conducting a factory and a farm. Bush- 
 nell worked in connection with both. His 
 heredity and environment seemed to com- 
 bine to preclude narrowness and provincial- 
 ism. Diversity came in upon him in life and 
 thought. His mother was a woman by whom 
 duty was made authoritative without being 
 hateful, and who made religion felt as a 
 reality without making it a constant topic 
 of conversation. The home was a New 
 157 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 England home and more ; and in a sense it 
 was prophetic of Bushnell, who was to be a 
 New England man, and far more than that. 
 Conscience, and a practical relation to life, 
 with a compelling conviction in the things of 
 religion, are three New England character- 
 istics. These things were true, but not the 
 distinctive, characteristics of Bushnell. The 
 deep vein of mysticism and the versatility of 
 his thought and life in combination with the 
 other qualities, made Bushnell what he was. 
 At twenty-one he entered Yale College. 
 After a course where he was felt as a leader 
 he graduated. Then he studied law and 
 became a tutor in the college. He had been 
 religious as a boy, but a skeptical period 
 came and an intense revival movement in 
 the college found him intellectually imsym- 
 pathetic. A group of young men who ad- 
 mired him stood aloof from the movement. 
 This was more than Bushnell could bear. 
 He listened to the demands of his conscience 
 and his heart and opened himself to the re- 
 vival influences. How his doubts were dealt 
 with may be seen in his own words. . Speak- 
 ing of the Trinity he said: "I am glad I 
 158 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 have a heart as well as a head. My heart 
 wants the Father, my heart wants the Son, 
 my heart wants the Holy Ghost — and one 
 just as much as the other." It was the 
 appeal to experience which was to underlie 
 much of his thinking and hfe. He entered 
 the divinity school and in 1833 was invited 
 to become pastor of the North Church in 
 Hartford, Connecticut, where all his active 
 ministerial life was spent. His pastorate 
 entered into the very life of Hartford. The 
 park bearing his name is one evidence of how 
 deeply he impressed the city. His influence 
 entered into the fiber of the manhood of the 
 city, inspired it in educational ideals and 
 even in commercial activity. He became 
 Hartford's first citizen. After hearing him 
 on Sunday, we are told, men would say, 
 "I've heard a great sermon and I'm going 
 to make my week mean something!" His 
 relation to his own church is suggested by 
 the unity with which it stood by him through 
 the fierce theological controversies which 
 raged about him, finally withdrawing from 
 the Concession to protect him and express 
 its loyalty to him. When his divergence 
 159 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 from opinions almost universally held be- 
 came understood the attack began which 
 continued a running fire for years. Vain 
 attempts were made again and again to 
 bring him to trial. The Congregational 
 polity was in his favor. Besides, Bushnell 
 was not the sort of man to try for heresy; 
 there was such a massive Christian quality 
 about him that New England common sense 
 held the heresy-hunters in check. He was 
 interested in everything. He planned roads, 
 could not pass over a stream without calcu- 
 lating its water power, had a passion for 
 nature, organized a musical society when at 
 Yale, was practical, poetic, virile, alive to 
 the finger tips. Through all this versatile 
 life the ring of conscience sounds clear, and 
 under it there heaved the great tidal move- 
 ment of a deep personal religious life. He 
 was forever original. Though a reader, he 
 was not in any technical sense a scholar. 
 There was too much going on inside his own 
 mind for that. He kept problems hanging 
 on pegs, as he said, until he could get to 
 them. Such eagerness and such vitality were 
 his that to the last he was planning new 
 160 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 and large enterprises of thought. If he was 
 still alive, he would be publishing a book 
 this year to startle men out of intellectual 
 sluggishness, partly agreeing with the spirit 
 of the time, as easily disagreeing with it; 
 moving with an ahnost airy freedom from 
 earth's control, but with a very solid strength 
 for a man who has wings. His thinking was 
 a preacher's thinking, his theology was a 
 preacher's theology. The young men who 
 listened to him in Hartford found in him a 
 leader. Through his books he has been the 
 master of many, a sort of theological pastor, 
 and his preaching rooted in his experience. 
 Skillful and brilliant as he was, the secret of 
 his power was not in these things, except as 
 they expressed the spiritual realities which 
 he had verified in his own life. Great as 
 he was a thinker, he was greater as a 
 seer. His style at times is dazzlingly bril- 
 liant. Heaven and earth are laid under 
 tribute, and one is sometimes almost be- 
 wildered bj^ the play of light, the gleam of 
 figure, the sweep of movement, and the qual- 
 ity of noble phrase. Yet it is not always 
 an easy style to read, and it is not always 
 161 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 just lucid. Bushnell's originality is his 
 weakness, as well as his strength, here as 
 elsewhere. He takes liberties with words. 
 To a generation taught by Matthew Arnold 
 some of his constructions are awkward. 
 Perhaps it would be too much to expect a 
 volcano to have regard to literary chastity. 
 There is something in BushnelFs style which 
 suggests the paintings of Church, with their 
 daring brilliancy of color. The comparison 
 may not be fair to Bushnell, but he has 
 something of the fault of Church. All is, 
 of course, redeemed by a wealth of thought 
 which completely saves his style from being 
 splendid pyrotechnics. Its best defense 
 would be to say that it was an expression of 
 the man. 
 
 The last years of Bushnell's life were a 
 battle with disease. A manly battle it was, 
 and they were not years of idleness. They 
 were filled with work as he was able, and the 
 richness of his nearness to God glowed over 
 them. The theological controversies were 
 healed not by agreement but by a growing 
 respect and reverence for the man. In the 
 day of his passing one of America's most 
 162 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 distinct and notable minds was lost to this 
 world's activities. When we think of the 
 largely built men of his century, we do not 
 hesitate to name him among them. 
 
 II 
 
 The New England theology was a thing 
 of wonderful logical acumen, but it tended 
 to reduce theology to the terms of formal 
 logic. In one way Browning's "Tertimn 
 Quid" in The Ring and the Book might 
 represent its fatal tendency to miss reality 
 in the pursuit of logical correctness. And 
 the logic became not merely formal and 
 mechanical but cold, heartless, even cruel. 
 Some of its assertions were unethical enough 
 unless measured by some supramundane 
 standard of ethics where two and two 
 morally do not make four. The reaction 
 from this came about in two ways. First 
 there was the Unitarian movement. It had 
 several aspects. There was the moral aspect. 
 Trying to get away from an immoral God, 
 it gave itself to negations. It insisted and 
 reinsisted that certain cruel things which 
 theology had asserted could not be true of 
 163 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 God. In many of its negations it was cor- 
 rect enough, and, doubtless, many were 
 driven into Unitarianism by the false asser- 
 tions of a mistaken orthodoxy. Then there 
 was its theological aspect. It more and 
 more reacted so as to leave Christ quite com- 
 pletely without divinity. Beginning with a 
 lofty and spiritual sort of Arianism, by the 
 very law of its nature it lowered and lowered 
 its estimate of Christ. A distrust of the 
 potency of the supernatural led toward the 
 repudiation of miracles. Theologically, 
 Unitarianism tended to drift into a modified 
 skepticism. Then there was the aesthetic 
 side. It represented religion without ethical 
 cost. It created piety without the echo of 
 Mount Sinai thundering through it. A 
 natural outcome of this aspect is seen later 
 in the philosophy of Emerson and the dilet- 
 tante piety of "Christian Science." Begin- 
 ning as a party of protest, Unitarianism 
 possessed great and noble leaders. In many 
 details it was right. But almost every pro- 
 found tendency promised less and less noble 
 things in days to come. The other reaction 
 from the older New England theology was 
 164 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 in the direction of a modified Calvinism. 
 Here the governmental theory of the atone- 
 ment found play. But it was an attempt 
 to heal with more logic the wounds made by 
 logic. The syllogism still sat grandly on the 
 throne. Whatever may be thought of it as 
 an intellectual achievement, the result did 
 not save the situation. The modified Cal- 
 vinism had taken up logic and by its logic 
 it was to perish. In such a theological world 
 Bushnell was trained. His whole theological 
 life was a reaction from the reign of formal 
 logic. The heart must be heard. Life must 
 speak. Christian thinking must be made 
 vital. We will best approach his work from 
 the standpoint of his theory of language. 
 To him language was not a vehicle of abso- 
 lutely correct speech; it was a symbol, a 
 suggestion. If this were true, it was a great 
 and destructive bomb thrown into the camp 
 of the formal logicians. For, if words are 
 but symbols, how can they be used in closely 
 reasoned demonstrations ? Who would think 
 of making a syllogism of metaphors ? Words 
 are a means of contact with reality through 
 a sort of splendid suggestion, but you must 
 165 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 not try to tie them down to the niceties of 
 absolute accuracy. Then nature was a great 
 symbol. Bushnell was quite Wordsworthian 
 in his feeling about nature. It was just 
 another set of words, a symbol of the highest 
 realities of life. Coming in this attitude to 
 the problems of theology, he had a wonder- 
 ful exegetical freedom. He really did not 
 need the help of modern critical scholarship ; 
 his theory of language saved him in every 
 awkward situation. Regarding the Trinity 
 he at first expressed himself in quite Sabel- 
 lian forms. He had a passion for the unity 
 of God like that of Unitarians. One God 
 with three modes of expression might pretty 
 well describe the impression made by his 
 early writing about the Trinity. The more 
 he thought over the problem the more he 
 tended to move toward orthodoxy. He 
 pushed the distinctions in the Godhead 
 farther and farther back until finally he 
 spoke of God as "eternally threeing him- 
 self." Perhaps this sounds more nearly 
 orthodox than it is, for to the last Bushnell 
 emphasized the threefold aspect as necessary 
 in regard to relations with the finite rather 
 166 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 than inherently essential to the life of the 
 Godhead. His study of the supernatural 
 recognized a world of nature, with its 
 mechanical laws, and a supernatural world 
 including all persons — man as well as God 
 — but he conceived of it all as a unity with 
 God as ruler. The contention that man was 
 supernatural tended to be of the greatest 
 help to men beginning to be afraid of the 
 laws of nature, and his insistence that all 
 made a unity ruled by God was right and 
 true. If he had seen that even the laws 
 of nature are just God's ways of doing 
 things, he would have come to the very heart 
 of the problem. His work on Christian 
 Nurture, of more practical than theological 
 value, insisted that children in Christian 
 homes should be brought up as belonging to 
 God and trained as members of his King- 
 dom. This seems like a commonplace now, 
 but the practical contention, valuable as it 
 was, had a theological presupposition which 
 needs careful scrutiny. A certain kind of 
 emphasis on training needs to be made with 
 clear understanding of the meaning of per- 
 sonahty and personal choice. Wlien Bush- 
 167 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 nell spoke of Christ he usually used terms 
 in which the divinity swallowed up the 
 humanity. He was sure of God in Christ. 
 The other side of the problem perhaps 
 scarcely occurred to him. 
 
 This hasty sketch of his work as a Chris- 
 tian thinker, omitting The Vicarious Sacri- 
 fice, which will be referred to immediately, 
 does not reveal what was most characteristic 
 and valuable in his theological method. He 
 was always expressing his own Christian ex- 
 perience, or what he felt necessary to protect 
 it. It was the theological foundation for a 
 life he wanted to get. He was ready to 
 consider and reconsider his theology in the 
 light of his growing Christian life. Theology 
 was to be not merely crystallized Christian 
 experience ; it was to be Christian experience 
 living and thrilling in beautiful symbols, 
 forever suggesting and leading the soul to 
 the sanctuaries of Christian reality itself. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The first volume of The Vicarious Sacri- 
 fice was written during the Civil War. The 
 book itself has a great throb of battle in it. 
 168 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 But it is no petty warfare, with intellectual 
 raid and plunder; it is a great, noble battle, 
 a Gettysburg, with far-flung lines and lof- 
 tiest heroism. The book has its necessary 
 polemic, but its whole tone is lofty. 
 Here Bushnell's repudiation of the the- 
 ology of formal logic is expressed at white 
 heat. The central thing about the Chris- 
 tian faith was salvation. The central thing 
 must be expressed in terms of life. It must 
 not be even wonderfully articulated bones, 
 it must be flesh and blood and nerves. Here 
 theology must be translated into heart 
 throbs. So he set to work upon the great 
 task, to discuss salvation in terms of life. 
 And the great principle, the positive foun- 
 dation for all the work, was the necessity 
 inherent in love to get under whatever bur- 
 den of sorrow and pain and sin affects those 
 loved; in suffering sympathy to enter into 
 the very meaning of their woe; to bare its 
 own life to the blasts which beat upon them ; 
 to go forth to rescue at whatever cost, nay, 
 with a certain passionate eagerness for the 
 cost of sorrowful experience which will 
 work rescue. This is the principle of 
 169 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 vicarious sacrifice inherent in love. It is a 
 universal principle. It is true of God the 
 Father, it is true of the Holy Ghost, it is 
 true of the good angels, it is true of all 
 redeemed souls. When love is love it has 
 no other choice than to go forth under any 
 burden of pain for the helping of those for 
 whom love yearns. This is the motive of 
 salvation. This is the spiritual meaning of 
 the cross. It is an eternal meaning. There 
 was a cross in the heart of God from eternity. 
 Christ revealed it on Calvary. The inherent 
 obligation of God's life required this sacri- 
 fice. He was not any better than he ought 
 to be; he was just completely loyal to the 
 meaning of his own love. But this quality 
 of willingness to suffer for the rescue of 
 men becomes itself a moral power, becomes 
 itself a rescue when it is expressed in terms 
 of human life. The vicarious principle in 
 the heart of God, crystallized into action, 
 becomes the moral power which conquers 
 and renovates the sinner. Christ came to 
 be this moral power — not to be simply an 
 example, not to be simply an influence, but 
 to be a power, the power of love in the 
 170 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 abandon of suffering to rescue from sin. 
 His work as a healer gives a keynote to his 
 ministry. He was always healing bodies, 
 it was a parable of his work as a healer of 
 souls. No technical change in legal status 
 would satisfy him ; he must see sin conquered 
 — slain — in man, and his work was so to 
 become a moral power that the very root 
 motives in men's lives would be seized and 
 held for God. How did he do it ? By every- 
 thing about him. By life and death all 
 together. He did not come to die; he died 
 because he was here and the situation in 
 which he found himself required death. You 
 can follow his life from the start, however, 
 and, full of wonder as it is, full of heartbreak 
 as his death is, the pivotal place in his prac- 
 tically becoming a moral power was at the 
 resurrection. That showed who he was. The 
 life and death of a splendid man could not 
 become the required moral power, but the 
 life and death of One revealed by the resur- 
 rection to be God in human life breaks right 
 into the heart and becomes the power of 
 God unto salvation. View life, and words, 
 and works, and death from this high vantage 
 171 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 ground, and all leaps witli significance. 
 The eternal heartbreak in the life of God 
 has got itself expressed. Thus he loved, thus 
 he suffered ; thus he entered the very burden 
 of the world's woeful sin. Thus the very 
 moral potency of God is set loose in human 
 life. Thus does Christ become the moral 
 power of God in rescuing men from sin. 
 
 But now we are beset by the hosts of the 
 logicians. What becomes of the justice of 
 God in this view? The question rings out 
 with the charge of the enemy. Right 
 eagerly Bushnell girds himself for the fray. 
 Let us get to the root of the matter, he says, 
 in effect. This whole question of justice 
 must be scrutinized, for justice is not the 
 fundamental thing in God. Justice is a 
 quality of God in the practical exigencies 
 of government. There is a deeper thing. It 
 is the very ideal law of right, existing before 
 government; the law in fundamental one- 
 ness with which God is what he is. Justice 
 must be treated with respect, but this funda- 
 mental law must be satisfied. And what is 
 vicarious sacrifice, what is love taking up the 
 burden, the woe, the whole tragedy of sin 
 172 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 upon its own feeling and life, in rescuing 
 agony, but the very expression of this funda- 
 mental law? This is the law before govern- 
 ment. It is the deepest thing we can touch; 
 and instead of being an obstacle in the way, 
 it causes the rescue of men by the moral 
 power of vicarious sacrifice. But what about 
 the antagonism between justice and mercy? 
 There is no antagonism. They work to- 
 gether. Justice holds the evil man in the 
 chains of his evil until a change in his life 
 lifts him out of the category where retribu- 
 tive causes work. There is no let-up in this. 
 It is unflinching. Mercy finds a way to 
 work in the man a change which lifts him 
 out of the range of the retributive causes 
 of life. Justice is steady, and works as 
 another force in the very field where mercy 
 works. Like two forces in nature, they may 
 seem to contain a formal contradiction but 
 really are cooperative in the whole process. 
 But what about the law's high demand upon 
 life? Christ honors it in every way. He 
 restores men to obedience to it. He restores 
 it to its place of power. He obeys it him- 
 self, and he dies in loyalty to it. Christ is 
 173 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 the great supporter and uplifter of the law. 
 As to legal enforcement, there is no failure. 
 We may almost say that a new sternness 
 comes to light in Christ. He first announced 
 the doctrine of eternal punishment, and he 
 announced it in the most appalling forms of 
 speech. And he announced the judgment. 
 His words flame with moral fire. All this 
 perfectly protects legal enforcements. As to 
 God's rectoral honor, that, too, is protected. 
 For Christ as God stepped aside from no 
 burden laid upon the race by the curse of 
 sin. He entered into the very meaning of 
 the curse. Under its pressure he so lived 
 and wrought and died as to become the 
 world's supreme moral power. A work so 
 wrought can never dishonor God as a ruler. 
 So, not by mechanical or commercial substi- 
 tution but by the moral power of his 
 vicarious sacrifice, Christ works out our sal- 
 vation. It is a process wrought in men. It 
 is not something done for them in which they 
 have no part. And what is their part? It 
 is the consent of faith. By faith they so 
 open their lives to this moral power that it 
 does its work in them. Justification by 
 174 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 faith is not a new legal status; it is a new 
 life. The sinner is actually made into a new 
 creature ; but this new life constantly comes 
 from the power of Christ. The man all the 
 while is being worked upon. And this con- 
 stant derivation of power from Christ 
 through faith is justification. 
 
