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         Title: Grace and Personality
    Creator(s): Oman, John (1860-1939)
   Print Basis: New York: The Macmillan Company, c1925
        Rights: Public Domain
    LC Call no: BT78.O6 1925
   LC Subjects:

                Doctrinal theology
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                                  INTRODUCTION

   In the intellectual commerce of Britain and America the publication of
   the present volume is an enriching event for America. As manful thought
   on a vital theme, it deserves the interested respect of every free mind
   which apprehends religion as the supreme human concern. But from a host
   of us who have come by way of Calvinism to the theological revisions of
   the twentieth century it commands more than respect; its rightful meed
   is earnest gratitude.

   Not lightly nor without an awareness of loss have we been induced to
   discard a considerable portion of those rigidities in which Calvin
   framed his conception of the ways of God with man. Unable to believe
   all that he believed, we have yet been profoundly conscious that by
   disrupting his "system of doctrine" and leaving part of it aside, we
   have forfeited a solidity and substantiality of conviction in respect
   of which our newer constructions compare but ill with his great
   monument of the religious mind. Our building is better in its spires
   than in its foundations. From those spires we scan our modern horizons
   and are persuaded that distantly we descry truth more radiant than
   Calvin was ever permitted to have in vision. But when our moods of
   exaltation give place to serious self-criticism, it is painfully borne
   in on us that, however spacious our outlook, we have not searched the
   farther reaches of our belief along any such patiently plodded pathways
   as Calvin followed. In speculative imagination we sweep a large
   territory, but we have not mapped it with rod and chain as he did.

   This lack of thoroughness marks the worst weakness of what in these
   days is by some execrated and by others extolled as liberal Christian
   thought. It will be execrated by fewer and praised with restraint of
   extravagance by many more when stronger expositors arise in its name to
   discipline its thinking and to require of it imperatively the three
   intelligent essentials of carefulness, consistency and completeness.
   Recovering thus a robust capital of precise ideas and achieving the art
   of expanding those ideas without vaporizing them into thin air, the
   modernminded church would escape its most uneasy embarrassment the ever
   haunting sense that Christian liberalism, as regards both its hold on
   its adherents and the force of impulse that it imparts to them, suffers
   by comparison on one side with old-time dogmatic Protestantism and on
   the other with still more ancient and more positive Roman Catholicism.

   Both of these afford a fixity on which the foot treads firmly. And it
   is not strange that crowds of pilgrims continue to prefer solid roads,
   hard trampled by many generations safely gone on before, rather than
   new trails which the first explorers have not successfully cleared of
   obscurity. If therefore a liberalized and liberalizing treatment of
   Christian doctrine has any mission for these and succeeding times, it
   must attain a definiteness of teaching, an unevasive lucidity of
   dealing with questions which experience poses for the living soul of
   man, and a dynamic of motive for sacrifice and service, such as to this
   day the later theology has not produced in any satisfactory equivalence
   to the older theology. To this end it is not enough that modern
   theology should be truer; it must intellectually be as thorough v and
   as affirmative, and spiritually it must be more intense.

   The significance then of "Grace and Personality" lies primarily in
   introducing to American readers, at a moment when this need is
   conspicuous and daily growing more urgent, a mind that seems singularly
   adapted to the defining and teaching function here invoked in
   liberalism's behalf. Dr. Oman would of course deprecate being called
   either a prophet or the son of a prophet. But it is better still to be
   a father of prophets a forerunner of enlighteners and it is a sober
   appreciation, neither fulsome nor ecstatic, which turns these pages
   with increasing faith that to just such herald's duty, ushering in a
   clearerthinking future, God may have appointed this earnest British
   teacher. Without violent imagination one might see an age turn on this
   stout stake which he has set up. For here in small compass is a
   restatement of Christian theology, less stately, less copious but in
   scope hardly less comprehensive than Calvin's own and not wholly
   unworthy to be compared even with the massive "Institutes" for "system"
   -- patent principles exactly defined and their implications pursued to
   the end of unwavering logic. It is not, however, "remorseless" logic,
   as logic is proverbially said to be, but full of goodness and mercy as
   befits the ultimate Author from whom both logic and theology derive. A
   document so well conforming to the Lord's description of the work of an
   instructed scribe, who out of his treasure brings forth things new and
   old, might readily be the charter of a better era of more powerful
   faith.

   A book from which radical consequences on the future are anticipated,
   it is common habit to stamp "revolutionary," whether the epithet is
   intended as a label of honor or a brand of discredit. But for all the
   novelty in Dr. Oman's thinking and the uniqueness of his writing,
   "Grace and Personality" is distinctly not revolutionary. In essence Dr.
   Oman is as Calvinistic as Calvin himself. That is indeed the secret of
   his successful criticism of Calvin. For no man could so perfectly and
   definitively excise from the imposing body of Calvin's thought its one
   supreme blemish except he began where Calvin began in seeking to
   conceive the meaning of the world. The Genevan oracle founded his whole
   philosophy of creation, life and destiny on the primitive and
   everlasting fact of the Sovereignty of God. And on that foundation Dr.
   Oman also stands up as stalwartly and immovably. "All is of God," is to
   this clear-minded writer in decided contrast with the typical trend of
   "modernism" a proposition not only unqualified but unqualifiable.
   Pelagianism gets no tolerance from him; even semi-Pelagianism is
   dismissed as impossibly in conflict with experience. If a man is to be
   saved out of his sin, only God can save him; if man is salvable, it is
   only because God has wrought into him the capacity of salvation. Here
   this present-day Cambridge professor travels by the highroad of the
   strictest Reformation orthodoxy.

   How happens it then that he is no longer found in Calvin's company when
   the latter is seen proceeding down the rocky defile of limited
   atonement, unconditional election and irresistible grace? Where has he
   turned aside and whither? Has he discovered a straighter and loftier
   highroad? Dr. Oman does not doubt it nor is it easy to think of an
   unprejudiced reader who will not be drawn to follow him in this matter
   by his simple declaration of his own faith. In effect John Calvin is
   complained of for having (unconsciously, of course) limited the
   Sovereignty of God by his own Gnostical weakness of imagination. Like
   the Gnostics he could not quite imagine the awful and exalted majesty
   of the Infinite Creator, filling the heavens of heavens, as great
   enough to reach all the way down to the mundane plane of humanity.
   Calvin could never have thought, like Lanier, of making himself "a nest
   in the greatness of God," for the simple reason that he never saw God's
   greatness level with high-tide mark in the sea marshes. Calvin's God
   had height but not depth.

   Instead the grim and grand old Genevan had to have a Sovereign God
   "high and lifted up." He could not even give full value to the
   psalm-saying: "Though Jehovah is high, yet hath he respect unto the
   lowly." It was God on a throne, God an autocrat, God disposing the
   destinies of mankind as arbitrarily as the destinies of their subjects
   were disposed by those earthly tyrants whose day darkened toward
   twilight on the morning that Calvin was born this was the Emperor God
   that the Calvinistic theology brought in to rule the Christian religion
   as well the world's secular affairs. And by necessity it followed that
   such a God, if genuinely sovereign in his world, must show it by
   deciding independently whom he would save and whom he would not, and
   must save those whom he did save according to his own choice and
   election, regardless of foreseen character, bad or good, in themselves
   transactions as individual but as impersonal (to take advantage of one
   of Dr. Oman's most illuminating distinctions) as, for example, a public
   assessor's imposition of taxes.

   But Calvin missed the truth, says our author with bold and satisfying
   finality, only because he did not see that Jesus had long before solved
   all this difficulty of his about Gdd's greatness and man's littleness
   by delineating the Divine Sovereignty under the aspect of Fatherhood.
   Nay, more; Jesus showed that in God Sovereignty was and by his nature
   ever must be Fatherhood. In place therefore of the old dream of a
   measureless exaltation above the world of men, the good news came by
   Jesus Christ that "the tabernacle of God is with men and he shall dwell
   with them" just as a father should with his dependent children. And
   from thence Dr. Oman follows his chain of linked logic scripture logic
   with scripture links to a triumphant theology of Fatherhood which meets
   every requisite of the modern call for the simplest and straightest
   possible interpretation of the evangel, based on the single presumption
   that Jesus most meant to teach what his life and death most directly
   exemplified.

   Clearly, for Jesus, saying "Our Father" was not the happy accommodation
   of an illustrative phrase; it was an absolutely factual utterance of
   the essential character of God. It was the only definition of God ever
   attempted by the "First-born among many brethren," the Son of God among
   all his sons who knew him best. Wherefore, Dr. Oman argues, as this
   reader understands him, the regulative question by which to guide every
   effort to search out the secrets of God's dealings with men is this:
   "What would a Father do?" He believes that Jesus knew no limit beyond
   which it was unsafe for a man to judge God by that criterion of
   confidence.

   Above all else Dr. Oman is sure that a Divine, Father could not pick
   and choose favorites among his children. What for Calvin's monarchical
   God was simply in accord with the native manner of kings it is
   impossible to attribute to a Sovereign Father. "The elect," therefore,
   are no closed class of selected aristocracy; "they who are called
   according to his purpose" is as broad a classification as "they that
   love God," and for them all impartially "all things work together for
   good." Even for the rebellious and disobedient there is naught but love
   in the Father's heart. But how can it be that a Father who loves all
   his children does not estop them from wandering into sin does not
   forcibly drag them back from incurring the punishments which his
   necessary law attaches so inevitably to sin? Answering these profound
   puzzles of theodicy Dr. Oman reaches his clearest heights.

   Do "the fathers of our flesh," he asks, rejoice in obedience to which
   they must compel their children? Or can they compel it when children
   are come to full age? Is not always the true reward of wise and
   faithful parenthood realized in the fellowship of children who respond
   to parental ideals from willing and gladsome hearts -- the self-motived
   and unconstrained fidelity of love? And shall God desire less -- and be
   content to be served by driven slaves? Truly he "dealeth with us as
   with sons." And that means how true and discerning is the author's
   psychology! that he deals with us as persons moral persons "in his own
   image." But what is, or conceivably could be, moral in compelled
   goodness? Even immaculate purity, if imposed, could not be goodness --
   Dr. Oman is "very bold" to say that, but can it be denied? Even God
   would not dare to make grace irresistible. "Grace can be conceived as
   irresistible only if it be thought of as something less than gracious."
   But God's love for us is "a gracious personal relation" -- the author
   has put Christendom in his debt for that shining phrase -- and neither
   as a gracious Father nor as an honorable gentleman will our God compel
   us to do for him what is not in our hearts to do willingly.

   The Sovereignty of God and the free will of men -- from immemorial time
   the philosophers have pronounced that an insoluble antinomy. But what
   solution shall the practical man wish better than this truly gracious
   truth God the Father so much prizes the friendship of free children
   that he will not destroy their freedom even to win their friendship?
   And those whom God will not compel let men -- whether dogmatists,
   prelates or potentates -- beware of putting under bondage. "The liberty
   of the glory of the children of God" has "so mighty a Defender" -- He
   who is the Source and Bestower of it -- "Our Father who art in heaven."
   And Dr. Oman speaks as a commissioned champion representing that
   Defender.

   To be sure, there are defects in the book. It is not in man that
   writeth to direct an impeccable pen. Personally I am least content with
   the author's treatment of the atonement; he seems inadequately to
   apprehend some profound aspects of the cross of the Son of God --
   particularly the "patripassianism" it revealed. The call of the cross
   for our penitence would be a slight voice if it should be assumed that
   forgiving us costs our Father nothing but the gesture of waving our
   sins aside. Sin has results, as Dr. Oman justly teaches, and neither
   the forgiven sinner nor his fellow men ever suffer out all of those
   consequences. God himself suffers the heavier remainder. And so the
   cross speaks to all generations.

   Yet the general judgment which the work invites stands superior to all
   flaws of detail. The volume is documentary and exemplary proof that a
   liberal theology can have under it a foundation -- a foundation as safe
   as the unfailing will of God and as beautiful as the revelation of the
   Eternal Fatherhood through the gracious gospel of our Lord and Saviour
   Jesus Christ. On that foundation even the adventurous building of man's
   freedom is a divine construction which it is gross presumption for
   timid ecclesiasts to call insecure.

   NOLAN R. BEST.
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                                     PART I

                          A GRACIOUS PERSONAL RELATION
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CHAPTER I

THE INFALLIBILITIES

   The supreme crisis of Christianity throughout the ages, it has been
   maintained, was not the Reformation, but a movement two centuries
   nearer our own time. The French and Germans passed through it as an
   acute fever and, knowing it to be a crisis, gave it a name -- the
   French Illuminisme, the Germans Aufklarung But we, the first to begin
   and the last to end, never realised its significance enough to make us
   invent for it a native designation. Had the title not acquired a cheap
   association, we might have called it The Age of Reason, but, as it is,
   if we wish to convey some meaning even at the cost of precision, we
   must call it Rationalism, and if we wish to be precise even at the risk
   of conveying no meaning, we must borrow from the French and call it The
   Illumination.

   The Reformation, it is maintained, was a mere breach in outward
   organisation, which left the old foundation of external authority
   unassailed in principle, and the body of dogma which rested on it
   unquestioned in fact. A portent it may have been, but only as an
   indication of a much more radical movement of individual emancipation,
   which, though its beginnings can be traced as far back as the twelfth
   century, first reached clear understanding of itself in Rationalism.

   In this country, at least, Rationalism is thought of mainly as an
   attack upon all external, traditional authorities. Its criticism of
   tradition was made formidable by the use of an apparatus of serious
   historical inquiry never before available : and this has proved to be a
   work of far-reaching consequences. But the new and revolutionary
   development was the positive assertion that nothing is either true
   faith or right morality which is not our own; and that, in consequence,
   external authority is, in principle, an unsound basis, and individual
   judgment, not merely a right, but a duty.

   The greatest thinker of the movement conceived it to be the arrival of
   the race at the stage of manhood, when we must take on our own
   shoulders responsibility for our own convictions, as well as for our
   own actions, because we ought to know that even a true belief is not
   for us truth, unless we ourselves see it to be true, and even a right
   action not moral, unless we ourselves discern it to be right.

   This estimate is unconsciously conceded by the usual criticism of the
   Reformation, for what is deplored is less its own work than the ills
   which seem to have followed in its train. Had it not first opened the
   breach, it is argued, the cold waters of scepticism might never have
   flooded our fruitful fields.

   And the loss in finality is obvious.

   A doctrine both of God and of man of the utmost simplicity and
   definiteness was possible on the old dogmatic basis. God was the
   absolute and direct might and all He did without error or failure; and
   man was the creature of His hand, directly fashioned and needing
   nothing for his making but the word of power. Then to deal with the
   Omniscient was to have infallible truth, to deal with the Supreme to
   have absolute legislation, to deal with the Omnipotent to have
   irresistible succour. Faith was acceptance of infallible truth,
   justification coming to terms with absolute legislation, regeneration
   the inpouring of efficacious grace; and the whole dogmatic edifice
   stood solid and four-square.

   With the undermining of this structure, definiteness and certainty
   seemed to have vanished; but this effect was made more complete by the
   age of Evolution which followed. Then everything was seen in flux, with
   nothing fixed about which we could have decision or conviction: and, as
   the easy temper of a time of abundant material prosperity interpreted
   evolution as a fine flow of even upward progress, decision and
   conviction were also regarded as unnecesary. Thus all distinctions
   tended to be toned down, and not least moral and religious
   distinctions. Religion softened into vague lines and dim chiaroscuros
   and timid approximations, till truth seemed mainly a business of
   suspending judgment, and goodness of meaning well. Absolute distinction
   between truth and error, good and evil, even at the centre, disappeared
   from a territory where lately all had been absolute. It was not merely
   that creeds and customs, which had come unscathed through ages of
   controversy, began to suffer change. The dogmatic form itself began to
   crumble. Suggestion, hypothesis and practical persuasion took the place
   of definition and decree.

   Historical investigation also wrought to the same end. The old dogmatic
   method had been to argue a priori from what becomes Omnipotence and
   Omniscience: the historical method is to inquire, without
   presupposition, what God actually has done. Under this solvent all the
   infallibilities began to crumble. An infallible Orthodoxy followed an
   infallible Vicar of Christ, an infallible Scripture an infallible
   Orthodoxy, an infallible Christ an infallible Scripture.

   Many, for whom finality alone is security and peace, could see in this
   only a desolating inundation of human error and wickedness, destroying
   the fruits of the Spirit, undermining social order, and blotting out
   the landmarks of morality. So far from regarding the movement as the
   emancipation and enlightenment of mankind, they saw men condemned by it
   to wander in perpetual twilight amid shadowy ghosts of former faiths,
   which could neither be expelled nor embraced. Assuming that God's truth
   ought to be infallible and God's grace irresistible, they concluded
   that it was mere human perversity which rejected and denied, and were
   assured that, some day, God would display all this questioning as
   nakedly wicked. As this iniquity was ascribed mainly to soft living and
   material prosperity, new hopes have been stirred by years of misery and
   war. When the intellectual ferment dies before the stress of living and
   the nearness of dying, and the confidence in progress changes to a fear
   of desolation and returning barbarism, and joy in every aspect of human
   activity passes into a sense of the futility of human endeavour, will
   not all this pride of intellect be laid low? If we are forced to say
   once again, It is not in man that runneth, but all victory is only of
   God, what else is the true lesson of the ages? What is our need, if not
   that God should direct amid human blindness, and rule amid human folly,
   and uphold amid human weakness? May not what many have hailed as
   liberty, therefore, only have been the temper of an easy, worldly,
   intellectually curious time, which the temper of an age burdened with
   the practical stress of life and death will repudiate?

   The rebuilding of the ancient dam of a united Church on the old
   foundation has, from this interpretation of history, been the dream of
   many individuals and the inspiration of more than one movement: and so
   long as the dam alone is considered and the flood ignored, the project
   seems hopeful. But, if the Reformation was only an effect and not a
   cause, only the first plain indication of a greater movement, and if
   its stream is still rising, the stoutest ecclesiastical barrier is a
   feeble hope. Nay, greater strength might only be an added danger, for
   the longer it holds, the more devastating will be the inundation.

   Wrong turnings have been taken in human history: and they have at times
   had appalling consequences. And the causes doubtless were human
   blindness and wickedness. But this rather seems to show that God does
   not govern His World by infallible direction and irresistible power. In
   particular, it does not seem a convincing way of defending the
   infallibilities of an omniscient and omnipotent God to suppose that He
   was as blind as the ecclesiastical authorities to the danger for them
   of an insignificant monk, or as incapable of removing it.

   No windings, moreover, in the course of man's progress can obscure the
   fact that its general course is in the direction of a greater
   responsibility for his own beliefs and actions. Nor has the result been
   merely the rejection of external authorities, for on the foundation of
   direct consciousness of truth and conscience of right, men have been
   able to build with the security of the witness of reality to their own
   minds, and they have found in it a certainty not to be given from
   without. Nor is there any dubiety that, in religion also, we should
   have a securer foundation, could we but dig down to this direct
   witness.

   In any case, the web of history cannot be unwoven, and we must accept
   our position in it as we find it. And the actual situation is that
   there is no more any infallible authority left on which to build, at
   least in openness of mind and with a sense of reality. Saying "Peace,
   peace," when there is no peace, or "This is the unassailable
   foundation," when already it is not only assailed but crumbling, is not
   to make ourselves secure, but only to make ourselves deceived.

   This does not mean that the rationalist temper, which thought itself
   superior to the past because it could replace all that was true in it
   by its own unaided intellect, is right. This superior temper was the
   chief weakness of Rationalism. The interest of the age which followed
   was chiefly in history, but its temper also was not so free from
   superiority as to make it unnecessary for us to seek our true
   foundations in the past with reverence and insight. Yet, if we are to
   build on them to better purpose, it must be as discoveries of truth and
   righteousness, and not by mere acceptance of them as tradition.

   We must distinguish between the temper of a time and its true lesson
   and call, whether the temper be intellectual or practical, overflowing
   with enthusiasm or cautious and critical. Only as we succeed are we
   true prophets. The false prophet is a shell gathering up and echoing
   the spirit of the age; the true prophet is no echo of the moods and
   passions of his age, but a living voice declaring what is its true
   lesson.

   That is never easy. We do not advance merely by widening and correcting
   our outlook. The new can be won only at the expense of combating the
   old, and what we combat we are apt to misrepresent. New truth displays
   itself only as it dethrones ancient error, and new lessons are learned
   only as they overcome ancient habit: and in that task truth and right,
   which have been mixed with error and wrong, are not always
   distinguished and preserved. Concentration is an essential of all human
   endeavour, and a calm balance of interests is often a mere juggler's
   trick inconsistent with urgent tasks and earnest purpose, yet this very
   concentration may cause us to overlook or deliberately set aside
   important issues.

   Then comes a time when this limitation is discovered and when the
   losses have to be made good; and, as weariness and haste prevail after
   effort in most human affairs, the result is usually a reaction which
   condemns as worthless what is merely imperfect, and tries to ignore the
   obstacles which make a mere return to the past impossible. Nor is this
   kind of reaction anywhere so common or so disastrous as in religion.
   Blind reverence for the past is made a matter of faith, though the
   chief lesson of the past is that the face of faith is always forward;
   and blind adherence to its ways is made a sacred duty, though the chief
   result of the long and weary journey may have been to label them, "No
   thoroughfare." We have to subject all moods, it matters not what they
   are, to the spirit of truth and wisdom. And a mood which would suppress
   intellectual interests and obliterate the varied humanities is not
   least in need of that control. Nor, if we are to judge by the long ways
   of Providence in the past, will the true lesson be any less of
   patience, because our temper is of haste. If the short-cut of the
   infallibilities has been closed by inquiry and reason, we cannot follow
   it again by affirmation or even by the strongest conviction of its
   utility.

   Many efforts have been made to rebuild on the old infallibilities, and
   no doubt others will follow, because there are always persons encased
   in a jointless armour of obscurantism hard enough to turn the edge of
   any fact. But the value, for truth and beauty and goodness, of our own
   insight, choice and deliberate purpose, being once seen, can never
   again be wholly renounced. Whereupon, faith in the outward powers,
   which impose upon us what we ought to believe and set up for us what we
   ought to revere and prescribe for us what we ought to do, can never be
   an unwavering allegiance; and every attempt to defend them as a work of
   piety has in it a hectic unreality from start to finish. Once we
   clearly see that the highest possessions are valueless apart from our
   possession of them by insight, reverence and loyalty, we can never
   return by the way we came. Regrets for that straight and level and
   well-fenced road, with its solid, square dogmatic keeps for the shelter
   and protection of the pilgrim, may still linger, and the heart may
   tremble at the uneven, uphill, winding way into a great unmapped land,
   but we know it is cowardice not to seek along it God's better country.

   Even if we return to the figure of the devastating waters of doubt and
   denial, which expresses better the sense of desolation in many hearts
   than a road, which, however forbidding, may lead to a land of promise,
   there may still be a surer hope than building ecclesiastical dams, hard
   to construct and little secure. When the Nile spread its obliterating
   deposit of black mud over the fields hardly won from the desert and
   watered at such cost of patient toil, the victor over it was not the
   engineer stemming its current with his barricade, but the inspired
   peasant who, greatly daring, flung his precious rice into its
   forbidding ooze. May not that adventure in new discoveries of
   fruitfulness be the true answer to all life's ills, and, in particular,
   to all life's questions? May not the great perplexities of our time, as
   well as its great distresses, be simply a challenge to find in God's
   doings a loftier purpose and to win from His providence a richer
   harvest? Above all may not man thereby attain a better security than
   some uncertain authority outside both of the truth and of ourselves,
   even the direct witness of truth to our own souls? If on all other
   subjects we have found the only basis of truth which can bring us to
   final agreement to be the same witness of the reality to each one,
   religion is not likely to be an exception, seeing that in religion, as
   in nothing else, our whole spiritual worth is involved in believing
   only what we see to be true and following only what we discern to be
   right, and that the ground of this faith in man as the measure of truth
   and righteousness is the religious conviction that God made man in his
   own image, so that there is no place where this confidence has more
   right than in religion.
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CHAPTER II

THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM

   The question of a final authority as the external infallible ground of
   belief would have been settled long ago, if it had stood by itself and
   been merely a matter of inquiry. What maintains it, so as to make
   inquiry a sin and the manipulation of history a work of piety, is the
   conviction that an infallible authority is a plain inference from the
   nature of God. If He is omnipotent and His omnipotence is directed by
   omniscience, must not His revelation be without error or defect?

   Or can we suppose that He has failed to provide adequate means for
   maintaining it in purity? Then it appears to some that the old
   foundations must be underpinned at all costs to facts, and to others,
   who are more submissive to facts, that God has not acted worthily of
   His power and knowledge, but has left man calamitously to his own
   phantasy and vain devices. Nor, so long as we accept this conception of
   God's working, as by direct, irresistible might, can we ever escape
   from suspense between dogmatic assertion of what must be and a troubled
   awareness of what is.

   With any measure of openness of mind the difficulty of conceiving that
   the only adequate working of God is by irresistible might, directed by
   an omniscient plan, becomes distressingly evident. Unless we are to
   make God merely a name for a cosmic process indifferent to good or evil
   at least in the present world, we must restrict the operations which
   are adequate to His power and knowledge to very few persons, and even
   with them to very special experiences. But, in that case, religion
   fails us ordinary people, and especially in our ordinary ways where our
   need is greatest. Why, if His power and knowledge are infinite, should
   God not extend His perfect working to us also and to all our concerns?
   Why, if the only adequate method of the Almighty is resistless,
   unerring might, should He ever use an inferior one, which so obviously
   admits error and failure so extensively, perhaps so exclusively?

   These difficulties alone would make it plain that this view of God's
   necessary working needs to be revised, and that the way of doing it is
   not to lay down a priori regulations, argued from the bare idea of
   omnipotence, but, instead, to consider God's actual way of dealing with
   His children. When we do so, we see that the argument from His
   omnipotence is an assumption based on the mere naked idea of absolute
   force and in no way concerned with the notion of God as Father: for, if
   in all things He deals with us as a Father, His grace cannot be thus
   divorced from His working in nature and ordinary history.

   What all life does say to us is that God does not conduct His rivers,
   like arrows, to the sea. The ruler and compass are only for finite
   mortals who labour, by taking thought, to overcome their limitations,
   and are not for the Infinite mind. The expedition demanded by man's
   small power and short day produces the canal, but nature, with a
   beneficent and picturesque circumambulancy, the work of a more spacious
   and less precipitate mind, produces the river. Why should we assume
   that, in all the rest of His ways, He rejoices in the river, but, in
   religion, can use no adequate method save the canal? The defence of the
   infallible is the defence of the canal against the river, of the
   channel blasted through the rock against the basin dug by an element
   which swerves at a pebble or a firmer clay. And the question is whether
   God ever does override the human spirit in that direct way, and whether
   we ought to conceive either of His spirit or of ours after a fashion
   that could make it possible. Would such irresistible might as would
   save us from all error and compel us into right action be in accord
   either with God's personality or with ours?

   When we maintain the contrary, it can hardly be that we are
   interpreting experience. May we not simply be misled by a vain
   imagination of how we ourselves should act on the throne of the
   universe? But to conceive God after the fashion of our own impatient,
   domineering spirits, is not the way to find Him in all His works.

   When we turn from argument to reality, there is little to show that
   either truth or righteousness ever came by way of irresistible might.
   Progress ever winds slowly forward, fretting at every obstacle and
   constantly returning upon its path, never working with absolute things,
   but always with the struggle of human thought and purpose. The long
   sorrowful experience of the ages seems to show that the last thing God
   thinks of doing is to drive mankind, with resistless rein, on the
   highway of righteousness.

   All infallibilities presuppose an idea of grace mechanically
   irresistible. But a direct force controlling persons as things is no
   personal relation between God and man; and the religion which rests on
   it does nothing to maintain the supreme interest of religion, which is
   the worth of persons over things, of moral values over material forces.
   God might so act upon men and still be a person, but there would be
   nothing personal in His acting; He might even care for each individual,
   but it would not be as a soul thinking its own thoughts and acting
   according to its own thinking; and the whole method has to be
   restricted to special spheres of grace, else it would not be an
   explanation of the world in any essential way different from heartless,
   rational, cosmic process.

   It is a grave result that, to give any infallibility the appearance of
   being in accord with fact, much history must be manipulated and zeal
   for investigation carefully kept in leading-strings, but it is still
   graver if this be done in the interest of a conception of grace as the
   irresistible force of omnipotence directed, in an unswerving line, by
   omniscience, which, being mechanical and not spiritual, introduces
   irreconcileable conflict between moral freedom and the succour of God.
   We can only find God in all life, and His operation adequate to our
   spiritual needs, when we discover His method to be patient enough to
   pass round by way of persuasion and education through our errors and
   failures: and then only is He God and not mere process.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER III

ITS MODERN STATEMENT

   If the question of the ground of faith is thus to be resolved into the
   question of the nature of grace, it may be asked why the modern mind,
   which so intensely raised the former question, seems to have been
   peculiarly indifferent to the latter.