 Just now another attack comes sweeping 
 before the reader. The guns thunder with 
 the sacrificial ammunition of the Old Testa- 
 ment. Bushnell proceeds, as he believes, to 
 capture the guns and to turn them upon the 
 enemy. What was the meaning of the whole 
 sacrificial system of the Old Testament? 
 Why, hke words themselves, it was a great 
 symbol, and it was finally to teach not legal 
 cleansing but moral cleansing. Ceremonial 
 cleansing was finally to uplift cleansing of 
 life. The whole system was a parable of 
 purification. And what does all this mean 
 but that the whole system was a preparation 
 for the viewing of Christ's work as a real 
 purification, as a moral power? 
 
 Now, after the manner of ancient battles, 
 the fighting along the line ceases and some 
 giant words come up to do single combat. 
 175 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER . 
 
 There are three GoHaths of them: Atone- 
 ment, Propitiation, and Expiation. Of these 
 Expiation is a Philistine indeed and Bush- 
 nell goes forth to his slaying. As a matter 
 of fact, we are told, expiation is no biblical 
 conception at all. It is a heathen concep- 
 tion grafted on the Bible and grafted on the 
 gospel. Expiation spells itself out in terms 
 of unutterable cruelty. It is a heartless 
 conception from the classics. It has no home 
 in the Bible nor in our faith. Expiation 
 slain, atonement and propitiation are ex- 
 plained. They have been fighting under the 
 wrong colors. All we need is to understand 
 them. Atonement is at-one-ment — the real, 
 not the legal, harmonizing of man and God. 
 And how is this done except by the power 
 of Christ making the man a new creature? 
 Propitiation is the new attitude God can 
 have toward this changed, renewed man. 
 The essential change is in the man. This 
 makes possible a new relation of God to him, 
 and this essential change is wrought by the 
 moral power of Christ. But there is some- 
 thing left to be done. Christ's great sacri- 
 fice is to become a moral power in our lives 
 176 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 and so save us from sin, but he does not 
 become a moral power by our calling him 
 that. He does not become a moral power 
 by our thinking of him as that, or by our 
 trusting him as that. In fact, we must for- 
 get all about his being a moral power, or he 
 cannot be the greatest power at all. Our 
 very self -consciousness, in thinking of him 
 as a moral power, is in danger of preventing 
 his becoming so. How is this dilemma to be 
 dealt with? We must think of him object- 
 ively. Not that his work is objective,v^to 
 be sure, but that in order to be subjective 
 it needs to be thought of objectively. So 
 we may bring back the very phrases of 
 objective atonement, only we will under- 
 stand that we are using them as beautiful 
 symbols to deliver us from over-subjectivity; 
 not that we accept any mechanical logical 
 conception which might seem to flow from 
 their use. So shall Christ become our great 
 moral power. So shall his vicarious sacrifice 
 renew the world. 
 
 IV 
 
 All this work is done with a mental bril- 
 liancy, a resourcefulness in conflict, a con- 
 177 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 stant and detailed reference to the Bible 
 seen from continually surprising angles, a 
 depth of spiritual power, a devotion to 
 Christ and a moral passion of which this 
 discussion has given no adequate notion at 
 all. It is a splendid piece of constructive 
 work coming from the mind and heart of a 
 great Christian man. Now, what is to be 
 our verdict upon it? 1. In the first place, 
 the great positive contention is true. Mr. 
 Charles W. Iglehart once described the 
 "Moral Influence theory" as "a number of 
 true things about the atonement." That 
 Christ's work is a power in men can never 
 be denied, but while that is true it is not 
 all the truth ; while it is a power in men it is 
 also an achievement for men ; and this Bush- 
 nell did not see. 2. Not a little of BuslmelFs 
 negative work will stand. The crass 
 mechanical views of the atonement must be 
 repudiated, and repudiated as earnestly as 
 by Bushnell; but he had not faced the ques- 
 tion whether an objective work of Christ 
 had not been wrought which was no mechan- 
 ical or commercial exchange, but a vital 
 thing, capable of being expressed in terms 
 178 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 of vitality. And he did not ask if many 
 who used terribly inadequate phrases might 
 not be feeling after a reality which their 
 phrases grossly misrepresented, but which 
 was the great fact of the whole matter for 
 all that. If he had sought to find the vital 
 meaning in an objective atonement, instead 
 of discarding it, all his work would have 
 been different. 3. His presentation of the 
 moral view keeps within sound of the 
 thunders of Mount Sinai in the most won- 
 derful way. It would surely be impossible 
 to present the moral view in a more whole- 
 some fashion. What he says of judgment, 
 punishment, and all ethical things bristles 
 with cutting blades of moral intensity. This 
 is not, I think one may say, a characteristic 
 of typical moral-influence theories. Could 
 a man who had such an intensely glowing 
 sense of fundamental moral things continue 
 contented with the moral view? It remained 
 to be seen. 4. His theory of language was 
 a pitfall to its user. Of course there is a 
 large symbolic element in language; but if 
 speech is to be at all trustworthy, there must 
 be a place for definite meanings, and even 
 179 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 in transcendent themes we may be sure of 
 certain results without claiming any ex- 
 haustive knowledge. We may have islands 
 of certainty even in the infinite ocean. 
 There is a symbolic element in language 
 and there is a definite element. When all 
 speech is reduced to symbol it makes a man 
 too free. It tends to make him lawless. 
 5. So Bushnell's use of the Bible, uncon- 
 sciously to himself, was free and easy. It 
 is not dependable. Often where modern 
 criticism would have delivered Bushnell 
 from difficulty he just takes wings and flies 
 away. He had a right to the deliverance, 
 but he had no right to the method, and often 
 he uses the method when he has no right 
 either to the deliverance or to the method. 
 We must treat words more seriously and 
 reverently than his theory allowed. 6. His 
 feeling that the great subjective work must 
 be spoken of as though it were objective is 
 a most interesting thing. It gives an air of 
 artificiality to this part of a most real book. 
 Yet his point is surely well made, and the 
 escape from the dilemma is not hard for vis 
 to see. The work must be thought of 
 180 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 objectively because it is an objective work — 
 not as a necessary mental fiction. It is a 
 work for us, and so becomes a power in us. 
 Seeing the matter in this light, we preserve 
 all that is of value in the moral view and 
 give the deeper — the central — fact of the 
 atonement its right place. 7. With all its 
 vitality, there are most vital and essential 
 questions the book does not adequately face : 
 What does sin mean in the sight of God? 
 Does sin make such a difference to God that 
 something more than the rescue of the sinner 
 must be done to satisfy him? How is the 
 rescued man to have peace in spite of his 
 memory of past sins ? Just what is the New 
 Testament consciousness about the death of 
 Christ? 8. Bushnell did not succeed in so 
 getting the great law of right quite into the 
 natm-e of God that here was the very source 
 of its existence. If he had done this, and 
 had faced the demand of the nature of 
 God in the presence of sin, he would have 
 found full deliverance from mechanical 
 and commercial theories, but he would not 
 have made the port of the moral-influence 
 theory. 
 
 181 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 V 
 
 The second volume of The Vicarious 
 Sacrifice was first pubhshed in 1874 — eight 
 years after the pubhcation of the first 
 volume. It was published as a separate 
 work, with the title, Forgiveness and Law, 
 and it was Bushnell's intention that it should 
 appear finally as a substitute for Parts III 
 and IV of his earlier volume. This was 
 much objected to, and after his death it was 
 decided to let the first volume stand as it 
 was, and publish Forgiveness and Law as a 
 second volume under the same title as the 
 first — The Vicarious Sacrifice. 
 
 This volume came as a result of what 
 Bushnell felt to be an accession of new light. 
 It has two positive contentions. One has 
 regard to propitiation, the other expresses 
 a conception of the relation of law and com- 
 mandment. Bushnell had made the dis- 
 covery that when a man tries to forgive there 
 is a moral repulsion which can be overcome 
 only as the person wronged gives himself, 
 in some way, in self-sacrifice and suffering, 
 to the one who has wronged him. Then the 
 182 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 hardness or moral repulsion departs from 
 his own heart. He has propitiated himself. 
 Using his favorite principle of arguing from 
 analogy, Bushnell reasoned, If this be true 
 of human nature, why not of the divine 
 nature? And so he came to the conclusion 
 that there is a moral repulsion in God's 
 nature which is overcome by self -propitia- 
 tion. But this self-propitiation of God is 
 not the suffering life and death of Jesus. 
 These are the means by which God's self- 
 propitiation is revealed to men. But the 
 self -propitiation itself is an eternal thing — 
 God's everlasting taking cost and suffering 
 upon himself — by virtue of his very nature. 
 Jesus made this aspect of the nature of God 
 tangible to men. It now becomes possible 
 for Bushnell to see more in the phrases 
 representing the idea of propitiation in the 
 Bible. He now has a distinctly Godward 
 side in his conception of the atonement. 
 The other positive contention of the new 
 volume had regard to law and command- 
 ment. Bushnell felt that the commandment 
 of Christ was a different thing from the law 
 — the statutes — of the Old Testament. The 
 183 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 one was legal, and imposed demands for a 
 man to perform definite things. The other 
 implanted a great principle and, in free and 
 spontaneous dependence on Christ, expected 
 loyalty to it. Life, Bushnell felt, is full of 
 parallels to these two. First there is the 
 legal demand ; later, with new incentives, the 
 spontaneous loyalty. But these legal de- 
 mands have regard not to final justice, but 
 to discipline, and the "penallj^ coercive dis- 
 cipline" and the great motives back of the 
 commandment together work the completion 
 of the Christian man. Final justice comes 
 only in the summing up after this life is 
 over. It has nothing to do with this life. 
 This world is a place of discipline. And in 
 that discipline the harder pressure of the 
 law and the creative incentives of the com- 
 mandment work together. Bushnell re- 
 affirms his attitude toward justification by 
 faith and urges finally the viewing of 
 Christianity under different forms of 
 thought, such as those used by Jesus in fore- 
 telling the Holy Spirit's work, in order that 
 we may be freed from the frozen lifelessness 
 of old formulas, and, perhaps, at last, from 
 184 
 
BUSHNELL 
 
 the larger perspective, see more adequately 
 the great meaning of old words enslaved 
 now by a scholastic theology. 
 
 This book was written when Bushnell was 
 about seventy years old. There are several 
 things to be said about it. 1. It shows his 
 wonderful openness of mind. He was al- 
 ways ready to receive new truth. He was 
 the kind of man who keeps growing to the 
 day of his death. 2. It was, more than he 
 really knew, probably, a step toward an ob- 
 jective view of the atonement. It recog- 
 nized an obstacle in God which had to be 
 met. It was met, he believed, by self -pro- 
 pitiation. This was a long step. Wlien a 
 man sees that God's nature is such that 
 something must be done to satisfy him 
 before sin can be forgiven he is no longer 
 merely a teacher of the moral-influence 
 theory. 3. The significance of all this lies 
 here; Bushnell had written the most nobly 
 Christian exposition which could be made 
 of the moral view. If a Christian could ever 
 rest in that view, he could rest in it as it is 
 expressed by Busluiell. But Bushnell him- 
 self could not rest in it. His own Christian 
 185 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 consciousness was so profound that it re- 
 quired something more. And so the man of 
 seventy years set about thinking out this 
 "something more" and found it as an ob- 
 jective element, a Godward side to the 
 atonement. So, though he himself did not 
 see it, Bushnell becomes the most effective 
 critic of the moral view. 4. It is, I think, 
 not fanciful to see a certain kinship between 
 Bushnell's idea of self-propitiation and 
 Professor Curtis's idea of self-expression. 
 The latter idea seems to have the reality 
 Bushnell was reaching after. 5. His con- 
 tention that this world is not being conducted 
 on principles of absolute and stringent 
 justice is correct. Such a view would pre- 
 clude forgiveness. 6. But you do not feel 
 that he has found the real root of the demand 
 for the atonement. His is a nobly Christian 
 mind moving toward the haven with the 
 haven not yet in sight. The great true thing 
 about Bushnell in relation to theology was 
 his profound conviction that theology 
 must not be a dead formula but a living 
 reality. It must be a perfect dynamo of 
 vital energy. 
 
 186 
 
ROBERT WILLIAM DALE AND 
 
 HIS THEOLOGY, WITH 
 
 SPECIAL CONSIDERATION OF 
 
 HIS THEORY OF THE 
 
 ATONEMENT 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 ROBERT WILLIAM DALE AND HIS THEOL- 
 OGY, WITH SPECIAL CONSIDERATION 
 OF HIS THEORY OF THE ATONEMENT 
 
 I. The Man and His Work 
 
 One day a visitor to the English city of 
 Birmingham sought out the Carr's Lane 
 Congregational Church. He walked to and 
 fro in front of the building looking up at it. 
 And as he walked he thought, "It is here 
 that so great a preacher proclaims the ever- 
 lasting gospel." The visitor was Andrew 
 M. Fairbairn, the future principal of Mans- 
 field College, Oxford, and the preacher who 
 had so stirred his admiration by a volume of 
 printed sermons was Dr. Robert William 
 Dale. More than this young Congrega- 
 tional scholar looked upon Carr's Lane and 
 its pastor with enthusiasm. He was 
 Birmingham's greatest preacher, one of its 
 most potent civic forces, and a man whose 
 influence reached far over England. 
 
 In December, 1829, Dale was born. His 
 189 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 father was a manufacturer of hat trimmings. 
 The home was more than serious enough, 
 but under its austerity there was a deep and 
 warm affection. It was the great desire of 
 the mother that her son "Bobby" should be 
 a minister, and for this she was "wiUing to 
 make any sacrifice." Dale was sent to 
 private schools, not always fortunately 
 chosen, but even as a boy he showed more 
 fondness for books than for play. At four- 
 teen he was deeply engaged with Butler's 
 Analogy, and before he was sixteen he had 
 a written philosophical discussion with a 
 Scotch metaphysician. 
 
 At fourteen he became an assistant school- 
 master. Religious struggles began about 
 this time. He tells how he read James's 
 "Anxious Enquirer" on his knees, and in 
 keen distress about his personal salvation. 
 His own words must tell of his conversion. 
 "At last — how, I cannot tell — all came clear: 
 I ceased thinking of myself and of my faith, 
 and thought only of Christ: then I won- 
 dered that I should have been perplexed 
 for even a single hour." 
 
 At the age of fifteen Dale was received 
 190 
 
DALE 
 
 into the church and soon began preaching. 
 Even then the quahties of his preaching 
 caused hearers to feel that the ministry 
 should be his life-work. Difficulties were re- 
 moved and at the age of eighteen Dale found 
 himself in Spring Hill College, Birming- 
 ham. In the school Henry Rogers, a contrib- 
 utor to the Spectator in its greatest days, 
 deeply influenced Dale. From him the 
 young student learned to care profoundly 
 for real literary qualities of style. He was a 
 diligent student and his scholastic career was 
 one of unusual distinction. At this time 
 George Dawson, the brilliant Birmingham 
 preacher who vigorously expressed his social 
 ideals, exercised what was to be a lasting 
 influence over Dale, who caught his civic pas- 
 sion without imbibing his less desirable ideas. 
 By this time John Angel James, for fifty 
 years pastor of the important Carr's Lane 
 Congregational Church, had his eye upon 
 the able young student. The degree of 
 M. A. having been received from London 
 University, Dale found himself first the 
 assistant, then the co-pastor of Dr. James at 
 Carr's Lane. Upon the death of Dr, James 
 191 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 in 1859 Dale was made sole pastor of the 
 Church, which position he held for thirty- 
 five years. We will not attempt to follow 
 the life of multifarious activity which now 
 opened upon him, but will content ourselves 
 with speaking briefly of some of its aspects. 
 Dale was first of all a preacher. His 
 sermons from the first moved in stately 
 fashion at a lofty height. He wrote and 
 read them because he was unwilling to trust 
 his exhaustless fertility of speech. His 
 sermons were not always within the compre- 
 hension of all of his audience, but a poor 
 woman who confessed that she never under- 
 stood them said that she was so helped by 
 his prayers that she always came to church. 
 And he preached sermons. There was no 
 self-conscious garnishing of stjde, and no 
 seeking for a reputation for profundity. 
 The depth of his thought was the natural 
 outcome of a mighty mental inquiry applied 
 to great problems ; the high level of his style 
 was a real expression of the man. He was 
 a preacher of courage. When he had been 
 at Carr's Lane for years he was able to say, 
 "I have never feared, and I have never 
 192 
 
DALE 
 
 flattered you." The truths of the faith 
 mastered him, and he forged them into ser- 
 mons poured forth at white heat; practical 
 Christian ethics claimed him, and a passion 
 for righteousness penetrating every depart- 
 ment of life glowed at Carr's Lane, then 
 out over England; the glories of the inner 
 life of the Christian shone upon his soul, 
 and then transfigured his pulpit. 
 
 In the early days he had been told that 
 Carr's Lane people would not stand doc- 
 trinal preaching. He replied that they 
 would have to stand it. "I think God could 
 hardly confer upon this country a greater 
 blessing," he declared, "than in reawakening 
 that intense interest in religious doctrine 
 which characterized the heroic men who be- 
 longed to the times of the commonwealth." 
 So he kept Carr's Lane's great congrega- 
 tions hanging eagerly upon his words as he 
 spoke of the great doctrines, and even 
 preached to them his theory of the atone- 
 ment. And not only Carr's Lane but 
 England listened. 
 
 All the while Dale was becoming a great 
 municipal power. He had imbibed the ideals 
 193 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 of men like Dawson and threw himself 
 heartily into every plan for the betterment 
 of the city. In counting the influences that 
 have made Birmingham "the best governed 
 city in the world" Dale's contribution will 
 be found to be a very important one. From 
 municipal affairs to politics is a short step, 
 and Dale grew to be a great political power. 
 A quotation from a speech by Joseph 
 Chamberlain made after his final election to 
 Parliament will illustrate this. "I have seen 
 a statement/' said Mr. Chamberlain, "that 
 I go to Parliament as the representative of 
 Mr. Dale. Well, if that be so, there is not a 
 member of the House of Commons who will 
 have a better, nobler, or wiser constituency." 
 There is not space to tell how, inspired by 
 a vision of the reign of Christ in the affairs 
 of men, he threw himself into politics and 
 became a great Liberal leader. In city and 
 in nation his influence was a pressure always 
 toward the reign of right and righteousness 
 in public affairs. 
 
 Then Dale was a great educator. Inter- 
 ested in different kinds of schools, studying 
 their problems and taking part in their con- 
 194 
 
DALE 
 
 trol, he became a national educational figure. 
 He was the deciding factor in the removing 
 of Spring Hill College to Oxford; and 
 Mansfield College is to-day the great monu- 
 ment of his educational influence. 
 
 Recognition after recognition came to 
 him. Chairman of the Congregational 
 Union, LL.D. from Glasgow, member of 
 Royal Commission on elementary education, 
 chairman of International Council of Con- 
 gregational Churches — such are a few 
 honors which come quickly to mind. In 
 Australia he spoke in city after city, return- 
 ing to a great welcome in Birmingham typi- 
 fied by the large printed greeting, "We love 
 you and we tell you so." In America he 
 gave the Yale lectures on preaching, noble 
 utterances voicing intellectual and spiritual 
 ideals every preacher might well make his 
 own. He wrote sermons, pamphlets, and 
 books, achieving a style Sir William Rob- 
 ertson Nicoll has called "one of the most 
 perfect in the whole range of English 
 Literature." Dean Alford reviewed a vol- 
 ume of his sermons with enthusiasm. West- 
 cott wrote with warm appreciation of his 
 195 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 work on Ephesians, and Cardinal Newman 
 paid tribute to his book on the atonement. 
 
 Even this is not all. This busy, active, 
 versatile man found time in lonely medita- 
 tion to become in a notable sense a great 
 mystic. His journey to Palestine with its 
 hours of quiet musing left its mark upon 
 his life. Then great personal bereavement 
 came. And the terrible disruption of the 
 Liberal party caused his retirement from 
 political life. He became ill and had period 
 after period of enforced idleness and suffer- 
 ing. And out of this sorrow and disap- 
 pointment he went, not to an embittered and 
 cynical old age, but to a sunset glory of 
 communion with God. 
 
 Now his sermons came to glow with the 
 light of this hidden communion. He made 
 the discovery in his own words that "Christ 
 is alive," and every Sunday morning his 
 people were asked to sing an Easter hymn. 
 He wrote sermons and books enriched with 
 a spiritual depth and power, unknown be- 
 fore even in his fertile ministry. 
 
 Then, in 1895, the end came. Birming- 
 ham and England joined to do him honor. 
 196 
 
DALE 
 
 No such concourse had been seen for man}^ 
 years as his funeral j^rocession. "Above on 
 the sandstone chff in which the cemetery is 
 quarried, on the long platform of the rail- 
 way station, and on the station roof itself 
 men and women stood in serried lines, and 
 from beyond the walls came the murmur of 
 unseen thousands outside." In West- 
 minster Abbey and in Saint Paul's Cathe- 
 dral, as well as all over the country, voices 
 were lifted in eager tribute. It had been 
 a life of amazing energy and versatility and 
 a life of great achievement. But best of 
 all it had been the life of a man of God. 
 
 II. Dale's Theology 
 
 In approaching Dale's theology we must 
 
 remind ourselves of some of the outstanding 
 
 features of the theological situation in which 
 
 he found himself. He was an heir of the 
 
 Puritan movement and two great things 
 
 came down to him from it. First there was 
 
 r an almost overwhelming sense of God. The 
 
 ^Puritan, to paraphrase some one's words, 
 
 feared God so much that he feared nothing 
 
 else. And the movement gave to its sons a 
 
 197 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 sense of the height and majesty of God. 
 Puritanism had seen Isaiah's vision of the 
 holy God, and never forgot the awful glory 
 of the experience. Then Puritanism be- 
 lieved in God reigning. It had been almost 
 a theocracy in the days of the commonwealth. 
 And in the blood of its sons there throbbed 
 an eagerness for the Christian conquest of 
 national life. To an heir of Cromwell 
 theology could never be simply an affair of 
 the cloister. 
 
 But the eighteenth century had spread the 
 palsying blight of deism over England. 
 Deism was the theory of the absent God 
 and the self-sufficient man. One good thing 
 had come from deism — a sense that man and ^ 
 man's powers must be taken account of. 
 For at this point the Calvinistic Puritan was 
 weakest. He was so dazzled by his vision of j 
 God that he could not see man. It was 
 great to have this vision of God, but man 
 must be taken account of. And Calvinism 
 had hard and rigid things to say about man 
 and God's relation to him. Its theory of 
 the atonement had been constructed with 
 bars of steel fastened by iron bolts. It was 
 198 
 
DALE 
 
 strong, but it was cruel. In alleviation of 
 this, theories of public justice which sought 
 to explain the atonement as a feature of 
 God's judicial dealing with men were intro- 
 duced. 
 
 In this atmosphere of mitigated Cal- 
 vinism Dale received his own theological 
 training. The out-and-out reaction from 
 Calvinism which preferred no God, to the 
 God of the Calvinist, cannot be said to have 
 influenced Dale. He felt that Christianity 
 must be rational, but had not a particle of 
 the rationalist in him. But he was more than 
 a son of the Puritan movement — he was a 
 son of the great revival. Wesley had 
 created a living church, and helped to give 
 new life to the existing churches. A real 
 Christian experience makes a new man of 
 your theologian, and Dale had a real Chris- 
 tian experience. The root of everything in 
 his theology is that he had found forgive- 
 ness, peace, and life in the salvation of 
 Christ. This will help to account for the 
 small effect the tractarian movement had 
 upon him. The tractarian movement was a 
 great seeking for rehgious authority, and a 
 199 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 finding of it in the church. A hving ex- 
 perience of the power of Christ set Dale free 
 from the dangers of this quest. 
 
 The broad church movement had real 
 points of contact with him. Its passion for 
 Christianity dominant in life was his own. 
 Its rejoicing sense of all Christ was touched 
 his sympathy. But to Dale Christianity 
 must have a deeper root than it gave. He 
 could rest only in a theology which found 
 its center in a mighty expiation. 
 
 Coming now to Dale's own theology. He 
 never wrote it out in a complete system; it 
 must be gleaned from his various utterances. 
 He had brought his powerful mind to bear 
 upon problem after problem. And his 
 thinking moved in the direction of a system. 
 
 Let us begin with the great question of 
 authority. He dealt with it in an epoch- 
 making book, The Living Christ and the 
 Four Gospels. The portrait of Christ is by ^ 
 its own power morally convincing, he tells 
 us. And when a man submits himself to 
 the gospel message and accepts the Saviour 
 he comes to know for himself, for salvation 
 is the revelation of the living Christ in his 
 200 
 
DALE 
 
 own life. This experience of his is confirmed 
 by the similar experiences of sixty genera- 
 tions of Christians all over the world. Here 
 is a great Gibraltar. The church is sm-e 
 because it knows. Its experience vindicates 
 the authority of Christ. How much this 
 message meant as it traveled over England 
 and America in the days of a brilliant and 
 destructive criticism it would be hard ade- 
 quately to say. It was one of Dale's noblest 
 messages to the church. 
 
 Coming to Dale's conception of God, we 
 find that even his theism felt the warmth 
 of his experience. A man was to be a theist 
 not simply with his head. He was to ex- 
 perience his theism. Dale's whole theology 
 was colored by the sweeping majesty of his 
 conception of God. It gathered together 
 the noblest things of Puritanism, and fused 
 them in a personal experience of awe in the 
 presence of the Most High. 
 
 Dale's speculations regarding the Trinity 
 reveal a certain philosophical inaptitude. He 
 speaks of the Father as though he were the 
 transcendent one, the Holy Spirit the im- 
 manent one, and the Son the personal re- 
 201 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 vealer. But he is clear in his assertion that 
 /'There are not three Gods, but in the hfe 
 
 (and being of the One God there are three 
 centers of consciousness, vohtion, and 
 activity." 
 
 In deaHng with man we come upon Dale's 
 belief that man's very life roots in a higher 
 life, that apart from this higher life, he has 
 no life of his own. Sin is not only the rejec- 
 tion of moral and spiritual well-being. It 
 is the rejection of the root of life itself. So 
 Dale came ultimately to believe in the an- 
 Anihilation of the finally perverse. The 
 important thing at this point is to see what 
 an organic part of his thought this view was. 
 Its inadequacy had its roots deep in his 
 thought. His method of dealing with free- 
 dom and sin, and man's relation to the race, 
 reveals a noble man in the difficulties of 
 intellectual problems which he tried ineffec- 
 tually to solve. He had an overwhehning 
 sense of sin, nobly Christian in its whole 
 quality. But the tragedy of moral evil was 
 sin to him. He made the terrible mistake 
 of concluding that man was a sharer in the 
 responsibility for sins to which he had no 
 202 
 
DALE 
 
 v' relation of personal choice. The failure 
 here is seen throughout his discussion. He 
 tried to preserve man's freedom and to be 
 just to his personal life. But he never really 
 succeeded — and he never knew that he failed. 
 There was enough Calvinism in his blood 
 to give him content with inadequate views. 
 But deeper than this he was sure that he 
 could trust the race to the God who had 
 cared enough for it to give it Calvary. 
 
 His conception of redemption we will 
 soon consider in detail. The church was the 
 body of men and women who possessed the 
 new hfe in Christ. It could not be rightly 
 a state church, for that included those who 
 did not have the life in Christ. The seat of 
 church government and authority was those 
 who enjoyed this life. The sacraments 
 were not a magical rite, but the Lord's 
 ( Supper was more than a memorial. It was 
 4 a spiritual opportunity. Here the Christian 
 could receive spiritually the life of his Lord. 
 Sanctification was the life in Christ victori- 
 ously possessing the Christian. Immortality 
 this victorious life in its endless progression. 
 The doom of the wicked, the absence of all 
 203 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 life, even existence, because they utterly 
 turned from the offered life in Christ. 
 
 Dale's theology was Christian doctrine 
 construed from the standpoint of a personal 
 experience of the life in Christ. Its strengtli 
 was in this triumphant emphasis on Chris- 
 tian experience, its weakness a failure to 
 understand that personal intention is the 
 crucial thing in human life, and a tendency 
 to add to the ethical personal relation of the 
 Christian with his Lord a metaphysical re- 
 lation which can hardly be cleared of the 
 charge of pantheism, and of which we shall 
 see more in his theory of the atonement. 
 
 III. Dale^s Theory of the Atonement 
 
 Dale was trained, as we have seen, in a 
 school where the tendency was to explain 
 our Lord's work from the standpoint of 
 ^ public justice. The depth of his own reli- 
 gious experience and its relation to a pro- 
 found sense of sin would ultimately have 
 demanded a personal reconsideration of the 
 whole problem. But the theological move- 
 ment toward the moral view of our Lord's 
 work, which became more and more influen- 
 204 
 
DALE 
 
 tial, was in sharp contrast to his own deepest 
 rehgious intuitions, and in the hght of this 
 fact his personal grapple with the great 
 problem was made. 
 ^ BushnelFs Vicarious Sacrifice, with its 
 fine religious feeling, its passion for all noble 
 things, and its fascination of style, was seiz- 
 ing upon men's minds, as a vital and appeal- 
 ing treatment of the problem. Would the 
 whole world go to the moral view? A strong 
 voice needed to speak if this was to be pre- 
 vented. Then Dale spoke. In the Congre- 
 gational Union lecture, delivered in 1875, 
 Dale made his great utterance. He was 
 confronted by two possible views of the work 
 of our Lord. Was it an expiation, or was 
 it a transcendent act to win men from sin? 
 Was the great problem to turn men from 
 sin, or was there a deeper problem? Was it 
 /necessary that something be done to satisfy 
 the righteous God before sin could be re- 
 mitted? Of course in any view our Lord's 
 death was a moral power. Dale did not 
 dispute this. The question was. Is it simply 
 and oply a moral power, or is it essentially 
 expiation, then a moral power also ? 
 205 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 The first task to which he set himself was 
 to prove that the New Testament concep- 
 tion is that the death of Christ was an 
 V objective atonement. He distinguished 
 sharply between the fact and any theory of 
 it. He was a great deal more interested in 
 the fact of an objective atonement than its 
 rationale. That fact was crucial. 
 
 In six lectures he conducted a masterly 
 argument. The history of our Lord's life, 
 his words, the apostolic consciousness, all 
 were shown to involve an objective atone- 
 ment. It was no massing of proof-texts. 
 He showed how the fact of an objective 
 atonement was a part of the movement of 
 the apostles' thought, how it was essential 
 to the effectiveness of arguments they used, 
 and how at every point what they say fits in 
 with it, and that they absolutely fail to say 
 the things it would have been natural — even 
 imperative — for them to say had they held 
 the moral view. Christ and his apostles 
 held, whatever we may hold, that his death 
 was an expiation making possible the for- 
 giveness of sin. 
 
 Following his exceedingly vigorous and 
 206 
 
DALE 
 
 able exposition of New Testament conscious- 
 ness, Dale takes a survey of the history of 
 the interpretation by the theologians of the 
 church of our Lord's death. He shows how 
 Christian consciousness always clung to the 
 idea of an objective work by our Lord. 
 Sometimes the explanations theologians 
 gave were absurd. There was plenty of 
 inadequacy here. But through it all Chris- 
 tian consciousness clung to the idea of an 
 objective work. And the theologians simply 
 did the best they could to provide a rationale 
 for it. Here, then, was a great standing 
 ground. The New Testament and Chris- 
 tian consciousness united in a demand for 
 the expiatory view of Christ's death. So 
 much was firm whether a theory could be 
 found for it or not. 
 
 Now Dale approaches his constructive 
 work. Can hght be thrown on this fact 
 that our Lord's death is the ground on which 
 our sins are forgiven? He believes it is 
 possible, first, by considering Christ's rela- 
 tion to the Eternal Law of Righteousness; 
 second, by considering his relation to the 
 human race. 
 
 207 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 The ultimate source of moral distinction 
 Dale conceives as the Eternal Law of 
 Righteousness. This is not the result of the 
 will of God, nor does it find its source in the 
 nature of God. But neither is it superior 
 to God. It comes to life in him. His very 
 /moral sovereignty consists in his perpetual 
 ^ assertion of his oneness with it. He is the 
 moral law alive. Punishment is conceived, 
 not as a means of improving the sinner, nor 
 as a means of preventing others from wrong- 
 doing, nor as the expression of wrath be- 
 cause of personal injury to God. It is 
 deserved suffering because of the breaking 
 of the law. The law of righteousness neces- 
 sarily demands the eternal expression of the 
 fact that sin deserves to be punished. And 
 if God is to preserve his oneness with the 
 Eternal Law of Righteousness, he must for- 
 ever declare by deed that fact. 
 
 Can sin, then, be forgiven? There was a 
 conception which regarded penalty as self- 
 acting. Page after page is devoted to the 
 eloquent overthrow of this view. It simply 
 does not correspond to the facts of life. But 
 let us look more deeply at penalty. Now, 
 208 
 
DALE 
 
 we find that its very greatest power comes 
 from the fact that it is a personal thing. 
 The God who is one with the Eternal Law 
 of Righteousness is back of it. It is not 
 simply the work of a mechanical law. It is 
 the deed of a God who is Righteousness 
 alive. Now, if God ever forgives sin, he 
 must find some way of asserting this prin- 
 ciple that sin deserves to be punished, of 
 revealing his oneness with the Eternal Law 
 of Righteousness which shall be as effective 
 as the punishment of the sinner. Here we 
 come to the crisis in the discussion. Christ — 
 himself God, Judge of men — whose pre- 
 rogative is the punishment of the sinner, 
 /endures the punishment instead of inflict- 
 \ing it, and so the problem is solved. God's 
 love for the sinner gives his punishment of 
 the sinner a great added moral significance. 
 His love for the Son makes the deed on 
 Calvary, when the Father withdrew his 
 companionship from the Son and left him 
 ^in the very loneliness of a condemned sinner, 
 an act of divine self-sacrifice beyond any- 
 thing of which we could have conceived. 
 This is the grandest moment in the moral 
 209 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 history of God. So Christ asserts God's 
 oneness with the Eternal Law of Righteous- 
 ness. So he makes possible the forgiveness 
 of sin. 
 