   Even were this indifference certainly the case, it would prove nothing.
   Great concentration on one aspect of a question is a protection, not
   only from the assaults of other questions, but from other aspects of
   the same question. This is at once a necessity of concentration without
   which we cannot advance, and a limitation of it which may make it
   barren for disovery. Only one interest can be the focus of our
   attention at one time, but the way in which that relegates other
   matters to the circumference, not because they are less vital or better
   solved, but merely because we are not interested, might as much exclude
   us from the true solution even of the problem which possesses us, as a
   concentration on mirrors to the ignoring of light would prevent us
   discovering the reason of a reflection.

   This might be a sufficient reply, the more convincing that these last
   two centuries have certainly left us no solution of their problems
   which is so sure, so much in the nature of things, so harmonising to
   our perplexities, that it leaves us no call to seek farther afield.

   But the deeper reason is that facts are often far from being what they
   seem. The great central problems of life, in particular, change far
   less in matter and substance than in form and temper from one age to
   another. The new garb, it must be admitted, transforms the old problem
   beyond knowing till we confine attention to its main features. Then,
   under the new names Rationalism and Romanticism, we recognise the old
   antagonisms of free-will and predestination which at one era bore the
   names Pelagianism and Augustinianism, and, at another, Arminianism and
   Calvinism.

   The most obvious and transforming change is in temper.

   The old intensity required the old dogmatic security, the loss of which
   has been our dominant perplexity, for the particular way of God's
   working necessarily becomes a more hesitating concern when we have to
   face the doubt whether He works at all. Yet the question of whether God
   works can never be separated from the question of how He works.

   A still more important reason for the different temper is the extension
   of the question from the sphere of personal salvation to the whole
   realm of experience, whereby it underwent the calming change from
   theological dogma to philosophical theory. But this extension was
   implicit in it from the beginning, and Calvin had already gone a long
   way towards making it explicit: and, if principles live in a serener
   air when applied to the universe than to our individual salvation, they
   are not necessarily altered, nor even our personal stake in them made
   less.

   Rationalism, the chief movement of the eighteenth century, is not
   difficult to recognise as Pelagian. Those who still retained the old
   dogmatic certainty of the doctrine of election immediately recognised
   in it the ancient foe. And they were right because, though it conceived
   the problem of human freedom far more profoundly, its interest was the
   same, and its temper not so very different, and for the reason that its
   principle was the same, and its limitations the same, in kind, if not
   in degree.

   Its interest too was in the rational and responsible individual. As
   never before, it realised the amazing significance of the fact that
   nothing is of real value for truth or beauty or goodness which is not
   of our own insight, choice and deliberate purpose. In particular, it
   achieved a clear understanding of the necessity for absolute
   independence in moral judgment and moral decision, if they are to be
   truly moral, by making plain that what we merely take over as accepted
   or do as customary is, for that very reason, not moral. Moreover, the
   bearing of this significance of the moral person on the rejection of
   external authorities was evident from the beginning, as the defenders
   of the infallibilities were not slow to perceive.

   Negative assaults can always be resisted, but here was a new, positive,
   convincing presentation of the basis of all sound reverence, even
   reverence for man as man, man not as great or good or wise, but man
   simply as a responsible being, an end in himself, and the measure of
   the value of all other ends.

   Here was the old Pelagian interest, enormously deepened. Yet, in spite
   of this deepening, there went with it much of the same shallow temper.
   The adherents of Rationalism, with a few notable exceptions, were just
   as cheaply optimistic about man, talking glibly about the infinite
   perfectibility of the human race; and for the old reason that they
   measured what man ought to be very comfortably by rules he could
   tolerably easily fulfil. The profounder spirits conceived morality by a
   larger imperative, but its maxims, though they imposed a yoke not easy
   and a burden not light, came short of the infinite in man's striving;
   and, though their test was fitness to be universal laws, they could not
   embrace the fullness of life, but remained empty forms.

   This moralistic temper itself was a limitation, but it showed itself in
   a dull common-sense, which could only see the world through smoked
   spectacles and had no perception that the marvel even of man is in
   reflecting all the world's wonder and variety. It gave nothing to its
   beloved in sleep, but often talked as if the mind had to make its own
   world out of nothing; and would only then find it very good. Its
   supreme limitation is seen in its conception of God. He was a useful
   explanation of things as they are, and He may be necessary some day
   again as a judge of things as they ought to have been, but to introduce
   Him seriously into the system now seemed to upset the whole regard for
   the moral individual, which was the recent, the intense, and certainly
   the true discovery. If God did things for us, we seemed to have less
   responsibility; and to appeal to Him was to betray our moral
   independence. For it, in short, piety was only morality on crutches.

   The reason was simply that the idea of God as omnipotent direct force
   was never called in question. Man was a finite force operating within
   frontiers which, though marvellously delimited, would be utterly
   submerged by much less than the measureless flood of omnipotence.
   Therefore, nothing was more important in the whole system than to
   delimit man from God, and to secure that God remained in deistic
   isolation from a system, which, the more perfect He had made it, could
   the better do without Him. And, with this isolation of God, everything
   went that was not of striving and crying.

   The poetic and philosophical movement which followed, and which
   dominated the nineteenth century, usually called the Romantic Movement,
   was not a completion of Rationalism, but a reaction from it. That it
   had any kinship with Augustinianism or Calvinism is less easy to
   perceive, because, while its interest was the same, and its limitations
   the same, and for the reason that essentially its principle was the
   same, its temper does not encourage comparison.

   It had the same sense that morality is subtler than rules, that the
   foundation of peace is securer than resolution, that the highest in man
   is a reflection of things far beyond man's achieving, and that God is
   the eternal presence of a self-revealing, immanent reality in all
   happenings. As never before, it conceived the world as a great,
   changing, opulent spiritual reality, and valued in man the infinite
   variety of type, the amazing individuality wherein he reflects the
   riches of the universe. This spacious worldly temper does not suggest
   either the fifth century or the sixteenth. But how many other interests
   have suffered a similar transformation, yet remained essentially the
   same! And there are indications that even the old temper was not wholly
   changed. In its own way it also said "Glory to God in the Highest."

   Moreover, by it the authorities at once began to recover their places.
   Only one authority proclaimed itself infallible, but others acted as
   though they were. The discovery of the individual had considerable lip
   service, but was really an embarrassment. The fact that there are no
   spiritual values except through the worth of our own insight, choice
   and personal consecration, and no spiritual ends unless the moral
   person is an end in himself, was implicitly denied even when explicitly
   affirmed, vague incarnations of values, now more state than church,
   being set over man, as images to which he must bow and which it is his
   end in creation to serve. The essence of the whole matter was that the
   individual is only a pattern in the web, important as pattern, but only
   because the warp and woof run through him as through all the rest of
   the universe. The final word was immanent cosmic process, and rational
   man was but its highest vehicle and most conscious mirror.

   This is predestinarianism in a way to have taken away even Calvin's
   breath; and it gives a calm superiority to good and evil, which no
   doubt he would have rejected with all the intensity of his vehement
   spirit. But is it other than the logic of his position? If the glory of
   God is to act by omnipotence directed in a straight line by
   omniscience, He could only fix the scheme of all things in an eternal
   process of Reason, in respect of which we can only say that we have
   often had dreams that it is not all very good. Once you begin with the
   Absolute and conceive it thus mechanically as force, the only peace you
   can arrive at is to do your best to contemplate the whole as a very
   marked improvement upon your own unfortunate confinement to the part.

   The problems of an ordered universe and a responsible individual when
   divided, as in Rationalism and Romanticism, are so very easy that one
   often wonders why so many people have taken the trouble to write so
   copiously about them. Start from one end and you find the moral
   individual a self-contained force, so you refuse to travel farther;
   start from the other and the universe is an all pervading force, which,
   in spite of all appearances, merely flows through the individual. Both
   are neat, mechanical explanations, and the mind of man feels a
   satisfaction in what is neat and mechanical.

   But on such terms, how shall we at once reverence the sinner for the
   great responsibility which even her sin shows she carried in her soul,
   and the little child who, from his simple receptiveness, has hidden in
   his heart all the measureless possibilities of the Kingdom of God?
   Above all, why should we ever speak of God, for, buried in His world,
   we lose Him as effectively as when He is excluded from it?

   The illuminating fact which makes us persons and not things, is that we
   are nothing except what we receive, yet we can receive nothing to
   profit except as our own; and both solutions are easy and worthless,
   because by them the things God has joined are divided.

   The problem of the eighteenth century was the individual with that
   strange frontier over which nothing should pass without his own
   judgment and activity; and the problem of the nineteenth the different
   and spacious individuality which is a response to all the varied wealth
   of the world and the mirror of the infinite opulence of the Reason that
   works in all things.

   It does not become us to be ungrateful for all the material both
   movements have provided for the solution. But we shall discover its
   true value only when we realise that the problem of the twentieth
   century ought to be to put the problems of the eighteenth and of the
   nineteenth together and to show how the nature of a person is such and
   the grace which succours it is such that they cannot be divided, making
   it appear how a higher sense of responsibility is a deeper humility,
   and a more entire humility a more courageous responsibility, or, in
   other words, how absolute moral independence and absolute religious
   dependence are not opposites but necessarily one and indivisible.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER IV

IRRESISTIBLE GRACE

   The change from religious dogma to philosophical theory has had three
   far-reaching effects. It has diminished passion and increased inquiry;
   it has made incredible the belief that God uses the sole method
   adequate to His nature only in a few concerns of a few people; it has
   shown that the question of our dependence on God cannot be solved by
   the easy method of denying the duty of moral independence.

   Yet, with all the change of form, the substance remains, in essence,
   the old question of the relation of God and man: and, after all is
   said, the only answer is by faith in what we believe we can most surely
   trust and in which we seek our emancipation from the mere flux of
   things. For the eighteenth century it was in what secured us moral
   independence, and for the nineteenth in what gave us religious
   dependence; and, if we have a special problem in the twentieth it is to
   unite both. There is no purely intellectual view of the universe, but
   all views are consciously or unconsciously religious views of what
   ought to be man's life in it. Therefore, most of the philosophical
   appurtenances are mere stage properties, and the living heart of the
   problem, when we strip them off, is still the mere theological or
   anti-theological dogma of the predestined or the free. It is,
   therefore, simpler for us, while not forgetting what the past two
   centuries have contributed, to begin with the old controversy
   concerning grace.

   No other controversy has so much life-blood in it. There were hard
   arguments and occasionally hard blows. Religion was concerned, and not
   merely theology, for the issue at stake seemed to be whether man's
   trust was to be in God or in himself. If the arguments were furnished
   from the study of the thinker, they were often as hotly disputed in the
   hut of the labourer; and even the trenches have known them in the form
   of one's number being up.

   Simple, practical faith may be without perplexity so long as it trusts
   the assurance of the heart that God's succour and His children's
   service are not thus at variance. And there is in most men a haunting
   sense of an utter trust in God and not in man which not only does not
   annihilate the moral personality, but is its supreme succour, giving
   the feeling that both sides have somewhere missed their way. But there
   are few matters on which it is more difficult to live without thinking,
   even though all thinking about how we act readily confuses practical
   faith.

   No criticism short of a criticism of the conception of grace upon which
   the whole controversy turns, requires any pause for consideration;
   because, if grace is the might of omnipotence directed by omniscience,
   no dubiety can arise respecting the side faith must embrace. Its lot
   must be cast in with Augustinianism, for there is no faith, without, in
   the end, ascribing everything to God. To-day, as always when we are
   forced to recognise life's appalling failures, faith must rely, not
   partially, but utterly, upon God.

   Even semi-Pelagianism can provide no satisfactory religious basis. If
   God will only act when we begin, or continue acting only as we fulfil
   certain conditions, then, in the last resort, our reliance is on man
   and not God. But, to the miserable uncertainty and painful anxiety of
   that trust, all experience - and not least our present distress - bears
   witness.

   The religious man always has ascribed, and found his whole peace and
   confidence in ascribing, all things to God. Any good result, in
   particular, he does not dream of ascribing in part to God and in part
   to his own right resolve. He speaks, not of man that runneth, but of
   God who giveth the victory, and he has only one hymn of praise: "O the
   depths of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!"

   Pelagianism, instead of affording calm trust and patience, causes men
   to seek security in their own doings, or, what is worse, in their own
   emotions, creating in them a restless endeavour to excite their souls
   in public or to impose upon themselves disciplines in private. But the
   end of neither way is peace. On our own insight and initiative, or on
   our own fidelity and continuance, faith cannot build, seeing how
   nothing is more in need of the Divine succour than our failure to make
   right beginnings, except our failure to continue "in any stay." Would
   temptation only abide without, it never would be temptation. Wherefore,
   the succour of our tempted, weak and wavering wills is the supreme work
   of grace.

   This whole concern about our own effort, moreover, is hostile to the
   spirit of peace. The faith which does not rely wholly upon God, but
   partly on exciting or disciplining its own soul, lives in
   valetudinarian anxiety about its spiritual health. To be perpetually
   feeling our own pulse is the surest way to rob ourselves of the
   self-forgetting vigour in which health is displayed.

   Morally, moreover, even though it be rather a moral than a religious
   theory, Pelagianism is equally shallow and unsatisfying.

   Though, in some sense, we must affirm that, what we ought to do that we
   can do, moral sincerity, as little as religious earnestness, concurs
   when Pelagius affirms that "man can be without sin, and can keep the
   Divine commands, easily if he will." To be able so much as to fancy
   this to be true, we must, as Harnack says, "belong to those lucky
   people, who, cold by nature and temperate by training, never notice any
   appreciable difference between what they ought to do and what they
   actually can do," and must have no experience either of the passionate
   nature or of the moral conflict of men like Augustine. Even thus
   favoured by the frosty powers, we should still not succeed in
   cherishing the idea of the easy triumph of good resolve, did we not
   confuse real morality, which requires true insight and right motive,
   with respectability, which requires only visible conformity. In true
   morals, even as in true religion, if we believe in God at all, He must
   be the strength of all our doing.

   No better success, either religious or moral, attends the attempt to
   make the theory less Pelagian, by emphasising more the backing of God
   and making man's doing mainly a condition for deserving God's support.

   Morality, as a doing to win God's backing, is not moral, for it works
   with a corrupt personal motive of selfish good, complicated by a
   corrupt personal hesitation due to considering another interest than
   duty. Our attention is directed from our task to our merit with God.
   But merit is no more a right moral than a right religious motive, and
   the eye that regards it is not single, and the whole body will
   certainly not be full of light.

   A mixture of independent purpose and dependent faith, moreover, fails
   to maintain the very sense of responsibility, for the sake of which the
   semi-Pelagian theory is chiefly esteemed. Responsibility requires
   absolute, not partial, independence. We may not say, "We cannot," in
   face of what we ought; and not even dependence on God may involve us in
   dubiety regarding our power to obey. A really independent moral
   personality is not, as this theory conceives it, a lake at low water
   and an arm of the sea at high.

   If grace is the irresistible might of omnipotence, directed in a
   straight line by omniscience, and man's will is a finite force running
   counter to it, the operation of God must be marked by no failure and no
   error; and where we meet with either, we do not meet with God. Hodge's
   argument abides indisputable. Everything, he says, on the Arminian side
   at ones loses its value, if it be admitted that regeneration or
   effectual calling is the work of omnipotence. As with the scientist or
   the metaphysician, so here, God is absolute, unconditioned force, force
   infinite and direct, in respect of which the finite force of the human
   will is in nothing be regarded. What is to be said in that case, except
   that faith and reason seem to be for once agreed?

   The inevitable reaction, nevertheless, from Augustinianism to
   Pelagianism, from Calvinism to Armianism, testifies that man's
   spiritual needs are not satisfied, and the shallowness of the Pelagian
   argument is only a proof of the depth of the instinct, for men are
   usually satisfied with bad argument only when their convictions rest on
   other grounds. Being convinced that the very business of religion is to
   give us succour in this vast world of overwhelming forces, we cannot
   rest content to ascribe our whole life to the direct operation of God,
   after a fashion that makes God the most overwhelming of all forces, the
   most destructive of any reality to which the name personality could be
   given.

   But, if grace is the direct force of omnipotence, the only way of
   escape is to keep the personality, in some measure, apart from God, and
   to set it over against Him. To set the finite against the Infinite, to
   ascribe value to the human will over against the Absolute will may not
   be convincing in logic, but how is the personality, which alike gives
   meaning to morality and value to religion, to be preserved, if not by
   thus setting our religious dependence and our moral independence in
   antagonism?

   Argument, moreover, can at times be too triumphant. If we have to
   consider the work of omnipotence alone in regeneration, what reason
   have we to go beyond it in any other sphere? Is it responsible only for
   the regenerate, and not also for the unregenerate? Why should we
   restrict it to effectual calling, and not ascribe to it also vicious
   desire and the perverse will? Is not all the world the work of
   Omnipotence? If, then, God can work anywhere with overwhelming fiat,
   why not everywhere? Can a world, thus easily to be corrected, be evil,
   yet Omnipotence be good and blameless?

   These questions may not be dismissed as a mere logical dilemma which
   practical faith may ignore. Faith, on the contrary, is deeply involved:
   for the faith which works with this direct idea of God's omnipotence
   is, in a world in which God seems so sparing of good and so tolerant of
   evil, continually locked in a death-struggle with the fear that, either
   God cannot help, or does not care.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER V

THE CATHOLIC COMPROMISE

   Every form of Catholicism is an attempt at such a compromise with
   Augustinianism as shall meet the needs both of faith and
   responsibility. Catholicism also holds the conception of grace as
   infinite power in conflict with man's will as finite power. On reaching
   God we find irresistible might and, therefore, a sphere in which there
   are infallible authorities and absolutely efficacious operations. But
   only at times are we within the scope of its full activity. God is the
   limitless ocean, but the locks so regulate its tides that the little
   lake of human personality may have something both of the freshness of
   the ocean and of the amenity of an inland sea. The Augustinian idea of
   grace remains unaltered, and attention is directed wholly to the limit
   of its operation. This is confined to the Church, which, being assured,
   by omnipotence directed by omniscience, of absolute security in creed,
   organisation and the means of grace, is the sphere of a grace which
   overrides every deflecting agency. But the more it is secure, the more
   man can be left within it to the freedom of his ways. The individual
   rein, so to speak, can be relaxed if the ring-fence of the Church is
   without a breach. The absolute reliance upon God which religion
   requires being thus provided for, we may safely assign freedom to the
   individual will and ascribe to it merit, thus, it is argued, doing
   justice both to Augustinianism and Pelagianism.

   This compromise of an Augustinian church with Pelagian members has had
   practical value in providing room both for faith and duty. As an
   escape, on their own conception of grace, from a rigid Augustinianism
   or an easy Pelagianism, it had no small measure of success. Yet the
   hesitating temper known as timor filialis, which demands other
   securities besides child-like confidence, shows that it does not
   provide the utter dependence on God religion requires; while its
   age-long conflict, both with personal and with political freedom,
   proclaims aloud its failure to provide the absolute independence which
   alone can satisfy morals.

   Reason and religion alike, moreover, tend to extend and not to limit
   Augustinianism.

   If prophet or pope can be so overridden by the direct might of God as
   to guarantee infallible guidance, and if that is the higher way, the
   only way absolutely manifesting God's working, why is there a lower? If
   God can so control any spirit, and it is a supreme good so to be
   controlled, why not all spirits, to the utter exclusion from the world
   of error and sin? If some souls, by the finger of God's power, are
   transformed in their substance in melius as Augustine expresses it, why
   are not all made of the best substance in the first instance? Or if,
   for unknown reasons, the improvement must be effected later, the
   restriction of the operation to so special a channel of grace would
   surely argue in the Infinite a strangely parsimonious mind.

   Even while the ring-fence of the Church held good, dissatisfaction with
   this roundabout way of relying on God and desire for a more personal
   and direct dependence could not be quite suppressed. Every revival of
   religion, every movement of greater spiritual earnestness and depth,
   tended to return to Augustinianism for the individual, as well as for
   the Church: and this need for a nearer and more personal assurance of
   grace was naturally intensified after a large breach in the ring-fence
   of the Church had been made by the Reformation. Luther, no less than
   Calvin, was an Augustinian, and many shared in Calvin's intense
   conviction that everything short of complete pre-determination came
   short of the glory of God and was so much less reason for putting our
   trust wholly in Him.

   After the Reformation, however, as before, the conception of grace
   remained unchanged, being more clearly than ever conceived as the
   operation of omnipotence directed by omniscience. The sole change was
   again its sphere of operation, which was transferred from the Visible
   Church to the body of the elect, made one because each is individually
   chosen and by absolute power made regenerate. This still required the
   distinction between an efficacious and a common grace, but efficacious
   grace was now a rein for each and not a ring-fence for all. Yet it was
   still concerned with the Church, for a direct, irresistible, individual
   force of grace was expected to guarantee for the elect, in a way
   impossible for a corrupt and divided Church, unity of faith and purity
   of organisation, as well as a directly and externally secured
   salvation.

   On this point the history of English Christianity is illuminating. For
   seventy years after the Reformation, in so far as it was not Roman, it
   was Calvinistic. These seventy years cover the whole period during
   which it was possible to cherish Calvin's hope of a body of elect kept,
   by the power of omnipotence, in unity of faith and practice, because,
   at the end of it, no blindness could fail to see that the might of
   grace, though backed by the might of the State, had failed to maintain
   even the appearance of harmony. Then those who set outward unity above
   liberty turned their hopes once again towards the ring-fence of the
   true Church, whereupon they became Arminian in their view of the
   individual; while those who would only have unity with outward liberty
   tended to emphasise still more exclusively God's unconditional
   election, enlightenment and control within.

   The reason of the divergence was not a difference of goal or of the
   grace by which it is attained, but only different ways of seeking to
   reach the same end of unity by the same direct operation of
   omnipotence, which would secure the one infallible truth, the one true
   fellowship, and the one unvarying, externally guaranteed salvation. One
   side placed its sphere in the individual and the other in the Church,
   but, to both alike, reliance upon God meant, at some point, reliance
   upon overwhelming force. The tradition was, in the one case, more
   guaranteed from without, and, in the other, more from within, but for
   both parties alike, faith was fundamentally acceptance of a tradition
   guaranteed in some way as infallible. Justification was passed round by
   way of the Church in the one case, and delivered more directly to the
   individual in the other, but, for both alike, it was a judgment
   arbitrarily attached to faith by absolute Divine fiat. Finally, to this
   justification grace for regeneration and sanctification was appended,
   with some difference of view as to the necessity of the channel of the
   Church, but with no real divergence on the view of it as a direct
   operation of God from without.

   In all these systems there is a unity of aim which makes it plain that,
   for all alike, the perdurable ground of all high faith and of all deep
   morality alike is the grace of God. But, if they are all in conflict
   with fact, bankrupt in logic, and unable to reconcile religion and
   morality - the most inseparable interests of our nature, would it not
   seem that something is omitted in their conception of grace, some
   finer, subtler, more pervasive dependence of man on God, as though we
   should assume that the lake depends upon the ocean only by canal or
   tide, and forget the rain-bearing clouds, which not only rise from the
   bosom of the deep and for ever maintain the lake in brimming fulness,
   but which refresh all its landscape, so that it is not as a dead eye in
   the pale and rigid visage of a desert, but is the ever changing glory
   in the face of the fair and fertile vale?
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VI

AUTONOMY

   This view of God's will as infinite force and man's as finite force
   seems, so far as our spiritual nature is concerned, to leave us three
   options, all alike unhappy. The floodgates of God's might may be so
   opened upon man as to obliterate all his individual features in one
   universal inundation; or they may so shut off God's succour as to leave
   man's whole nature a parched desolation in which uninspired resolutions
   grow as a meagre salt bush; or they may so let grace out in places and
   withhold it in others as to break up the desert only by stagnant pools.
   When we insist that God's power, being absolute, can have no
   limitation, human responsibility vanishes and no human character is
   left even in error and sin; yet, if we set over against God man's will,
   as the only element in moral decision, morals become negative and
   external, and religion a mere appendage to this formal morality.
   Working compromises readily ignore logical contradictions, if only, in
   spite of logic, they can be made to work. But when they work for the
   corruption of morals by religion and of religion by morals, more than
   theory is at stake. The conclusion would seem to be that "fate,
   free-will, foreknowledge absolute" involves controversy so endless,
   unconvincing and profitless that it should be left to occupy a vacant
   eternity and be dismissed from time. But the question will not remain
   dismissed, because the nature of our dependence upon God is of the most
   practical moment both for our liberty and our faith, our morals and our
   religion, and, so long as we think of God's will as infinite force and
   man's as finite force, the only way is to determine their boundaries.
   Then, forthwith, our moral independence and our religious dependence
   become

     "Incensed points of mighty opposites,"
     having nothing in common save a hostile frontier.

   But the method which leads to a practical result so disastrous requires
   us to carry the question farther back, and to ask whether grace is a
   force which can be delimited. Behind that question, is yet another of
   vital importance to the answer we shall give. How shall we ask? Is it
   to be in the old way of arguing down from the throne of God, of
   propounding what seems to us fitting in the relation of an Infinite
   Being to His finite creatures, or is it to be upward from the actual
   position we occupy here below?

   For mapping out from above God's operations, it must be admitted that
   we occupy no vantage ground. We are not able at all to soar, and we
   look up with no eagle eye. Only if we can see grace as it works on
   earth and understand it as it affects our own experience, can we
   possibly hope to have either clearness or certainty.

   As soon, however, as we are able to rid ourselves of the idea of
   omnipotence guided by omniscience as irresistible violence on a
   pre-determined scheme, and conceive it as freedom to choose its own
   ends, directed by a manifold wisdom selecting and using the means for
   attaining them, we begin to see how worthless is this scheme of the
   Divine and how vital is an understanding of our own experience. If
   instead of a God circumscribed on every hand by considerations of His
   own dignity, we have One manifesting His wise care in the most trivial
   events and common relationships, a God primarily concerned with our
   need and not with His own schemes or His own honour, to look up from
   earth will not be a disadvantageous position forced upon us by our
   lowliness, but the only place from which to understand a relation to us
   which is of love, in the sense at least of being considerate of what we
   are. If grace is determined by love, not merely as spacious sentiment,
   but as this practical regard, the first question cannot be, How would
   it seek to display its dignity? but must be, How would it serve its
   children? And as that service takes place upon earth, our experience
   upon earth alone can be the means of understanding its character. The
   supreme question, therefore, regarding grace, would be, What, amid all
   it does with us, is the end it seeks to serve? And the certain answer
   would be that its end is the succour of moral persons.

   In that case the way to understand the nature of grace is not to
   theorise about the operation of omnipotence, but to ask ourselves, What
   is a moral personality, and, how is it succoured? To consider instead
   the coruscation of omnipotence as resistless might and of omniscience
   as undeflected fixity of plan, is as if an engineer could only prove
   his power by making engines weighty enough to break all the bridges.
   Real power, on the contrary, is never violent, and real wisdom never
   rigid.

   If grace, therefore, be the operation of love, the essence of which is
   to have its eyes directed away from its own dignity or any form of
   self-display and towards the object of its care, an inquiry into its
   nature must be vain which does not start by considering the human
   nature it would succour. In that case, the first question is not, What
   is the nature of God's grace? but, What is the nature of a moral
   person?

   The moment we turn to this latter question, we find that the vital and
   distinguishing characteristic of a moral person is what philosophers
   have called autonomy. When that is lost, man is no longer a person, but
   is a mere animate creature. This independence is the singular, the
   unique quality of a person, and in any relations between persons where,
   on either side, this is ignored, the relation becomes less than
   personal. All free and noble and right relations between men, on the
   contrary, depend on keeping it sacred and inviolate, on both sides and
   in all aspects of life.

   This autonomy appears in the essential quality of our experience, that
   it is self-conscious; in the essential quality of our aims, that they
   are self-directed; in the essential quality of our acts, that they are
   self-determined. Yet, we must beware of regarding these as separate
   autonomies, because much futile and misleading discussion arises from
   thus isolating the problems of mind. They are merely aspects of the one
   independence of a moral person, which consists in being
   self-determined, according to his own self-direction, in his own
   self-conscious world.

   No succour that would be personal may ignore this central
   characteristic of the moral person. Every day we are reminded of the
   impossibility of truly helping people except through themselves, and of
   the irrelevance for our own lives of all that does not approach us
   through some personal relationship. Help may be irresistibly
   individual, as when we pick up a child, in its despite, from under a
   carriage wheel, yet it may be as little personal as when the child is
   still left struggling in the arms of a stranger, crying for its mother.
   No really personal aid can be of purely external operation, but must
   call forth a response from within. It cannot even be direct in any way,
   but must pass round so as to embrace giver and receiver in one
   fellowship. Nothing could be gained for this end by increasing the
   might of a direct force even up to omnipotence or directing it on a
   perfect plan even up to omniscience; but the more overwhelming it were,
   the less personal it would become.

   If this be also true of God's relation to His children, it is manifest
   that His grace must work through His world, and that to isolate it from
   the religious and moral interpretation of our experience is merely,
   from first to last, to turn a living personal relation into a
   mechanical abstraction, which cannot but mislead us in all our thoughts
   about God.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VII

MORAL PERSONALITY

   Grace, if it be concerned with the succour of God's children and not
   with the display of His sovereignty, must be in accord with the kind of
   personality He has given His children and would forward in them. An
   inquiry into the nature of grace must, therefore, begin by asking what
   is meant by a moral person being self-determined, according to his own
   self-direction, in the world of his own self-consciousness; for only
   then can we know how he is to be succoured.

   First, the moral person is self-determined.

   The quality of life is the power to serve in some way, however vaguely,
   its own ends, and not merely to be moved, like inanimate things, by
   impact from without: and a person must at least have this measure of
   self-determination. Yet there are views of the unity of the world as a
   uniformity of mechanical causation, by which even this is denied. And
   it is not really secured by changing the controlling force from
   physical energy to spiritual grace, if it is still an absolute
   compulsion which leaves no more reality in will than a physical force.
   Moreover, it is hard to distinguish from a blind force, because if
   there is no true freedom in the effect, there is no reason for assuming
   personality in the cause. Thus the kind of necessity for which Calvin
   so passionately contended for the glory of God is merely for the glory
   of the cosmic process.

   Again, rational action is upon motive. Then motives are taken to be
   impulses which prevail merely by their strength as feeling. This leaves
   no will, but only a resultant of feelings, after the type of the
   diagonal of physical forces, and our consciousness, as though will were
   self-determined, and our sense of freedom and responsibility, as though
   our actions were not mechanically necessary, could only be illusion due
   to ignorance of the real causes by which we are moved. But impulse is
   one thing and rational motive another; and we can become creatures of
   impulse, whereupon the will is a mere mandarin that nods with the
   loudest clamour of motives, and the result is not rational action, but
   anarchy.

   Responsibility, moreover, is our most direct conscious experience; and,
   what is more, its reality is necessary for explaining a consciousness
   of self. Were freedom merely a question of our own feeling, it might be
   explained away as a private illusion due to ignorance of the real
   causes which move the will. But were there not a sphere over which we
   have power, how could any consciousness of self, over against the
   world, ever have arisen? Unless we stand up against it, and operate in
   it otherwise than by the mere law of cause and effect, why should we
   ever have dreamt of distinguishing ourselves from the world of things?
   Nor does it alter anything to call the force God, if He operate on us
   by a grace which determines us by determining our impulses.

   There could, moreover, be no continuous sense of self, without the
   imputation of our doings to ourselves. Self-consciousness is little
   concerned with self, except in so far as self is concerned with the
   conduct of life. We stand with our faces toward our world and our backs
   toward ourselves, and only catch fleeting glimpses of ourselves over
   our shoulders; and the continuous personal memory which gives
   continuity to our experience, is not due to an unbroken vision of
   ourselves, but to uninterrupted ascription of our doings to our own
   responsibility. God, of course, could Himself act and delude us into
   thinking we did, but if life is illusion of that nature, it is vain to
   speak of God or any other conceivable object of knowledge.

   Will, moreover, is one with ourselves as no other possession can be
   identified with its possessor, and there can be no personal relation
   with us except through it. Nor may God, any more than man, ignore it,
   yet treat us as persons. We have much experience of constraints beyond
   our power to alter, which are doubtless appointed of God. They
   determine the situations in respect of which we must determine
   ourselves; and even where that is impossible, they may be of moral
   value, if, like a barrier in a wrong road, they encourage us, of
   ourselves, to search for the right. But in themselves they are not
   personal, and, therefore, in the strict sense do not concern our moral
   relation either to God or man. God, no more than man, may ignore our
   self-determination and treat us as persons, yet, if He treat will as a
   mere balance, determining it by mere infusion of love or any other
   feeling, self-determination would be made as unreal by this pressing
   down of the scale as by mere physical impulse weighting it.

   The third point of importance is that self-determination is
   determination by the self, by its own character, its own ends and its
   own motives. This, and nothing less, marks off the frontiers of the
   person amid the universe and makes them real. Yet, if this only means
   that all actions are the mere product of a character already
   determined, there is still no real self-determination which could
   explain self-consciousness or justify responsibility.

   Great subtlety has been expended by many writers, from Calvin to Dr
   McTaggart, on wringing from this theory such a doctrine of
   responsibility as would at least explain such imputation of our doings
   to ourselves as gives us a sense of continuity and of separateness from
   all other things.

   But a spinning-top, kept going by a spring within, is just as
   mechanical a toy as one flogged into motion by a whip without, and has
   just as little right to distinguish itself from the rest of the
   mechanical world.

   Still less is it clear why the sense of responsibility should take the
   form of a remorse which we never ascribe to any cause but our own will.
   Dr McTaggart explains that, though it is an illusion to suppose the
   situation within our power to amend, we are naturally pained to find
   that it shows us to be bad characters. Thus remorse would be of the
   same nature as regret for soiling our clothes, because, being lame, we
   were not good at clearing ditches. On this view, so far as remorse has
   a rationale, it would not be from anything which could have been
   different in the past, but, like a splint to the lame, to stiffen our
   characters for the future. But why so unpleasant a device should have
   been hit on, when they are already as stiff as absolute determination
   can make them, is hard to see.

   Did we admit this to be a true description of remorse, which it is not,
   we should still have to ask how character as moral attainment improves
   so as to be character, and not mere disposition as a gift of nature.
   This type of argument appears specious only by importing ethical ideas
   into character, to which, on this view, it has no manner of right.
   Character improves and degenerates, but how? Is it merely by storing up
   in itself motive, as sun-heat is stored in coal -- both we hope for
   domestic consumption and not for conflagration?

   But, does this explain the formation of character? No doubt we all act,
   in some way, after our character, but, how is it that some of us act in
   such a way that our characters improve and others in such a way that
   our characters degenerate? Character is said to form itself in life's
   troubled sea. But, if we row against it or float with it only according
   to the kind of persons we happen to be, while life might be saved or
   shipwrecked, our character ought to remain what it was before, mere
   disposition, good or bad as the fates decree.

   Unless there is more, what right have we to speak of character at all,
   and not merely of disposition? By treating action upon moral character
   as if it were mere action upon natural disposition, and then
   caricaturing the free-will as a balance possessed of the absurd
   characteristic of ignoring the weights put into the scales and of
   kicking the beam by accident and sheer arbitrariness, freedom can
   easily be proved absurd and even immoral. Is not an action, we are
   asked, approved or disapproved solely as the outcome of character; and
   when a person is held responsible for a bad action, for what is he
   blamed, if not for being a bad character?

   In a sense that is true. But would it be equally true to say we blame
   him only for having a defective natural disposition? When we speak of
   bad character we speak of what this and similiar actions have made, and
   which, therefore, is a just cause for larger blame than a single
   action. Yet it would be still truer to say that we blame a man for
   habitual disloyalty to the possibilities in him of being a good
   character, than simply to say we blame him for being a bad character.
   Did we think action upon character a fixed, direct, invariable result,
   as oil, acting after its nature, encourages fire, and water, acting
   after its nature, discourages it, we should not find in it either
   intrinsic goodness or badness. We should approve or disapprove only as
   it served the occasion, as we approve of fire in a stove warming us,
   but disapprove of it in the middle of the room devouring our furniture.
   In no case should we dream of ascribing responsibility to character for
   not being something else, any more than we should hold water
   responsible for not being oil when our stove burns low, or oil for not
   being water when our carpet is ablaze.

   We ascribe responsibility, not because we are indifferent to motive or
   uninfluenced by our character, but because we are assured of a power to
   allow or to restrain motive, according as we are loyal or disloyal to a
   character which, except in so far as it has been lost by previous
   disloyalties, has power to approve the good and disapprove the evil.
   Action is specially disapproved as the outcome of a bad character, but
   only because character, as distinct from disposition, is itself the
   most permanent result of our loyalties and disloyalties. Bad action as
   the effect of mere native disposition, we rather condone.

   If will is, in this direct way, determined by character, the sole
   effective work of grace would be what Augustine describes as changing
   the substance of the soul into better. This purely miraculous operation
   would no doubt amend our deeds, but would do nothing towards giving us
   responsibility in freedom. And Augustine, in fact, has no more room for
   any thing of the kind and does no more to show God as a Father, not a
   force, than Calvin, even though he does not, like Calvin, regard
   himself as a philosophical determinist. Such a change could only amend
   impulse and improve disposition, for true moral motive is derived from
   ends yet to be attained, not from transactions in the past, and moral
   character is achieved by following them, and cannot be merely given.

   Self-determination, therefore, cannot be rightly judged when taken by
   itself. Only by isolating it from the self-direction by which it is
   guided and the self-conscious world in which it acts, is motive reduced
   to impulse and necessitarianism made plausible. Wherefore, we must pass
   on to the further aspect of personality, that it is self-directing,
   always remembering, however, that this is only another aspect of the
   same activity and not a new attribute.

   Second, a moral person is self-determined according to his own
   self-direction.

   All discussion about freedom which is not mere dialectic, deals with
   loyalty to our own legislation for ourselves. Action, though otherwise
   not wrong, is less than right, unless we, of our own insight, judge it
   right; and, when it conflicts with that insight, its innocuousness does
   not hinder it from being, for us, wrong. Whatsoever is not of our own
   faith is, for that sole reason, sin. What is called heteronomy, that is
   legislation for us by others, is, at best, a non-moral state, in
   constant danger of becoming immoral. As being towed is not steering,
   and, on damage to the tow-line, may be shipwreck, so is an externally
   directed morality.

   Though conscience needs to be educated, and all life ought to be its
   education, it may not, in the sense of being told what to say, be
   instructed. Education, instead of imposing upon us the verdicts of
   others, commits us more entirely to the task of producing the knowledge
   of right and wrong from our own personal insight. What is called the
   direction of conscience is merely the substitution of rules for
   insight. Hence it is of the essence of a right relation to God as well
   as to man that He is not, in that sense, a director of conscience.

   To allow a judgment of right to be imposed on us by other people's
   consciences is a wrong moral attitude to life, which exposes us both to
   a wrong measure of duty and a wrong motive for its performance. In the
   first place, the hardest casuistry is easy to meet, compared with the
   demands, upon motive as well as act, made by our own consciences. To
   lay ourselves open to rules laid down for us is, in practice, to be
   exempted from all the calls which go beyond good custom and obvious
   good conduct; whereas, to lay ourselves wholly open to our own
   consciences is to find our true duty begin where rules end. And, in the
   second place, we are led, in seeking to make other people's rules our
   standard, to make other people's approval our motive. But that is no
   moral motive, even as to be content merely with what other people
   require is no moral ideal.

   More exclusively than our relation to our neighbour, our whole relation
   to God is determined by the independence of our moral judgment. The
   ground of respect for all sincere judgment of right is not that it is
   infallible, for it is often mistaken and always inadequate, but because
   the only way of seeing more clearly the absolute righteousness is to
   judge of it with greater independence. Then, if we find God's will as
   we see right, our moral independence is the condition of depending on
   Him: and it must be so if the will of God and the moral order are one.
   Once admit external and arbitrary commands as His will, commands
   imposed from without and arbitrary so far as our discernment can go,
   and God and the moral order are no more one. Good then becomes merely
   what God wills; and there is no more any meaning in calling God good.
   An order imposed by God otherwise than through our own sense of right,
   however exalted its demands, would be no true moral order. Nothing is
   morally observed which is done as the exaction of God's will. It must,
   even if it be only in submission, be the expression of our own. Nothing
   is adequate to our whole moral relation to God short of the
   identification, through our own insight, of our duty with His will. God
   cannot be served by setting conscience on one side and consecration on
   the other. To be independent moral persons, legislating for ourselves,
   so far from being hostile to true knowledge and right service of God,
   is the imperative condition without which God can neither be known nor
   served. The only vital question regarding self-determination concerns
   our freedom to follow this self-direction -- to do, of our own purpose,
   what we know, of our own insight, we ought. Liberty of indifference
   may, or may not, exist, but the only liberty of moment concerns freedom
   of choice between preference and duty. The sense of being within our
   duty is, at the same moment, the sense of being within our power; for
   what we cannot do no "ought" can impose upon us. To apply this only to
   physical hindrances and not also to character is mere immoral juggling;
   and to say that we cannot because we lack the necessary succour of God
   is equally immoral fatalism.

   Finally, this self-determination according to our own self-legislation
   is only possible because its sphere is the world of our own
   self-consciousness.

   When we say the moral person lives in the world of his own
   self-consciousness, more is meant than that every person is conscious
   of self, or even that the self is the centre of all experience. It
   means that the world I deal with is all of it my world, towards all of
   which I can be active, if only by way of approval or disapproval.

   By this activity the circumference as well as the centre of our moral
   world is determined, because, only as it is within our
   self-consciousness, is it the sphere in which we can be self-determined
   according to our own self-direction. The horizon of it is drawn by the
   efficacy of our freedom, just as the width of our outlook by the
   efficacy of our climbing. In view of the enormous variety of the world
   without us, capable of being known, and of the enormous variety in our
   mind within, known already and capable of returning into consciousness,
   M. Bergson must be right in maintaining that the difficulty is less to
   explain what enters consciousness than how the rest is kept out. The
   only answer we can give is, at least, of moral quality. Our window is
   not designed primarily for the view, but for the practical purpose of
   watching the road along which events travel, so as to foresee them as
   they come, bring our experience to bear upon them while present, and
   preserve their lesson as they depart. The object is not to embrace the
   largest possible landscape, but rather to confine us to the world of
   our interests and our activities.

   The result is an experience so intimately one and so essentially our
   own that we must either rule in it or live in perpetual domestic
   anarchy. With this rule alone all that is really personal is concerned.
   Events quite outside of this self-conscious experience may determine
   the situations with which we have to deal, the springs of motive in
   respect of which we must direct ourselves, and even the disposition
   which affects deeply the ease or difficulty of our task, but, till they
   enter the world of our self-consciousness, they have no personal
   relation to us.

   The moment they enter consciousness, however, a transformation takes
   place. Before, they were isolated events, morally indifferent in
   themselves; forthwith, they are part of our experience and come within
   the scope of one judgment, which includes an estimate of ourselves as
   well as of our world.

   Not till we realise that we act in a world which is, in this moral
   sense, our own, can we see the full scope of our personal independence.
   However much it may be given, the world which is our real moral sphere
   is ours only as we interpret it, are interested in it, judge it, use
   it. No new experience can be merely added to it, but can only enter as
   our whole world is adjusted to accommodate it. Neither impulses, nor
   anything else prevail in it by being shot into it like arrows out of
   the dark.

   If an act retain its personal character, and is not mere blind
   surrender to emotion, it not only springs from our personal will, but
   it deals with the whole world of our self-consciousness. Acknowledged
   or unacknowledged, every really personal action is done on what Kant
   calls a maxim -- a valuation not only of a particular way of acting,
   but of ourselves and of our world in relation to it. The hand is not
   put forth to steal by force of hunger as the piston rod to work by
   force of steam, but the course of action involved in thus satisfying
   hunger is consciously accepted in such a way that all contrary motives
   in our whole conscious world are ruled out, and, for the moment at
   least, the whole level of our own personal world is brought down or up
   to the level of our action, and its permanent level is thereby
   affected.

   Thus to offend in one is, in a very true sense, to offend in all, there
   being no conscious decision in which both ourselves and our whole world
   are not involved. The misery of failure is the anarchy it brings into
   what cannot be other than our own household, which we must continue to
   profess to rule. In that task God, no more than man, can help us except
   through our own purpose, guided by our own insight, dealing with our
   own world: and, only as grace works in this personal way through
   ourselves, is it God's dealing with us as His children.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VIII

DEPENDENCE AND INDEPENDENCE

   A person is thus distinguished from a mere individual by the call to
   rule, in his own power and after his own insight, his own world. The
   essential quality of a moral person is moral independence and an ideal
   person would be of absolute moral independence.

   But the essential quality of a religious person is to depend on God;
   and he must be as absolutely dependent as a moral person must be
   absolutely independent. As he seeks a peace which shall endure through
   self-distrust and the sense of sinful blindness and the overwhelming
   might of adverse fortune, no part of his reliance can be on high
   resolve or a pure conscience or a manageable world.

   Religion and morality, therefore, cannot be harmonised by compromise
   and the just mean between reliance upon ourselves and reliance upon
   God.

   Compromise, moreover, is as fatal in practice as in theory. In the
   nature of the case, and not alone by unfortunate accident and
   individual perversity, piety used as a buttress for moral independence
   weakens and corrupts morality. Consciously pious persons are often not
   moral, in part merely because the natural man can use considerations of
   piety, like any other convenient evasion, to confuse moral issues, but
   still more because to substitute dependence upon God for the clear
   moral sense that we can because we ought, is itself a confusion of
   moral issues. There is no need to go the whole length of bribing
   conscience by the hope that occasional times of pleasant and profitable
   aberration God will wink at; for merely to put conscience on one side
   and God's mind on the other, and our wills on one side and God's
   succour on the other, is a frame of mind full of moral pitfalls. And
   even less is of evil. Though we should admit between them no
   possibility of conflict, to buttress the approval of our conscience by
   the motive of doing good to win God's favour would itself endanger the
   only safe moral attitude, which is to do right solely from reverence
   for right itself.

   Because morality can be so readily corrupted by compromise between
   moral independence and religious dependence, the history of modern
   Ethics is little more than an account of various attempts to free
   morality from religious authority and religious motives, and to find in
   itself its own sanction and the reward of its own laws.

   But there is equally good reason why the history of modern Theology is
   little more than the story of various attempts to rest religion on its
   own basis, by showing that it is no mere reward for good behaviour, but
   has its own sphere and is itself the ground of its own trust and hope.
   Religion, modified by moral independence, cannot be pure, because it is
   changed from faith in a truly spiritual hope into trust in a moralistic
   legal righteousness; and it cannot be strong, because faith conditioned
   by our moral state is, in the last resort, not faith in God, but in
   ourselves.

   Compromise being found unworkable, isolation has been tried. Religion
   and ethics, we are told, must, like Abraham and Lot, go their separate
   ways, and no more attempt to feed their flocks on common pasture. The
   religious type turns towards the East and the moral towards the West;
   and their only hope of reconciliation, even in eternity, is to separate
   far enough to meet somewhere on the other side of the world. On this
   side, at least, they never could be far enough apart to prevent
   suspicion and hostile feeling. On the one hand, we shall have a man
   like Augustine, apt to regard every claim to moral independence as
   savouring of ungodliness, and treating the appeal to conscience, not as
   a justification, but as the essence of the offence, when private
   judgment is set against what is for him God's battalions. On the other
   hand, we shall have a man like Kant, to whom every kind of dependence,
   even upon God, is only moral flaccidity, so that to betake ourselves,
   even in the stress of moral conflict, to prayer for help, is to
   endanger our moral integrity at the moment we try it most. Both types
   we must accept, but it will always have to be apart.

   This counsel of despair might, through weariness, prevail, did it leave
   a situation practically tolerable. But the nature of the case, our own
   experience, the history of faith and morals, all proclaim that nothing
   except disaster can result from assigning interests so central and so
   inseparable to different persons, or even to separate compartments of
   one life.

   On the one hand, religion ceases to be spiritual when moral
   independence is sapped.

   Faith is not spiritual unless won by our own insight into truth,
   received by the consent of our own wills, and applied to the government
   of our own lives. And, without goodness shining in its own light, every
   standard by which we could judge a doctrine of God is lost, and faith
   becomes mere submission to arbitrary greatness. As that greatness has
   no moral relation to us, it can only operate on us after the manner of
   a merely mechanical force. Then the self which was expelled by the door
   returns by the window, because the salvation which is of God's
   arbitrary working can be desired only for our own selfish well-being.

   That in itself is an ominous beginning. But an operation which is
   effected behind the veil of the unconscious must yet be thought by us
   to have some condition and some result. The condition, unless it is
   purely arbitrary, can only be our moral state and the result our moral
   improvement, but, being linked up to our salvation in that external
   way, our moral condition could only enter as merit, which is a thing of
   pride even when ascribed to God's help. Merit to condition grace and
   display its efficacy is self-regarding from start to finish, and it is
   the task of true religion to set us free from its power. Yet no
   religion can deliver us which regards salvation as the effect of sheer
   unrelated underground explosion, because, as Augustine expresses it,
   God's grace then becomes our merit.

   But the moment religion gives any place to merit, it becomes
   moralistic, which is to say the doing of things by rule, for some
   outside end; and as such it utterly fails to be our direct, natural,
   and right relation to God. Thus it is false, in the last result, even
   to its own interest of utter dependence upon God.

   But, if, on the one hand, religion ceases to be truly spiritual when
   moral independence is sapped, on the other, morality ceases to be truly
   ethical when religious dependence is rejected. If religion, without
   morality, lacks a solid earth to walk on, morality, without religion,
   lacks a wide heaven to breathe in. Never, except in the atmosphere of
   living religion, has morality maintained its absolute demand,
   penetrated from outward conformity to inward motive, grown sensitive to
   the deeper requirements of humility and sympathy, and, finally, passed
   all rigid bounds of law and come face to face with the infinite claim
   of love, which destroys all idea of merit and leaves men, after they
   have done their utmost, unprofitable servants. Never, in short, can
   morality without religion penetrate from good form to goodness, from
   manners to morals.

   Morality likewise, left to itself, fails to maintain its own special
   interest the absolute independence of the moral person. Mere good
   resolution is no adequate ground for assuring anyone that he can,
   because he ought. Unsupported by anything beyond isolated
   determinations, we are certain to bring down our "ought" to the measure
   of what we "can." Morality is thereby reduced to what the older
   theologians called "civil righteousness," which does not go much beyond
   decency and fair-play, and leaves out of sight the deepest of all moral
   requirements, which is not to act conscientiously, but to seek an ever
   more penetrating conscientiousness. Thereupon, the danger besets us of
   immoral satisfaction with a perfection which is little more than
   abstinence from the grosser forms of wrong-doing. And that means
   dependence on the external standards of our society.

   This restriction of morality to what can be overtaken by resolution
   explains why, just as there are consciously pious persons who are
   imperfectly moral, there are consciously moral persons who are not
   religious. The reason is not too great moral independence, for they are
   in the highest degree dependent on accepted morality and judge
   themselves constantly by the approval of others. On the contrary, the
   true reason is failure to follow the demands of their own consciences
   to the point where they find that their morality depends on a reality
   greater than themselves.

   Religion and morality may not be either thus yoked together or divorced
   without destroying the depth and reality of both. No truly religious
   and moral person is ever tempted to compromise between his own will and
   God's, or to consider them alien and opposite. The heart of all right
   living is to find ourselves by denying ourselves, to direct ourselves
   by renouncing our own preferences, and to possess our world by losing
   it. We are persons, and not merely individuals, precisely because we
   unite in one these seeming opposites, and attain our independence as we
   find ourselves in God's world and among His children.

   This living movement the moralist, even more than the theologian, is
   apt to miss. Then independence has its logical outcome in Fichte's
   theory that each one builds his own world as a gymnasium for his moral
   will, because such independence is the isolation of a Zeppelin, which
   not only directs itself by its own mechanism but floats in its
   self-produced cloud-vision of a world.

   If, however, our world is not of our making, we may not isolate our
   personal independence, as though it were of no consequence what kind of
   world we live in, and it did not matter what meaning or purpose it
   manifests or of what manner of fellowship it admits. Seeing we need a
   moral world to act in, moral truth to walk by and a moral fellowship in
   which to serve, to divide moral independence from religious dependence
   is merely to dissect living reality in order to make explanation easy.
   As the living unity is thereby turned into separate dead mechanisms,
   the explanation is as misleading as it is facile.

   When, for example, we affirm that, "we can be cause we ought," and
   regard the aphorism as moral and non-religious, or even irreligious, we
   can only mean that our individual wills have power to realise every
   ideal we can conceive, and that they have this ability in complete
   isolation and in any kind of conflict with the nature of reality. But
   such confidence in mere resolution only the profoundest ignorance of
   ourselves and the shallowest view of the ideals of righteousness could
   maintain. In respect of will thus viewed, we can only say,

     "How free we seem, how fettered fast we lie."

   The conviction that duty is power, on the contrary, is an assurance of
   what is possible for us, not in isolation, but in our true fellowship
   both with our brethren and with the Father of our spirits, and not in
   any kind of world, but in a world the final order of which is moral and
   not material. That is to say it is a confidence essentially religious.

   Self-determination is just determination by the self. But when we stop
   there, we have only a moral individual, not a moral person. The deep
   significance of the self is its interaction with a world on which it
   depends, yet, of which, nevertheless, it should be independent. It can
   act on no impulse till that is transplanted within and becomes our
   motive; yet its aim is never the motive, but always the handling of a
   situation appointed for us by a reality outside and independent of us.
   With this situation we can deal rightly only as we are truer to
   ourselves, yet have less self-regard; as we are less dependent upon
   outside influences, yet are better served by them; as we are more loyal
   to our own ideals and heedless of all else, yet are wholly surrendered
   to a righteousness which is in no way of our appointing.

   This distinction between an isolated individual and a moral person in a
   moral world appears still more plainly in our self-legislation. Its
   independence would be mere individual preference apart from our
   dependence on a reality beyond ourselves. The more utterly personal a
   moral judgment, the more clearly it asserts itself as what ultimate
   reality decrees. It is no inference from the reality around us; yet,
   the more life seems antagonistic to all its requirements, the more it
   must be affirmed as life's one safe guide and wise interpreter. Only by
   being true to ourselves can we find the reality we must absolutely
   follow; yet, only by the sense of a reality we must absolutely follow,
   can we be true to ourselves. Thus our dependence and our independence
   would seem to be apart merely as strands of one cord, which have no
   strength unless united.

   Our moral judgment, moreover, is also dependent upon the ideals around
   us. Civilisation is so far from being identical with morality, that
   every advance in civilisation is merely a further demand upon our
   personal discernment to differ from its errors and oppose its
   corruptions. We are not, however, independent, as though it mattered
   nothing in what age or country we live. Our moral judgment, on the
   contrary, is the more independent as we most profit from human
   progress. Only from the summit of the development of human ideals is
   there any clear and wide moral outlook. But this distinction between
   faith in mere progress, which would deify history, and dependence on a
   divine purpose in progress, to be discerned amid human failure, must be
   religious.

   Finally, our self-conscious world, as a moral sphere, requires the same
   organic unity of dependence and independence. It is our moral sphere
   precisely because it is our own world, selected by our interests and
   arranged for our efforts, wherein we are always at the centre, and
   which has no circumference, but only a horizon which moves as we move
   and keeps ever arranging itself round us according to the practical
   business we must transact in it. Nevertheless, this world, though
   strictly of our self-consciousness, is wholly provided for us. True, it
   does not invade us, and we can only receive its witness by a response
   akin to moral sincerity. But this is sincere wholly as it is directed
   towards a reality beyond ourselves, in the midst of which we cannot be
   independent after any fashion we choose, but only by dependence on the
   guidance of truth. Yet this truth, which is of all things most
   independent of us, we can only follow by fidelity to our own insight.
   Thus, at the very spring of our consciousness, we find the inseparable
   demands, to be independent only by the right dependence, and dependent
   only by the right independence.

   Will is moral self-determination, but it is sustained by its true
   fellowship; it is guided by moral self-legislation, but this ought to
   be according to a conscience of right which is the meaning of reality;
   it operates in our self-conscious world, but that, being given and
   real, can only be dealt with in dependence on truth. Our dependence and
   independence must, therefore, be united in equal marriage. We are not
   independent, as though we could ride over reality; but, also, we are
   not dependent, as though reality could simply ride over us. The moral
   personality is neither absolute and self-contained, nor overborne by a
   force absolute and wholly outside; but it must, in a manner, be always
   at home, even while it lives most abroad. It knows nothing of will,
   except as it responds to the attractions of a varied outer world, but
   it only truly realises its will by possessing all things and not being
   under the power of any; it has no ideals except as it seeks the
   ultimate nature of reality, but it cannot find them till it return and
   discover them as the absolute requirements of its own constitution; it
   has no knowledge except by going out of itself and for getting itself
   in a varied world, but it can garner what it brings back only as its
   own experience.

   In the end it is a question of the world, that world which is ever new
   and provided, yet ours as it comes within our horizon, ours, moreover,
   to be possessed, and not merely contemplated and accepted. Even when it
   is a monster, there is still trembling on its lips the secret whereby
   it can be turned into our fairy princess: and religion is concerned
   simply with the discovery of that secret. In that case, how can we
   imagine religion and morality alien or even isolated interests?

   But a religion which insists merely on dependence on God, without
   giving heed to its moral conditions, is in no better case than an
   isolated morality. If morality without religion is apt to be slavery to
   accepted forms, religion without morality is apt to be slavery to
   accepted formulas. The explanation of the isolation, moreover, is the
   same. Man is thought of as a unit, and never really as a person. Just
   as the moralist thinks under such a rule of exclusion that succour by
   another person, though it were for helping us to true independence and
   freedom, is necessarily the limitation of our own, so the theologian,
   under the same rule, thinks it would be succour whether it helped us to
   independence and freedom, or merely overbore us. But if grace is
   distinguished from God's ordinary providence as efficacious according
   as it demands nothing in the helpless individual except submission,
   that is surely a condition grace, as irresistible might, could easily
   enforce; and it would be inexplicable why it suffers even the
   appearance of a person attempting, of his own insight and after his own
   purpose, to rule his own world. And the situation grows worse when we
   set up such channels of its working as the purely impersonal dominance
   of our fellow-men, which also admits of no relation except passive
   subjection.