 But had Christ any relation to the race 
 which will give body and stability to this 
 interpretation? Dale replies that he had, 
 for Christ in Dale's conception is basally 
 connected with the race's life. He is its 
 root and its ideal realization. So that what 
 he does is in a unique sense a race deed. 
 IVhen Christ endures on Calvary the penalty 
 of sin, it is in a recognition within the race 
 of the terrible penal desert of sin, and makes 
 possible on the part of men the same 
 acknowledgment. They now make this 
 verdict on the justice of sin's receiving such 
 punislmient their own, through the power 
 of Christ, the race representative. 
 
 Now, before sin entered the world Christ 
 was actually and ideally the race represen- 
 tative before the Father. But sin broke 
 right ax^ross this relation. When the 
 Saviour was incarnated and bore sin's pen- 
 alty, he secured to the race, in spite of sin, 
 and by that very act made possible, the 
 210 
 
DALE 
 
 restoration of all the glorious possibilities of 
 that relation as originally held. But, more 
 than this, the death of Christ, through his 
 basal connection with the race, is the death 
 of sin. Those who accept him find in his 
 death the slaying of their own sinfulness. 
 Calvary thus completely conquers sin and 
 assures the victory of righteousness. 
 
 To sum up: — Christ's death is an objec- 
 tive atonement for sin: 1. Because his sub- 
 mission to the penal demands of law — ^he 
 being the race basis — is an expression of 
 ours and carries ours with it. 2. His death 
 renders possible the very relation between 
 the race and Christ which sin had broken, 
 with all its infinite promise. 3. The death 
 of Christ involves the destruction of sin in 
 those who accept the Saviour. 4. The death 
 of Christ expresses God's oneness with the 
 Eternal Law of Righteousness as perfectly 
 as it would be expressed by the punishment 
 of the sinner. 
 
 Here, then, the problem is solved. The 
 
 Eternal Law of Righteousness has received 
 
 final expression as one with God. The race 
 
 has been given the supreme opportunity in 
 
 211 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 spite of sin to be a race in Christ and so 
 secure all life and all blessedness. So much 
 in exposition of Dr. Dale's theory. 
 
 Now, for our own question: Can we ac- 
 cept it as a satisfactory account of the work 
 of our Lord? Some grave difficulties 
 emerge at once. 
 
 1. Dr. Dale's conception of the Eternal 
 Law of Righteousness, despite all his pro- 
 testations, is a dethronement of God. Dale 
 tried to evade the difficulty very bravely, 
 but after all was said he left God the sub- 
 ject of a Higher than He. We must find 
 the source of the moral law in God him- 
 self. When Dale said that the source of 
 the law could not be in God's nature he was 
 thinking of the impossibility of its being a 
 mere attribute of God. The source of moral 
 distinction is deeper than a mere attribute. 
 It is at the basis of the very nature of God 
 as a totality. But this basal thing is a richer 
 thing than Dale's Eternal Law of Right- 
 eousness. Beginning with moral distinction, 
 it includes all moral harmony, and so becomes 
 the Holiness of God. Here is the ultimate 
 basis of morality. You cannot get back of 
 212 
 
DALE 
 
 the nature of God. There is nothing beyond 
 that. The demand for an atonement comes 
 not from God's allegiance to an eternal law 
 of righteousness, which we cannot find ulti- 
 mately rooted in his own nature. It comes 
 from the Holiness which is God's own 
 nature. The totality of God's nature de- 
 mands Calvary. 
 
 2. The conception of Christ as the race 
 basis demands scrutiny. Dale uses it some- 
 what uneasily and with less than his accus- 
 tomed clarity. But it is evident that he 
 means more than can be harmonized with 
 genuine personal relations. He means more 
 than that Christ's whole attitude toward sin 
 may be made personal in the Christian's life 
 through the power of God. He means more 
 than that it sets free divine energies which 
 enter the life as we accept the Saviour. And 
 the thing he means is a sort of metaphysical 
 oneness which goes a long way toward spell- 
 ing pantheism. Here we strike a root of 
 failure in Dale's thinking. A sharp notion 
 of the integrity of personality is quite 
 lacking. His notion of sin, his notion of 
 redemption, his notion of the life in 
 213 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 Christ are vitiated because he did not think 
 of sin as a thing with personal intention 
 necessarily behind it, of redemption as a 
 process which at every step must have re- 
 gard to the demands of man as a personal 
 being and the life in Christ as a relation 
 always consistent with the integrity of per- 
 sonality. The incarnation was necessary 
 because God could be satisfied only with a 
 deed achieved in the human race, and only 
 such a deed could be redemptively appro- 
 priated by man. No metaphysical relation 
 of Christ to the race can make his deed the 
 race's possession except as it is personally 
 appropriated. The flaw in Dale's thinking 
 at this point is that it gives us a feature of 
 redemption which conflicts with the integrity 
 of the personal, ethical life. 
 
 In conclusion, a few words of apprecia- 
 tion of Dale's work on the atonement: 
 
 1. It shows us a man trying to get a 
 theory which will adequately express his 
 Christian experience. This must always be 
 the mood of the theologian. It gives Dale's 
 work an atmosphere full of the Christian 
 quality. We sympathize with what he is 
 214 
 
DALE 
 
 after, even when we do not think he has 
 found it. 
 
 2. He is trying to be true to the Nev/ 
 Testament. He hstens eagerly, not merely 
 to its words, but to its heart-beats. He 
 wants to find what was the deep New Testa- 
 ment feeling about redemption, what was 
 its consciousness, and he wants to be true to 
 it. Here he is a guide to all Christian 
 thinkers. 
 
 3. The distinction he makes between fact 
 and theory is very important. Of course 
 Professor Denney is right in contending 
 that it must be more than a blank fact. But 
 there is a difference between saying that 
 Christ assumed our responsibilities, and 
 wrought our redemption, and having a 
 worked-out theory of our Lord's work. The 
 fact, with this content, does not constitute 
 a theory. And Dale was right about this 
 fact being absolutely important. Typi- 
 cal Christian experience has over and over 
 again rested on this fact, when no articu- 
 lated theory could be given. If the church 
 is to keep typical Christian experience, 
 this fact must be kept before men's minds, 
 
 215 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 whether an adequate theory can be given or 
 not. 
 
 4. The two great notes which Dale struck 
 — Christ's relation to the Ultimate Moral 
 Demand, and Christ's relation to the Human 
 Race — must never be lost sight of. They 
 will have to be treated more adequately, but 
 treated they must be. 
 
 5. Few books could be better fitted to 
 give a man the right temper, the right ambi- 
 tion, and the real Christian emphasis in 
 personal grapple with the great problem, 
 than this volume by Dale. And it will be 
 a personal inspiration to every man who 
 rightly reads it. 
 
 216 
 
THE THEOLOGICAL SITUATION 
 REGARDING THE ATONEMENT 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL SITUATION 
 REGARDING THE ATONEIVIENT 
 
 I 
 
 Some General Characteristics of the 
 Present Theological Situation 
 
 Probably many an observer of present- 
 day thought-movements would deny that 
 there is a theological situation regarding 
 anything. Theology, he would say, we have 
 outgrown and discarded. The subtle dis- 
 tinctions of schoolmen no longer concern 
 men under the hea^vj pressure of the condi- 
 tions of actual life. Even the preacher who 
 holds his congregation has to become undog- 
 matic. If a man chooses to spin out theo- 
 logical theories by the pale glow of his study 
 lamp, let him do it; but he has no real rela- 
 tion to the thought and activity of the time. 
 Out under the hot rays of the sun, the 
 world's workers are busy, and have time for 
 only the thought which is vital and prac- 
 tical. Men care about what Jesus taught in 
 the Sermon on the Mount ; that is practical. 
 219 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 They do not stop to waste their time and 
 energy in quarrehng over who he was: that 
 is irreverent, and useless. Practical Chris- 
 tian ethics has a great future; speculative 
 theology is dead. There is not time even to 
 bury it decently; we are bus}^ with the de- 
 mands of the present. "Let the dead past 
 bury its dead." But theology, like Banquo's 
 ghost, will not be disposed of so easily. The 
 truth of the matter is that man is a theo- 
 logical being, and forsakes theolog}^ only to 
 return to it. We really cannot get away 
 from our nature, and it is not of much use to 
 try. The patronizing loftiness with which 
 many men view those who still care about 
 theology is so transitory that we need not 
 be disturbed about it. The human mind 
 must ask theological questions and ulti- 
 mately will demand some sort of an answer, 
 and when the hazy indefiniteness has been 
 cleared from much of present-day thinking 
 we will begin to realize that more than 
 mental gratification is at stake in the answer 
 to the theological questions. JNIan's whole 
 practical life roots in the realities with which 
 these questions deal. It makes all the dif- 
 220 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 lerence in the world whether you have a 
 theology of hope or a theology of despair; 
 and no theology amounts ultimately to the 
 same thing as a theology of despair. If 
 morality and religion are to survive, we 
 must believe that the very structure of the 
 universe takes sides with them. For the sake 
 of righteousness and practical piety the 
 great theological questions must be an- 
 swered, not by specious evasions, but by 
 resolute affirmations. So we will approach 
 the examination of the present theological 
 situation feeling that those who concern 
 themselves with these things in a positive 
 way have the future on their side. At the 
 very start we will declare ourselves free from 
 the vitiating insistence of the Zeitgeist that 
 one must not affirm an}i;hing about God 
 for fear of being dogmatic. 
 
 Let us now try to look upon the present 
 situation more closely. 
 
 1. The most outstanding fact in all typical 
 present thinking is modern science. "The 
 reign of law" expresses in a phrase the great 
 discovery of the nineteenth century. Law 
 was first discovered, then deified. The great 
 221 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 philosophical heresy is the viewing of law as 
 self-active and self-supporting. In every 
 direction, outside the church and within, men 
 are afraid of this mighty uniform machine 
 which they have discovered the universe to 
 be. They fancy that laws have strength of 
 their own. At this point the corrective much 
 modern thought needs is the understanding 
 that laws can do nothing; that in themselves 
 they are nothing. A law is only a name for 
 the way in which God works. A law with- 
 out a person is as impossible as an idea with- 
 out a mind. The cosmic history can be 
 summed up in a brief sentence — "God acts." 
 The deification of law is at the root of an 
 enormous amount of the inadequacy of 
 modern thought. 
 
 2. A second characteristic of the present 
 situation grows out of the results of modern 
 biblical scholarship. The scientific method 
 had been applied to the study of the Scrip- 
 tures with results revolutionary, if not 
 destructive. That much which has been con- 
 fidently asserted consists of brilliant hypo- 
 theses, rather than well- fortified conclusions, 
 we may readily admit, but enough has com- 
 222 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 manded the practically universal consent of 
 scholars to make it possible to speak of re- 
 sults of biblical criticism. In certain respects 
 it will never be possible for thoughtful men 
 to look upon the Bible in the same way 
 again. More than this: these results have 
 outlawed widely accepted views as to the 
 inspiration and authority of the Bibld. It is 
 no longer possible to regard it as verbally 
 inspired or mechanically authoritative. Is 
 Christianity itself at stake? By no means. 
 But the theories as to God's method in his 
 revelation, which are at stake, are so widely 
 spread that a confusion of thought which 
 makes them one with the faith itself is all 
 too easy and natural. This helps to account 
 for the great unrest within the Church and 
 the increase of skepticism without. But 
 Christian thinkers have not been without 
 power to deal with this situation. The way 
 out of the confusion, we are beginning to 
 understand, is to regard God's message as 
 "psychologically mediated" and its authority 
 as the result, not of uncertain and external 
 defenses, but of what we may call its moral 
 and "spiritual cogency." To the man who 
 223 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 accepts Christianity because it alone fits his 
 needs, frees him from sin, and completes 
 his life, external and mechanical theories of 
 the Bible are so needless that he loses them 
 without regret. Without a conception of 
 the authority of the Bible as vital, the results 
 of modern criticism are alarming; with it, 
 criticism is interesting and useful when 
 reverent: it is something to be strenuously 
 opposed where guided by poisonously ration- 
 alistic presuppositions; but in either case it 
 is unable to touch the profound certainties 
 of the Christian faith. The way to deal w4th 
 even the worst phases of criticism, where 
 a destructive conclusion has murderously 
 lurked in premises of the scholar's thinking, 
 is to come to the same problems with Chris- 
 tian experience and Christian intuition. If 
 Christian experience is kept alive, it can be 
 trusted to deal with all the problems of criti- 
 cism and to adjust itself to all the legitimate 
 results of scholarship. The worst result of 
 criticism is when a man makes it an excuse 
 to turn from unpleasant realities and shut 
 the deeps of his life from just the truth he 
 needs. The remedy is not to curse criticism 
 224 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 but to become passionately honest and 
 earnest men. 
 
 3. Another characteristic of our time is 
 the prevalence of Christian experience which 
 is not typical. One of the thought-provok- 
 ing features of the life of the church is the 
 prevalence of devotion to Christ which has 
 not the New Testament ring. There are 
 great Christians who are strangers to some 
 of the characteristic moods of apostolic 
 Christianity; and it is their loss. Because 
 of the type of their experience both their 
 theology and their scholarship are vitiated. 
 The fault is that the whole nature has not 
 been listened to in its call for Christ. There 
 has been no thoroughgoing moral struggle 
 which flung the life helpless until the Saviour 
 came. The great need of the church is a 
 universal redemptional consciousness among 
 Christians, and the way to that is to get men 
 into the current of deep moral struggle. Let 
 a man face his whole life under the stress of 
 the demands of his conscience, and in this 
 way receive Christ, and his whole bearing 
 and all his intuitions will become typical and 
 trustworthy. 
 
 225 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 4. A feature of the present situation for 
 which one can only have praise is the deep- 
 ened ethical sense of which we are seeing 
 constant evidences. The whole foundation 
 of Christianity must be seen to be clearly 
 moral if men are to be satisfied by it. 
 Presentations of doctrine which are charac- 
 terized by ethical makeshift can have no 
 profound seizure upon our time. It would 
 be impossible for a theory of "God's cheat- 
 ing the devil by a piece of sharp practice" 
 to take its rise to-day. The whole study of 
 the Bible and of Christianity has a new 
 frankness and candor and a new honesty. 
 Men feel that it is no longer possible to deal 
 with Christian truths in the temper of the 
 Jesuit. Every Christian doctrine must be 
 judged at the bar of this alert ethical sense. 
 
 5. Then there is a new emphasis on 
 psychology. The facts of experience must 
 be taken account of. They must be treated 
 scientifically. The inner life of men is a 
 realm for careful investigation. While it is 
 possible to do exceedingly superficial work 
 in this realm, if a man has not a proper 
 perspective and sense of values, the interest 
 
 226 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 in psychology, and the feehng that it must 
 be taken account of, is very hopeful and full 
 of possibility, for the closer you get to an 
 adequate psychology of the inner life the 
 nearer you come to the place where it is seen 
 that real and essential Christianity is de- 
 manded by the nature of man. 
 
 6. One more general characteristic of the 
 present situation is its dawning social vision. 
 There is a deepened hunger for brotherhood, 
 and a new feeling of man's responsibility 
 for man. The most vital thought of the time 
 has this quality of eagerness for social service 
 and for a social goal. It has permeated 
 present-day activities and created vast 
 philanthropies. It is seen in the ardent 
 dreams of the Socialist and the quiet service 
 of the settlement worker. A theology which 
 has a social message will find a vital point 
 of contact here. 
 
 The attempt to deal with the whole situa- 
 tion which we have been discussing, which 
 has obtained the greatest influence, has been 
 the Ritschlian theology. The Ritschlian 
 theology is a surrender to the spirit of the 
 times. It does nothing to the false concep- 
 227 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 tion of law, but tries to formulate a theory 
 of Christianity which can live with it. It 
 drops every Christian emphasis unpleasant 
 to the modern mind. It is an expression of 
 a devotion to Christ which has never mea- 
 sured the reaches of Christian experience. 
 It does, in its theory of value judgments, 
 move in the right direction for securing a 
 true basis for the authority of Christianity, 
 but in the refusal to allow religious truth to 
 be related to scientific truth it becomes the 
 creator of an emasculated Christianity. It 
 is alert to avoid ethical makeshift, but fails 
 to discern the profoundest ethical realities of 
 life. Its psychology is that of the bays and 
 inlets of human life. It has never sounded 
 the great deep. Bring a man profoundly 
 convicted of sin into the presence of the 
 Ritschlian theology, and it has not an ade- 
 quate word to say to him. It does feel the 
 social hunger, however, and in a real way 
 expresses it. The valuable things of the 
 Zeitgeist are expressed here, but its weak- 
 nesses also. And so the Ritschlian theology, 
 full of fresh eagerness and fine places of 
 reality as it is, as a total is thoroughly inade- 
 228 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 quate. The theology which deals adequately 
 with the spirit of the time and the men of 
 the time must not speak like a cringing 
 courtier, but must speak with the voice of 
 a king. 
 