   If grace is this kind of strong hand upon the individual, we can no
   more approve its goodness and wisdom: because a grace which can ignore
   our moral independence can have no excuse for allowing our moral
   deficiencies. If God's relation to us need only be individual, there is
   no manner of justification for an evil or even a defective world.
   Unfortunately, even in the most restricted religious sphere, the
   failure of this grace is conspicuous. Especially we have the
   uncertainties of revelation and the divisions of the Church, which, if
   grace be irresistible power acting so individually and impersonally
   that a prophet may be a pen and a pope a mouthpiece, are mere scandals
   of God's negligence. Nor are there many facts in history which, on this
   conception, religion can look in the face without attempting to impose
   dogmas upon and drill, in the spirit of a pedagogue, to give the answer
   required.

   What reason in the world, moreover, can there be, why, if grace can
   work impersonally and even have a material vehicle, it should not be
   efficacious over the whole realm of human affairs? Why should it pass
   in purity only through certain priestly channels, while all other
   rivers of truth and goodness may be polluted? No reason can be given
   except God's arbitrary will; and a will that could easily correct by
   power, and simply will not, is not good. Could it not control the
   potentates as well as the pope, and secure to their decisions a like
   infallible expression of God's own mind? Why, when He could by the mere
   finger of power have made the result so beneficent, is the actual
   outcome desolation and mutual slaughter?

   Nor is there any reason, except God's purely arbitrary good-pleasures,
   unless we distinguish His grace from His ordinary action in the world,
   by being more personal, and not by being more powerful. It is not then
   irresistible, but in the nature of the case, seeing it can only work
   through our moral independence, it can be resisted. We are never for it
   mere subjects, and much less mere pawns in God's pre-determined game,
   but it deals with us as with children, not indeed as those who are
   free, but as those whom it can only truly bless by helping them to
   attain freedom. Then we can see that human choice must have a real
   efficacy in the world, and that the struggle for good is a real
   conflict and the surrender to evil a real defeat. If man can learn, of
   his own insight and purpose, only by experience of his own mistakes,
   his life may be filled with much struggle that is otherwise futile, and
   his history be a record of much that is, for every end besides his own
   personal victory, error and failure. But the reason will be that God is
   patient, and not that He is weak. If He will not have us accept His
   purpose save as our own, discern His righteousness save by our own
   insight, and learn His thought about His world save as our own blessed
   discovery, our dependence upon Him is no more in conflict with our true
   moral independence than help given in any other perfect personal
   relation, the basis of which is mutual respect, the relation, let us
   say, of a father to the son he would equip for finding his task by his
   own insight and performing it from his own fidelity.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER IX

IMPERSONAL OPERATIONS

   Experiences, we have seen, are not personal merely because they happen
   to a person, any more than they would be nautical merely because they
   happen to a sailor. Yet the confusion between what is personal and what
   is merely individual is constant, and is responsible for identifying
   the efficacy of grace with the passivity, even the impotence of man.
   The grace which was purely the work of omnipotence, would be so
   individual that no special pleading could acquit it of partiality, yet
   would have no manner of right to be called personal. On the contrary,
   it would be irresistible for the very reason that it had no concern
   with self-determination or self-direction, or anything whatsoever of
   which any person was conscious. Being pure outside force, it might have
   so perfect an individual relation to us as to number our hairs, cleanse
   every thought of our hearts, and straighten out all crookedness of
   disposition, yet have no more personal relation to us than a storm has
   to a ship which, without permitting a rag of sail to be shown or the
   rudder to be stirred, drove it like a log into harbour. The storm would
   still be the same kind of violence which dashes more hapless vessels on
   the rocks; and this form of grace would still be the same kind of force
   as lands the non-elect into perdition.

   Direct forces act upon us individually, as upon all created things.
   Spiritual as well as material forces may thus operate, without
   requiring either our personal consent or our personal co-operation. Our
   mental disposition is as much given to us as our physical constitution,
   and the spiritual privileges with which we start life are as externally
   appointed as our social rank.

   Great remedial, recuperative influences may also act as impersonally on
   the soul as on the body. There seem to be rapid, transforming
   influences, which, in some lives at least, work enduring good. Part of
   the effect may be explained as the sudden manifestation of a hidden
   process of recuperation, which, in so far as it depended on struggle
   and aspiration, would be personal, however suddenly the strength it
   brought was exerted to rend the bonds of evil habit. A sick man is not
   suddenly cured, because the result appears suddenly in his getting out
   of bed. But it is not easy to deny that, for persons in whom any
   continuous purpose of good adequate to the change was conspicuously
   lacking, new beginnings have been effected by overpowering experiences
   which appear to be different from moral persuasion and not to be the
   fruit of moral endeavour, but to be a new impersonal gift given in the
   midst of life, a new talent, as it were, of disposition.

   Like all created things, a moral person must work with forces which are
   given, and which act, so far at least as human experience goes,
   impersonally. They fashion our life at the beginning, and how far they
   may refashion it later facts alone can show. But the moral and
   religious significance of disposition is the same, whether it be
   provided before we are ushered into the world, or be a later endowment.
   In both cases alike, it is an impersonal gift, of value only as it is
   afterwards personally employed.

   In their moral aspect, gifts of disposition, whether born with us or
   later windfalls for the recuperation of wasted powers, are simply raw
   material for the formation of character. A person naturally disposed to
   good, resolute of purpose, and with passions not easily roused by
   temptation, is, morally, just a person to whom much is given and from
   whom much will be required. Privilege has moral value only as it
   becomes responsibility; and whether we are born to it or receive it by
   unexpected bequest, makes no manner of difference. In itself,
   therefore, no kind of impersonally affected change of nature affords
   any ground for moral approval. A sudden, mysterious, mystical endowment
   of strength of will, for example, would be as impersonal and, in
   itself, as morally indifferent as a sudden access of strength of arm.
   It might be merely a "talent lodged with us useless," or even be a
   false object for moral complacency, and, in the end, a cause of moral
   disaster.

   A gift of disposition, whether as the original shoot or as a later
   graft, is not yet part of our moral selves, till, by personal use, it
   is transformed into character, though, like moments of insight and
   inspiration, it is given to be used to that end. The moral life is not
   mere hard purpose, not mere steady rowing in a tideless sea; but, on
   the other hand, the life is not moral at all which abandons itself
   rudderless even to the most favouring current. Morality is not the mere
   set of the stream, but the pilot who must endeavour to take the current
   at its flood. When, therefore, we use language accurately, we see that
   the moral self can only be a moral attainment, and cannot be directly
   forwarded by any kind of impersonal succour, how ever great may be its
   indirect obligation.

   The religious aspect of impersonal gifts is not fundamentally different
   from the moral. More willingly, as a rule, than morals, religion admits
   the existence of directly creative, and, so far as their known
   operation is concerned, purely mysterious and mystical forces. Some
   connection of them with our past experience religion, like morality,
   might desire to establish; because, while God is able of the stones to
   raise up children to Abraham, the living interest of religion is in
   God's dealings with Abraham's actual children, such as they are. But,
   whether it discover this connection or not, it gladly ascribes all to
   God, saying with the Psalmist, "He has made us, and we are His." Nor is
   there any religion which would willingly believe that He may not
   restore or reinforce what He had formed.

   Nevertheless, a spiritual gift merely given would be no more religious
   in itself than a physical gift, such as good looks, health, or power of
   endurance. Only as we reach by means of it a spiritual relation to God
   is it religious. As a mere gift to be trusted to by itself, it might
   even be irreligious; and as a substitute for a right personal relation
   to our fellows and to the Father of our spirits, it might be used, as
   every endowment may, for our undoing. To make the abundance of the
   change wrought in us the ground of our confidence is no more good
   religion, than it is good morals to make our happy disposition the
   ground of self-approbation. It might deliver us from desire, reinforce
   resolution, dispel the clouds of evil imagination, yet, if it remain
   mere gift not turned into humility towards God and service to His
   children, in no way forward in us the ends of religion. True religion
   is so far from being necessarily succoured by any sudden and
   transforming experience of what Hodge describes with the Schoolmen as a
   material change, that to rely upon it is to expose ourselves to grave
   moral and spiritual dangers.

   There is a temptation to seek an easier deliverance than victory over
   evil thoughts and evil habits, to hope to vanquish desire as easily and
   as pleasantly as we succumbed to it, to excuse ourselves, in short,
   from the moral struggle by which alone real character is formed.
   Persons who rely on this passive type of regeneration are often wanting
   in kind and patient relations to their fellows and even fall at times
   into utter uncharitableness. The reason is that right relations to men
   are for them of no significance for their relation to God, but their
   superiority, as the work of God's special operation, is rather exalted
   as the common level is lowered. Then this sense of exceptional
   spiritual privilege is mistaken for dependence upon God, while they
   make a true dependence upon God impossible by thinking themselves
   raised above life's necessary hazards and by limiting God's action to
   exceptional conditions and overpowering experiences.

   Direct, impersonal changes, therefore, instead of being esteemed the
   one form of grace upon which to rest our assurance, the one supreme
   gift to be coveted in ever more resistless measure, should, like all
   other gifts that are responsibilities, be left to God's wisdom to
   bestow. Far more earnestly than for their increase, we should pray for
   their better use; and we should even recognise that, in God's wise
   appointment for us, they may have no more place than great ability or
   large possessions. Mere daily spiritual bread may even be as necessary
   a limitation for our good as mere daily material.

   The experience of sudden conversion may, how ever, still appear to be
   personal, and yet to be impersonally effected. Is it not an invasion of
   our personality by an influx of the Divine, so overpowering as to seem
   to justify the belief that it enters through some trap-door in the
   sub-conscious, yet does it not work the most personal of all relations
   the recognition of our dependence upon a personal God and of
   brotherhood with all His children?

   Upon the problem of the sub-conscious we are not here called to enter.
   However large a place it may have in psychology, neither for morals nor
   for religion can the sub-conscious ever be more than a storehouse from
   which material is provided for their exercise. Whether it be
   replenished only from past experience or from some other source makes
   no difference in that respect. The sphere of the impersonal material
   with which religion and morals deal may be extended, if the
   sub-conscious is a source of new experiences as well as a reservoir of
   old, but, till they enter into the tasks and conflicts of conscious
   life and present personal issues for our decision, this can raise no
   question either of faith or duty. The contrary could be maintained only
   by showing that direction of conscience or a definite idea of God
   enters directly by some subliminal opening. But that view the long
   weary struggle for the ideals of righteousness and the unity of the
   Godhead makes highly improbable; nor, even if it were established,
   should we be justified in trusting a guidance so given, save as it was
   tested by our conscious faith and purpose.

   Conversion is thought to rise by unrelated miracle from the
   sub-conscious, like Aphrodite from the sea, only because of confusion
   between things that differ. If conversion means an awakening to our
   true relation both to God and man, and not merely some amendment of
   disposition, how can it be other than of conscious insight? Being a
   change of outlook -- above all in respect of the lowliest things -- how
   can it be a sub-conscious change of nature?

   A change of nature might afford the impulse which was the occasion of
   revising our view, but the insight alone can be the operation, even as
   being turned round forcibly may be the occasion of seeing, but not the
   act of vision.

   Being insight, not induction, it may be sudden; and being a perception
   of our right relation to our whole world, it may be transforming. By
   illumining our whole nature, moreover, it may at once expel the evils
   which live only in the dark; and by allowing the Divine righteousness
   and truth to make themselves heard, it may at once amend the kind of
   slavery to habit and the weakness of moral fibre which is due to
   listening only to our own desires. Yet the rapidity and extent of these
   changes are due not to mystical transformation of the soul, but to the
   hearing ear and the understanding heart perceiving a new meaning in
   things, which changes for us our whole world. Not through the
   unconscious moulding of any force is the heart truly converted, but
   through a conscious vision of the Father, whereby, this world being
   changed from our own world of pleasure and possession into God's world
   of duty and discipline, and our fellow-men into His children, all
   things become new.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER X

A GRACIOUS RELATIONSHIP

   This view of conversion as a discovery that God is worthy of trust, and
   not as a mystic change in the substance of the soul, should not be too
   lightly conceded, because, once it is understood and accepted, the
   reasons for special administrations of grace as a sort of love-philtre,
   with special persons in whom and through whom they are mainly
   efficacious, will have lost their cogency. Instead, we require the
   assurance of a gracious relation to us which would at once cease, were
   it impersonal in its dealing or restricted in the sphere of its
   goodness. Its whole quality and distinction is to seek to be personal
   on both sides, and, if any aspect of life had to be exempted from its
   wise and loving dealing, we should never know where next it might fail.

   The work of salvation which has this beginning, could be occupied only
   with revealing God's mind toward us and eliciting our mind toward Him,
   and not with cleansing our souls by a grace which acts as impersonally
   as bleaching powder whitening cotton. Thus the question of how we are
   saved comes back, as, in the end, all religious questions do, to the
   question of God's real relation to man.

   The view of the Gospels is that God deals with us as with children. On
   that point, all theologies nominally agree. But, for the most part, the
   agreement does not go beyond the terms. To one the Fatherhood of God is
   a wholly mystical relation, man being linked up with Him in a kind of
   tribal bond, by ties which, though hidden, are almost material; to
   another it is a purely ethical relation, the whole of it being
   expressed in mutual responsibilities. But a truly personal relation,
   gracious to us in all things, is, in the above sense, neither mystical
   nor moral, being simply religious, simply trust in a Person whose whole
   dealing with us proves Him worthy of trust.

   The essence of the situation is that God is our Father in the whole
   breadth of our experience, and not merely in some special sacred sphere
   of ecstasy or rite or even duty. Nothing less is at stake than the
   whole nature of the world when rightly used as God's world. The test of
   a true faith is the extent to which its religion is secular, the extent
   to which its special religious experiences are tested by the
   experiences of every day.

   In the life of Jesus nothing is more conspicuous than His meagre
   interest in specially sacred doings, and His profound interest in the
   most ordinary doings of the secular life. In His parables the only
   figures from the special religious life of a specially religious time
   are the Pharisee praying with himself in the temple, and the Priest and
   the Levite turning aside on the road to Jericho -- self-approving and
   little approved men, solitary to their heart's core. But what a varied
   secular procession of kings and slaves, and bailiffs and debtors, and
   farmers and fisher-folk, and housewives and children, and all at their
   secular occupations, with more feasting than fasting, and more
   marriages than funerals! Yet every mortal is occupied with God, and, as
   he is rightly or wrongly occupied, all his life is right or wrong.

   The customary worship was, with Jesus, also a good custom, but it
   brought too much conflict to be for Him the sanctuary of peace. The
   true and quiet and restful and inspiring means of grace He found in the
   sunrise and the sunset, and the uncertain winds and equal rain and the
   fashioning of the wayside flowers. All experience was a manifestation
   of the Father, and not least the very indifference of nature which has
   so often crushed men's hopes when they are based only on a legal and
   narrow-hearted idea of righteousness and reward. Jesus sees God
   carefully watering the field of the evil even as the field of the good,
   not in equality of indifference, but in an affectionate wisdom which
   does not give all the cake and praise to the good children and only dry
   bread and correction to the bad, because a rule of equal goodness is
   necessary for both.

   The Fatherhood of God, as manifested by Jesus Christ, has nothing to do
   with operations of grace confined to special channels and efficacious
   in special directions and undiscoverable elsewhere, but manifests
   itself in a gracious personal relation, which embraces all
   secularities. It is not as though God gave some help with our worries,
   burdens, failures, sorrows, sins, but were our Father only in spite of
   them. The gracious mind of the Father towards His children appears in
   setting all these experiences on high, with the light of His love
   shining on them and turning all their shadow into radiance.

   This relation, in its complete bearing upon life, is apt to be better
   realised by all of us in our prayers than in our theologies. In
   particular, as they directly draw near to God, Calvinist and Arminian
   ever tend to enter into a larger world where their differences are
   reconciled. And even in the Gospels, with all their varied, living
   presentation of how we ought daily to live in the world of our Father,
   nothing is so adequate to the whole scope of our relation to God as the
   Lord's Prayer.

   It is usually divided into a section which applies to God and a section
   which applies to man, the former religious, the latter moral. But this
   misses the central meaning, that there is nothing which applies to God
   which is not of practical moment for man, nor any interest of life
   which can be safeguarded apart from God.

   The whole concerns our relation to our Father, and the ruling thought,
   from first to last, is "Our Father which art in Heaven," our common
   Father in a sphere which is no less in the world for being so far above
   it. Deliverance from the Evil One, with which the prayer ends, is as
   much concerned with that name of Father as the hallowing of it, with
   which it begins; and each new petition follows from what goes before,
   expanding still farther the content of calling God our Father in
   Heaven.

   That all this name represents, all the heavenly good in which God is
   manifested as Father, should be hallowed comes first. This is for man's
   sake, and not merely for God's honour, because reverence for the
   highest is man's deepest need, what he reverences being, in his inmost
   heart, what he is, and in his ultimate attainment, what he will be.
   Being deliverance from all idolatry, the acceptance of God's Rule
   follows. Then loyalty to it finds the doing of God's will to be the
   only final good. The battle being thus set in array between the kingdom
   of light and the anarchy of darkness, as good soldiers of God, we are
   assured of the supply of our material wants in the measure to fit us
   for our task. Being thereby no longer aggrieved with God or in rivalry
   with man, we know our unworthiness in our high calling and our need of
   forgiveness from God, and are able to discover its efficacy by
   forgiving others. Finally, facing temptation as one battle with evil,
   we know its power and find in God the hope of deliverance. This is the
   religious order.

   Mere morality proceeds in the opposite direction. Let us resist
   temptation, face our sins, endure hardness. So let us begin to do God's
   will, that His Kingdom may be gradually brought in, and, in the end,
   every heart be inspired by the true reverence! The result is striving
   and crying, with the perpetual menace of defeat and the increasing
   shadow of despair. But the servant of the Lord should not strive, nor
   be, after that fashion, morally strenuous. An essentially apocalyptic
   hope, a dependence, not on man who runs, but on God who gives the
   victory, dominates this prayer as it does all our Lord's teaching. Yet
   by it man's achievement arrives at victory. The order is first
   reverence, then surrender, then obedience, yet always one and
   indivisible, even when successive in their manifestation.

   Here we find a truly personal relation to our Father, with its gospel
   inseparable from its ethic and its ethic inseparable from its gospel,
   with its moral independence always inspired by its religious dependence
   and its religious dependence ever showing its vital force in our moral
   independence.

   The same attitude is manifest in all our Lord's life and teaching. His
   concern is not with operations of grace affecting the mysterious
   sources of life, but with the conduct of life itself. Yet the central
   interest is no more moral than it is mystical, but is the religious
   presentation of life as all of it, except in so far as we prevent it,
   the manifestation of a gracious Father. Thus, in all events alike, we
   discover one gracious relation to us which makes them all cry in our
   hearts, "Abba, Father." Yet this is to be realised in the service of
   God's children, and not in ecstatic emotion; for, by the love of the
   brethren alone, can we realise our place in the family of God.

   Attention is thus transferred from abstract reasoning about the kind of
   finality which becomes omnipotence, to the true relation of our Father
   with ourselves, from a relation of grace which prevails the more the
   less it is personal, to a gracious relationship which succeeds only as
   it becomes intimately personal. Then such distinctions as one grace
   which is wholly common and another which is wholly efficacious, one
   which is through sacred channels and another through secular, one equal
   only to civil righteousness and another equal to the Divine
   requirements, can no longer find a place. Even if such operations
   exist, they concern religion only as they are brought into connection
   with a right or wrong personal relation to God. In the right relation,
   nothing is common, every thing is efficacious for spiritual good; in
   the wrong relation, nothing is efficacious, everything is common. Thus
   the daily drudgery might crown us with the dignity of faithful,
   self-forgetting, humble service, while our most overwhelming mystical
   experience might turn into spiritual pride and uncharitableness.

   If these considerations are sound, Augustinianisms have all started
   out, from the beginning, on the wrong road. Attention is fixed on grace
   as a gift merely given, and on works as human resolves merely carried
   through, with no attention paid to the gracious relation of the Father
   to His children which does away with all that hard contrast between
   tasks and gifts. How utter is the failure would appear in this alone
   that grace is conceived as irresistible precisely because it is not
   conceived as gracious.

   Pelagianisms and semi-Pelagianisms, making the same false start, fail
   even more utterly, because, setting God's grace and man's resolution in
   the same opposition, they assign so much to God and so much to man,
   which necessarily ends with the emphasis on man's doings and not God's.
   Such an idea could only arise when God's true personal relation to His
   children had been ignored and His impersonal doings put in the
   foreground.

   In a right relation of persons, especially of father and child, the
   help of the one does not end where the effort of the other begins. A
   son is distinguished from a servant by such perfection of help that his
   dependence on his father is the unfailing spring of his independence
   and mastery, and no manner of encroachment on his self-reliance. And
   how otherwise are we to be sons of God? Not surely as mere tools or
   sycophants!

   This gracious relation cannot provide the flawless world to be expected
   from grace as overriding omnipotence guided by omniscience, because a
   personal relation can only work as it meets response, and response
   means that we can only accept God's will and rely on it by seeing it to
   be good, even the use of the world which alone is blessed. In short, we
   can only accept God's will as, by insight, we discover it to be our
   own. But, if we measure the world by a different good and pursue ends
   in it God has not blessed, what we work in it is evil and what we hope
   from it disappoints. It is calamitous, not merely in appearance, but in
   reality, because only for serving God's end is it good.

   There is, therefore, no such thing possible as a natural belief in
   Providence, because the world is not good on mere natural values. For
   such ends as comfort or health or prosperity to all or even as material
   rewards to the righteous, it is ostentatiously not good. A true belief
   in Providence is the goal and not the starting-point of religion, a
   prophetic victory over evil and not a metaphysical optimism about the
   balance of good. Yet unnecessary intellectual difficulties are made for
   faith by confusing a personal with a merely individual relation to God.
   The best ordered household can be most graciously personal; the
   individual treatment of the fond and foolish parent may make no home
   but a bear-garden. Were the universe managed as our private concern, we
   should merely be God's spoilt children. A personal rule, on the
   contrary, expects us to honour the system by which all are benefited
   and does not hesitate to allow us to suffer the consequences of
   breaches of it, even though they be not our own, because we cannot be
   blessed apart from our place in God's family. But the system is
   personal if its end is to help persons, in freedom and independence,
   both in their own souls and in their service of their brethren, to
   fulfil themselves.

   The conception of God's rule as individual, with out any regard to the
   conditions which would make it personal, turns this bearing with and
   for others into mere indiscriminate punishment: and from this most of
   our perplexities regarding the ways of Providence arise. No room is
   left for moral system or for any use of it in freedom. If God permit
   sin or suffering He has already come short. How, then, shall we expect
   Him to remedy what He should never have allowed? Would we, in face of
   this necessary conclusion from the individual view of God's rule, still
   maintain that it is both omnipotent and good, we must pass delicately
   over sin and evil, as a phase of development due to finiteness in its
   object or irregularity in its progress. When the stress, as at this
   present time, becomes too severe for so comfortable a judgment, and sin
   insists on showing itself exceeding wicked and evil exceeding
   calamitous, the only way left, on this individual, but not personal
   view, is to return to the old Dualism. In it God's rule is good, but
   not omnipotent. There is a world of self-existing, brute forces, amid
   which a good God is struggling as best He may. God is a kind Person
   doing His utmost to reinforce the good, but He is hedged in by blind
   resisting powers, much as we are. Taken seriously, this would mean a
   return to the old agonising sense of doubtful conflict in life, with
   all its murky pantheon of the powers of darkness, and with the old
   Manichaean demand for an ascetic renunciation of the world as evil.

   Religion is then no more a victory over the world, but only a not very
   weather-tight individual shelter in the general storm. Goodness is no
   more the ultimate meaning of the world, but an alien benevolence
   precariously imposed upon it; and no religion can have what was the
   supreme attraction of Christianity for the ancient world, that it gave
   to God "the sole monarchy." Nor is there any better way so long as we
   think that God deals with us merely as individuals, whom, if He could,
   He would manufacture to His mind, and forget that a personal relation
   has two sides, which require us to find God's world also our world and
   His mind our mind and His service our service, and all by our own
   insight and devotion, and that the essence of a personal system is not
   to manufacture us good, but to help us to win our freedom and the right
   use of it together. In that case God cannot relieve us of our
   responsibility even when calamitous. Without it we might be the clay
   and He the Potter, but we should not be children and He our Father.
   Only with responsibility are sins real disasters, but the victory of
   responsible freedom is an end great enough to justify so perilous a
   road, for, without it, God would merely have a dull universe of
   perfectly manipulated marionettes.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    PART II

                         THE MODE OF ITS MANIFESTATION
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER I

BLESSEDNESS

   If the relation of God to us is one gracious dealing because it
   includes all things, life is made blessed in the assurance that all
   things work for good.

   Such a confidence in good is a challenge to live our life to the full,
   but, unfortunately for its appeal to the active and energetic, the
   usual associations of blessedness are with a heaven to be won by
   submissiveness to evil as God's mere inscrutable will, and not with
   fullness of life. For anyone who has ever loved to hear the cordage
   sing in a gale, or to pursue breathlessly an elusive secret of nature
   in a laboratory, or to fight in the arena for liberty and progress, a
   life of mere submissiveness, however great be its reward in a future
   life, has no attraction. The aureole of its anaemic calm is, for them,
   in the same class as the merriness of England which would wet-nurse
   them back into second infancy by the mechanical smoothness of its
   social machinery. And this passive state is made even less attractive,
   when it appears that we must keep ourselves in it by constant effort,
   like restless boys under the necessity of behaving as becomes their
   Sunday apparel.

   This impression is constantly left on us, in particular, by the
   interpretation of the Beatitudes. As the supreme account of the blessed
   state, they have been called the essence of the Gospel. But, when they
   are set forth purely as a series of moral precepts, which are
   heart-searching, but repressive, in respect of motive, and
   far-reaching, but passive, in respect of performance, they sadly lack
   the joyful witness to themselves which is the essence of good news. A
   higher moral demand, not content with conformity of act, but
   penetrating to the intents and thoughts of the heart, while remaining a
   mere imperative of conscience, would, in any case, be a ground of
   despair, and not of blessedness; but, if it be also mainly for
   repression and passive submission, it would not, like a positive
   struggle for victory, even rally our energies to steel our hearts to
   endure.

   The Beatitudes deserve their name, precisely because they are not
   negative moral imperatives to be obeyed by resolution and effort, but
   are a religious programme of how we can have absolute moral
   independence in the world by discovering how utterly God is to be
   depended upon. They are not moral precepts distinguished from other
   morality by requiring motives still farther beyond the best resolution
   to provide, but are the inspiration of faith and hope and love through
   which morality becomes the liberty of God's children. In short they are
   the good news of victorious freedom and not a moral code to enslave by
   impossible rules of refraining from evil.

   The less systematised form of the Beatitudes in Luke is usually taken
   to be nearer the original than the more complete and balanced form in
   Matthew. But Luke is not usually the more careful and complete reporter
   of our Lord's sayings; the balanced, gnomic form has parallels in other
   sayings; repetition, even in our day when we can verify quotations,
   rubs down and does not add definition to the original; finally, the
   "poor" also in Luke may have the special spiritual meaning of its
   Hebrew equivalent, and the later tendency to exalt material poverty
   makes it unlikely that it was the original and spiritual poverty a
   meaning afterwards imposed on it. But, while the complete form is thus
   more probably the original, it would not be of less significance as an
   account of the way of blessedness, had it been perfected by the
   thoughts of many who had tried to follow in Christ's footsteps.

   God's relation to us, we have seen, may not be determined by abstract
   argument from the operation of omnipotence, and is only to be known by
   our experience of His purpose. As His purpose is concerned with us as
   moral persons, we have also seen that the true nature of His grace must
   be determined by what moral personality really is. The impossibility
   that grace should be a direct and overwhelming power, we have further
   seen, at once appears when we discern that the essential quality which
   distinguishes a person from all else in the world is autonomy.
   Autonomy, we found to mean more than mere freedom of the will, a truly
   moral person being self-determined according to his own self-direction,
   or, in other words, by his own conscience of right, and in a world
   which, by mastery in it, he has made his own self-conscious dominion.

   This may seem a very technical scheme to apply to the Beatitudes: and
   it is not suggested that Jesus consciously constructed them after any
   such pattern. Their concrete simplicity of form is at once their beauty
   and their power. They are religious intuition, not abstract reasoning.
   But, being an intuition of life as a whole, they can be interpreted on
   principles which apply to life as a whole. Nor, in this case, is the
   application either difficult or forced, because inheriting the earth
   cannot mean in material possession, but only by finding it our true
   sphere; seeing God, being a present state, can only mean for our true
   guidance; the great reward in the heavenly kingdom is victory over evil
   without and within, And these sayings sum up the effect of each of the
   three groups of which the Beatitudes are composed.

   Thus, the first group sets forth the nature of a blessed
   self-consciousness; the second, the nature of a blessed self-direction;
   the third, the nature of a blessed self-determination. To be poor in
   spirit is to live under God's rule and possess the world as ours
   because it is God's; to hunger and thirst after righteousness is to
   find God's guidance and be directed of our own insight; to be
   peacemakers is to determine our ways like God's children and have His
   victory over evil without and within.

   Yet it is to be observed that Jesus reverses the order we have followed
   and commences with the world. The reason is that He would start from
   faith and not from resolution, in short, that His order is religious
   and not moral. The good news is that we are in our own true world
   because it is God's, and the rest follows. Yet the moral victory is not
   merely added, because there is, in practice, no relation to God which
   is not realised through a relation to man. Therefore, in each case, the
   relation to man comes before the relation to God.

   The first three beatitudes show how we are blessed in our whole
   conscious world.

   The first is the key-note which determines the religious music of the
   whole. The blessedness of the Rule of Heaven is only for the poor in
   spirit, only for those who utterly accept God's will for them, only for
   those who have learned complete religious dependence.

   Poverty of spirit is not a Stoic temper of endurance, or an Epicurean
   temper of making the best of it. Still less is it a Fatalist temper
   which despairs of all remedy. Because it must be won against pride and
   self-will, its form is negative; but it is poverty towards God not
   towards life. On the contrary, it is the positive discovery of the end
   for which the whole world of which we are conscious is of God's
   gracious appointment, making all of it ours, all within our power for
   our victory over it, if in no other way, by a victorious attitude of
   soul which trusts that God has a worthy end to serve through it, even
   when it is rather of man's evil devising than of God's appointing.

   Poverty of spirit is no steeling of the heart which asks:


   "What reinforcement we may gain from hope;

   If not, what resolution from despair."

   It is a present possession which delivers from all temptation to make
   the world plastic to our desire, or to select from it only what we
   approve according to our ideas of immediate pleasure or visible
   possession, and which lays us open to all life's lessons and all life's
   demands, in the whole breadth of God's appointment. Thus it may be
   summed up as acceptance of the duty God demands and acquiescence in the
   discipline He appoints, not as submission to the inevitable, but as the
   discovery that our blessedness is in God's purpose in the world and
   beyond it. So long as we can shun life's worst tasks and trials, we
   might be happy, but to be blessed is to know that there are none we
   ever need to shun, because, through our Father's unfailingly gracious
   relation to us in all things, there is nothing we may not face and turn
   to profit.

   As our own world, under our own management, for the service only of our
   own desires, it is not a great exaggeration to describe life in it as
   "a tale told by an idiot." We can neither add God to it, in the hope
   that He will ultimately shape it more to our liking, nor find God in it
   by some process of selection and distillation. In one sense, we find
   God through the world. The world is there for that very purpose. Yet,
   without God's purpose in it and beyond it, the world has neither
   meaning nor good. To call it, by itself, God's world is merely to live
   in a precarious optimism, which is sufficiently refuted by the way
   every heroic soul has been received in it, and especially by the
   poverty, the hatred, the criminal's execution it accorded to Him who
   uttered these sayings. Yet, in that very defeat in shame and agony and
   death, He displayed the use of the world, from which no evil in it was
   to be excepted, but the worst could be discerned as working for good.

   The difference is not merely between a world made by God and a world
   made by cosmic process, but between a world God uses to serve a purpose
   beyond it, and a world with its purpose in itself and its good only in
   what we can immediately possess and enjoy.

   This assurance of a world in which, if we have no rebellion when we
   hear God's call and follow His purpose, even sin and sorrow are no more
   our foes, is the foundation of the whole blessed state. The question is
   not whether this faith is edifying, but whether it is true, whether God
   has actually made the world so that it can be possessed by high
   consecration to His purpose, and is lost when we seek its purpose in
   itself, as though God had merely made it, and His rule were no
   continuous part of its reality.

   This blessed possession of the world as God's Realm by the poor in
   spirit gives sympathy toward men and meekness toward God.

   The way to happiness is often the comfort of ignoring suffering, but
   the way to a blessedness which would embrace all experience, must be
   the way of sympathy, because from hardness or indifference the true
   purpose and value of life's conflicts and sorrows are hidden. To mourn,
   therefore, is to be comforted, because it is a response to life's
   deepest meaning, and not mere desire to be dismal, and to pass through
   the world as a vale of tears, our eyes red with weeping, our cheeks
   white with pining, our hearts resolute to accept no joy. A cherished
   grief is selfish, and selfishness is never blessed. Nor could a
   cultivated gloom be comforted any more in another world than in this,
   for a habit of sadness would only feel aggrieved by a change of scene
   which precluded its exercise. To mourn, on the contrary, is to be
   unselfish, with the large unselfishness which exposes our hearts to
   feel with others and confers on our hands the facility to help.

   The reason why such sympathy is blessed is not to be sought in the
   nature of human emotion, even though it be true that to be incapable of
   sorrow is also to be incapable of joy, but is due to the nature of
   things. Not because we are sensitive souls are we comforted, but
   because sympathy is the way to discover that the true meaning and value
   of life lie behind life's tasks and trials, and not behind its
   pleasures and possessions. The lust for pleasure and possession, which
   makes us hide our face from our brother's need, bars for us the road to
   reality; while fellowship with our brother's conflict and pain enables
   us to find God's end in the whole of life, and not merely in the part a
   selfish hardness would select. If we would have the comfort of God's
   blessed use of all life, we must not allow the monotony of sin and
   suffering to act upon us like the drip from our eaves, which first
   wakes us to think of the belated traveller and then sends us to sleep
   in the comfortable sense that our own roof is weather-proof. Above all,
   repetition must be to us the opposite of a reason for dulling our
   sympathy with every fresh heart that suffers, or for being blind to the
   disaster of every fresh soul that is overcome. Faith in God is not the
   hypothesis of an easy indifference, but is the victory which overcomes
   the world by transmuting its failure and conflict and pain. The most
   selfish hardness might believe in special acts of grace, by attention
   to which we might be able to ignore the rest of experience, but only
   sympathy can discover the gracious relation of the Father to all His
   children, from the scope of which nothing is omitted.

   Through this sympathy we gain the insight into God's patient purpose of
   good which enables us to be meek. But, in that case, meekness has
   little to do with the conventional, stained-glass window presentation
   of it as bloodless mildness. If meekness is mere pliancy, as of the
   willow before the storm, He who offered us peace because He was meek
   and lowly in heart, must have been far astray about Himself. Why,
   moreover, should the special blessing of it be to inherit the earth? To
   pious renunciation of earth it might help us; but what could it do to
   enable us to hold the earth in blessed possession?

   True meekness is the relation to the Father of our spirits which, by
   laying us open to His whole purpose, shows us all things in the earth
   working for it. It is opposed, not to energy or courage, but to the
   haughtiness of spirit which, measuring by its own end and estimating
   possession by its own private estate, can at most inherit in the earth
   -- and that only under the most favourable conditions -- the very small
   part which pampers appetite and provides the pomp and circumstance of
   place. And even this meagre portion it has only the illusion of
   possessing, because what feeds the lusts of the flesh and the lusts of
   the eye and the pride of life, comes to hold us as its thrall. Only as
   we discover in them a purpose worthy of us as children of God are all
   things ours, things secular as well as things sacred, sorrows as well
   as joys, the weakness of decay as well as the buoyancy of youth,
   failure as well as success, loneliness as well as friendship, death as
   well as life. Then, in the whole realm of our self-conscious world, we
   are in blessed possession of our true moral independence.

   The next three beatitudes set forth the blessed direction of ourselves
   in this world which is ours.

   Under God's Rule absolute righteousness alone can direct us: and hunger
   and thirst after it is the only satisfaction.

   A conscience merely morally determined only lays down rules, and is too
   easily satisfied if they are not obviously broken. But the supreme test
   is not to be conscientious up to the measure of rules of universal
   application. It is to be continually in search of a more penetrating
   discernment. As we for ever hunger and thirst after righteousness, and
   not as we obey a code of accepted moral imperatives, are we truly
   conscientious.

   But, if the moral demand is thus without limits, a blessed state, in
   which we could enjoy a sense of moral independence, would seem to be
   placed beyond all hope of attainment. How, if it is of the essence of
   our morality never to be satisfied, can we ever be filled? We are never
   allowed to feel that we have done what is required of us. Our measure
   is the perfection of our Father in Heaven. After our best devotion, we
   are still unprofitable servants. That striving after the infinite,
   moreover, springs directly from the religious source of our moral
   judgments. Only those who love God are called according to His purpose.
   But if love is the fulfilling of the law, it is a law without
   definition or measure or finality. To love God with all our heart and
   to apply it by loving our neighbour as ourselves makes our best
   approximation a harassing futility by the immediate extension of the
   requirement.

   Rather than be troubled by a conscience with this hunger after a
   limitless righteousness, men will accept the sternest imperative from
   without, for, when its measure is fulfilled, they can sit down in the
   sunshine of self-approval.

   Yet there is a security on the ocean never to be won by hugging the
   shore. The righteousness which is no longer a rule, but the infinite
   requirement of love, changes from a code into an inspiration which
   transforms the measurelessness of duty into the measurelessness of
   faith, the measurelessness of what God means and will accomplish. With
   escape from care about conforming to rule, anxiety about merit also
   departs; while, under the guidance of the perfect law of liberty, the
   humblest tasks assume the worth of serving in God's household. With the
   solemn splendour of the stars uplifting our hearts and their far
   travelling light upon our way, we can unite an ever increasing
   endeavour with an ever deepening peace, in a way foreign to every form
   of moral imperative and in an independence of human approval never to
   be won by a merely moral attitude.

   A quiet sense of possession, with an ever increasing endeavour after an
   ever enlarging purpose, which gives freedom from every standard of
   anxious merit, every right moral judgment of life demands, but no rules
   of a merely moral judgment of life can supply. A measured moral
   imperative must be changed into the measurelessness of an infinite
   religious aspiration and assurance, into a hungering and thirsting
   after righteousness which has its only measure in the infinite love of
   God, before we can have both ceaseless aspiration and lasting peace.

   The practical effect is mercifulness in our judgment of others, whereby
   our eyes are purified for seeing God.

   Hunger and thirst after righteousness approves itself as real and
   unrestricted, by mercifulness in our judgment of our fellows. By this
   mercifulness we also obtain mercy. This blessing is not attached merely
   externally by a kind of equity which will treat us as we treat others,
   but it is a law organic in its nature and direct in its working,
   something which is a necessary moral result.

   A conscience which has found in the infinite righteousness the perfect
   law of liberty, has abandoned the external and restricted standards
   which make swift condemnation easy and confident, and has seen the
   blessed hope which changes anger against iniquity into sorrow for those
   who have turned aside from God's gracious way. And this vision of God's
   infinite purpose, which silences legal judgment and estimates man's
   failure according to the Divine compassion, also sets our own failure
   in the light of God's mercy, and teaches us, by our own forgiving, how
   God forgives.

   Thus we reach the purity which sees God. Without mercifulness purity
   might mean no more than refraining, after a negative fashion, from
   obvious breaches of an external code, such purity, for example, as is
   claimed by the Perfectionists, and is little more than respectability.
   Then seeing God would mean no more than believing in a Moral Legislator
   who always acts upon the strictest principles of retribution. As He
   manifestly does not so act in this world where the tabernacles of
   robbers prosper and those who fear God are despised, even that belief
   must be transferred to another life. But, if God is the same and man
   the same, why, only because we are unhappy in our virtue, should we
   expect a radical change of method merely from change of scene?

   The pure in heart need no new scene to manifest God's blessed rule, for
   they are purged by mercy from the crude and self-regarding association
   of rights and rewards which interprets His equal providence as
   universal indifference, and not as immeasurable patience and gracious
   pity. To be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect is no cloistered
   withdrawing from the contamination of an evil world, but to be like Him
   in kindness to the unthankful and evil, and, through our own heart of
   compassion, to see Him as a love which, without partiality, is
   concerned about the good of all His children, and not least the sinful
   and wayward, and which does not determine its action by mere household
   rules of good behaviour.

   A spirit in judging which grows gentler as it grows more pure, and
   purer as it grows more gentle, which forgives more easily as it sees
   more clearly the sin to be forgiven, every right moral judgment
   requires, but no mere moral judgment can provide out of the hard
   approval and disapproval of its imperatives. On the contrary, it always
   ends in a condemnation, which, as we pass it upon others, is ever apt
   to return upon our own heads. To shield ourselves we are tempted to
   compromise with human nature, till our moral rules do little more than
   condemn obviously disastrous crimes and vices. But, as the demands of
   outward respectability do not grow less harsh as they become more
   superficial, the mere moralist ends as a death's head at life's feast.
   He never can become its living and gracious president till he discovers
   the infinite value of man to God, without which morals are little more
   than rules of prudence, which it may be part of life's cheerful hazard
   to deny. We are morally independent, not as we see ourselves in
   isolation, and are, therefore, negative, legal and hard, but as we see
   God, in whose infinite holy purpose we find a love which is our true
   good, and become at once penetrating in our judgment of sin and pitiful
   to the sinful. And as such a God is wholly without arbitrariness,
   conscience cannot be too independent in judging of His righteousness.

   The remaining beatitudes and, with them, all that follows set forth the
   blessed determination of ourselves which gives us victory in this
   world.

   We are to approve ourselves children of God by setting our wills upon
   making peace.

   Here we find the presupposition of the whole conception of blessedness.
   Reality alone can be the durable basis of peace; and righteousness is
   the same as reality, if we are made in God's image. With error and
   evil, even the semblance of peace cannot, by any dexterity, evasion or
   compromise, be long maintained. The more compromises are dressed out as
   principles, the more evil imaginations are gracefully suggested, the
   more oppressions are unassailed, the more self-indulgence is approved
   as a mark of superiority, and, in general, the more hypocrisies are
   held in esteem, the more utterly, in the end, is peace undermined.
   Blessedness can rest on nothing less than peace, peace on nothing less
   than reality, reality on nothing less than righteousness: therefore,
   the blessed task is to work for truth and righteousness. Under God's
   rule there can be no peace by way of illusion, or what the prophet
   calls "agreement with hell to be at peace with it": therefore, there
   can be no peace by seeking to lead quiet and peaceable lives in
   convenient blindness and passing by on the other side, and keeping
   generally on the safe side of the hedge, but only by a resolutely
   veracious will, which is neither to be attracted by the pleasant ways
   of evil nor dismayed by its threats. As that is how God seeks peace,
   that is how we are His sons. But the secret is reconciliation, not
   resolution, a reconciliation which can enable us to bear any cross
   which is God's will, but which is of God's working and not of man's
   achieving.

   Here, too, we are first concerned with our relation to men. The work of
   making peace, however much it may give us peace within, does not give
   us outward peace, but exposes us to being persecuted for righteousness'
   sake and having all manner of evil said against us falsely, for the
   sake of Him who is the Prince of Peace because He, alone among men,
   never accepted any terms nor agreed to any truce in the warfare for
   truth and righteousness.

   By this certainty of being brought sooner or later into conflict with
   falsehood and unrighteousness, the peacemaker is shown to be a very
   different person from the peaceable. They are, indeed, as wide apart as
   eternal right and immediate expediency, as the way of victory and the
   path of least resistance.

   The peaceable are so far from being peacemakers that they are peace's
   most deadly and deceiving foes. From the days of the false prophets
   who, by saying, "Peace, Peace," when there was no peace, brought their
   country to irretrievable ruin, all down the ages, it has been the same
   story. Their principle of letting sleeping dogs lie has provided the
   indulgence upon which every villainy can rely till it is ripe for
   disturbance. The true peacemaker, on the contrary, must be an active
   and resolute guardian of the peace, who so bears himself in the world
   that all the powers of evil are sure to try to bear him down both by
   violence and by misrepresentation.

   Thus every peacemaker is a fighter; yet he is not a peacemaker merely
   by fighting even in the cause of truth and righteousness. To make peace
   we must ourselves possess it; and there is no mark of possessing it
   like freedom from anger or impatience at persecution and
   misrepresentation. But freedom from resentment does not mean merely
   control of our tempers. It means a quietness of heart the world cannot
   give nor take away, because the Kingdom of God is truly ours, and,
   under this rule, evil is weak and we need not rage when it wastes its
   strength, and righteousness is secure and we need not be depressed when
   it is left to grow strong in the shade, the peace of Him, whose Cross,
   though the triumph of wickedness, was the exposure of its weakness and
   the healing of a great pity for its folly.

   In spite of all the opposition of evil, our relations with men are made
   blessed by the quiet confidence which has too large a security to envy
   the prosperity of the wicked, and the quiet veracity which is quite
   simple because its eye is single and its whole body full of light. But
   this full blessedness appears only when, in courageous conflict with
   evil, we discern our true relation to God in the Kingdom of Heaven.
   Being a prophet's victory, it brings a prophet's reward, in a clear
   vision of God's purpose in the world, which shall abide when all else
   passes away, and be our perfect reward when we have become its perfect
   subjects.

   This promise of a reward might seem to lead us back to the idea of
   religion as an external bribe, and to corrupt the moral will at the
   moment of seeming to sustain it only by the blessing of goodness, and
   to burden all our endeavour by anxious care for our merit. But the
   blessedness of living in the perfect rule of God ceases to be mere
   future and external reward, and becomes the native air of our spirits
   in which alone we can maintain an unconquerable will, when, through
   seeking peace with our fellow-men only in sincerity, we enter into
   fellowship with the Father of our spirits in His Kingdom. As our
   serenity in conflict and our assurance of triumph, however great be its
   blessing in this life or its promise for another, God's Rule is never
   for us a mere external reward and our service of it is never to acquire
   merit to gain its reward. Its heavenly reward is to be salt and light
   amid the corruption and darkness of this present world.

   But its final victory is in dealing with God, in being able to meet the
   judgment of Heaven, which is concerned with the heart and not with the
   outward appearance, before which hatred is murder, lust adultery, and
   all unveracity of soul as a broken oath. This is the crowning victory
   of our self-determination, without which all our effort after good is a
   vain attempt to make a corrupt tree produce good fruit.

   Only as we are thus masters in our own souls, have we any true moral
   independence. Yet this independence, which is so necessary for the
   moral will, is utterly beyond mere moral effort, working in our own
   world for our own purpose. Only by finding ourselves in God's world as
   a new creation, which, for His purpose is gracious in all its dealing
   with us, is a new creation in our souls a possibility. Unless we serve
   under a rule of goodness we cannot be blessed: and no morality can be
   strong which is not blessed. But the strength of breathing our native
   air no morality can, from its own resources, supply; and, when it makes
   the attempt, it only offers a reward which forces upon us a
   consideration of our merit which is too external to be moral and too
   much a cause of anxiety to be blessed.

   Blessedness concerns a gospel and not merely a morality; and yet it
   manifests itself as a gospel only as it calls forth a profounder
   morality. Its concern is with the Kingdom of God, but we only find that
   rule as we discover that it is our own. We have to do with God, but
   with a God who has to do with man. A true theology is merely an
   exposition of all that this involves, and it is a gospel only in virtue
   of its theology; yet, as Christ's life and death were its only perfect
   incarnation, its essential concern is with right living and right
   dying.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER II

REDEMPTION

   While in the Beatitudes the will is made good mainly by insight, in the
   ordinary moral teaching it is made good wholly by effort. Morality is
   then our own stroke; and, if religion is needed, it is only as a
   swimming-belt. The dependence of morality on religion which history
   makes plain, is regarded as a sort of first aid in learning to float.
   Law, we are told, at first appeals to religion, and morality to law,
   but, like learning to swim on bladders, the better the end is served
   the more temporary the utility. With progress, law ceases to be
   enforced by the thunders of Sinai and right and wrong have other
   sanctions than Heaven and Hell.

   Many accept this view, yet still maintain the abiding need of religion
   on the ground that morality will always need such external support.
   They point to the length of the course and how man wearies in running
   it. And experience doubtless confirms all they say about man's failure,
   even with the bliss of Heaven and the terrors of Hell before his eyes
   and all promise of help to flee from the wrath to come. But religion
   and morality, when thus associated, are both set in a false light.

   In the first place, even if morality need that help from religion, the
   less help were needed the better, seeing that the essence of moral
   progress is to have conscience of right and wrong by direct insight
   into their own nature, and to be able to act upon reverence for good
   for its own sake. Hence we should ever be less religious as we became
   more moral.

   In the second place, the backing of our wills by religious rewards and
   punishments or any extraneous help would corrupt the will by selfish,
   non-moral motive and lymphatic non-moral dependence, and could not help
   to make the will good, could, indeed, not fail to corrupt it.

   Religion as a device for reinforcing morality, calling in God merely to
   fill up the gaps in our own effort or to enforce the judgments our
   consciences fail to maintain, dangerously resembles a mixture of
   bribery and magic. Not after that fashion ought it to be a physician
   for the sick.

   The Beatitudes take a different road. They start from the view that a
   good will is primarily of insight, not of effort. Religion is then no
   more merely a lifebelt, but is our atmosphere, our native buoyancy as
   it fills our lungs and our native strength as it nourishes our blood,
   the more necessary for us the greater our effort. The question of God
   is the question not of an outwardly reinforced, but of an inwardly
   blessed morality.

   A blessed morality is not one free from conflict, but one which enables
   us to fight as the citizens of a moral universe, and not as Ishmaelites
   in a moral wilderness. In that case it must be a religious morality.
   The question of God is just the question of whether morality is the
   ultimate reality or only a passing convention; and that means, whether
   we reach it best by rules or by penetration and sensitiveness, by
   setting our teeth or by finding the true fellowship of our spirits.

   This question concerns nothing less than the nature of the world. Is it
   a world such as Jesus conceived it, where, if we seek first the Kingdom
   of God and its righteousness, all the rest is secure; or is it such a
   world as Huxley propounded, where morality is a nightmare accident, to
   be maintained, at most for a little space and for a little time,
   against a natural order which can be effectively used only by the
   cunning of the ape and the ferocity of the tiger? In the former case
   alone can the strength of a good will be insight, sensitive and
   penetrating; in the latter the best it can do is to stick to rules and
   set its teeth.

   Morality can only be blessed in the assurance that the world is God's
   and, in its final purpose, good. But, as it appears and as we measure
   it, it is not good. Nor can we, by any high resolve we are capable of
   exercising, either isolate ourselves from the evil or turn it into
   good. "My mind to me a kingdom is" is but vaguely true at best, seeing
   how every experience is of mind and how nothing in our mind can be
   withdrawn from the influence of our whole experience. As a realm within
   our control, it is so far from being a blessed possession that our
   fortitude is little more secure than our fortune and our misery at
   least as much of our folly as of our fate. The world cannot be taken
   apart from human use of it, so that we must include in it, not only the
   society of our fellow-men as we share in it, but our own resolve as we
   exercise it. And thence come its chief evils, both moral and material.

   No religion which has deeply influenced mankind has ever sought
   blessedness in the world as it appears, but always by redemption from
   that world; and, the more fully it has faced the issues of life, the
   more it has included society as part of the world, and ourselves as
   members of society. From other religions Christianity is distinguished,
   in this regard, only by a more earnest insistence on the necessity of
   redemption and by embracing everything more entirely in its scope. Even
   Buddhism does not travel through as dark a pessimism, for what are
   virtues for Buddha are often only hypocritical respectabilities for
   Jesus; while, with Jesus, not only does the fashion of this world pass
   and its lusts with it, as with Buddha, but the ruler of it, while it
   lasts, is the Father of Lies, maintained in his pre-eminence by hearts
   deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

   Redemption from the vanity and vexation of the world, as our world to
   be measured by our pleasure and valued as we possess it for ourselves,
   is always the supreme religious need, and, without that redemption, we
   never can discover God's world to be measured by His purpose and valued
   by what He gives us to possess. Not till we learn that all things work
   for evil to those who love themselves and seek their own pleasure and
   possession in the world, can we discover that all things work for good
   to those who love God and seek His purpose in the world.

   No faith in God is worth anything which has not faced this need of
   redemption from the world. Without that, it is at best an easy trust
   that a pretty comfortable world has a fairly benevolent origin, which
   adds nothing to the world as we actually experience it. So long as the
   world, on the whole, agrees with us, that kind of belief in God is not
   difficult, but, as it alters nothing in our view of the world, it can,
   with equal ease, be neglected as a superfluity or even denied as an
   irrelevancy. What we have lightly accepted we can as lightly reject.
   God may be an intellectual interest, yet, being an easy, an otiose
   hypothesis, it makes no practical difference. But, if every possibility
   of discovering that this life, with all its conflicts, all its ills,
   all its evanescence, may be blessed, depends on finding life God's
   dealing with us in His world, the question of God involves every
   question worth asking, because it involves nothing less than
   blessedness in our whole experience, which, without Him, has nothing in
   it that is blessed.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER III

RECONCILIATION

   The distinctive element in the Christian religion is not any difference
   from other religions respecting the need of redemption from the world,
   except in so far as deeper moral insight may show more clearly the
   moral nature of the need, and so derive evil from sin and not directly
   from desire. What does distinguish it from all other religions is the
   kind of redemption it offers. In contrast to all ways of renunciation,
   its way of being redeemed from the world is reconciliation.

   This antithesis, thus baldly stated, might, however, mislead. Other
   religions, with the possible exception of Buddhism, also aim at
   reconciliation; and the religion which requires its followers to deny
   themselves and take up their cross and follow One whose obedience led
   to a death of shame and lingering agony, in a very high degree requires
   renunciation. But renunciation, in other religions, is first and for
   reconciliation; in Christianity, reconciliation is first and
   renunciation of value only as it is from reconciliation.

   Especially in times of great stress and calamity, when life seems hard
   to maintain and cheap to lose and innocence a poor protection and human
   policies insane imaginations and passion is spent and peace not won,
   the direct way of renunciation has such a strong attraction that it has
   drawn to it many professing the Christian name. Then the world seemed a
   canopy between the soul and God. Under it the most man could hope to do
   was to erect some candle-lit chamber of ecstasy; to keep the evil dream
   of life from sheer nightmare by the exercise of a strict ascetic rule
   to curb its fantasies; to regard the revelation of God as the lightning
   thrust of infallible truth rending at points the darkness of existence;
   and to hope for the help of grace as an occasional lift under life's
   burden.

   But a blessedness which passes through the world and man to the Father,
   manifestly takes no such direct road to redemption. We are so to deal
   with the earth as to inherit it, so to value man that we shall see God,
   so to fight for truth and righteousness as to enter His kingdom of
   peace. Ours is to be the blessedness of the prophet, the man of all men
   most determined to see "the goodness of the Lord in the land of the
   living," to let no event go till it blessed him, to suffer no wrong to
   alienate him either from peace or service. His call placed him in the
   forefront of every battle for truth and righteousness, and made him
   face the world and never flee it. No more by striving for renunciation
   than by striving for possession did he seek to conquer the world. His
   life was blessed because, through his personal relation to God, he had
   found in his life God's real meaning and purpose, and had been
   delivered from his false self in his own unreal world, to find his true
   self in God's real world.

   And how otherwise than by finding what life signifies for personal
   relations is life ever transformed? Mere gifts, apart from the giving,
   go only a very little way, and the shorter the richer the giver. "Rich
   gifts are poor, when givers prove unkind," and not much richer if the
   givers are indifferent. Wherefore it comes that no gifts from the
   measureless abundance of the Infinite, even though they were gifts of
   grace, ever speak of the mind of God towards us by themselves. Grace is
   gracious only as it manifests in the world a purpose which at once
   possesses us, yet sets us free; makes us absolutely dependent, yet
   gives us independence of all things; enables us to lose ourselves, yet
   truly, and for the first time, to find ourselves.

   No direct operation of grace as power could ever establish such an
   understanding. What is more, it could not establish a personal
   relationship at all. The more it is omnipotent in the sense of utterly
   over riding our personal will and moulding us as mere clay in the hand
   of the potter, the less it gives us a right to refer its source to a
   person.

   So long as we conceive the relation to us of the Divine through
   omnipotent operation, we never can be freed from the fear that, in
   ascribing the world to a personal God, we are assuming a cause like
   ourselves, on the ground of an analogy to the work of our own hands
   which may have no validity beyond the bounds of sense: for any effect
   which is only of power may possibly be only of process. Like Narcissus
   with the water, we might, in an obsession of vanity, be using the world
   merely to reflect our own faces, when we imagine behind it a person
   like ourselves.

   But, if God's dealing with us, even as man's, is through the world and
   society, through a moral intercourse whereby we obtain mastery in our
   whole self-conscious world, our fellowship with the Father is verified
   by our position in His household, which the world becomes for us as we
   lay hold of its true order, abandon all thought of explaining it by
   pleasure and possession and learn to judge it by discipline and duty,
   and find thereby that we too are masters in it as in our own world.
   Only by that victory can we be justified in the confidence that we are
   not deluded, but have laid hold of life's real and victorious secret,
   when we deal with it through a personal God, without whose moral will
   it is all vanity and vexation of spirit.