 II 
 
 The Situation Regarding the 
 Atonement 
 
 It was important to say so much in a 
 general way because all the things we have 
 discussed have an important bearing upon 
 the atonement as a problem for our time. 
 It is in this world that present-day thinking 
 about the atonement is being done. When 
 we come to the consideration of the atone- 
 ment itself the first thing which strikes us 
 is the movement away from the Satisfaction 
 Theory. Various reasons have contributed 
 to this. Probably the most important are 
 these four: 
 
 1. An Ethical Reason. The Satisfaction 
 Theory has often been presented in ways 
 which made it repulsive to a sound ethical 
 sense. It would be difficult to get any ade- 
 quate conception of the amount of struggle 
 229 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 earnest men have had with immoral presen- 
 tations of the work of our Lord. A revolt 
 from the theory in whose name these presen- 
 tations were made was inevitable. 
 
 2. A Reason in Reality, The Satisfac- 
 tion Theory has been presented as such an 
 inanimate mechanism that it had not even 
 a throb of life. As men have listened to 
 solutions in which only cold logic and com- 
 mercial exchange were involved they have 
 been repulsed. A theory of the atonement 
 needs to be real. 
 
 3. A Theological Reason, The distaste 
 for theology has left men with inadequate 
 ideas of God and of sin. With no high 
 doctrine of God, through which the fire of 
 moral lightnings flashed, they have lost the 
 sense that there was an obstacle in God 
 which must be met before sin could be for- 
 given. With conceptions of sin which have 
 lost the penetrating sense of its heinous 
 tragedy the problem has seemed to become 
 far less grave, and the solution just the 
 revelation of the Father's love. 
 
 4. A Personal Reason, Men are proud 
 creatures. They do not like to bend too 
 
 230 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 much even to God. And the Satisfaction 
 Theory made men bend. They have pre- 
 ferred some theory which called for a smaller 
 price from men's pride — which demanded on 
 the part of men less humiliation. Probably 
 this personal reason has had to do with more 
 turning from the deeper interpretation of 
 our Lord's work than men would be ready 
 to admit. The out-and-out reaction from 
 the Satisfaction Theory is, of course, repre- 
 sented by the various forms of the Moral 
 Influence Theory. There is much that is 
 winsome and attractive about this theory, 
 and there is much that is true. In its highest 
 fol^ms it is quite saturated with elevated 
 Christian feeling. As presented by Ritschl 
 it does not commend itself much, but when 
 we have a clear sense of the deity of om^ 
 Lord, and his passionate desire, even at the 
 price of death, to win men from sin, it be- 
 comes a great theory, with power to feed us. 
 Doubtless, the most generally attractive 
 theory of our Lord's work is some form of 
 the Moral Influence Theory. In Christ we 
 see the heart of God, and, seeing, we are 
 won to him. Multitudes will heartily accept 
 231 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 this statement of our Lord's work. But 
 this is not enough. Even the highest type 
 of the Moral Influence Theory assumes that 
 all there is to be done is to get a bad man 
 made into a good one. But that is not all. 
 The man who rests in the Moral Influence 
 Theory may be a real Christian, but he has 
 never seen what God actually is. And he 
 has never sounded the depth of his own 
 moral life. If he had, he would know that 
 something had to be done about his past sin. 
 The great, holy God must be satisfied, and 
 man's own conscience demands something 
 deeper than revelation, forgiveness, and a 
 new life. Then the New Testament is an 
 awkward book if you have merely the Moral 
 Influence Theory. It calls for something 
 deeper. 
 
 Men who have felt that they could not 
 live in the Satisfaction Theory and were 
 unable, too, to rest in the Moral Influence 
 Theory, have tried to find an abiding place 
 along lines first marked out by Grotius, in 
 the Governmental Theory. The thing that 
 is deeper than the Moral Influence Theory, 
 they have said, is that God is a ruler. He 
 232 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 must protect the interests of moral govern- 
 ment. Christ's death served the very end 
 of penalty in regard to moral government. 
 Therefore the sinner may be forgiven. The 
 death of Christ is a vindication of God's 
 moral concern. This theory too witnesses to 
 a truth. Our Lord's death is certainly a 
 vindication of God as a God of moral con- 
 cern. But unless it is more than that, it is 
 a question if it can be as much. If it is 
 only an awful fact, put there to show God's 
 hatred of sin, the question is, Does it really 
 do it? 
 
 There must be a deeper root to save it 
 from being erratic. Then it does not pene- 
 trate into the depth of the obstacle in God. 
 This is far deeper than the needs of moral 
 government. Somehow this theory has not 
 struck vitally with men in our time. With 
 the inadequacies we have already mentioned 
 another may help to account for this: The 
 Governmental Theory is not deeply related 
 to the New Testament. Besides the reac- 
 tion from the Satisfaction Theory there has 
 been the attempt to state it so as to give it 
 an actual contact with the lives of earnest 
 233 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 men. In this connection, of course, the name 
 of Dale comes to our minds at once. He 
 made it clear that the Satisfaction Theory 
 could be so stated as to be exceedingly real 
 and vital, even if his statement was not 
 adequate. Our Lord's work was rich and 
 diverse in its bearings, and men have seized 
 upon various aspects of it as the cardinal 
 features of theories. Their works have been 
 statements of various true things about our 
 Lord and his work, but have not had the 
 strength of a final theory. To the degree 
 that they have a deep sense of sin and of 
 God's righteousness they have had power to 
 feed real Christian life. Lacking this, they 
 have contributed to a superficial type of 
 Christian experience. 
 
 With a widespread superficiality in the 
 treatment of the atonement there has been 
 a hunger for something deeper. This has 
 been voiced in a volume of most unusual 
 noteworthiness — Professor Denney's The 
 Death of Christ. The book comes right out 
 of the modern methods of scholarship, and 
 from a mind fully equipped with fine instru- 
 ments of thought and aware of all the move- 
 234 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 merits of the theological world. This book 
 makes it absolutely clear that to the New 
 Testament consciousness our Lord's death 
 was a substitution for us — that the atone- 
 ment is an achievement which he wrought 
 for us, and that all the other great things 
 about our Lord's work flow from this. "He 
 was a sin-bearer." This message not only 
 represents New Testament consciousness, 
 but this is Christianity. Professor Denney 
 does not have a philosophy to offer for this. 
 He does not seem to feel the need of it. 
 
 He has not given us a rationale of the 
 atonement, but he has said things so funda- 
 mental, and with such fearless freedom from 
 bending to the call of the spirit of the time, 
 that a new hopefulness has been given to 
 the whole theological situation. 
 
 All this is the background of a book which 
 appeared in the fall of 1905 — The Christian 
 Faith, by Professor Olin A. Curtis. We 
 want to see how this work is related to this 
 whole theological situation and the signifi- 
 cance and value of his theory of the atone- 
 ment. 
 
 (1) Some General Remarks about Pro- 
 235 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 fessor Curtis's Theology. The first thing 
 Professor Curtis does is to set himself free 
 from false conceptions of law. Law is not 
 self-sustaining. It is God at work. Evolu- 
 tion is not a self-sufficient process. Nothing 
 happens in the whole movement of which 
 God is not the final causal power. This 
 opening chapter having lifted the flag of 
 defiance to the Zeitgeist — when the Zeitgeist 
 is wrong — we expect a treatment of the 
 problems of theology which will not be 
 simply a reflection of the spirit of the times, 
 and we are not disappointed. We study 
 man to see what is in him ; what the demands 
 of his inner life really are. So we come to 
 the imperative need of religion, then of the 
 Christian religion, if this man's life is to 
 come to completion and peace. Thus we 
 reach Christianity fathoms below the plane 
 where criticism works, and find in Chris- 
 tianity a vital and adequate authority. The 
 book is related to real and typical Christian 
 experience — the New Testament type of 
 experience too. Every reader will feel this 
 quality, and the fact that one man was con- 
 verted while reading the book seems to em- 
 236 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 phasize this. The modern demand for an 
 ethical treatment of Christianity is here 
 fully met. There is not an ethical subter- 
 fuge in the book. It is unflinchingly frank 
 and honest, and it interprets Christianity 
 without even a particle of Jesuitical evasion. 
 The emphasis on psychology, which we 
 found to be a part of modern thought, is 
 strategically used to show that from the 
 standpoint of psychology we can prove that 
 men need many things from which the 
 modern mind now turns. An element of 
 peculiar strength is this penetrating psycho- 
 logical analysis. One of the fine things 
 about the present situation we found to be 
 its dawning social vision. Now, the whole 
 spirit of the social hunger is gathered up 
 and poured forth in this book. We may 
 say, then, that it has the most thorough con- 
 tact with the real things in the life of to-day, 
 while it is not afraid to repudiate what is 
 felt to be inadequate or false. 
 
 (2) The Racial Theory of Our Lord's 
 
 jRedem'ptive Work. First we must look 
 
 upon Professor Curtis's approach to his 
 
 theory of our Lord's redemptive work, 
 
 237 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 God's holiness is the totaUty of all that he 
 is. It is the law of the organic life of the 
 Trinity. It is infinite moral love. The very 
 life of God requires that this law of holiness 
 should be expressed. In a normal situation 
 it freely comes forth in full and harmonious 
 expression. In an abnormal situation caused 
 by sin a dualism is caused, with a necessary 
 emphasis on moral concern and also on a 
 desire to save the sinner. In an utterly 
 abnormal situation, when the sinner has ab- 
 solutely rejected God, the law of holiness 
 is expressed in moral concern alone. The 
 basis of the moral law is the law of holiness 
 — the organic law of God's existence — lifted 
 into his consciousness and personalized. 
 Righteousness has its source in the nature of 
 God, but becomes a living thing by his per- 
 sonally filling it with the constant power of 
 his own decision. Moral government is God 
 dealing with creatures according to this 
 fundamental law of his own being person- 
 alized. The end of the moral government 
 is that the universe, through and through, 
 may express and manifest what God is. 
 Creation was a preparation for this goal. 
 238 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 History is the movement toward it in spite 
 of sin. Penalty is punishment which so ex- 
 presses the hoHness of God as to secure 
 actual movement toward the final goal of 
 moral government. The Christian view re- 
 gards physical death in the human race as an 
 abnormal event caused by sin. The body 
 is the basis of racial contact and experience. 
 God wanted the race forever to express 
 moral love: in sin it refuses; in death he 
 breaks the racial connection and thrusts men 
 out alone. It is the awful accentuation in 
 punishment of the very selfishness which 
 refused to conform to the plan of God. 
 Coming more directly to the work of our 
 Lord, Professor Curtis discusses the teach- 
 ing of Saint Paul because he "furnishes the 
 more important data, and no further bibli- 
 cal study would essentially change the out- 
 come." We may summarize the result of 
 this discussion. In his bodily death our 
 Saviour bore the historic penalty for sin, 
 and so satisfied the holiness of God by fully 
 expressing it. Thus he rendered justifica- 
 tion ethically possible, on the condition of 
 faith. By his resurrection our Lord came 
 239 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 to the position where justification was prac- 
 tica^lly possible, he forming one by one the 
 new community. In his glorified body he 
 is the type to which the saints are to be con- 
 formed. Thus in every way he is the center 
 of the new race. A chapter on our Lord's 
 strange hesitation in approaching death 
 shows that the deepest tragedy of the Pas- 
 sion was that expressed in the words, "Why 
 hast thou forsaken me?" This w^as the cup 
 he dreaded to empty. 
 
 Now, we are ready for the constructive 
 work of the theory. The purpose of God 
 in redemption was the same as in creation — 
 "to obtain a race of holy persons." Now, 
 however, it was to do it in spite of sin. The 
 old race was doomed to destruction because 
 of sin, and was in process of dissolution. 
 Jesus Christ came to be the dynamic center 
 of the new race. By the incarnation he be- 
 came the race-man. His whole experience 
 had this end in view. His "exhaustive human 
 experience perfects his racial efficiency." 
 Before he can secure the new race Jesus 
 Christ must make an atonement for sin. 
 This is not a relative necessity, it is an abso- 
 240 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 lute necessity. It springs out of the very- 
 nature of God. The hohness of God must 
 be satisfied by a full and perfect expression 
 of it. And we may be sure the awful way 
 chosen was the only way, for had there been 
 a method of less terrible and tragic cost, God 
 would have chosen it. In the bodily death of 
 men God's nature had been partly expressed. 
 It did not say, "I love men." It just said, 
 "I hate sin." In establishing a new race the 
 holiness of God must be as fully expressed 
 in moral concern as it was by the destruction 
 of the old race. In his death Christ bore 
 the exact penalty for sin. Personally he 
 was not punished. As race-man he was 
 punished. "It was official representative 
 suffering." As race-man he stood right in 
 the place of the sinner and bore the penalty 
 of sin. "He was broken from the Adamic 
 race, like any other sinner." But, deeper 
 than this, he entered into the very spiritual 
 meaning of sin's punishment: he lost the 
 consciousness of his Father's presence. "In 
 the beginning of the isolation of his death as 
 racial mediator (he) met the whole shock 
 of the wrath of God against sin." "His 
 241 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 death had in its experience the extreme 
 ethical content of personal isolation." "There 
 alone our Lord opens his mind, his heart, 
 his personal consciousness to the whole in- 
 flow of the horror of sin — the endless history 
 of it; from the first choice of selfishness on, 
 on to the eternity of hell ; the boundless ocean 
 of its isolation and desolation he allows, wave 
 on wave, to overwhelm his soul." Thus in 
 his physical death, and his spiritual experi- 
 ence in it, our Lord bore the very penalty 
 of sin. In doing this he completely ex- 
 pressed the holiness of God. "He did it more 
 perfectly than it could have been done by the 
 annihilation of a whole race of sinners." 
 But Calvary is a creative thing. It makes 
 possible movement toward the very goal of 
 God — the salvation of the race as a race — 
 and this potency completes its power to 
 satisfy completely the eternal God. Thus 
 Calvary, the deed of the race-man bearing 
 the penalty of sin, and so expressing God's 
 hatred of sin as to render the foundation and 
 gradual formation of the new race possible, 
 is the atonement. When our Saviour rose 
 again the "racial center of organism became 
 242 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 a finished fact." His ascension and session 
 are features in the historic reahzation of his 
 mediatorial work in connection with the new 
 race. Thus there is a great series of re- 
 demptive deeds — the Incarnation, which 
 secures the race-man; the Death of Christ, 
 in which the atonement is consummated ; the 
 Resurrection, by which our Lord founds the 
 new race ; the Ascension, when he is inducted 
 into the office of mediator; and the Session, 
 in which his mediatorial work is carried on. 
 With all this, however, God can forgive the 
 sinner only on condition of the most unflinch- 
 ing ethical procedure on his part. There is 
 no moral let-up. But this sinner is not saved 
 by the moral quality of his accepting Christ. 
 This is merely a condition. The salvation is 
 a thing wrought by Jesus, not a thing 
 achieved by the sinner. A drowning sailor 
 must hold to the rope let down to save him, 
 but he does not save himself. The Christian 
 peace is secured in the fact that his whole 
 growth is growth in Christ. Every man in 
 the new race finds completion in the brother- 
 hood and in Christ. The brotherhood is to 
 be a great organism of service alive with 
 243 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 moral love and joy. This brotherhood — 
 rendered possible by the death of Christ — 
 will at last victoriously realize God's original 
 design in creation. And with all this the 
 holy God is satisfied. 
 
 Some things about this theory will strike 
 us at once : 
 
 1. It grows out of genuine Christian ex- 
 perience, and expresses it. It catches the 
 very feelings of the Christian who has found 
 peace with God through Jesus Christ. Its 
 emphasis on the awfulness of sin could 
 scarcely be prof ounder, and it has the feeling 
 about sin of a man who rejoices in the great- 
 ness of the Christian salvation. 
 
 2. It is rooted in vitality. Its psychology 
 is so keen, yet so sensitive to spiritual mean- 
 ings, its solution of the problem so deeply 
 related to the very demands of earnest life, 
 that there is a practical seizure. 
 
 3. It not only expresses the social hunger 
 of our time, it ennobles it. The great things 
 of men's hunger for brotherhood are ac- 
 cepted and transfigured in the glow of a 
 heavenly light. 
 
 4. Here, where there has been so much 
 
 244 
 
THE ATONEMENT 
 
 ethical makeshift we find none. It is all 
 honest and candid. 
 
 5. The substitution of God's holiness, as 
 the thing to be satisfied, for the one quality 
 of justice, takes away from this theory the 
 greatest difficulties which beset the Satisfac- 
 tion Theory. 
 
 6. The whole content of theology is 
 focused on the work of our Lord. Its 
 deepest place relates to what God is. Its 
 power would be lost if Christ were not God, 
 if there were not a real Trinity of real per- 
 sons, if our Lord had not lived a sinless life. 
 The resurrection is lifted into redemptional 
 significance. The theological truths appear 
 not as fragments, but as part of a great 
 organism. It is saying much of a theory of 
 the atonement that it relates itself to the 
 other truths of theolog}^ in this organic way. 
 
 7. The theory speaks in the language of 
 our time. It has listened to the time-spirit, 
 but it does not surrender Christianity: it 
 interprets it. 
 
 Still, under the glow of this piece of con- 
 structive work, it would be unwise to at- 
 tempt to utter a final criticism. Time will 
 245 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 answer questions as to its ultimate place 
 among offered solutions of the problem and 
 the question its vitality makes inevitable: 
 "May not we here have found a method 
 which strikes the keynote of the final 
 theory?" Of this, at least, we ma}^ be sure: 
 the very life blood of the great old theories 
 throbs here, and the joining is not mechan- 
 ical. The new features and the method of 
 articulation give us a view which is organic. 
 