   At this point many will ask, how this is effected by reconciliation:
   and much theology, it must be admitted, justifies the question. So far
   from bringing any real change into our experience, are we not escaping
   into a region over which experience has no control? How can
   reconciliation to some shadowy Person beyond the world make life in any
   way different from what it is by itself? What, moreover, is the actual,
   working meaning of reconciliation in the language of the market-place?

   These questions are reasonable, and according as we succeed or fail in
   answering them, we shall determine whether religion is for us an
   essential of life's immediate business, or only a prudent, but we trust
   not immediately necessary, provision against a possible future life.

   What reconciliation means may show itself more clearly, if we first
   consider what is meant by "enmity against God." This beginning would,
   in any case, be necessary, if to be at one with God is our natural
   state, for we are apt to accept a natural state as a matter of course,
   and only to learn from some measure of deprivation how necessary it is
   for our well-being. But this order becomes imperative, if we only know
   our natural relation to God by recovery from an unnatural.

   As enmity against God is frequently set forth, the suggestion of a
   practical situation might seem an idle paradox. The expression calls up
   the vague idea of a quarrel with a dim, vast figure in a remote Heaven,
   so utterly unconnected with our present doings that it is difficult to
   see how we ever could come into conflict with Him. An abstract Being
   can only be offended by an abstract independence. For that the only
   remedy would seem to be some kind of abstract submission, some
   mollifying of Him by comprehensive confessions and spiritual
   prostrations. Thus the acknowledgment of being at enmity with God too
   often ends in superlatives about a guilty and sinful state which deal
   with no reality that would be admitted if clothed in concrete language
   and illustrated by examples, and which, even so, are only wrung out by
   dread of discoveries in another life, without reference to any
   practical, situation in this.

   But reality is not one thing and God another; and if we are at enmity
   with God, we are at enmity with reality, past and present, as well as
   to come. To be at enmity against God is neither more nor less than to
   be in bitter hostility to reality, with the sense that it is all
   against us. We think reality ought to go the way of pleasure and
   possession, and when it goes quite another way, in the rebellion of
   hearts which refuse to inquire what the true way of reality may be,
   reality not merely appears to be, but actually is against us. Nor can
   its enmity fail to cause fierce antagonism; for, in a quarrel between
   us and reality, the strife is unequal, and we cannot escape a
   resentment which is fierce in proportion as it is futile.

   This resentment is not necessarily wholly personal, because a great
   addition to our own grievance may come from a generous wrath against a
   life which outrages all mankind. The world is manifestly only fully
   displayed as the work of a tyrant, if its cruelty is extended to every
   creature that feels; and we are only perfectly at enmity against God
   when we can regard our own bitter experience as universal.

   For a generation this hostility has been growing increasingly vocal,
   and now possesses a considerable literature which has all the merit,
   and no more, that indignation can impart. This is the more impressive
   that it was mostly produced amid an unparalleled prosperity, for it
   awakes us to the need of a God who shall be more than a mere adjunct to
   the comforts of life.

   But graver than lyrical pessimism is the dull rebellion of every day
   which never hurls impious defiance at heaven and never dreams of
   offering to curse God and die, which is, indeed, quite piously at
   enmity with God. Though religious in creed and observance, its attitude
   towards life remains a mixture of envy and resentment. Were the
   appointments of life ever seriously connected with God, it could only
   be a relief to learn that He was dead and would trouble men no more.
   Religion is often kept so aloof from experience that reconciliation to
   God may be loudly professed with one breath and everything He appoints
   be bitterly resented in the next. The God of man's profession is in one
   compartment, and the God of his life in another. But we are truly
   reconciled as we live, not as we profess, and we cannot be reconciled
   to God and be at enmity with what He appoints.

   Being embittered by life must, however, be carefully distinguished from
   being burdened by it. Otherwise it might appear that there could be no
   reconciliation to God till stress, as well as rebellion, wholly depart,
   and that peace with God should be measured by the extent to which we
   can keep on the sunny side of the street. But the deepest sense of the
   difficulty and stress of life may be so far from being enmity against
   God that, if the burden is laid on us by a sense of life's overwhelming
   significance, it might be the sincerest of all recognitions of God. To
   accept life as our difficult and strenuous way, because we meet it with
   sincerity and responsiveness to its calls, would be the highest proof
   that all rebellion had disappeared. Not the sense that life has so
   large a purpose that we stagger under its load, but only resentment at
   its burden, as if the sole purpose were to crush us, is enmity against
   God. Enmity against God is enmity with the lives He appoints, so that
   we only bear their burden because we do not know how to make it
   lighter, and not because we are sustained by the sense of its gracious
   meaning and blessed purpose. In practice, therefore, enmity against God
   comes to be just the spirit which resents discipline and evades duty.

   This spirit may not be equally manifest when resentment against God
   takes the form of wrath at the world on account of others. But the
   world is still estimated as it serves self-love and self-will after the
   way of pleasure and possession, and in no way as it affords discipline
   and requires duty. For others as for ourselves the world is expected to
   suffice without God: and that view yields no blessed meaning for others
   any more than for ourselves. Life, so interpreted, cannot be saved,
   even by some benevolence of feeling, from being as much against us as
   we can possibly be against it. The world as a closed system, with its
   meaning and end in itself and our desires as their interpreters, is
   evil and not good.

   By contrast, we may now see the meaning of reconciliation to God. As
   enmity against God is primarily enmity against the lives He has
   appointed for us, because we insist on using them for other ends than
   His, so reconciliation to God is primarily reconciliation to our lives
   by seeking in them only His ends. Its immediate significance is
   reconciliation to the discipline He appoints and the duty He demands.
   It is thus, in the first place at least, concerned with this life, not
   another, being the promise of sitting in the heavenly places amid the
   tumult of the present hour and not of sitting in a remote heaven in a
   passionless eternity.

   In practice it means resenting no trial and evading no task, because of
   the discernment that there never is a trial love has not appointed or,
   for a good end, permitted, nor a task love has not imposed, even though
   it be also from our own past failure. Then reconciliation means no mere
   vague emotion or dim ecstasy but present fellowship with our Father in
   His Kingdom, as it is manifested through the world and in the midst of
   our brethren.

   God's Kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit, but to be poor in spirit
   is only another name for being reconciled to life's discipline and duty
   as God's will of love. From this, the true spring of blessedness, all
   right dealing with life must flow, for it is a gracious relation to us
   of our Father, from the scope of which nothing is exempted.

   This is the only true belief in Providence, which cannot be held,
   either as an instinctive trust that God is kind or as an inference from
   life that He is benevolent, but only as the last and highest victory of
   a faith which has won a vision of a true and abiding good, which is not
   of the world, even while all things in the world become a new creation
   to forward it.

   There are theologians who have thought that the reconciliation to God
   which gives this vision, is too easy a way for so hard a victory, if it
   merely means arising and going to our Father, and they would add other
   and sterner conditions. But God Himself is the adequate condition, for
   returning means going back to God all the way, to God as He is, and
   not, as, before we come to ourselves, we should wish Him to be, and
   finding ourselves at home in His household as He appoints it, and not
   as we would appoint when we prefer to it the Far-country. It is so
   great a change that it requires a call according to His purpose,
   whereby we discover that no other purpose can, without disaster, be our
   own. Thus it is at once the forgiveness of sin and the hope of victory
   over it, a returning from the Far-country and a life in the household
   of the Father.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER IV

LOVE AND FAITH

   Reconciliation to God is concerned, first and last, with God alone, but
   not with God in isolation. On the contrary, it is the assurance that
   nothing is isolated from Him, but that, by His continuous gracious
   relation to us, we have the purpose for which the earth is ours, the
   love by which we judge all things, and the working together of all for
   good whereby we have victory over evil without and within. While grace
   as the action of omnipotence would be a straight line undeflected by
   any conscious experience, a gracious relation is a curve which
   encircles our whole world, and all our dealings with our fellow-men,
   and our complete victory in the Kingdom of God.

   As such, it has always a concave and a convex side, seemingly
   contradictory, really complementary. It enables us to find ourselves in
   God's real world, but only by delivering us from ourselves in our own
   unreal world; it secures us the perfect liberty of God's children, but
   only through the perfect service of our brethren; it wins for us the
   possession of peace, but only through the warfare of the Kingdom of
   Righteousness.

   Precisely because a gracious relation is personal and ethical, God's
   dealings with us must take this circuitous route, this way of immediate
   conflicts but ultimate harmonies, of opposites, which, mechanically
   considered, are irreconcileable, but which it is the nature of a right
   personal relation to reconcile.

   At the outset, we are met by the perplexity that, while God's relation
   to us is only another name for love and love is its only adequate
   response, love can neither be directly given nor directly required. It
   can only be indirectly evoked by giving us ground for the faith that
   God is love. But, in that case, it is the consequence, not the
   condition, of reconciliation.

   Love, as emotion unrelated to any experience, might, by the direct
   operation of grace as omnipotent power, be poured into the soul, and
   this might drown out all contrary emotions of enmity. But blind
   submission to the influence of another is not love, and it works
   nothing to be described as reconciliation, which must be at least the
   recognition of a mutual relation. This being seen, it is impossible to
   remain purely passive : and, if emotion is regarded as the condition,
   it seems a duty to be more emotional. But all effort after feeling is
   unreal, is indeed the spring of all unreality, and an attempt to supply
   what omnipotent grace has left lacking has a special unreality.

   An emotion which is to take its place in our conscious life, must work
   through some medium and have some verification. A direct impersonal
   force is most easily conceived as passing through the familiar vehicle
   of such forces--material things. Hence the attraction for this type of
   mysticism of a material sacramentarianism. But the more mysterious the
   spiritual grace this vehicle conveys, the more some evidence besides
   emotion is needed to prove its efficacy. To our own spiritual state,
   moreover, the precept "Know thyself" is specially difficult to apply;
   and, of all difficult things to know, our love to a God who remains for
   us a purely ideal Being in the Heavens, is the most elusive. Our
   actions, therefore, must be added as a test. God's work, in Augustine's
   phrase, must become our merit. Then this merit, to be of value as a
   test, must be legally estimated, and be, if possible, openly displayed
   in visible acts of self-imposed disciplines and self-denials. Thus we
   are brought back to legal merit as the evidence, directly, of our
   emotion, and, indirectly, of the inflowing of God's grace.

   Such merit is not less harassing because, in the last resort, it must
   be waited for till God chooses to transmute our nature into love. It
   still remains a trust in our own goodness, hesitating but not humble.
   Our attention being directed away from the graciousness of God's love
   to us and toward the nurture of the graciousness of our love to God, we
   cannot attain to quiet trust in God, but meet in our path again the old
   nightmare of legal merit. And after we have laboured our hardest to
   love God, we are no nearer our goal, for the simple and sublime reason
   that love is not love as it deliberately fans its emotion, but only as
   it forgets itself in what it loves.

   That this demand of our love to God is not the way to blessedness we
   shall see, if we ask how it would help us in our relation to the world
   and to man and to the Kingdom or Rule of God.

   I. In respect of the world we have seen that poverty of spirit is the
   secret of blessedness. It is strength and peace even in disaster and
   defeat, because it is the assurance that, in spite of our very
   ungracious relation to life and our constant blindness to its highest
   values, life, under the frowning face it often wears, has a wholly
   gracious relation to us. But dependence on our love to God is
   dependence on our gracious relation to life: whereupon life is
   manifestly not gracious to us. If, through love to God, we have a high
   and worthy relation to life, what are we to think of its stern and
   calamitous relation to us? Must we not feel ourselves superior artists
   for whom this rough and tumble world was not designed? Surely it is at
   best a carnal sphere for carnal souls, from which it is right to
   isolate ourselves in order to cultivate sensitiveness and sentiment.
   Thus the more we are assured of success in cultivating our emotion and
   the more we conceive in God an emotion corresponding to our own, the
   less this discordant world can be referred to God, and the more it is a
   mere cause of dismay to ourselves.

   II. Blessedness in our dealing with others might seem to be better
   guaranteed by the demand to love God. Love is the fulfilling of the
   whole law, and the unrestricted requirement to love our neighbour as
   ourselves is inseparable from the requirement to love the Lord our God
   with all our hearts, for, except as a child of God, he cannot have this
   absolute claim upon us.

   A right relation to man, nevertheless, is not to be won directly from
   our love to God. Our confidence is that we are the good children of the
   family. But that is not a reason for being kind to the unthankful and
   the evil. Rather it justifies us in resenting the despiteful usage and
   persecution of the bad.

   Nor is this conclusion mere inference and theory. The societies which
   have sought to realise God's love directly as love to God, have, as a
   matter of history, tended to regard themselves as God's peculiar
   people, exclusively the objects of His care, specially favoured of Him
   in this life and awaiting an abundant entrance into another, while it
   is no great disturbance to the cultivation of their emotions to think
   that an impassable gulf will finally separate them from the rest of
   mankind.

   The simple reason is that, to begin with our love to God is to begin
   with our perfect relation to men, the only possible effect of which is
   a sense of their deplorable relation to us. A truly blessed relation to
   others can rest neither on our love to God nor on our love to man, but
   only on the faith that, in spite of the imperfect relations of all of
   us to one another, the bond of God's family abides secure because it is
   guaranteed by the love of the Father from whom every family in heaven
   and earth is named.

   God's love means that He calls us, not servants, but sons. To this we
   stand in an effective relation only if its practical, ethical meaning
   is kindness to the unthankful and the evil. But, when we start from our
   love, we have only an aesthetic sentiment which must shrink from
   contact with coarse and erring humanity. So far from leading to the
   pure-hearted humility which sees God most clearly in His kindness to
   the worst, it sees a delicate spotlessness which draws its skirts round
   it when it touches the best. Out of that fear of contamination both for
   ourselves and God, no blessed victory of love to our enemies in face of
   their evil and unrighteousness is ever to be won.

   III. Blessedness in the Kingdom of God might, even with more assurance,
   be thought to rest on our love to God. We enter the Kingdom as we
   realise that love is the sum of all blessedness, and peace nothing less
   than assurance of the absolute victory of love.

   But can we say that love as an emotion cultivated in our hearts, which
   we take to be a response to a similar emotion in the heart of God,
   gives us either blessedness or peace in respect of any rule of God we
   know?

   Under the idea of God as love, thus emotionally understood, little more
   is presented than an indulgent parent, out of all relation to life's
   stern lessons and austere requirements. Such a God could neither afford
   us a sense of the overwhelming reality of truth and righteousness nor
   enable us to stand for them without any sense of distress or isolation
   or martyrdom. It might rather seem that a benevolent Deity could not
   mean His children to be so much distressed or to be exposed so nakedly
   and alone in the open breach. No prophetic call is here, no burden of
   the Lord to face every conflict, fear no opposition, stand against the
   world, if need be, on the side of God. An interest in spacious schemes
   of social amelioration to be carried out by the general approval of
   society would be its utmost effect.

   A sentimental religion with tender appeals to love God, leaving a vague
   sense that an emotional profession of kindly feeling to others is the
   fulfilling of the whole law, has been so obviously inadequate to life
   that, here and there, a teacher has arisen who insisted on giving the
   justice of God an equal place beside His love. Forgetfulness of the
   solemn and arresting fact that God is justice as well as love is, we
   are told, the reason why we have so much effusiveness and so little
   reality, so much prettiness and so little facing of life's stern
   insistencies, above all so much cheap benevolence and so little
   righteousness.

   The weakness here exposed is beyond denial, yet, by the way of setting
   God's justice beside His love, we shall never reach any blessed Rule of
   God. Justice and love cannot have equality, because, when thus set
   together, justice must be put first, as a condition to be fulfilled,
   before love can be suffered to exercise its mercy, and God, like man,
   must be just before He is generous. Whereupon, love, so conditioned,
   ceases to be love, and becomes a rather hesitating kindliness on
   strictly fitting occasions. Nor does justice fare much better, for it
   becomes little more than adherence to rules of equity.

   The true cause of the sentimental error is the notion of love as an
   emotion in our hearts, responding to a similar emotion in God's.

   Love to God, as the ground of our confidence, is merely an emotion,
   which, in itself, need be neither ethical nor spiritual, but is in
   constant danger of degenerating into sentiment, and, from that, into
   sentimentalism, which is the merest mask of true feeling.

   Yet the remedy is not to say God is justice as well as love, but to
   know that God's love is a mind towards His children which requires a
   rule incapable of being anything except righteousness.

   To begin with any of our graces commits us to a valetudinarian anxiety
   about our spiritual symptoms and a harassing punctiliousness about our
   spiritual regimen, whereas spiritual health, like physical, should
   forget itself in the exercise of its own energy and thrive on all it
   finds provided. And this applies even more to faith as mere feeling
   than to love. As a state of mind requiring to be cherished in ourselves
   -- a grace God implants and a merit by which He saves and yet which it
   is somehow our fault to be without -- the demand for faith keeps men
   for ever with their finger on their spiritual pulse. Our eyes being
   turned from God to ourselves, from the outward object to be believed to
   the inward state of believing, to be maintained simply as feeling,
   faith ceases to be, in an ethical and spiritual sense, conviction of
   any reality, and becomes a mixture of excited emotions, instigated
   confessions and suppressed intellectual convictions, morally insincere
   and religiously unreal.

   The right beginning is not faith as an emotion concerned about itself,
   but faith as a trust relying upon God. Only as faith arises from an
   object which constrains belief is it truly faith, being, by so much as
   it is of our own effort, the less faith. Only when, on contemplation of
   the object, belief constrains us, and we have no need to constrain it,
   is faith real. Except in so far as it impresses us as true, we have no
   right to believe anything; and to try to impress ourselves in a
   direction contrary to the object itself is to forget that truth is the
   basis of all right moral motive, and reality the security of all
   religious victory. A true faith is simply faith in the truth solely
   because it convinces us that it is true.

   Faith is only the right beginning when it is directed to God's gracious
   relation to us and away from all questions of our gracious relation to
   God. The greatest is still love -- and there is no faith to which it is
   not greatest, but faith has to do with love as a purpose on earth and
   not merely as a sentiment in the Divine mind. It is called faith, and
   not knowledge, not because it is more independent of the testimony of
   reality to itself, but because, the reality being God's purpose,
   acceptance of it, as we see it, is a necessary condition for receiving
   its witness as it speaks in the world and among men, because, in short,
   it depends, more than other knowledge, on inward sincerity. This
   personal requirement does not, however, make faith mere subjective
   response to abstract emotion in the heavens. Faith is still what we see
   to be true, and this personal condition only concerns the right way of
   seeing a personal reality. Faith affirms that the actual order of the
   world, upon which all our blessedness utterly depends, is of the nature
   of the wise and holy goodness we name love. Being an assertion about
   reality, about what is the ultimate word of power, as well as the
   ultimate word of fellowship, it must either be true or the vastest and
   most misleading delusion. Being concerned with the nature of final
   reality, the rule of love which faith affirms is either fact or
   fiction, and can be nothing between.

   By starting from faith in this way, we start from God's love as the
   blessed meaning of the world, the blessed order of society, and the
   blessed warfare of the Kingdom of God. Then only can we see that love
   is no substitute for the moral task, but just a comprehensive name for
   the full scope of its action and the full height of its motive. Faith
   works by love, but it is God's love as the reality of His Rule, not
   ours even at its best.

   We believe that God is love when we can reverse it and say that love is
   God, that, in whatsoever weakness it may meet us, it wields the might
   of omnipotence. To see this by our own insight is to have faith, and
   the man who has seen it is blessed in knowing that all the reality of
   which he is conscious is in his power for good, all the ideals by which
   he could direct himself unerringly in the midst of it are for his
   seeking, and all the Rule of God is for him, in all conflict, a kingdom
   of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. If that be the
   meaning of God's gracious relationship to us, the first question is,
   Can we trust it? and that means, Can we see it to be true? That can
   only be answered by the faith which sees its own blessedness to be in
   reality of this nature, love having, by experience, made its own appeal
   and been its own evidence.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER V

FAITH AND UNBELIEF

   When faith is regarded as a feeling of assurance given as a medicine or
   faith-potion, like an ancient philtre or modern inoculation, doubt and
   question are sinful hindrances to its operation which ought to be
   suppressed. This creates the painful dilemma that doubt and question
   arise, because God has not given us faith because we have sinned, while
   we cannot escape from sin unless we have faith. A common way of meeting
   this situation is to work up the feeling of assurance by exalted
   expressions of possessing it, for which many hymns are a help in need.
   But, being unreal and a spring of unreality, the stimulus soon passes
   and the feeling of assurance turns into the suspicion that the whole
   business is mere auto-suggestion.

   Yet a peace which absolutely depends upon God cannot depend on a faith
   which depends on ourselves. Faith is a gift of God, being illusion, not
   faith, so far as it depends on ourselves. But it is not given as a
   crude, compelling sense of a feeling of assurance imposed upon us. To
   be genuine faith it must be conviction by the truth as well as of it.
   If we are thus concerned with the object of faith, doubt and question
   are necessary, if we are to believe only in its witness: and we can
   face them with the confidence that truth will be good, whatever it
   prove to be. Especially should we have this confidence in seeking God,
   for surely He has not left Himself without a witness. By this witness
   He gives faith, as any person enables us to believe in him, by showing
   Himself, in all His dealings with us, entirely worthy of trust. Thus it
   is by the whole witness of life, interpreted by the whole of
   revelation, which, for the Christian, means, in particular, life as
   interpreted by Jesus Christ.

   With such a gift of faith we have the only kind of independence which
   is moral, the right and duty to determine our beliefs solely by the
   witness of reality. Yet with this we can still have a sin of unbelief.
   It is not, however, failing to force ourselves to believe, but is
   warding off the appeal which would otherwise compel belief. If, in this
   world of ours and in our present human society, love actually manifests
   itself as the final order, the highest security, the last word of
   power, we have to ask, how can men go on believing that the final order
   is compromise though it sacrifice both truth and justice, the highest
   security wealth though it never be devoted to a single noble end, and
   the last word of power armies and battleships quite independent of
   establishing righteousness? How, if faith in possession and pleasure
   continually corrupts, can we persist in it; how, if resentment and
   bitter rivalry are the chief cause of life's misery, do we cherish them
   as the way of being blessed; and how, above all, if wickedness is
   misery and weakness, do we envy its pleasure, which is sure to suffer,
   and vacillate before its power, which is sure to fall?

   The cause is neither too much intellectual nor too much moral
   independence. On the contrary, we never can believe in God's world and
   God's children and God's Kingdom, so long as we take our opinions and
   moral judgments from what is accepted around us. Humility here is not
   willingness to be in moral pupilage, but is such a direct concern with
   God as affords us unqualified courage and independence in respect of
   man. The sole hindrance is insincerity, breaking the force of the
   appeal of love as it speaks, through our lives, to our hearts. In the
   Gospels, therefore, hypocrisy is the only deadly sin, because it is the
   refusal to allow the deep things of life to touch us, and so the one
   sure way of escaping the impact of God's truth.

   Unbelief, then, is a sin, not because we fail to force ourselves to
   believe or to suppress doubt and inquiry, but because, to some evil
   intent, we are insincere with God's witness to Himself. For this
   reason, an evil heart of unbelief may be a clearer manifestation of
   deep moral corruption than the shadiest action. But it does not follow
   that we can set the creation of faith before us as a direct purpose,
   and still less that we ought to maintain faith by suppressing doubt,
   criticism and contrary opinion. There is no greater moral peril than to
   attempt to manipulate truth; and the peril is in no way lessened
   because the task is piously performed. Obscurantism and timid
   pre-possession are of unbelief and not of faith, if faith is conviction
   of truth on its own recognisances. Conviction as pre-possession, even
   were it by accident right, is in no sense the conviction of faith.

   In the strict sense, we should not even try to believe; for we have no
   right to believe anything we can avoid believing, granting we have
   given it entire freedom to convince us. Strictly speaking also, we have
   no right to exhort people to believe, and much of that very common type
   of exhortation is mere distrust of truth and disregard of veracity,
   which leaves earnest people with a painful and confused idea that faith
   is a self-maintained sense of nervous tension, and which undermines
   real faith by turning attention from God to our own state of mind.

   Paul's exhortation to the Philippian jailer to believe on the Lord
   Jesus Christ, as almost the only text which lends itself to this
   purpose, has been much pressed into its service. But, can we conceive
   that Paul simply uttered these words to that agitated pagan, to whom
   the name of Jesus could have conveyed no meaning? Have we more than
   Luke's summary of Paul's presentation of the object of belief, which,
   as he had already given several examples of Paul's real method, he
   could not suppose would mislead? The Apostle, we find, reasoned of
   righteousness and judgment to come. As he could do nothing without
   moral sincerity, that was his usual beginning. Then he reasoned from
   men's experience of God's goodness in life and from their groping after
   Him in worship to His presence in their hearts. Finally, he gave a
   reasoned presentation of the significance of Jesus Christ for faith,
   all set in the atmosphere of humble and sincere dealing with one's own
   soul, in which alone men can see the things in which they ought to
   believe. Similarly, when Jesus said, "Repent and believe the good
   news," He was there Himself as the embodiment of what was to be
   believed, and He only asked to be allowed to make His due impression,
   repentance being just the putting away of the hypocrisies which prevent
   the gospel from being its own evidence.

   There is only one right way of asking men to believe, which is to put
   before them what they ought to believe because it is true; and there is
   only one right way of persuading, which is to present what is true in
   such a way that nothing will prevent it from being seen except the
   desire to abide in darkness; and there is only one further way of
   helping them, which is to point out what they are cherishing that is
   opposed to faith. When all this has been done, it is still necessary to
   recognise that faith is God's gift, not our handiwork, of His
   manifestation of the truth by life, not of our demonstration by
   argument or of our impressing by eloquence; and that even He is willing
   to fail till He can have the only success love could value personal
   acceptance of the truth simply because it is seen to be true. In a very
   real sense all our defects are God's failure, but He allows Himself to
   fail in order to win a better success than mere correction of error or
   repression of evil.

   As, without some element of pleasant self-delusion, there could be no
   joy in sinning, a measure of hypocrisy exists in all sins, even the
   most open and flagrant. Can a man, for example, be a drunkard, without
   persistently and systematically deceiving himself about his state? When
   a libertine boasts of his conquests, is he saying to himself what truly
   he is and facing the straight issue of his action, or is he merely
   trying to throw dust in his own eyes? Does he look straight at his own
   brutal selfishness and the degradation and death which shadow his vice?
   But, while even the most flagrant and open vices are nests of
   self-delusion, the danger of hypocrisy increases with the
   respectability of the sin. Nor is there need of actual transgression at
   all, for the most blinding of all hypocrisies is the amazing spiritual
   illusion that privilege is merit and a just ground for our self-esteem,
   and not moral responsibility and a just ground only for humility.

   Because, in that sense, as Prof. A. B. Davidson put it, "perhaps
   mankind is one large Pharisee," unbelief is the most universal and
   deep-seated corruption in the human heart. Not because faith could be a
   moral effort, to be directly purposed and carried through, is unbelief
   culpable, but because the truth would always carry conviction, did we
   not use our privileges to pamper our self-esteem and create for
   ourselves a mail of proof of self-delusion to ward off its appeal, till
   we may end, where there can be at least no human hope of recovery, in
   loving darkness rather than light.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VI

FAITH IN CHRIST

   If God can give a true faith only by taking the trouble to show Himself
   worthy of our trust in all He appoints for us, all He requires of us,
   and all He purposes with us, the question of faith becomes the question
   of how God manifests Himself to His children, or, in one word, of
   revelation.

   But, if we no longer rely on the infallibilities, what is meant by
   revelation?

   Two difficulties, in particular, the studies of our time have raised
   for us.

   First, how can we believe in a historical revelation, when we believe
   in evolution and progress and the advancement of knowledge?

   Second, has not this advancement of knowledge compelled us to study the
   Bible by the same method as other ancient books, with the result of
   showing that it was written in the same way and presents the same
   difficulties regarding authorship, sources, mythologies, traditions?
   How, then, can we still be expected to speak of it as the Word of God?

   For revelation, in the sense of a Word dictated from Heaven about God's
   mind there and conveyed by an inspired writer as a mere scribe, science
   and criticism alike leave little room. To many this gives a bitter
   sense of loss. They ask how we can distinguish what is Divine from what
   is merely human if we can no longer believe in a literally inspired
   infallible Scripture. The reason is that they still cling to the idea
   of grace as the direct operation of omnipotence, for, if that is how
   God works, He is plainly not acting up to His irresistible power when
   He permits human error or limitation to mar the perfection of His
   revelation. Only on a different view of grace, as more patient because
   more personal, can we see that the living experience of those who, by
   special faithfulness in high endeavour and large conflict, have
   understood God's purpose in the world, may be a far Diviner vehicle
   than a mere animated pen, and that, as it interprets its own experience
   direct to ours, it has a security which no evidence for past
   infallibility can ever enjoy.

   The soothsayers in Israel prophesied in an ecstasy which they took to
   be possession by the Deity: and their deliverances were deceitful
   hopes. Volumes have been written by persons who thought they had no
   part except to write down what was poured into their minds without a
   thought of their own: and they are worthless. In all writings ever
   regarded as sacred there is a singular absence of any such claim: and,
   the less they were in ecstasy, the more they are of spiritual value. If
   the prophets ever thought that they were at times under such
   possession, they never wrote under it, but thought of their message
   till it turned into eloquence and poetry. No New Testament writer
   claims ecstatic inspiration in any degree for any writing. As has been
   said, the higher creations in religion, like all that is great in other
   spheres, have been accomplished only with the mind awake and the will
   set on its task.

   To revelation, in one sense, there can be no limitation, for, if God
   deals with all men everywhere as children, everywhere and to all He is
   revealing Himself; and especially all history, as the record of
   experience, is revelation, being a temple of God's purpose, not a mere
   museum of antiquities.

   But revelation, as usually understood, is concerned with more than
   God's manifestation of His mind, and deals also with the removal of
   misunderstandings in ours. And if God seeks to be understood by His
   children and not merely to display His power, if He is a person who
   would be personally understood, this dealing with our ignorance and
   blindness and perversity, which are a cloud between us and His light,
   is rightly named, by pre-eminence, revelation.

   If a word of God is inspired as it inspires us to lay ourselves open to
   God's appeal, it approves itself as it reconciles and not as it
   informs. Only as it enables us to accept His purpose in the world and
   submit to the measureless demands of His love and seek our peace in His
   rule of righteousness, does it make us know that we know God.

   The agent of this revelation is the prophet. But he is not a prophet by
   passively submitting, like the heathen soothsayer in Virgil's picture
   of an oracle of the gods, to the pressure and sway of the divine
   afflatus. He is a prophet, because, more than others, he is intensely
   awake to life and duty. His equipment is loyalty and moral insight, and
   his call the sense of great tasks imposed upon him by the challenge of
   grave and terrible events. Had he been only a passive vehicle for a
   direct utterance of omniscience, the abiding value of his word would
   have depended upon proofs of absolute accuracy and guaranteed
   authorship. But, by actively interpreting God's purpose for his own
   life among men, his word remains its own evidence by continuing to
   interpret God's purpose for our lives and our society.

   Even in this sense of reconcilers, there have been prophets since the
   world began, and the early Christians rightly accorded the name to the
   noblest Pagan thinkers. Yet the history of reconciliation is so
   supremely in the line of the Hebrew prophets as to permit us to include
   in our thought of their work all other contributions. Their
   understanding of reconciliation was an understanding of God's mind
   which so surpasses other views as to give them interest mainly as
   preparations and approximations, as much as the discovery of the
   elliptical orbit of the planets is an understanding of God's mind on
   that matter which makes obsolete all others. When Jesus comes as the
   perfect reconciler, their work also is merged in His, and He is Lord of
   the prophets, the chief cornerstone of prophecy.

   Upon Him, therefore, we may concentrate our attention, and we may be
   confident that, if we can remove the difficulties about faith in Jesus
   Christ, no other difficulties about revelation need be insuperable: for
   even those who do not give Him this central significance for
   revelation, will admit that we have no need to seek farther afield for
   the difficulties of the problem, because if they find perplexities
   about revelation in general, they find still more about Jesus in
   particular.

   If faith has to do with God's gracious relation to us in the present,
   and especially with a reconciliation which gives us blessedness in our
   daily tasks and trials, what connection could this have with a person
   who lived long ago and who meets us only in a book, even though we were
   sure we knew exactly what He was and what He said and did? But, still
   more, if we are to believe only what we see to be true, how can we
   believe in One regarding whose person -- on which so much is thought to
   depend -- there has been such fierce, perplexing and inconclusive
   controversy, and whose life and teaching have been handed down with
   such variety in the tradition, that it has been possible -- even though
   it be only a vagary -- to doubt whether He ever existed? Can belief in
   Him ever be more than a very tentative hypothesis, a kind of
   intellectual adventure, no supreme succour of faith, but a heavy burden
   faith must carry, the hardest goal to reach, the last victory to be
   won? And when, finally, we have thus laboriously won faith in Christ,
   has it really to do with faith in God? Is it not rather something added
   to that faith, and, in many minds, something substituted for it, and
   very far from being its most solid foundation?

   That the difficulties are real and practical, and not imaginary and
   merely theoretical, cannot be denied, Faith in Christ has frequently
   been so conceived as to be both a burdensome addition to faith in the
   living God and a misleading substitute for it.

   Faith in Christ becomes a burdensome addition to faith in God when a
   Christian is conceived to be, not one who has found in Christ the
   Father reconciling His children to Himself in the midst of this
   evanescent and evil world, but one who accepts certain facts about
   Christ's life and holds certain theories about His person. The theories
   especially have been used, not as a revelation to the individual soul
   which gives it moral independence in the knowledge of God's will of
   love, but as ecclesiastical mysteries, the possession of which requires
   the Church to keep her members in intellectual and even in moral
   pupilage, seeing that such a faith can only be held by way of not
   rejecting what official authority enjoins.

   This addition to faith in the living God then becomes a substitute for
   it, so that whosoever would be saved must not reject these doctrines in
   any of their mysterious details, till belief in Christ becomes a mere
   pass-word which, it is thought, God will respect when we come knocking
   at the door of eternity.

   For that way of escape from real faith mankind is only too ready. They
   do not find any faith in Christ so difficult as faith in the things He
   stood for, or any way of salvation so hard as His way of being saved
   from themselves. A saving faith, not inconsistent with indulging our
   instinctive rebellion against life's limitations, with seeking to live
   at ease even at some cost of conscientiousness, with maintaining
   ourselves as persons of substance and repute even at the price of
   doubtful compromise and concentration upon personal profit, with having
   our first reliance for our own security upon a bank account even though
   selfishly accumulated, and for our country's greatness upon
   cannon-balls even at some cost of righteousness, would need to have
   very hard conditions indeed not to exercise a strong attraction for the
   natural man.

   This faith also is a faith in God's grace, but it is as an act of
   omnipotence and not as the manifestation of a personal God gracious in
   all His relations with us. Christ Himself is conceived as the
   incarnation of this omnipotence, and faith in Him as the submission
   such a mysterious emanation of power demands.

   This becomes apparent in the accompanying doctrine of the Spirit, whose
   personality is used as a device for importing quite impersonal
   operations both into Christ's life and ours, overriding forces, which
   require from us no moral dealing with them, but which are pantheistic
   in all their methods. When, for example, men, whose contribution could
   be of no human value except as they have had experience and have
   reflected on it, are exhorted to empty their minds of all thoughts of
   their own in order to be filled with the Spirit, or when the sick are
   assured that it is want of faith to use human skill or even
   common-sense, and are asked to trust only the healing influx of the
   Spirit, the idea of a personal God is entirely superfluous. In the
   latter case it is quite openly rejected, but for spiritual healing ex
   opere operatum it is equally irrelevant. The Spirit of God as a
   medicine of immortality, active in a sacrament, might be a person, but
   to think so would add nothing to our faith in its efficacy. The
   personality of God, to be of any consequence for faith, must appear in
   a fellowship which deals with our whole nature by moral means and for
   moral ends, and not merely in operations of grace.

   To be of significance for this fellowship, Christ must manifest our
   perfect relation to the Father of our spirits by blessedness in the
   trials, injustices and conflicts of life, so as to manifest them all as
   of God, and show us how, amid the actual conditions of our life,
   intellectual as well as physical, we remain in the Kingdom of God,
   which is perfect blessedness in perfect righteousness. No manifestation
   of God's power can be a revelation of the Father; and to introduce it
   in the form either of omnipotence or omniscience into the life of
   Christ is merely to remove His life out of the plane of our conflict.
   What human reality, for example, can be left in Christ's sufferings
   which could enable us to say, "My God, my God," even when we felt
   forsaken, and commend our spirits to our Father as the floods go over
   our souls, if, as Dr Gore supposes, He had the night before observed
   the eucharist proleptically in His glorified body?

   Such a view springs from the notion that a revelation in our humanity
   is a mere condescension to our weakness, and that it would have no
   significance were the condescension to be taken seriously. The king
   covers himself with a beggar's rags, but he is a king only as his
   robes, which he still wears beneath, are not concealed. Though God thus
   graciously condescends to our humanity, in Himself He is really quite
   different, and a true revelation of Him must be by glory and not
   service.

   But, if God, being the Father, can have no more adequate manifestation
   than His children, what could we seek beyond One who accepts all life's
   discipline and meets all its demands, deals with all God's children in
   love, and unfailingly makes peace by obedience to righteousness even to
   death? It is a manifestation, moreover, we can verify, as, even amid
   our own failure, it enables us to realise God's gracious personal
   relation to us in all things.

   For this reason, faith in Christ is not primarily as He meets us either
   in Scripture or in doctrine, but as He meets us in life. When He is
   hungry, the blessed of the Father feed Him; naked, they clothe Him;
   sick and in prison, they visit Him. As we treat Him when we meet Him in
   flesh and blood in our brother, as we recognise the power of His
   meekness, purity, truth, holiness, amid the actual claims of pleasure
   and wealth and outward dignity, so is our living faith in Him.

   "How," He asks, "can ye believe who receive approbation one of another,
   and not that approbation which is of God alone?" Can we, that question
   means, unite two contradictory faiths in what is life's highest good
   and final security ? How, asks James, taking the same view, can men
   hold the faith of Christ, "in respect of persons"? which, being
   literally translated, is "in flunkeyism." What, in short, is the good
   of looking for Christ who was meek and lowly in heart, in the Gospels,
   when we should be certain not to recognise Him in our next-door
   neighbour? Till we believe in Him there, we cannot possibly believe in
   Him any where else.

   After we thus believe in Him in life, many intellectual questions, both
   about His history and His person, may remain; and we should not think
   that our belief gives us a right to silence them. This faith cannot
   decide what sayings in the Gospels are authentic, or what miracles are
   related without exaltation of the miraculous, or in what formula we
   shall express Christ's nature; even though, without it, no one will
   ever answer these questions aright. But, when we believe on Him in
   life, by finding Him the strength of our faith in God, however many
   intellectual problems may remain, the religious difficulties will have
   disappeared. By manifesting God's love in life's hardest appointments
   and sternest demands, by lifting up our sins and weaknesses into God's
   compassion and pardon, and so touching us with the love of God in its
   infinite requirements and infinite succour, and by giving us the spirit
   of peace in all our weary struggle against the kingdom and power of
   darkness, He lays us open, as the manifest presence of God alone can
   lay us open, to God's whole appeal through the whole of life. Here, as
   nowhere else, we discover that the weak things are the mighty, that, in
   the end, the things of love, not of violence, prevail, so that we
   believe, by the only way that can truly be belief, because, in its
   perfect manifestation in Him, we see our true blessedness to be its own
   evidence.

   We can now see why no Scripture writer ever dreamt that faith in Jesus
   could be a substitute for our faith in God, or a further burden upon
   it, or even any addition to it, or anything except the supreme succour
   of this faith, and why every word said about it thrills with strange,
   new, contagious joy in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
   especially why the Cross was victory over sin and sorrow, and not a
   mere agony of defeat inflicted by wickedness.

   The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ was put in the centre of God's
   revealing name, not, as is sometimes said, because faith in Christ was
   such an addition to faith in God that His followers had to break up
   their idea of God to put Him in, but, for the opposite reason, that
   their idea of God was broken and He made it whole. They could in no way
   unite the God of their experience in the world with the God of the
   deepest experiences of their own hearts; and their souls' conflict came
   upon them because they continued to be true children of the prophets,
   who never, for any distress without or doubt within, abandoned the
   endeavour to bring them into one.

   The Old Testament still speaks to our hearts because it is this supreme
   search after one God, not as an intellectual conception, but as a moral
   victory to unite all our life into one, and because of the confidence
   it gives us that those who seek after God in this way will find Him. No
   prophet ever attained, but also no prophet ever rested content with any
   of the easy solutions found in other religions. None ever sought peace
   in the dualism of one God of their worship and another of their work,
   or in the easy but hopeless unity of worldliness, or in the more
   difficult, but not really more victorious, unity of abandoning the
   world in order to endeavour to live in an ecstatic religion. When the
   Old Testament saints prayed, Lord, show us Thy salvation, they did not
   mean, Help us to avert our eyes from the welter and chaos around, but,
   Help us to face the Assyrian as well as the enemy of our souls. To the
   end it remained a distressful and dubious conflict, amid which men were
   always in danger of falling back on the hope that somehow, after all,
   this world may be interpreted on mere principles of human justice, if
   only you will give it time to show that the name of the wicked rots and
   the righteous are never forsaken or their children reduced to begging
   their bread. Then, they had to be recalled to the true way of seeking
   one God, not merely by a great religious book like Job, ending in
   silence before the greatness of God, but by the vocal pessimism of
   Ecclesiastes.

   Only when we realise this bitter antagonism between our experience of
   God in the world and our experience of God in the insight of conscience
   and the aspiration of the heart, can we realise the supreme
   significance, for our faith in God's whole gracious relation to us,
   when the grace or the graciousness of our Lord Jesus Christ became the
   middle term between the love of God without and the fellowship of the
   Spirit within.

   Later we have many attempts to interpret this name of God as Father,
   Son and Spirit by the conception of grace as the operation of
   omnipotence, but never in the New Testament, where this Divine name is
   just the full and complete expression of God's one gracious relation to
   us in all our experience without and within, making it as certain that
   all things in this world work together for good through the love of the
   Father, as that our true good is the kingdom which is righteousness and
   peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. Then only could men overcome the
   temptation to make the providence of God a cheap optimism, and the
   righteousness of God a way of compromising with this world and a mere
   matter of changed conditions in the world to come.

   Belief in God derives meaning and content from experience, and belief
   in God through Jesus Christ is through the only adequate dealing with
   life, because of the only perfect relation to God behind it. Neither
   God, nor aught besides, can we know apart from the world. But, on the
   other hand, neither can we truly know the world apart from God. We see
   God through the world, as we see a soul through the body, only because
   it is not a living body at all except as it is informed throughout by
   the soul. And even then we only know as we are taught to think, as it
   were, parallel with that spirit within, taught by a continuous
   interaction between knowledge and friendship, which we might equally
   call revelation and reconciliation.

   If it is the essential nature of God to have this personal relation to
   His children, He could be manifested only in a life perfectly lived
   among men, through a perfect relation to Himself. If the love of God is
   thus the inmost nature, as well as the deepest meaning of His outward
   working, that would be the only possible revelation; and we should
   never think of God as in Christ merely in condescension to the limits
   of our humanity. Through Christ we must think after the order of the
   Beatitudes, where all knowledge of God is mediated through a right
   relation to man. As Christ helps us to attain this gracious relation to
   God's children, we learn how He came from the bosom of the Father to
   declare Him, and how God is in Him reconciling the world to Himself.

   The final triumph of this manifestation is the Cross, the obedience
   unto death of the Prince of Peace in the service of God's kingdom of
   righteousness. When

   persecution for righteousness, even to shame and agony, stirs only
   pardon and supplication for His oppressors, it is turned from being an
   evidence of God's indifference into the triumph of His love; and, by
   sharing in this triumph, His children are made victorious over all
   evil. But we share only as we too are taught to sympathise with sorrow,
   forgive sin and endure the contradiction of sinners against ourselves.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VII

REVELATION

   Faith in God, through Jesus Christ, is faith in God which is of God's
   giving. Yet, only because God cannot give it directly, or otherwise
   than through our own personal conviction, does it require to be
   mediated at all. Could it be imparted by direct operation of
   omnipotence, so as to be breathed into our nostrils like the breath of
   life, there could be no need for making it depend on any other
   transaction. Every form of historical revelation would, in particular,
   be an irrelevance and an encumbrance; for if, by the finger of power,
   God can implant the faith which is the secret of blessedness, other
   aids could only distract attention from the real fountain-head. Why
   introduce a saint, or even a Christ, saying to His brother, "Know the
   Lord," if, by irresistible might, all can be made to know Him? Only if
   grace is a personal relation, does it need to work through human
   experience and God be manifest in Christ, reconciling the world to
   Himself.

   Nor would such revelation be merely an irrelevance. As soon as we
   returned from what is implanted and came again to our own thinking, it
   would become a quite insurmountable obstacle to any assurance that the
   God who governs the world is both good and omnipotent; for, if it were
   all a matter of operation, why should it require so many
   reinforcements, and have such obviously inadequate results? If God can
   mould our hearts, like clay, to real faith, why should there be the
   slow progress of the ages, or any unbelief, or -- seeing He could as
   easily make us holy as believing -- any sin?

   To refer us to the inscrutable will of God is merely to ask us to be
   satisfied with arbitrariness. But piety cannot hinder us from regarding
   such arbitrariness as grossly culpable, if it leave or, indeed, ever
   permit, this chaos of wickedness and misery, were the avoidance of it
   so completely and easily within the compass of His might. Could He
   remove, by the mere word of power, all distrust from the heart as well
   as all evil from the lives of His children, why does He refrain?

   Nor is it any explanation to say that we isolate ourselves from this
   operation of grace, for that justification of God could only belong to
   quite another way of thinking of Him. From the point of view of pure
   omnipotent operations of grace, our isolation from God must be the
   easiest possible obstacle to remove, or rather the most senseless for
   God ever to permit.

   The perplexity, moreover, carries with it grave practical consequences.
   For such a mystical faith, Christ is constantly no more than a symbol
   of a Divine operation, and all historical events have to be attached in
   an external, arbitrary, and even illogical way.

   The value of man's long search after God, the faith of the prophets,
   and especially the manifestation of the Father in the Son, must have
   some place assigned to them by any kind of religious thinker. But if
   the drama of faith is all operation of omnipotence, revelation can only
   be inserted into it as an epilogue; and, even then, it leaves the
   impression, which most epilogues do, that the author would not have
   found it necessary to come from behind the scenes and explain, had the
   drama been completer and better constructed.

   And, seeing how imperfect the drama seems to be as the work of
   omnipotence, we can give no better explanation than God's arbitrary
   good pleasure, why His communications were so intermittent in the past,
   and, in spite of the present abundant scepticism and wickedness, have
   now entirely ceased.

   Being isolated acts in the past, moreover, they must be cherished as
   heirlooms, else once more all will be confusion. But with the present
   criticism of our heritage, we find this task increasingly difficult, so
   that, in fact, we are beyond measure confused. The situation is as
   though we had fallen into doubt regarding the authenticity and
   interpretation of some letters our father once sent us from India,
   while the tradition about his one furlough home has grown mythical, and
   we cannot be sure any more that he actually is in that distant land,
   toiling, as we had supposed, for the benefit of his family.

   This notion of revelation as supplementary authoritative information
   causes, most of the perplexities which have so often been met only by
   an obscurantism about Scripture and doctrine which is guilty of fearing
   that truth cannot shine in its own light, but must, as it were, be
   lacquered with a kind of luminous paint of submissive piety.

   Butler argues that it would be the opposite of the proof of a Divine
   revelation to find it attempting to remove the mysteries, which, if
   humbly and sincerely respected, are the best part of life's discipline
   and the supreme test of the spirit of duty. To this Leslie Stephen
   replies by asking, what a revelation is for, if not to remove
   mysteries. With that position many theologies are agreed, and have,
   therefore, proceeded to construct out of Scripture elaborate universal
   and absolute systems, for which nothing remains mysterious or unknown.
   From disconnected tags of verses information is derived on every kind
   of subject in this world and the next, in earth and heaven. Especially
   the origin of the world and the destiny of man have been declared to
   the last detail.

   The result never was much to edification, and more recently it has been
   mainly to the encouragement of scepticism about the whole business of
   theology, root and branch.

   Nor shall we ever introduce the sense of reality into it again and
   establish for it a place among the sciences of experience, till we have
   revised our whole conception of revelation by relating it, no longer to
   information by sporadic acts of omniscience, but to most direct
   evidence of His love is His patient way of dealing with the blindness
   of our unbelief, this reconciliation is rightly regarded as
   pre-eminently revelation. Yet we should remember that it is revelation
   only as climbing an eminence affords us a prospect because the
   landscape is there already.

   To understand this living interaction of revelation and reconciliation
   is to understand how faith is both the gift of God and our own insight.
   It is like the relation between the prospect which inspires the climber
   to dare the Alps, and the climbing without which there would be no
   prospect; or like the first mariner whom Horace execrates for impious
   rashness in launching on the deep from love of gain, who would never
   have risked his life without prospect of gain and never have had
   prospect of gain without adventuring on the deep.

   Revelation, being thus concerned with the reconciliation to God's
   gracious relation to us by which alone we can discover that it is
   gracious, must be a work of history. What is more, it must be the work
   of history, the work which gives it meaning and treasures up its gains.
   The life of everyone who takes the right road and uses life to the
   right end and lays his heart open to the right influences, will help to
   interpret God's gracious relation to his fellows as well as to himself.
   But there will be special significance in the experience of those who
   meet life with special insight and sincerity and courage, and more
   particularly when exercised in times of supreme crisis in human
   affairs. As in all other human progress, they will establish one line
   of advance, so conspicuously in the right direction as to make all
   others mere matter of antiquarian interest. Finally, if there were One
   whose absolutely right relation to God manifested adequately God's
   relation to us, even that line would become only a preparation for His
   task, and He would be an ultimate revelation, not in the sense of being
   a substitute for our own insight or of exhausting the whole meaning of
   experience, but as the inspiration of our insight and the pioneer of
   our experience. Yet Christ is the supreme revelation only as He is the
   supreme reconciliation. Its finality is not as the guarantee of a body
   of truth which makes of no account God's patient wisdom in overcoming
   unbelief, manifested in all human history, but as the embodiment of a
   relation to the Father, the perfection of which we prove only as we use
   it to interpret His relation to us in all things and at all times.

   If reconciliation is in a free, a truly personal acceptance of God's
   gracious relation to us, it can only be by revelation; but, on the
   other hand, there can be no revelation to our own personal insight
   except by reconciliation. To understand this interaction, which is only
   possible between moral persons in a moral universe, but which is the
   very essence of their relation, is to understand how God's grace is
   nothing else than the succour of our moral personality into the liberty
   of the children of God, a succour which we may sum up by saying that
   faith is the gift of God by the whole of experience, interpreted by the
   whole of Christianity.

   We shall see what is effected for us, if we consider how, without the
   grace of Christ as the connecting link between the love of God in our
   outward experience and the fellowship of the Spirit in our inward
   experience, love is a shallow sentiment, as inadequate to the
   interpretation of life as a shower to fertilise the Sahara, and the
   influence of the Spirit as barren as a mist which never comes down as
   rain upon the mown grass and as showers to water the earth.

   The task is not to lay God open to us, but to lay us open to God. The
   uniting of the love of God and the fellowship of His Spirit is not
   because they are divided, but because, by reason of unbelief, we make
   both void by keeping them apart. The revelation which brings them into
   one, deals, not with God's unity, but with man's divided heart, as,
   when we see the same object apart and different, we do not need to
   bring the images together but to correct our sight.

   The difficulty to be overcome is primarily the manifold hypocrisies,
   springing, in the nature of the case, from all sin, which make us
   pervert the witness of truth, and look in the world for love as mere
   goodness without inward moral demand, and in our hearts for God's
   fellowship in the Spirit without application in any outward moral
   sphere. Love is then mere sentimental kindliness from which, in this
   world of hard trials and terrible responsibilities, no true belief in
   providence can ever be wrung; and the fellowship of the Spirit is a
   mere shadowy mystical sense of a presence realised in a dim ecstatic
   emotion, which, if we rest in it, is only a sort of "vacant interlunar
   cave." Without an abiding fellowship with the Father of our spirits to
   be our light and confidence in the hour and power of darkness, when, so
   far as the outward events of our life can show, even God has forsaken
   us, we can at best struggle to believe that life is pretty good on the
   whole, with an optimism which is not only cruelly assailed, but most
   deserts us when most needed: and, apart from realising God's love in
   our actual experience, the fellowship of the Spirit is equally empty of
   practical significance.

   The nearest analogy is the passive if passionate emotion too often
   called love, which compels the novelist to end his story where the test
   of it begins, with the marriage ceremony, a love which the deeper
   insight of the poet calls blind, and which rude experience teaches us
   usually flies out at the window as poverty enters by the door. Not
   being a moral fellowship, it is no preparation for helping those it
   unites to face the world together and make life blessed, whatever
   happen. It does not grow into a deeper, stronger, wiser comradeship
   because of the conflict, but is a mere expectation of being borne up,
   on the wings of overpowering and delightful emotion, above earth's
   rough and muddy ways. Then, instead of being life's supreme strength,
   it becomes its vastest and saddest illusion.

   A mystical sense of the Spirit is often not merely an analogous, but
   the selfsame emotion, little disguised and not much exalted; and at
   best is a passive emotion, with no personal moral foundations, a mere
   way of withdrawing for a little from the inward, if not the outward
   stress of the world, and its ideal would be to be carried over the
   rough places of life on the wings of a sustained ecstasy.

   But the Spirit is the Spirit of Him who was meek and lowly in heart to
   accept all life's sorrows, and the Father the Father of Him who was
   among us as one who serves. Therefore, to have the fellowship of the
   Spirit in unity with the love of God is so to see love behind
   conscience and power behind love that we can rejoice to bear our
   trials, which show us the things of the Spirit, and to serve our
   brethren by living in sympathy with suffering, in pardon of offences,
   and calm loyalty to every cause of righteousness, which shows us the
   love of God.

   The revelation of God, so understood, means that it belongs eternally
   to His nature not to be content to direct the world according to His
   own wise love, heedless of our misunderstanding, or to offer us His
   fellowship, heedless of our alienation, but that He must seek to
   overcome, in the freedom of a true reconciliation, our misunderstanding
   and our alienation. This is the end of all His dealings with us in
   time, and the task to which He has called all prophetic souls, and
   which is consummated in the Lord of the prophets, who, being perfectly
   the Son of God, enables us to be sons of God, for whom, in the
   fellowship of the Spirit, all things work together for good.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VIII

THE FELLOWSHIP AND MEANS OF GRACE

   Like a special revelation, a special fellowship in possession of
   special means of grace must be judged according to the relation of God
   to His children which it presupposes : and the great confusion which
   exists on the subject of the Church is due to the failure to set its
   necessary dependence on our conception of grace in the light of clear
   thinking.

   As soon as we consider the conception of the Church in connection with
   the conception of grace it embodies, we find that things conflicting in
   principle are often mechanically bound together in one view.

   Practically every church combines inconsistent ideas of grace, and some
   even glory in it and call it comprehensiveness. Thus we can have in one
   church a Bible wholly dependent on spiritual insight and a priesthood
   upon visible succession, or a conversion wholly by an act of God, yet
   with the failure to produce it resting upon man.

   Even churches, which outwardly seem at opposite poles, are often as
   closely linked, by their conception of grace, as the extremes of the
   swing of the pendulum by gravitation. Thus the extremest Catholicism
   and the extremest Evangelicalism are curiously akin, just because both
   depend on the same conception of grace as arbitrary acts of
   omnipotence. For the modern Protestant evangelist, as much as for
   Aquinas or even for Scotus, God's appointment makes things reasonable
   and right, so that neither of them can appeal simply to reasonableness
   and Tightness as the guarantee of God's appointment.

   From this agreement in theology there follows agreement regarding the
   fellowship on four important points.

   1.The fellowship, in both cases, is artificially limited. In the one
   case, the condition is submission to a certain tradition; and, in the
   other, the under going of a certain inward transformation. The latter
   may be a more religious requirement, yet it is still arbitrary and not
   ethical. In both the fellowship is exclusive by reason of the Divine
   arrangement, and not simply by the nature of the moral situation. It
   consists of persons, towards whom alone, and for His own reasons alone,
   God has a favourable mind, and not simply of persons who have a
   favourable mind towards God.

   Every fellowship must have some principle of exclusion, else it would
   be merged in humanity; and true comprehensiveness never means ease of
   admission. But a society may be exclusive, according as its doors are
   swung to open outwards and be under the control of those within, or so
   as to open inwards and be under the control of those without. Extreme
   Catholicism and Evangelicalism are both of the former type. They are
   not simply societies of those who have understood God's gracious mind
   towards all His children, and who have come together for the express
   purpose of helping others to understand that God has to them also the
   same mind, and of welcoming all who understand to join them in their
   task, but they are organisations of persons who, through special
   operations of omnipotence, have a special relation to God, the
   possession of which by newcomers must be investigated.

   2.Both alike are indifferent to moral independence. This appears in
   their readiness to persuade by impression, rather than to rest all
   their hopes on impressing by persuasion. One plays on the emotions by
   ritualism and the other by revivalism, but the aim, in both cases, is
   to override the moral personality. The means of grace of neither are
   means in the moral nature of things -- moral means for showing our true
   moral relation to God, in His world and among His children and in the
   service of His Kingdom -- but are merely instruments whereby omnipotent
   grace may take by assault our personal defences.