 246 
 
THE THEOLOGY OF ALBRECHT 
 RITSCHL 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE THEOLOGY OF ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 To a man who is interested in the thought- 
 movements of our time and the relation of 
 Christianity to them, the study of the 
 theology of Ritschl is sure to be of interest. 
 He will feel that he is studying something 
 which is alive. It is not a worn-out system in 
 whose channels men's minds move with diffi- 
 culty and to whose deeper meanings their 
 hearts do not respond, but a system grow- 
 ing out of the very heart of our modern 
 thought life, and one whose attractiveness 
 and vitality have been felt by multitudes. 
 
 In this study the plan will be, first, to get 
 a glimpse of the man and the movement in 
 quite external features; then to endeavor to 
 see the outstanding features of the thought 
 world in which the system was born. Fol- 
 lowing this, we shall try to see what Ritschl's 
 standpoint was, and then make a brief state- 
 ment of his system as we understand it. 
 Coming to the atonement, we shall try to 
 249 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 see Ritschl's view in relation to his general 
 principles and its place in relation to the 
 great historic theories, with some apprecia- 
 tion and criticism of his view. Then, in 
 conclusion, we shall have something to say 
 of the service of Ritschlianism, and in 
 criticism of its inadequacies. 
 
 First, then, the man and the movement. 
 Albrecht Ritschl was born in Berlin in 1822. 
 His father was a bishop and general super- 
 intendent of the Evangelical Chmxh in 
 Pomerania. In 1827 Ritschl's father moved 
 to Stellen, which thus became the home of 
 his childhood. When the time came for 
 Ritschl to enter university, Bonn was chosen, 
 as we are told, on account of Nitzsch. It 
 is an interesting fact that Nitzsch was a 
 theologian who believed in the agreement of 
 the evangelical theology and science and 
 sought to show this agreement. Thus 
 Ritschl's first theological environment in a 
 university was that from which his whole 
 system, as we shall see, was a revolt. It is 
 also worth noting that Bonn has a double 
 faculty — Catholic and Protestant. Ritschl 
 went to Bonn in 1839, and in 1841 we find 
 250 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 him at Halle. Here he was under Tholuck 
 and Julius Miiller. But the Hegelian phi- 
 losophy was represented by such men as 
 Professor Erdmann, and now Ritschl came 
 under the influence of Hegelianism, and 
 after a time we see him in the position 
 of a Hegelian himself. The great Hegelian 
 theologian, Baur, was in Tubingen, and to 
 Tiibingen Ritschl went. But Ritschl could 
 not content himself in the Hegelian ranks, 
 and by 1856 we find that he has completely 
 broken with them. The influence of this 
 Hegelian period remained with Ritschl, 
 however, and traces of it may be seen as in 
 his desire for a "whole" view of Christianity. 
 Through his own study Ritschl came under 
 the influence of Kant, and later became 
 personally acquainted with Lotze, whose 
 views influenced his own. Likewise in study 
 Ritschl came up against Schleiermacher, 
 who influenced him profoundly. 
 
 Ritschl was a teacher in Bonn for eighteen 
 years. We are told that "he began his first 
 semester with eight hearers in each of his 
 two courses, but the next semester he got 
 only three in one and two in the other. Three 
 251 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 years later he passed the whole winter 
 semester without lecturing at all, since no 
 one had taken the courses offered." But in 
 his last years at Bonn he was exceedingly 
 popular. It will interest us to notice the 
 fields he covered in his teaching. He first 
 took the New Testament, then he took up 
 church history, then history of doctrine, and 
 after he had been at Bonn seven years began 
 lecturing on dogmatics. After twelve years 
 he took up the subject of theological ethics, 
 and after sixteen years the subject of the 
 biblical theology of the New Testament. 
 We see that it was a wide field which Ritschl 
 himself covered. His last years were spent 
 as professor at the University of Gottingen, 
 and this period was a time of great popu- 
 larity. His earlier work on The Old Catholic 
 Church is interesting in its relation to his 
 rupture with the Tiibingen school. His 
 great work was his Justification and Recon- 
 ciliation. The three volumes consist of 
 (1) A History of Doctrine, (2) A Bibhcal 
 Theology, and (3) the positive statement 
 of his own system. The first volume was 
 pubhshed in 1870, the second and third in 
 252 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 1874. His last work was a History of 
 Pietism which engaged him ten or eleven 
 years. Ritschl died in his study March 20, 
 1889, aged sixty-seven years. 
 
 It has been declared that Ritschl touched 
 almost every phase of theological thought 
 in Germany, and what has already been said 
 of his preparation almost answers our second 
 question, What was the thought- world in 
 which his system was born? This may be 
 answered briefly by saying, On the philo- 
 sophic side, the world of Kant and Hegel; 
 on the theological side of the world of 
 Schleiermacher; and over against positive 
 Christianity the world of Strauss ; the world 
 in which Kant's critique of the possibilities of 
 speculative thought and his exaltation of the 
 practical reason had been heard; the v/orld 
 in which Hegel's philosophy of the "abso- 
 lute" had been received with open arms; 
 the world in which the rationalism of Semler 
 and Strauss had been felt; and the positive 
 impetus of Schleiermacher, with his insist- 
 ence upon the value of the subjective and 
 man's direct communication with God. This 
 was the world in which Ritschlianism was 
 253 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 born. And the aim of Ritschlianism is to 
 give a more adequate view of Christianity 
 than had been given elsewhere. 
 
 Now we must try to see what was 
 RitschFs standpoint in his work. On the 
 rehgious side his position was anti-mystical. 
 He did not believe in direct communication 
 between the soul and God. Dr. Garvie, in 
 his interpretation of Ritschl, tries to qualify 
 this statement, but at best it cannot be made 
 out that Ritschl held to a positive notion of 
 direct communication between the soul and 
 God. When Ritschl read Schleiermacher we 
 are told that he was both repelled and at- 
 tracted, and we may readily conclude that 
 the thing that repelled him was Schleier- 
 macher's mysticism, while his subjectivity 
 attracted him. 
 
 Then, following Kant, Ritschl came to 
 the conclusion that along the lines of theo- 
 retic thought you cannot do much for reli- 
 gion, while Kant's "Practical Reason" sug- 
 gested a way to do something for religion. 
 Ritschl made the distinction a sharp one. 
 To him there were two worlds : the world of 
 theoretic thought and the world of religious 
 254 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 truth, and these two do not touch, Ritschl 
 would never have us attempt to harmonize 
 Christianity with a theory of things. Reh- 
 gious knowledge and scientific knowledge 
 are distinct and their spheres are distinct. 
 
 Religious knowledge is based upon what 
 Ritschl called independent value judgments, 
 or judgments of worth. In other words, the 
 basis of accepting Christianity is its worth in 
 satisfying our religious needs, and we are to 
 be quite content with this and not to seek for 
 it an objective validity by moving along the 
 lines of ordinary theoretic thought. Ritschl 
 discards speculative theism. He condemns 
 ecclesiastical dogma for having mixed itself 
 with metaphysical notions, for he believed 
 that Christianity had suffered from being 
 mixed with philosophy, that very early it 
 began to accommodate itself to Greek 
 thought — in Harnack all this is expressed 
 clearly — and that it has suffered from its 
 connections all through the centuries. To 
 get back to Christianity before this un- 
 fortunate alliance is Ritschl' s endeavor. 
 
 But Ritschl's rejection of metaphysics is 
 by no means such a wholesale thing as at 
 255 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 first sight it may seem. For he must pro- 
 ceed according to a theory of knowledge, 
 and he must recognize the vahdity of logical 
 procedure. Ritschl himself was perfectly 
 conscious that he could not lock metaphysics 
 out of the door, and he is quoted as saying 
 that, after all, it is not a question of having 
 metaphysics, but what metaphj^sics you have. 
 And it is important to recognize that it was 
 on the basis of a particular philosophic view 
 that Ritschl made the distinction between 
 religious and philosophic knowledge. And 
 perhaps he was far more influenced by his 
 own philosophical presuppositions than he 
 himself recognized. 
 
 Now we come to Professor RitschFs sys- 
 tem of doctrine. And probably it would not 
 be putting it too strongty to say that he was 
 by nature a systematic theologian. 
 
 First, it is worthj^ of note that in Ritschl's 
 view the systematic theologian must do his 
 work from within the Christian community. 
 And his conception of the sj^stematic theolo- 
 gian is that he is to give an articulated view 
 of the whole of the Christian faith. 
 
 Beginning the survey of liis system then, 
 256 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 we come to his conception of God, Accord- 
 ing to Ritschl, the Christian conception of 
 God is that "given in the revelation received 
 through Christ" and this conception is that 
 of a loving will. All that we know of God 
 we can sum up in the word "love." By a 
 metaphysical excursion Ritschl argues for 
 the personality of God. He conceives of 
 God's love as his steadfast holding to his 
 purpose of a kingdom among men. In his 
 notion of God we miss a great insistence on 
 God's righteousness, and when we come to 
 God's relations to men his personahty seems 
 in time somehow chained and hfeless. 
 
 The World, Again taking a plunge into 
 the forbidden realm of metaphysics, Ritschl 
 deduces the world from the love of God. 
 He conceives of it as being called into ex- 
 istence and governed to secure the end of 
 God, which is the establislmient of a king- 
 dom among men. This is the end of his 
 love. JMen exist in the world as a means 
 to the kingdom. 
 
 Sin. But such a kingdom as God wants 
 in the world does not exist, and, summing 
 up all that is contradictory to the kingdom 
 257 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 of God, we may call it the kingdom of sin. 
 Ritschl puts no emphasis on the fall, and 
 rejects the idea of original sin. In relation 
 to the individual he conceives of two kinds 
 of sin : the final direction of the will in oppo- 
 sition to God, which he thinks cannot be 
 forgiven, and all other sin, which he classes 
 as ignorance, and which can be forgiven. 
 Sin is the opposite of the kingdom of God, 
 and opposition to God's will. The concep- 
 tions of sin as a violation of the moral law 
 and of one's own standards of righteousness 
 are not emphasized. 
 
 Guilt, Men have a consciousness of guilt 
 which leads them to distrust God. Those 
 things in life have the significance of 
 punishments which the consciousness of 
 guilt leads men to impute to themselves as 
 punishments. This consciousness of guilt 
 as distrust and guilt itself shut men out from 
 fellowship with God, and it is evident that 
 whatever shuts men out from fellowship 
 with God needs to be removed. 
 
 Religion. Ritschl has a peculiar view of 
 religion. JNIen find themselves in the world 
 with a feeling that they are of greater value 
 258 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 than the world, yet feehng that they are a 
 part of it. And in men there is a desire to 
 master the world. This leads to religion. 
 Religion is the expression of men's need of 
 world mastery. Christianity secures to men 
 this mastery, this lordship over the world. 
 
 Christ, Coming now to Christianity, we 
 find that it centers in the historic person of 
 Christ. Ritschl puts aside all such ques- 
 tions as the incarnation — the two natures, 
 hmnan and divine — as metaphysical. He has 
 no doctrine of the Trinity, and despite Dr. 
 Garvie's argmnent I am not sure that it 
 would be doing Ritschl an injustice to say 
 that in his notion Christ's preexistence was 
 ideal. And it is difficult to make out from 
 Ritschl how the Saviom-'s postexistence has 
 any direct relation to the conmimiity 
 foimded by him. To Ritsclil the di^Tuity of 
 C Insist consists in the worth of Christ to 
 men; as some one has put it, "God could 
 not do for us more than Christ has done." 
 So he has the value of God for us. 
 
 When we look at Christ the first tiling 
 that impresses us is his spiritual lordsliip 
 over the world. In his patience in suffering 
 259 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 and his trueness to his vocation (the found- 
 ing of the kingdom of God) even unto 
 death, there is a kinghness. In the loving 
 motive he had, and the continual estimate 
 of himself as Lord over the world, in con- 
 formity of this to the will of God, he is 
 God's revealer, and is equal to God. Jesus 
 Christ made God's end his end. To the 
 man who comes to him with a sense of guilt, 
 and a distrust of God on account of this, 
 Jesus reveals God's love and thus takes away 
 the distrust. 
 
 Justification, This removing of the ob- 
 stacle to fellowship with God is justification. 
 Jesus Christ by his own Lordship over 
 the world through making God's end his 
 end, shows man the way to lordship over the 
 world. Thus his religious need is met. Our 
 Lord is able to lead men to this freedom 
 because he had it first. He had the relation 
 of fellowship with God and leads men into it. 
 The experience which he possessed he shares 
 with men. In this sense he is their Priest. 
 
 The Community, But God is not after 
 saved men but a community. In fact, ac- 
 cording to Ritschl, it is only by means of 
 260 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 the community that the man becomes par- 
 taker in justification. The community 
 rather than the individual is the subject of 
 justification. A man enters the community 
 by trusting God and accepting God's end 
 as his end. 
 
 The Church, The community regarded 
 as worshiping is the church; as bound to- 
 gether and acting on the basis of unselfish 
 love, it is the kingdom of God. Of this 
 kingdom Christ is the founder, and to it he 
 stands as God. We get back to Christ 
 through his self-testimony and the testimony 
 of the disciples about him. But to Ritschl 
 there was no such authority to the point of 
 view of authorsT in the New Testament as 
 would keep him from disagreeing with them 
 if he chose. The community of Christians 
 enjoy religious freedom from the world. 
 By the exercise of patience, humility, and 
 prayer — prayer being principally thanks- 
 giving and the expression of patience and 
 humility — the members of the community 
 exercise lordship over the world. They feel 
 that no obstacle the world can offer can 
 divert them from their end — the kingdom 
 261 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 of God — and so exercise lordship over the 
 world. Along this way the Christian finds 
 his perfection — a perfection in relation to 
 his vocation, not an absolute one — in reli- 
 gious freedom and moral activity, in his 
 motives perfected. Moral activity in the 
 kingdom of God comes as a sort of con- 
 comitant of religious freedom. Professor 
 Ritschl never succeeded in showing in a very 
 satisfactory way the relation between reli- 
 gious freedom and moral activity. 
 
 Assurance, Personal assurance, of course, 
 does not come according to Ritschl as a 
 direct communication from God. His anti- 
 mystical tendencies prevented his holdmg 
 such a position as that. Assurance, he 
 thinks, comes in one's exercise of patience, 
 humility, and prayer, as the functions of 
 religious freedom. 
 
 The Holy Spirit, Ritschl's notion of the 
 Holy Spirit is that the Spirit is God's 
 knowledge of his own end. As said before, 
 Ritschl has no answer to questions about the 
 Trinity. These are metaphysical. He gives 
 one eschatological hint — the annihilation of 
 the finally perverse. 
 
 262 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 The Atonement, In the outline of 
 Ritschl's system we have stated the essence 
 of his view of the work of our Lord, which, 
 as we have seen, occupies a very important 
 place. Now we want to view it more defi- 
 nitely. Jesus Christ has a peculiar relation 
 to the Christian commmiity as founder of 
 the kingdom of God. Here we find his 
 kingly office. Jesus Christ has a pecuHar 
 relation to the Christian community as 
 revealer of God: showing men the love of 
 God, so that their distrust of God is taken 
 away, and showing them God's end in the 
 world, his kingdom, which they are to make 
 their end also. This is his prophetic office. 
 Jesus Christ maintained his o^vn fellowship 
 with God, which is the basis of the relation 
 into which he is to introduce believers. All 
 through his hfe, even unto death, he had to 
 maintain this relation himself in order to 
 introduce behevers into it. This is his 
 priestly office. 
 
 On man's part the necessity is that he 
 
 make God's end in the world his end. This 
 
 is reconciliation. ]\Ian now enters upon a 
 
 new relation of trust in God and comes to 
 
 263 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 the blessedness of lordship over the world, 
 and being one with the community bound 
 together by love. Lordship over the world 
 Ritschl calls eternal life. The significance 
 of the death of Christ to Ritschl is that it 
 represents the final proof of our Lord's 
 loyalty to his vocation, that is, the founding 
 of the kingdom of God. 
 
 All that man gains through Christianity 
 is directly related to the personal work of the 
 Saviour. His distrust in God is removed 
 by the revelation he gets in Jesus Christ. 
 The life of lordship over and freedom from 
 the world he first sees in Jesus Christ, who 
 shows him the way to it. His patience, his 
 humility, his prayer, his trust in God all 
 come from him. The new relation to God, 
 the new relation to the world, the member- 
 ship in the kingdom of God all come through 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 From the evangelical standpoint one is 
 almost tempted to say that Ritschl has no 
 theory of the atonement, for to him sin 
 makes no such obstacle between man and 
 God as makes an atonement in this sense 
 necessary. But in the sense that the life 
 264 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 and work of our Lord are the basis of men's 
 being admitted to the Christian commmiity, 
 and enjoying its privileges, we may call his 
 a theory of the atonement. 
 
 Now, what are its connections with the 
 historic theories? With the Governmental 
 none. Ritschl thinks of God never as a 
 ruler, but as a Father. The theory is not a 
 Satisfaction Theor3^ With Ritschl's general 
 view there would be no place for the pecul- 
 iarities of the Satisfaction Theory. The 
 Saviour bears no penalty for us in Ritschl's 
 mind. In one point, however, there is a 
 connection with the Satisfaction Theory. 
 Ritschl tries to utilize the idea of Christ's 
 being our representative, and brings out the 
 thought of God's imputing to the commu- 
 nity the position Christ has in it. But I can- 
 not see that this idea is connected in any 
 very organic way with his view as a whole. 
 We must classify his theory as a form of 
 the Moral Influence Theory. The great 
 thing about the work of our Lord is that it 
 reveals God. When man sees what God is 
 like his distrust is taken away. 
 
 Now, this emphasis upon Christ as the 
 265 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 revealer of God is a valuable thing and 
 worthy of our appreciation. The emphasis 
 upon the person of Christ and the spirit of 
 his life is a valuable thing. But when we 
 look frankly at the theor}^ we see that it is 
 not even the greatest kind of a Moral Influ- 
 ence Theory. One never feels the awful 
 movement of sacrifice in the Eternal God 
 which is a part of a Moral Influence Theory 
 which has a positive relation to the deity of 
 our Lord. One misses the emphasis upon 
 the power of our Lord's work to win men 
 from sin which is a part of a Moral Influence 
 Theory which is related to a profound con- 
 ception of sin. 
 
 Criticizing the theory in larger relations: 
 There is not the biblical emphasis upon the 
 death of our Lord. There is no conception 
 of sin as making an obstacle in God, no 
 emphasis corresponding to the biblical notion 
 of God's relation to sin, or to a man's own 
 sense of sin when his conscience is fully 
 awake. There is no adequate account taken 
 of the fact that God must uphold all moral 
 concern. His theory, then, we must char- 
 acterize as thoroughly inadequate, measured 
 266 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 by the Bible and by the deepest feehngs of 
 a man's own heart. 
 
 Now, viewing the system as a whole, can 
 we say that it has rendered service to 
 theological thought? In reply, we must 
 recognize that, in the first place, its emphasis 
 upon value judgments has been of service. 
 We need to see clearly that the great apolo- 
 getic of Christianity is the very fact upon 
 which Ritschl insisted — that it satisfies 
 man's religious needs, and a man's deepest 
 reason for accepting it is that it has the 
 worth of a satisfying thing to him. But 
 when Ritschl refuses to allow that a thing 
 necessary for our religious satisfaction shall 
 clearly have objective validity, we must part 
 with him. When he sees no connection be- 
 tween religious truth and scientific truth, we 
 must part with him. It has well been said 
 that a religious truth without objective 
 reality is not a real truth, and religion itself 
 is reduced to subjectivity if we are not 
 allowed to relate it to truth in other realms. 
 What is true in one realm cannot be false 
 in another. Christianity satisfies the man, 
 therefore he accepts it. And because it 
 267 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 satisfies him in the needs of his personal Hfe 
 he is not afraid to see it related to all life. 
 He knows that it must stand. 
 
 From the Ritschlian movement perhaps 
 there will come a sense of the truths of the 
 faith quite apart from their philosophical 
 setting, and that it is these truths which are 
 vital and not the particular philosophical 
 system with which we try to relate them. 
 This will be a good thing. But it must never 
 be taken to mean a divorce between religion 
 and every philosophical view of the world. 
 Another service of the Ritschlian movement 
 has been the emphasis it has placed upon 
 the historic Christ. This cannot help having 
 a freshening influence upon the religious life 
 of all who feel it. Then the lifting up of the 
 idea of the kingdom of God — the community 
 bound together by love — is a service we 
 ought to recognize. It should be made and 
 kept a great thought in the mind of the 
 Church. 
 
 When we come to speak in conclusion of 
 the inadequacies of the system, we find that 
 they are manj^ In the first place, as Pro- 
 fessor Orr points out, while ruling out a 
 268 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 theory of things from being related to his 
 system, he allows his own philosophical 
 theory to do strange and wonderful things. 
 Taking it as a basis, he rules out the con- 
 sideration of the Trinity, leaves his system, 
 to say the least, without a clear notion of the 
 preexistence of Christ — or the proper place 
 being given to miracles — and takes away 
 from Christianity things which have been 
 considered essential, and which we beheve 
 are essential, not with the excuse that in 
 "going back to Christ" and the primitive 
 records he finds full warrant for it, but be- 
 cause his philosophical theory demands it. 
 No wonder if such procedure suggests the 
 thought that if you shut metaphysics out 
 of the front door it will come in at the back 
 door. And, more than this, Ritschl is not 
 prevented from dealing with such subjects 
 as the personality of God, for all his dislike 
 of metaphysics. Philosophically, he has 
 done two things which seem to me unjusti- 
 fiable in a Christian theologian: he has 
 attempted to divorce the realm of religious 
 truth from that of scientific truth, and he 
 has allowed philosophical positions which 
 269 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 have commended themselves to hun to lead 
 him to discard cardinal Christian doctrines. 
 
 The Christian thinker may come to times 
 when he cannot harmonize some philosophic 
 position and some Christian fact, but he 
 must always insist that finally when the true 
 philosophy has come, and Christian doc- 
 trines are finally understood, there will be 
 perfect harmony, and this must be the end 
 toward which he is always working. In the 
 meantime he must be looking for a philoso- 
 phy large enough to explain his Christianity, 
 and not paring his Christianity down to fit 
 into his philosophy. 
 
 We have already suggested that Ritschl's 
 attitude toward sin is not that of the Bible. 
 Now our attention needs to be called to the 
 fact that it is difficult to reconcile his own 
 positions at this point. To him such sin as 
 may be forgiven is conceived of as ignorance. 
 Yet one of the things the work of our Lord 
 does is to show a man how to get rid of his 
 sense of guilt. Now, here is rather an 
 anomaly — a man having a sense of guilt for 
 sins he does not know he has committed. 
 Psychologically, we believe Ritschl's notion 
 270 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 of sin to be thoroughly inadequate. Then 
 he has missed the Bible emphasis about the 
 resurrection of our Lord. To this day it is 
 a question upon which there is disagree- 
 ment, as to whether Ritschl believed in the 
 actual resurrection. Anyone who reads the 
 New Testament will not find any such 
 doubtful attitude there. Then there is in 
 Ritschl a tendency to try to account for as 
 much of the whole thing as he can, inside a 
 man, which is rationalistic. He seems to 
 shrink from gripping what is quite outside 
 of human life, and this shrinking means that 
 rationalism had a greater hold on him than 
 he knew. 
 
 Perhaps one can sum up that in which 
 Ritschl's system fails by saying that it is a 
 surrender to the Zeitgeist and not a chal- 
 lenge to it. The spirit of the times says, 
 "Surrender the Trinity," and he surrenders 
 it. The spirit of the times says, "Surrender 
 the personality of the Holy Spirit," and he 
 does it. The spirit of the times says, "Sur- 
 render the actual preexistence of Christ, 
 the miracles, and the resurrection," and 
 Ritschl puts no emphasis on these facts. The 
 271 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 spirit of the times says, *' Surrender the 
 thought of the awfulness of sin," and Ritschl 
 transposes sin into ignorance. 
 
 But the attitude of the Christian thinker 
 must be not of surrender, it must be one of 
 challenge. Taking the facts which have been 
 the basis of that satisfaction of the church 
 through the centuries, he must build his 
 fortification and summon the modern spirit 
 to make the attack, confident tliat after the 
 din of battle, at the setting of the sun, there 
 shall have been lost not one of the great 
 fundamental positions of the faith. The 
 supernatural in the world on the basis of a 
 living, personal, loving, holy God; the God- 
 head — a Trinity, with a glowing riclmess of 
 life, not a lonely only one ; the incarnation — 
 real God becoming real man ; the sinless life ; 
 the redemptive deed on Calvary, when He 
 who laiew no sin became sin for us ; ' the 
 actual resurrection — the eternal session, the 
 judgment to come; the reality, awful in its 
 tragedy, of sin; the meeting of the hmnan 
 soul by God himself; the Spirit's personality 
 and ceaseless activity among men; the Bible 
 a basis for true and reliable knowledge about 
 
ALBRECHT RITSCHL 
 
 redemption- — all these shall stand a fortifi- 
 cation, not simply that but a range of granite 
 mountains, against which assault shall beat 
 in vain. The Christian theologian must 
 believe that Christianity is strong enough 
 to do battle and great enough to conquer. 
 
 273 
 
THE ESCHATOLOGY OF THE 
 BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE ESCHATOLOGY OF THE BOOK OF 
 REVELATION 
 
 I. The Contents of the Book 
 The book of Revelation recounts a series 
 of visions, ascribed to John on Patmos, a 
 small island in the JEgean, After the sec- 
 tion in which we find the seven letters to the 
 seven churches, the principal series of visions 
 are those of the seven seals, the seven 
 trumpets, and the seven bowls. Important 
 episodes, such as that of the woman and the 
 dragon, and the beasts fill out the structure 
 of the book. 
 
 A little closer survey of its contents will 
 be of use to us. John in the Isle of Patmos 
 receives the revelations which are embodied 
 in the book. Letters of warning and en- 
 couragement are for Ephesus, Smyrna, 
 Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, 
 and Laodicea. Following this, John sees 
 the vision of the book no one is worthy to 
 open, until the Lamb that was slain is de- 
 277 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 clared worthy and opens the book after 
 receiving the homage of heaven. As the 
 seals are opened symbohcal horses come 
 forth, one white, one red, one black, one 
 pale. Then the martyr souls under the altar 
 are seen. Great disturbances in nature fol- 
 low the opening of the sixth seal. The seal- 
 ing of Israel is described, and the opening 
 of the seventh seal introduces the seven 
 angels with the seven trumpets. Plagues 
 follow the sounding of the first four trum- 
 pets, the woe of locusts the fifth, and the 
 woe of armies the sixth. Here the episodes 
 of the seven thunders, the little book, and 
 the measuring of Jerusalem, with the death 
 and resurrection of the two witnesses, find 
 place. Next comes the account of the 
 woman whose son at birth is saved from the 
 dragon, who is cast down to the earth. The 
 episode of the beast from the sea and the 
 beast from the land follows. A series of 
 not very closely connected visions and utter- 
 ances now occur, ending with the reaping of 
 the earth. The seven angels with the seven 
 bowls pour them out, part of them intro- 
 ducing plagues like those of the trmnpets. 
 278 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 The fall of Babylon now finds a large place. 
 The marriage supper of the Lamb — then 
 the chaining of the devil, and the reign of 
 Christ with his martyrs and faithful ones for 
 a thousand years. Finally the last opposi- 
 tion, its defeat, the new heaven and new 
 earth, with a description of the New Jeru- 
 salem, and concluding words about the 
 prophecy, and the coming of the Lord. 
 Throughout the book there are interludes 
 where one catches glimpses of supernal 
 glory, and hears choruses of beatific song. 
 
 11. The Problem of the Authorship 
 OF THE Book 
 
 The book of Revelation itself purports to 
 be the work of John. And the testimony 
 of remarkably clear external evidence is that 
 this John was the one whom we know as one 
 of the twelve. This testimony goes back to 
 Irenasus, the disciple of Poly carp. In the 
 third century we come across the suggestion 
 that another John may have been the author, 
 and Eusebius thought it might have been 
 John the presbyter who was the author. It 
 seems pretty clear that if the book comes 
 279 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 from the pen of a John, it must have been 
 John the apostle, as no other was well 
 enough known to speak as the author does 
 to the seven churches. 
 
 The question has become complicated in 
 recent years by theories of composite author- 
 ship. There is a growing feeling among 
 some scholars that the unity of the book is 
 formal and artificial, and that there are 
 traces of different points of view, of different 
 historical situations, and of different authors. 
 A modification of this view is one held by 
 Professor Porter that one author used freely 
 different apocalyptic sources. While it 
 seems to me we must admit, with Professor 
 Stevens, that there are problems whose solu- 
 tion would be made simpler by admitting a 
 diversity of authorship, I do not find the 
 evidence yet sufficient to force that conclu- 
 sion. 
 
 The really serious objection to the Johan- 
 nine authorship, it seems to me, is the differ- 
 ence in the style emphasis of the fourth 
 Gospel and the book of Revelation. That 
 they have much in common one cannot 
 doubt, but there are differences which, to- 
 280 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 gether with other problems, make me hesitate 
 to pronomice with thorough conviction for a 
 Johannine authorship. We need not deal 
 with this problem more closely for the pur- 
 poses of this discussion. 
 
 III. The Peoblem of the Date of the 
 Book 
 
 Jerusalem fell A. D. 70. Nero reigned 
 A. D, 54-68. If the book anticipates the 
 destruction of Jerusalem, it was written 
 before A. D. 70. If the historical situation 
 reflected is that of Nero's reign, its limits are 
 more closely fixed. It does not seem to me 
 that the background of the book is that of 
 the reign of Nero. The persecution which 
 gives the book its atmosphere is one of far 
 larger dimensions than that of Nero. It 
 had become evident that Rome's character- 
 istic attitude was opposition to Christianity. 
 This, as has been pointed out by Professor 
 Ramsay, was not true in the time of Nero. 
 And I do not think the interpretation of the 
 symbols of the book requires his reign as a 
 background. That chapter eleven does 
 seem at first sight to anticipate the destruc- 
 281 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 tion of Jerusalem is true. This chapter is 
 one which would fit into the theory of com- 
 posite authorship particularly well. On the 
 other hand, if it be taken as entirely s^tq- 
 bolic, the difficulty is removed. 
 
 The reign of Domitian, 81-96, when a 
 great and terrible persecution was raging, 
 when Rome had become the great opponent 
 of the church, is the most natural and likely 
 backgromid for the book as a whole. 
 
 IV. The Book of Re\t^lation and 
 Other Apocalyptic Literature 
 
 Before the book of Revelation was written 
 there was a great output of apocalyptic 
 literature. The book of Daniel in the Old 
 Testament is an example. Certain common 
 characteristics of canonical and non-canon- 
 ical apocalypses are noteworthy. They are 
 the outcome of an age of persecution; they 
 speak in language of highly wrought 
 imagery, full of mystery and in a form less 
 noble than that of prophecy; they foresee 
 judgment, and the victory of the persecuted. 
 
 There has been a tendency to closely 
 relate Revelation to other apocalypses in 
 282 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 recent criticism. Regarding this there are 
 three things to be said: (1) Revelation is a 
 book of a class. It does not belong by many 
 kinships to apocalypses written before. ( 2 ) 
 It escapes in a wonderful way the extrava- 
 gances of the non-canonical apocalypses, 
 and is as impressive by its differences from 
 them as its likeness to them. (3) In regard 
 to material used from non-canonical sources, 
 the great question is not. Where did it come 
 from? but What is it worth? not, Was it 
 used before? but Does God here seal it as a 
 part of his revelation to men? 
 
 V. The Problem of the Interpretation 
 or the Book 
 
 Perhaps no problem of the kind which 
 the church has had to meet has touched in 
 perplexity the problem of the interpreta- 
 tion of the book of Revelation. The attitude 
 of the church at large has probably almost 
 always been that in some hidden way the 
 book contained a history of the church in 
 relation to the world, and the final consum- 
 mation. Here the exegesis of jugglery has 
 run riot, and almost every important char- 
 283 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 acter of history has been given a place in 
 the book by some fanciful interpreter. The 
 method is its own condemnation. Its results 
 are confusion worse confounded. A method 
 which results in the apotheosis of exegetical 
 insanity can never be a true one. 
 
 Men whose judgment has revolted from 
 this view, but who have reverence for the 
 supposed mystical meaning hidden in the 
 book, have cut the Gordian knot by declar- 
 ing that it refers to the future. It is a mes- 
 sage to the church to come in the final times. 
 They will find themselves in difficulty in 
 explaining the fact that it w^as clearly ad- 
 dressed to men who were alive when it was 
 written, the author's consciousness of having 
 a message to his own time, and in explaining 
 why God gave a message to his final church 
 millennium too soon, and left it as a per- 
 petual bewilderment to those who came be- 
 fore — a method contrary to all we know of 
 God's ways in revealing himself to men. 
 
 Some modern scholars have taken the 
 
 opposite view. All the book grew out of the 
 
 time of its authorship and had reference only 
 
 to that period. A close study of the material 
 
 284 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 of the book, with the principle of the time- 
 lessness of prophecy in mind, will lead, I 
 believe, to the conclusion that this method, 
 while bearing witness to an element of truth, 
 is quite one-sided and incomplete. 
 
 Another method which has been pro- 
 pounded with enthusiasm is to consider the 
 book a splendid expression regarding insti- 
 tutions and principles, not treating of facts 
 or incidents. That this view has a bearing 
 upon the significance of the book we need 
 not dispute, but that it adequately explains 
 a book whose center was an historical situa- 
 tion, whose comfort would have been all too 
 small had it consisted of great generaliza- 
 tions, and one which bears the marks of 
 particular reference, I cannot believe. 
 
 Before stating the method of interpreta- 
 tion to be followed in this study it will be 
 necessary to secure the standpoint out of 
 which it comes. 
 
 VI. What the Book Says to Christian 
 Consciousness 
 
 Every book in the Bible must vindicate 
 its right to a place in the canon at the bar 
 
 285 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 of Christian consciousness, and in case of 
 perplexity as to the interpretation of a book, 
 the relation it holds to that consciousness is 
 sure to be a key to be used in reference to 
 the securing of a proper method. 
 
 Now, what does the book of Revelation 
 say to the Christian consciousness? From 
 the first we find the book permeated by the 
 very atmosphere of Christian worship. It is 
 filled with poetry which is the expression of 
 genuine Christian emotion. It breathes the 
 reverent awe and restraint which is char- 
 acteristic of the thought of God at its 
 highest. The Holy God who is found here 
 is he than whom there is no higher. With 
 regard to sin, in its final form as a state of 
 deep and utter turning from God, one finds 
 an emphasis terribty in earnest and unflinch- 
 ingly real. In relation to Christ, we find a 
 faithfulness to history and a depth of under- 
 standing which is nothing less than marvel- 
 ous. Nowhere is he more exalted than here 
 — high as the Highest, the possessor of un- 
 utterable power and glory — yet the historic 
 Jesus who walked with men. Regarding 
 the atonement, the adequacy of the book 
 286 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 may be measured by the fifth chapter, which 
 is perfectly saturated with the deepest feel- 
 ing of the worth of our Lord's sacrificial 
 death. The wonder, the abnormality, the 
 tragedy, and the glory of the death of 
 Christ, all appear in this vision of the Lamb 
 that was slain. While there is an emphasis 
 on works, the root of hope is that the blood 
 of the Lamb has been effective, and the very 
 works emphasized are those of loyalty to 
 the Redeemer. 
 
 This much shows us what an appeal the 
 book makes to Christian consciousness, and 
 also proves that it must have been its 
 product. Only out of warm, pulsing Chris- 
 tian life could such conceptions have come. 
 
 But dealing with the book in a closer way, 
 we find that it bears unmistakable marks of 
 having been written as a book of consolation 
 and stimulus in an age of persecution, and 
 the conceptions here are such as to fill it 
 with power for every persecuted Christian 
 in every age. With what blackness of dark- 
 ness the clouds of evil cover the sky! The 
 very essence of evil, at its zenith of power, 
 pours forth its terrors. There is no easing 
 287 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 of the problem to make the solution easy. 
 Hell's masterpiece of evil in history appears, 
 and in the midst of all the book absolutely 
 glows with a glory of hope. Let the world 
 do its worst, the righteous shall yet triumph. 
 The light of a hope strong with a fervor of 
 confidence that never wavers, a hope clothed 
 with immortal youth and power, plays over 
 the pages of the book and into the heart of 
 the reader. 
 
 Dominant evil to be utterly overthrown. 
 Righteousness persecuted unto death, for- 
 ever triumphant. All this because God is 
 God and Christ is Christ. This is the mes- 
 sage of the book of Revelation. This it said 
 to the Christians of the first centmy, and 
 this it has said to the persecuted in every 
 age since. 
 
 VII. Standpoint in Interpretation 
 
 Now, we ought to be able to find a clear 
 and safe point of departure for the interpre- 
 tation of the book. It said this word of hope 
 to the sufferers of the first century. It 
 spoke to the depth of the Christian con- 
 sciousness from the same depth, "deep call- 
 288 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 ing unto deep." This and what flow from it 
 is the vital part of the book, and nothing 
 else is vital. The kaleidoscopic sjanbolism 
 of the book is an attempt to suggest the in- 
 expressible. The glowing hope in God, and 
 His Christ, leaps over the barriers and 
 limitations of speech, and pours itself out 
 in imagery — sometimes characterized by 
 incongruity — always only a hint, yet a 
 splendid and ever valuable monument to the 
 confidence, the trust, the perfect glow of 
 hope that inspired it. But the symbolism 
 is alwpys to be interpreted as the outpouring 
 in varied form of a God-inspired faith, not 
 as a mysterious detail map of the future. 
 The book of Revelation is not an alchemist's 
 book of magic, but, as it has well been called, 
 "An Epic of the Christian Hope." 
 
 We can agree with the scholars who hold 
 to the historical method in believing that it 
 grew out of a particular historical situation 
 and was primarily designed to meet it. We 
 can agree with the view which finds prin- 
 ciples in it, to the extent that so profoundly 
 did it treat the situation in which it found 
 itself that it expressed what is eternally true, 
 289 
 
THE QUEST FOR WOXDER 
 
 and could give hope to every following age 
 as well as its own. But its author did not 
 know there would be any following ages of 
 world history. He was thinking of his own. 
 So accurately has it dealt with the funda- 
 mental opposition of good and evil that 
 every new form of the age-long conflict, 
 especially those characterized by great and 
 terrible suffering, seems but the fulfillment 
 of what it foretold. This because the awful 
 opposition of the first century, though the 
 author of the book did not know it, was in 
 many forms to be repeated from age to age. 
 Lastly, the consummation which the author 
 foresaw — though he knew it not — was to be 
 delayed many centuries ; and so the word of 
 God's final triumph does await fulfillment, 
 and will be both a message and a glad ful- 
 fillment to the final church. Thus, it seems 
 to me, we do justice to what is vital in the 
 other theories, and have a standpoint which 
 sets us free from the vagaries of Quixotic 
 exegesis. 
 
 To present an outline of the interpreta- 
 tion a little more formally: In the time of 
 Domitian the great persecution, which really 
 290 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 made it evident that Rome itself was the 
 terrible enemy of the faith, came on. In 
 this time of widespread and awful calamity, 
 when it seemed as if the iron heel of Rome 
 must wipe out the faith, the book of Revela- 
 tion appeared. It was a book with a great 
 past behind it. Saturated even to the phrase- 
 ology with the Old Testament, as Professor 
 Harnack brilliantly says, "It was thought 
 in Hebrew and written in Greek." We 
 may add, that while it owed much of its 
 form to the Old Testament, its outlook and 
 essential message belong to the gospel. It 
 carried its own vindication to the hearts of 
 Christian men as God's message to them. 
 To endure to the end, in hope of sure and 
 eternal triumph — this was its summons. 
 Perhaps a touch of added mysteriousness 
 was given to it because of the dangers of this 
 persecuting age. But to any Christian it 
 carried its own key to its great message and 
 needed no interpretation. 
 
 It is not necessary that we should peer too 
 
 curiously into the method of the origin of 
 
 the message. If the author had actual 
 
 visions, which I do not think need be dis- 
 
 291 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 puted, we may remember that vision as 
 well as a prophecy could be psychologically 
 mediated; and that it is quite in harmony 
 with what we know of God's methods in 
 Revelation, that the inner life and the ex- 
 perience of the recipient of the vision should 
 have entered into and colored the vision 
 itself. Into this realm we need not enter 
 further. The message spoke God's word to 
 the time. That was its vindication. It has 
 spoken God's word to generations of Chris- 
 tians since. That has given it its place in 
 the canon. Not the mysteries of its symbol- 
 ism but this message to Christian conscious- 
 ness placed it secure in the Book of God. 
 
 To the author of the book of Revelation 
 the incarnation of all evil is the Roman 
 empire. So his message of the overthrow 
 of evil is a message of the fall of Rome. 
 This is one great burden of the book. But 
 he goes back of Rome to the Satanic power, 
 the ultimate personification of evil. He too 
 is to be overthrown. With this final over- 
 throw and judgment comes the consumma- 
 tion of all things. As it was with the 
 prophets of old who caught a glowing vision 
 292 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 of the future, but to whom distinctions of 
 time were not revealed, so it was with this 
 prophet of a later day. Each prophet had 
 seen the glorious consummation just front- 
 ing him or his age. So this Christian prophet 
 seemed to see the great future unrolling just 
 ahead. He thought all was to happen 
 quickly. He was a true son of the prophets 
 in this attitude. But with him, as with them, 
 the consummation was farther than the seer 
 dreamed. 
 
 The hunger for revenge because of the 
 persecution of the saints seen in parts of 
 the book may be assigned to the awful ex- 
 periences of the time. Certainly, it does not 
 express a permanent element in Christian 
 consciousness. The fact that ahnost no 
 place is left for personal decisions in the 
 future grows out of the author's conception 
 that the end is at hand. He viewed the 
 world in the light of a bearing already held, 
 either for or against God. 
 
 VIII. Outline of the Eschatological 
 Teachings of the Book 
 
 1. The figurative passage regarding the 
 293 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 martyrs under the altar is the nearest hint 
 of a conception of an intermediate state. 
 That they are in a place where they are 
 protected by God, but not yet come to their 
 full reward, is the conception. 
 
 The book of Revelation believes in the 
 resurrection and the future life. Its central 
 message of hope for those who suffer even 
 unto death would disappear without that. 
 Its great goal is a goal after death. That 
 the Lord is to come again, and that his 
 coming is to inaugurate the consummation, 
 is the conviction the book would give its 
 readers. Regarding the one thousand years 
 reign we will speak later. It believes in a 
 judgment where justice will be meted out 
 to all who have Hved — to the righteous 
 eternal life with God, to the wicked eternal 
 suffering with the devil. I do not think an 
 honest exegesis can find any basis for con- 
 cluding that the thought of annihilation ever 
 entered the author's mind. 
 
 An important element in the forward look 
 
 of the book of Revelation is that it is not 
 
 contented with a goal for life like that of 
 
 evolution, a goal which would bring great 
 
 294 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 things to some future generation without 
 solving the problem of those who perish on 
 the way to this consummation. It is essen- 
 tially a personal eschatology. All the dead 
 are gathered and the consummation metes 
 to each hfe its proper future. Many phi- 
 losophies of history are brutal compared 
 with this splendid outcome, where each 
 individual life comes to its own goal of joy 
 or woe. 
 
 In chapter sixteen there is a wonderful 
 negative emphasis on personality. In spite 
 of all judgments, the people described here 
 "repented not." The author of this book 
 knew that men could so set themselves 
 against God that his chastisements could not 
 move them. 
 
 The teaching regarding heaven is full of 
 poetic beauty, and full also of reserve. The 
 perfect city has glories which are expressed 
 in a description in which earth's richest and 
 rarest are called upon to suggest what can- 
 not be described. The absence of death, sin, 
 and sorrow, and the presence and all-suffi- 
 ciency for the dwellers of the city of God 
 and the Lamb, these are expressed with a 
 295 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 beauty and tenderness hardly to be sur- 
 passed. 
 
 Hints full of insight regarding the great 
 finality for the saints are given: "The Lamb 
 that is in the midst of the throne shall be 
 their shepherd, and shall guide them unto 
 fountains of waters of life" (7. 17) ; "His 
 servants shall serve him; and they shall see 
 his face ; and his name shall be on their fore- 
 heads" (22. 3, 4). Service and fellowship 
 with God, and oneness with him — these are 
 the final words about the final universe. 
 
 2. Some Particular Problems in the In- 
 terpretation of the Book, ( 1 ) The two wit- 
 nesses of chapter two may symbolize the 
 witnessing, suffering, dying, victorious spirit 
 to be found in the true church. 
 
 (2) The Beasts. The beasts of chapter 
 thirteen constitute an interesting problem. 
 The best solution, it seems to me, is to regard 
 the Final Beast as a symbol of the Roman 
 power as embodied in the office of emperor, 
 and the second as some particular manifesta- 
 tion of that power through some lower 
 official. The healed death-stroke has been 
 suggested to be the threatened convulsion 
 296 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 at the time of the death of Nero. The num- 
 ber six hundred and sixty-six, faUing short 
 of the perfect number, may well suggest the 
 realization in humanity of all that is oppo- 
 site to holiness and perfection. The finding 
 of Nero's name by incorrectly securing the 
 numerical value of the letters of his name in 
 a language not used by the author in writing 
 the book, and not understood by his readers 
 (cf. Professor Ramsay), is fanciful enough. 
 
 (3) Babylon, The whole treatment of 
 Babylon, the great and wonderful city, and 
 its fall, it seems to me, without doubt refers 
 to Rome. Professor Milligan's attempt to 
 interpret it as referring to the faithless 
 element in the church quite fails to secure 
 vital historical contact for the passage. On 
 the other hand, the situation out of which 
 the book came and the language of the 
 passages themselves fit in a remarkable way 
 the interpretation which refers them to 
 Rome. 
 
 (4) The 1,000 Years, This passage 
 occurs in the twentieth chapter of the book. 
 It describes the chaining of the devil and 
 the reign of Christ with his saints for a 
 
 297 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 thousand years. It is usually interpreted to 
 mean a period immediately following the 
 Parousia. It has been interpreted, how- 
 ever, to mean the whole Christian era from 
 the first coming until the Parousia, because 
 Christ in his work essentially conquered the 
 devil and sin. The reconciling of this view 
 with the statements of the passage about 
 the saints (who had been dead) reigning 
 with Christ, and the first resurrection, seems 
 a task of proportions which may well lead 
 us to seek shelter in some other view. It 
 seems clear that, however we treat the pas- 
 sage in relation to Christian doctrine, its 
 meaning as it stands is that after our Lord 
 comes, there will be a resurrection of his 
 saints and a period of triumph for them 
 with him in this world. The following loos- 
 ing of the devil and final conflict are full of 
 perplexity, and when one remembers that 
 the whole passage in its present form repre- 
 sents views unparalleled elsewhere in the 
 New Testament and probably contradictory 
 to other teaching, it becomes evident that 
 the passage cannot be pressed for purposes 
 of New Testament theology. However, it 
 298 
 
THE BOOK Of revelation 
 
 is safe, I think, to say, that it is a witness to 
 a deep Christian intuition that Christianity 
 is to have a real triumph in this world. 
 
 IX. The Eschatology of the Apoca- 
 lypse Compared with Other New 
 Testament Eschatology 
 
 The most marked divergence of the book 
 of Revelation from other New Testament 
 conceptions is to be found in the passage 
 just discussed. Saint Paul does say that 
 Christ must reign until he has put all his 
 enemies under his feet (1 Cor. 15. 2.5) . But 
 this is not a real parallel, for Satan is bound 
 before the beginning of the one thousand 
 years and loosed afterward. The two pas- 
 sages have in common a victory of Christ in 
 this world. Saint Paul emphasizes Christ's 
 delivering up the kingdom unto the Father. 
 This conception does not appear in the book 
 of Revelation. The solution in all likelihood 
 is that Paul's vision had complete illumina- 
 tion at this point. 
 
 In general, however, it may be said that 
 there is striking agreement between the 
 eschatology of the apocalypse and that of 
 299 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 the rest of the New Testament. The great 
 essential features of the outhne we have 
 given of this eschatology of the apocalypse 
 might have served as an outline of the 
 eschatology of the New Testament. Indeed, 
 its relation to our Lord's eschatological dis- 
 course in Matthew 24 is so remarkable that 
 it has been called an enlargement of that 
 discourse (Milligan). 
 
 X. The Eschatology of the Apocalypse 
 AND THE Christian Theologian 
 
 The Christian theologian may well enter 
 the deepest places of this book before he 
 begins to write on eschatology. There are 
 great moods in the book which need to be 
 his mood. The sense of the dire evil the 
 church must meet in the world, of the indi- 
 vidual problems whose onty solution is in 
 the life beyond, he should feel. Its under- 
 standing of the power of a person to set 
 himself permanently against God should be 
 his. The pulsing joy in the final trimiiph 
 of God and the righteous should throb in his 
 pages. The great sense of the eternal 
 significance of the Lamb that was slain 
 300 
 
THE BOOK OF REVELATION 
 
 should ring clear, as he writes of the final 
 universe. 
 
 This book joins its witness with the rest 
 of the New Testament to the great eschato- 
 logical conceptions he is to relate to his 
 system: the Parousia, the resurrection, the 
 judgment, heaven, hell; and he presses close 
 to first-century Christian feeling about these 
 things as he reads the apocalypse. Then he 
 should try to enter into fellowship with the 
 subtle spiritual insight of the book. In its 
 symbols he will find no hidden map of the 
 future, but he will find a wealth of sugges- 
 tions as to many deep things of Christian 
 experience and life in them. The Chris- 
 tian's hidden relation with Christ, suggested 
 by the name Christ gives him, known only 
 to himself — in this, and it may be in number- 
 less other figures, he may find hints and 
 suggestions full of meaning to the Christian 
 devotion, out of which theological insight of 
 a spiritual kind will come. 
 
 And the final word of his eschatology will 
 be that of this book : God exalted, righteous- 
 ness triumphant, the whole universe, all, all 
 imder God's sway — he King of kings, and 
 301 
 
THE QUEST FOR WONDER 
 
 Lord of lords. And for this the Hallelujah 
 Chorus will need to sing in his own soul. 
 
 XI. The Apocalypse and Oue Hope 
 
 The book of Revelation stands to many 
 like the sphinx with its o^^^ti unrevealed 
 secret, a strange monument on the desert of 
 the years, with long, dark mysten^ enshroud- 
 ing it. But it need not be so. Let us come 
 to it as Christians with the hunger of Chris- 
 tian hearts, and it has food for us. Turning 
 forever from the false esoteric view of the 
 book, let us listen to its real message. Have 
 we sorrow ? ^lay we some day meet persecu- 
 tion ? There it stands a beacon of hope. At 
 the gateway of death it draws aside the 
 veil, and we behold "Jerusalem the Golden." 
 Do earnest hves fail of fruition here^ It 
 points with perfect hope to the fulfiUment 
 beyond. And over and over it sings the song 
 of our o^vn deepest Christian mood — the 
 basis of our hope — the song of praise and 
 everlasting devotion to the "Lamb that was 
 slain." 
 
 302 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: July 2005 
 
 PreservationTechnologies 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 
 
 1 1 1 Thomson Park Dnve 
 Cranberry Township. PA I606f-. 
 (724)779-2111 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 , ilHIIiKi 
 
 014 503 562 4 
 
 ■■ill'* 
 
 :i;tlli 
 
 
 \ .".ir, 
 
 I',:!! 
 
 I 'I 
 
 ••■I'..:-,.:'. 
 
 )..,:, 
 
 . ,1!; 
 
 •;':il 
 
 -l|i 
 
 I