   3.Being, both alike, unable to attach any meaning to the liberty of the
   children of God, a divided church, for the one, and an unconverted
   world, for the other, are mere unaccountable Divine failures. Frequent
   charges of schism and obduracy have the appearance of ascribing them to
   man, but human error has no effective right in either scheme. The kind
   of submission which alone is required for belonging to the true Church,
   God could surely have easily imposed upon all rational creatures;
   while, if man can be converted by the might of God as easily as an
   infant is snatched from the fire by a grown man, why are not all faces
   set in the right direction from the beginning? Why, above all, on the
   one hand, should the unity of the Church be attached to an obviously
   easily divided priesthood, backed by obviously questionable assertions;
   and conversion, on the other, be made dependent for its operation on
   emotional impressiveness, often too obviously self-conscious to be
   really impressive?

   In neither case do we pass beyond the conception of a God who sets
   arbitrary limits to His working, which are the less justifiable that He
   works, in any case, with means which, being arbitrary, are, therefore,
   not limited by the moral nature either of things or of persons.

   4.For both types of piety the rest of experience is irrelevant. Both
   are non-worldly, but not, for that reason, necessarily unworldly. The
   religious life being a special kind of sacred doing concerned with
   another world than this, this world may remain, as it was before, our
   world, measured by place and possession. The other world is alongside
   of this, running, in a way, parallel, so that the hope of the other
   world limits our behaviour somewhat in this, yet to do well in this
   world is a mark of God's favour which augurs well for the next. In no
   sense have we now eternal life. The restraints of those whose trust is
   in ritual naturally more concern matters of taste and their hopes of
   the approval of God rest more on social position; while those whose
   trust is in revivalism apply restraint more to habits and estimate
   God's approval more by possession. But for neither is religion such a
   relation to God that it can inherit the earth without place or
   possession in it. Nor is either able to show how this positive victory
   is the true safeguard of religion, doing away with the need of negative
   precautions.

   From a fellowship which would express the relation of a personal God to
   us as moral persons, so that He is gracious in all our experience, all
   arbitrary dealings are ruled out. Righteousness and truth and joy in
   spiritual things are the very Heaven in which our Father dwells, which,
   so far from being outside of our present experience, shows itself real
   as it turns the perpetual change of our earthly life increasingly into
   the one purpose of God, so that the uncertainties upon which nothing
   could be built are shown to be themselves a building of God.

   Of the fellowship which would thus embody the conception of grace as a
   gracious relation of God to His children in all things, four
   characteristics also may be distinguished.

   1.It is a fellowship which has no frontiers except those it exists to
   remove: and in that task it must acknowledge no failure except what is
   due to the moral independence necessary for the truly personal relation
   to a gracious God it exists to manifest.

   By the nature of grace as God's gracious personal relation to His
   children, response to which must be won and cannot be compelled, all
   its limitations are determined. It is a fellowship of persons who
   realise their relations to one another through their relation to God
   and who find their relation to the Father realised in their fellowship
   with His children; and it takes the form of a society, working under
   historical conditions, because an understanding of God through human
   relations requires a common use of experience. But it is a special
   society only because it rests exclusively on a blessed dependence on an
   absolutely gracious God, impossible to realise except in freedom and
   moral independence, which is not the basis of any other society. This
   may set a severe limit to success, but it is not arbitrary, being
   imposed only by God's respect for the liberty of His children, and by
   the nature of His Kingdom as a family and not merely a federation.
   Arbitrariness is impossible for a gracious God, but, on the other hand,
   compulsion in a truly personal relation is equally impossible.

   2.It has no means of grace except what enables us to use the world as
   God's world, in fellowship with men as children of God, and in peace
   through His rule of truth and righteousness, because it interprets
   God's gracious relation to us in all experience. Its means of grace
   must be real means for bringing home the nature of reality to minds
   made in the image of God, which is to say, they must impress only as
   they persuade. The Apostle's ideal was, "By manifestation of the truth,
   commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God."
   The appeal is by truth alone to the common human conscience and to it
   alone. Yet no limit may be set for the variety of the manifestation, so
   long as it is truly in the sight of God and not an appeal to mere human
   suffrage. It may draw from us sublime poetic utterance and stateliness
   of presentation, or it may drive us to the utmost simplicity of speech
   and worship. Both will be right in their place, if they spring from the
   vision of spiritual realities. But, also, both will be wrong, not
   manifesting but obscuring, if they are used as substitutes for consent
   of the soul, to sweep men along without freedom or insight.

   Prayer, Word and Sacrament are still the means of grace, yet only as
   they are means of manifesting the truth to every man's conscience, and
   not merely as they are devices or vehicles or impressive doings. Except
   as means of persuading they cannot help to manifest God's gracious
   personal relation to His children, for as devices to wring blessings
   out of God or as vehicles to convey something into man, however
   individual they may be, they would not, in any strict sense, be
   personal.

   Prayer is not bombarding God for acts of omnipotence which, otherwise,
   He might withhold, but is the intercourse of the family of God, wherein
   our brethren are included as well as our Father. As it manifests a
   gracious relation, whereby all things work together for our good, its
   chief task is in everything to give thanks; and, though our needs may
   require special petitions, it is because, being straitened in
   ourselves, we need God's help to receive to profit, and not because God
   forgets to be gracious till He is urged.

   Speech is the natural mode of communication between persons, because it
   enables both to think the same thought, each as his own thought, being
   a word only as it is spoken with the understanding to the
   understanding. The Word, as a means of grace, is, therefore, the
   utterance of what we have been enabled to see of God's dealing with us,
   to minds made like ours in the Divine image, that they also may see.
   Therefore, it must commend itself, not merely to the liking for
   pleasant or even for solemn and impressive utterance, but to the
   conscience of right which can enable men to interpret it as a word of
   God to themselves.

   The Sacraments solemnly employ water, and bread and wine -- the common
   things in daily use -- to express and, as it were, give the
   concentrated essence of the sacrament of life. They presuppose that
   there is more in nature than an appeal to the senses, and more in every
   gift of food than to eat of the loaves and be filled, and that we ought
   therein to see the miracle of a gracious God manifesting Himself in
   goodness. The miracle is extended in these rites to all God appoints
   for us. The special rite which connects this sacrament of life directly
   with the Cross, forbids us to rule out any part of experience, and
   teaches us to find in agony and shame and death the manifold wisdom and
   measureless love of God. This is the message by which it becomes
   pre-eminently the sacrament of reconciliation.

   3.This leads to the next mark, which may be described as the secular
   quality of its religion.

   The special rites of the special fellowship, having distinctive
   sacredness, not by remoteness from things secular, but by penetrating
   deeper into their true meaning and true uses, teach us not to use the
   sacred shrine as a shelter from the secular world, but to make all
   things sacred, and so, in the right way, to abolish the distinction
   between sacred and secular, till the world is our spiritual possession
   as much as Cephas.

   Our Lord's religion was in a pre-eminent degree secular. From the
   day-labourers, farmers and fisher-folk, he demanded a righteousness
   beyond that of the recognised ministers of religion, a demand made
   reasonable by removing righteousness from the sphere of sacred
   observances into the sphere of our common relations in the common life,
   through faith in the Father exercised amid our daily tasks and trials.
   All His own ministry was simply the absolutely religious handling of
   the incidents which arose for Him in His intercourse with the ordinary
   people who met Him, as we should say, by accident. His teaching abounds
   in illustrations from the secular life, but there are only two from the
   ecclesiastical religion -- the Pharisee praying in the Temple with
   himself alone, and the Priest and the Levite passing by on the other
   side. Moreover, most of what he says to the Scribes and Pharisees
   applies to the dangers of outward organised religion at all times.

   4.The final mark is the relation of the fellowship to the Rule of God,
   the sense in which the Church is the Kingdom of God. Catholicism
   identifies the Church with the Kingdom as far as it outwardly extends,
   and Evangelicalism only as far as it inwardly succeeds, and the
   difference is deep and wide; yet they are at one in regarding the Rule
   of God in both as fundamentally mystical and traditional. Grace, that
   is to say, is a swaying of individuals, of which the individual may be
   conscious, but is so immediately the work of God that he may not; and
   its manifestation in history is merely the handing down of the
   accumulated results of individual operations of grace, so that we are
   founded upon the apostles and prophets and Jesus Christ is the chief
   corner-stone purely by traditional guarantees, for which our moral
   freedom is no necessary condition.

   But in the society which embodies a gracious relationship of God to all
   men, in all things, at all times, the Kingdom of God is manifested
   religiously -- or we might say apocalyptically -- and ethically, and
   not mystically and traditionally.

   The Kingdom of God is the Rule of God, and not, in any sense, mere
   moral progress of man. Our reliance is on God, and not on our freedom,
   and there is place only for trust and gratitude, and none for merit,
   yet the essence of God's Rule is that it is not content with obedience
   except in the blessedness of moral independence. All His dealings with
   us, from first to last, concern our freedom, not, indeed, as if we were
   free, but always to make us free. Were we free, we should be already
   saved, and we are only being saved; but what we are being saved into is
   the liberty of the children of God. Wherefore, God's Kingdom has come,
   not in so far as individuals have been made the vehicles of absolute
   truth or holiness, or even in so far as mankind grows in truth and
   righteousness, but in so far as men are willing in the day of God's
   power, in so far, in short, as being reconciled to God, they find in
   His will alone their blessedness.

   This society of the Kingdom of God is necessarily historical, but is
   not traditional. The blessedness of God's Rule is God's most unmerited
   gift, introduced wholly by the finger of God, yet is so personal that
   even God cannot impose it except by enabling us to accept it; and the
   essential thing to see is that it is not less, but more God's personal
   gift, because it takes the trouble to pass round by way of our own
   personal acceptance and co-operation. Hence this amazing, varied,
   suffering, joyous world, with some success but much frustrated
   endeavour, much knowledge laboriously won but more darkness we cannot
   by any effort dispel, and much gladness of living but ever arrested by
   pain and shadowed by death. And hence also the supreme significance of
   those who, in fellowship, have, from age to age, interpreted to their
   brethren the Divine rule it displays. These are the prophets who, since
   the world began, have been preparing for the fullness of the time when
   it might be perfectly manifested in teaching and service and poverty
   and all the agony and contumely which could increase the terror of
   death, and the apostles who have since interpreted the fullness of this
   manifestation. On this foundation of the apostles and prophets, with
   Jesus Christ as the chief corner-stone, we are to build, not in slavish
   subjection to the past, but in the freedom of God's children, who are
   also themselves apostles and prophets.

   Instead of regarding the rest of experience as mere scenery for
   operations of grace which are canalised in special channels, whether
   priest or evangelist, we see that nothing less than our whole varied
   experience can suffice for making souls truly in God's image, free and
   not restrained, knowing as He knows, loving as He loves, choosing as He
   chooses, blessed as He is blessed, sons and not subjects. If this be
   the high goal, we can understand the necessity of the labyrinthine
   by-ways towards truth, with blind alleys that admonish us to seek anew
   the true road, with agonies and disasters to warn us of our mistakes
   and our sins, with the necessity of bitter penitence and sympathy
   evoked by suffering. Then the Church, if it be interpreting to mankind
   this mind of God, has its convincing place, however small it be, or
   however divided on other matters. But, otherwise, what is life but a
   mockery and a despair, and what is the largest, most united church, as
   a mere refuge in the midst of it, save a poor kind of device at best,
   wholly inadequate as the work of a goodness which, with the resources
   of omnipotence, can compel man as it will?

   Mankind is often weary of the long and arduous and circuitous way, and
   constantly takes shorter cuts than God's way of personal faith and
   moral freedom. Often the Church which should stand only for God's
   order, is inveigled into the service of organised compulsion and
   becomes the most eager and successful advocate of mental pupilage and
   moral subjection: and, then, men are put back under the discipline of
   what the Apostle calls the Law. Yet God is not weary and soon He burns
   up the wood and hay and stubble with which men build, often in vast
   calamities and desolating conflicts, till men are taught that a mere
   order of subjection is, in the last resort, mere anarchy, and that the
   Divine way of the insight of our own faith and the consecration of our
   own wills, through our own recognition that in all things God is
   gracious, is alone the abiding order of reality, which evil can neither
   tempt nor terrorise.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    PART III

                             THE WAY OF ITS WORKING
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER I

MECHANICAL OPPOSITES

   We are to covet earnestly the best gifts, yet, if we covet only the
   gift and pay no heed to the giving, we shall repeat, even in spiritual
   things, the old Roman story of Tarpeia, who, thinking only of a gift
   and ignoring the hostility and contempt with which it would be given,
   demanded from the enemy what they carried on their left arms, and found
   it not the golden bracelets she expected, but a weight of shields which
   crushed her to death, and which her greed had overlooked.

   Material wealth as mere gift, without interest in the receiver to
   prepare him for its use, may be a mere weight upon the springs of
   action and self-control, for idleness and self-indulgence, and not for
   larger enterprise and usefulness. Instruction, concerned merely with
   imparting information, without sympathetic understanding of the pupil
   and care to develope his thought and interest, may be a dead load upon
   the mind, lumber not education. Both may be more shield than bracelet.
   And mere giving of moral help may also be flinging of shields upon a
   victim. Moral precepts and religious dogmas are impressed upon the
   child as though he were wax. He is shielded and directed, and, if
   unfortunately he stumble, he is wiped like a doll and set back in his
   place, till a moral catastrophe too grave to be so amended may be not
   too costly, if it enable him to save his own personal sense of truth
   and righteousness from being crushed by this load of individual, but
   impersonal supervision.

   As the true test of a father's aid is the responsibility, freedom and
   independence of his son, so the proof of God as Father is not in giving
   good gifts, but in knowing how to give them that they may secure us in
   freedom and not merely in fortune. The most liberal domination on God's
   side and the most indebted subjection on ours will never make us sons
   of God, but only puppets of His pleasure.

   If freedom and the right use of it could be merely given and it were
   only a matter of God moulding us to His will by the word of His power,
   the manifold slaveries and misuses of the will would seem to show that
   He is as parsimonious in his exercise of His prerogative as the Pope of
   his infallibility. But when we thus conceive grace as direct power and
   a good will as another direct power, we find ourselves trying to
   conceive that God makes us free by compulsion, while, yet, we are free
   only as we are not compelled, that God, by the might of His hand,
   shapes our thinking to truth, our feeling to purity and our wills to
   good, while, yet, except as we see for ourselves nothing is true,
   except as our own hearts reverence nothing is pure, except as our own
   purpose is consecrated nothing is good.

   When our doing and God's doing thus become irreconcilable mechanical
   opposites, and we find ourselves, not only in conflict with experience,
   but introducing absurdities into it, we ought surely to realise that we
   have missed our way.

   Yet it is followed blindly and persistently, partly from the mechanical
   nature of our thinking, which, even in the personal sphere where it is
   wholly misleading, tends to reduce all explanations to the appearance
   of a law of motion; and partly from the lack of practical harmony in
   our whole dealing with experience, whereby our faiths and our purposes
   are put in separate compartments. We constantly look at life
   religiously and morally, as through a binocular out of focus. At best
   we dimly feel these worlds are one, though we cannot help seeing them
   apart even when we look with both eyes; at worst we shut one eye and
   look morally, and then open that and shut the other and look
   religiously. Then we say very sagely, room must be found for both
   worlds. Life, we say, is not a circle but an ellipse with two foci. God
   is grace, but He is also power -- as if the whole question were not
   whether the ultimate power is gracious; or God reveals Himself in
   Christ, but also in Nature -- as if the whole question of Christ were
   not how Nature is to be interpreted by the purpose of God; or God is
   love, but He is also justice -- as if the whole question of the
   government of God did not concern a righteous love; or God speaks in
   His Word, but also in conscience -- as if there were any word of God
   not manifested to every man's conscience or any conscience apart from
   the manifestation of the mind of God; or there is the problem of the
   individual, but there is also the problem of the Kingdom of God,
   meaning by that, compromises and adjustments between the claims of
   institutions and the vagaries of their members -- as though the whole
   outcome of religion did not concern social persons who only find their
   own kingdom as they discover God's.

   The task of theology is not to effect some kind of working compromise
   between the two tubes of the binocular, but to find their proper
   adjustment to one clear field of vision, so that we shall not be moral
   and religious, but shall so depend upon God as to have in all things
   moral independence, till our religion becomes morality and our morality
   religion.

   As God is not concerned first with good gifts, but with right giving,
   measured by right receiving, grace is never a mere direct line of
   power, passing through us with impersonal directness, as light through
   window-glass, but is a curve of patient, personal wisdom, encircling
   and embracing us and all our concerns. With this curve a true theology
   is wholly occupied.

   Grace has always a convex side towards God, and a concave side towards
   man. Taken separately, they are contradictory and opposite, but,
   united, they are as perfectly one as the convex and concave sides in
   one line. As acts of grace and acts of will, they are sheer conflicting
   forces; in the gracious relation to us of the Father of our spirits,
   their harmony is the essential expression of our fellowship. Yet, the
   harmony of love, not of absorption, of personal agreement, not of
   pantheistic oneness, can be won only as we realise the contradiction
   and see how God overcomes it, by accepting it.

   Every right doctrine of grace, therefore, starts from the conflict
   between us and God as individuals which, just because it belongs to our
   power as persons to maintain, God's indirect personal dealing with us
   alone can overcome.

   Religious and moral positions, being opposed mechanically, admit of no
   solution, but, being combined personally, they admit of no conflict.
   The way of the working of God's gracious personal relation to His
   children is shown precisely in this reconciliation, which, being, on
   His side, the succour of our freedom, and, on ours, the liberty of His
   children, is not religious in one aspect and moral in another, but is
   moral because it is religious and religious because it is moral.

   Yet this truly personal harmony can be achieved only through
   contradictions, which are not mere intellectual puzzles to which we
   might find some clever answer, but are actual practical opposites which
   arise from the fact that man is one person and God another. As we can,
   being persons, maintain our separateness from God, they admit only of a
   religious solution, a solution by showing us that our true freedom in
   the will of God as the gracious, wise and religious regard for His
   children which we express as love.

   Our relation to God is thereby made moral and religious in inseparable
   unity. Yet our dependence and our independence are not brought into one
   by any process of resolving the moral into the religious or the
   religious into the moral. When the moral is resolved into the
   religious, man is not one person and God another, but man is overridden
   in his course and his end is to be absorbed, and God acts as a
   pantheistic Absolute and not as a Father; when the religious is
   resolved into the moral, the truly personal relation is also lost, man
   becoming a mere self-enclosed individual and God a remote Deistic Maker
   and moral Potentate.

   Man being a person, can maintain his separateness from God, and, God's
   relation to us being personal, He cannot overcome it merely by a grace
   which irresistibly removes it. His acceptance of it is, on the
   contrary, the basis of all His dealing with us, so that He cannot
   succeed by withdrawing our responsibility, but only by making us more
   perfectly responsible, till we discover our true freedom in making His
   righteous and holy will our own. That is not attainable by the highest
   might of omnipotence even guided by omniscience, but only by the
   patient and wise regard for His children we call love. As love must,
   from its nature, desire our worth to be in ourselves and not merely to
   force us, by any kind of means, to be worthy, it must accept the
   contradictions which arise when our wills are set in one direction and
   its purpose of good for us in another. Nor has it any other way of
   overcoming the sin which causes them than the personal persuasion which
   would enable us to discover that we are true to ourselves only as we
   seek the highest love appoints for us, and find ourselves only as we
   lose ourselves for love's sake.

   All doctrines of grace, being doctrines of love, and not of power, must
   accept these calamitous opposites, which are there so long as our will
   is set in one direction and God's in another. They may neither be
   ignored nor overriden, but, on the contrary, it is of the essence of a
   gracious personal relation to be wholly determined by them. It may not
   take the easy road of might, for, then, instead of achieving a personal
   relation, the relation between God and man becomes wholly mechanical,
   as between forces not persons. The very business of a doctrine of
   grace, on the contrary, is to show how grace steadfastly maintains a
   relation between God and His children, wherein we remain persons even
   as He is a person, and have moral independence even as He has, an
   independence which we only perfectly achieve, as we attain a perfect
   trust in our Father, whereby we can serve Him joyously, as love can
   alone be served, in His children.

   An account of the way of the working of God's gracious relation to us,
   therefore, is just an account of these opposites, which, so long as
   they are opposed mechanically, are irreconcilable contradictions, and
   of how love overcomes them by a personal dealing which turns them into
   the perfect harmony of unbroken peace and unceasing purpose of good.
   The problem is how to set forth the doctrines of grace, so that
   salvation shall not be either God's working or our own, or, in part,
   God's gift, and, in part, our own achievement, but, from its beginning
   in penitence to its completion in the possession of eternal life, be,
   all of it, at once of God's giving and of our own achieving, at once of
   God's working in us the willing and the doing, and of our working out
   our own salvation with a fear and trembling which is at once a
   recognition of the reality and the imperfection of our task, and a
   trust in God's as alone making it perfect and secure.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER II

PENITENCE

   Faith is not, as is often affirmed, trying to believe things on a
   venture, yet, only as we can do no other than venture, have we faith.
   When, as often happens, men say in effect, This is true, but I don't
   hold with it; this is trustworthy, but I am not so simple as to entrust
   myself to it; this is God's way, but I won't risk taking it, they are
   merely deceived by words. What you hold with is your real truth; what
   you entrust yourself to your real faith; the power whose way you take
   your real God.

   As God's goodness is not mere benignity, a purpose of good, the will to
   do His will must be fundamental for all right faith in it. To benignity
   sentiment might be a sufficient response; but who can imagine that mere
   benignity can explain this world, either its worst or its best, or
   sentiment be an enduring link with anything that could sustain us
   throughout life's weary day? A good God, adequate to experience, can
   only be a God whose power is manifested in love, and whose love is
   interpreted by conscience, and in whom, therefore, no one can have
   faith without measuring life by goodness in the moral sense.

   Our faith in God is a saving faith, because, faith being this practical
   trust, to believe in God is identical with committing to Him our
   salvation; and we show what manner of belief we have in Him by the kind
   of salvation we expect. An expectation of ease from distress of body or
   conflict of soul, though sought by way of the hardest asceticism,
   merely means that we hope, after breaking through the hard shell of
   life, to find the sweet kernel of beneficence. Only the expectation of
   a moral victory from which sin could neither draw us nor drive us,
   marks a true faith in the goodness of God. But that hope is manifestly
   unreal and perverse and hypocritical, if divorced from moral purpose.

   The succour of faith in God through Jesus Christ, so far from replacing
   this moral requirement, most intensifies and deepens it, unless we
   evade its appeal by separating belief in Christ from belief in every
   thing for which He stood. Otherwise we could not look in the one
   unblurred mirror of God's gracious relation to His children, without
   seeing in it the one perfect manifestation of our true moral relation
   to God and man, and having an overwhelming sense of its moral
   requirement. To call Jesus Saviour -- if we really trust that to which
   we entrust our salvation -- is in the same breath to call Him Lord. To
   say we believe in Him without standing for what He stood for and
   forsaking the opposing possessions and devices by which men seek to
   safeguard their lives, is merely to use Jesus, as we can most easily
   misuse the highest, to deceive ourselves.

   Nevertheless, grace is grace precisely because, though wholly concerned
   with moral goodness, it does not at all defend on how moral we are.

   This indirect way Phariseeism in all ages has failed to grasp, with
   disastrous results both for its religion and for its ethics; and, so
   long as we relate faith and works directly, we escape a Pharisaic
   salvation for 'the visibly righteous only to run into an Antinomian
   salvation unrelated to righteousness.

   Yet the true situation is perfectly simple as soon as we realise the
   personal nature of the grace whereby we are saved. God's gracious
   relation to us can have no meaning for us without moral sincerity. But,
   as it is while we are yet sinners, and to deliver us from sin, to make
   our moral goodness its condition would be to defeat its purpose. The
   condition of faith in it is penitence, and not any form of
   self-approbation, however well founded.

   As soon as this fact comes home to us, it is only too common to
   conclude that our first duty must be to work up a sense of being
   miserable offenders. The most approved means is to employ the darkest
   superlatives in confession, which, however, no sensible person is ever
   to dream of turning into even moderately unpleasant concrete instances.
   The result is seldom real spiritual abasement. More frequently it
   reinforces spiritual pride by making our self-acquired moral
   humiliation, at the cost of nothing that really humiliates, appear our
   easiest, yet most meritorious attainment.

   Not carefully manufactured self-depreciation, but sincerity with
   ourselves in the light of reality, is the condition of true penitence.
   Towards that we do not advance by a "voluntary humility," a purposeful
   persuading of ourselves to think ourselves other than we are. To
   deprecate any hold we have on truth, to make light of any
   self-discipline we have won, to undervalue any capacity we have for
   moral tasks, particularly if it mean excusing ourselves from their
   performance, is false, not true humility. An unreal emotion about his
   own depravity would not have improved the young ruler who had kept all
   the commandments from his youth; and when Jesus loved him for such
   obedience, He was neither lowering His standard of righteousness nor
   altering His conception of sin.

   No depreciatory estimate of our moral state will give true penitence,
   but only a wholly different estimate of ourselves in respect even of
   our highest attainments. Yet this estimate must be wholly of simple
   truth; for truth requires no working up, nothing except to see things
   as they really are.

   To see things as they are, however, is to see all our privileges as
   responsibilities; whereas the essence of hypocrisy is to regard them as
   merits. The beam of hypocrisy which perverts all our judgment of
   ourselves and of others, is the identification of privilege with merit
   and not with responsibility.

   Moral comfort and self-approval can then be won from events utterly
   irrelevant to any element of character. Thus a man feels his moral
   consequence increased and his moral responsibility diminished, because
   an event, so independent of him as the death of a relative, has put
   money in his purse. Self-esteem is made easier through the esteem of
   others, and life less of a responsibility through deliverance from the
   pressure of need. Ability, training, even dull acceptance of good form,
   nay mere terror of social reprobation, may all be mistaken in this way
   for moral worth. By thus taking appearance for reality all conventional
   moral judgments are formed. But, with conventional moral judgment,
   there can be no true penitence, because, being the beam which clouds
   our moral vision and leaves us in an utterly unreal moral world, it
   perverts God's whole testimony to us through reality.

   Could that beam be removed, penitence would need no manufacturing, but
   would come, as truth can alone come, by being seen. As soon as we see
   our privileges as of God's goodness, and in no way of ours, our virtues
   turn out to be the goodness and long-suffering of God, which have
   shielded us from ourselves and hedged us round with restraining
   influences. But, instead of employing the goodness of God for its
   proper end of making us more sensitive to His true judgment of us, we
   use it to create for ourselves an armour of self-esteem to ward off any
   suggestion of our unworthiness.

   To be without that mail of proof is necessarily to be penitent, for it
   is to be without protection from the assaults of conscience. The
   language about being poor and miserable and blind and naked, and about
   all our righteousness being filthy rags, may still not come naturally
   to our lips, and it is vain to attempt self-hypnotising by confessions
   we do not feel. Little of it, however, will seem mere hyperbole, so
   soon as we see how our good opinion of ourselves has been formed in a
   world of perverted moral esteem, where we can turn even the privileges,
   which, having been misused, are our chief condemnation, into our own
   merit. Except in this unreal moral world, in which our own
   consciousness of truth, our own conscience of right, our own sense of
   responsibility have no chance of straight speech with us, no one can
   maintain a steady self-approval: but there we can divert attention from
   our true characters, which constantly resist the truth in
   unrighteousness, to the outward respectability, which permits us to
   esteem ourselves through reflecting the opinions of others, who cannot
   look upon our hearts. Unprotected by this superficial and external
   estimate, we should be exposed to the judgment from which Jesus alone
   never wavered, that hypocrisy is our supreme error and spiritual
   hindrance, in comparison with which even a gross vice is a small
   obstacle. Once delivered from this blindness, we should have no need to
   exaggerate our sins and shortcomings, for only by its aid can we
   cherish the vanity and folly which allow us to judge God's goodness as
   though it were our own. Nothing is needed except to escape from it, in
   order to discover that there never could be any good news of God which
   depended on our goodness or which was capable of being good news at
   all, unless it were preached to the poor, preached simply to man's
   moral need.

   To repent, therefore, is nothing else than to see ourselves as we are
   in the real moral world, apart from the hypocrisy which refracts our
   vision till we can esteem our privileges, however misused, as requiring
   even the God who gave them to regard us with approbation. Without such
   repentance faith cannot give blessedness in face of all reality, seeing
   that moral reality, which is the most important of all kinds of
   reality, is both perverted and evaded.

   But, if penitence is only another name for moral sincerity, it is plain
   that we cannot repent merely on demand, and by mere moral effort, and
   as a preliminary condition for having faith. If we were utterly
   sincere, we should, of course, be wholly open to the testimony of
   reality to itself and so necessarily believe the truth and the truth
   alone. The whole difficulty regarding God's gracious relation to us
   lies in our refusal to face reality, for its victory would be won, were
   that effected.

   Thus repentance is not a preliminary to faith, but an integral part of
   it. To see a gracious personal relation of God to us is as necessary
   for true penitence, as penitence for seeing that God is gracious.
   "Repent and believe" does not mean repent first and afterwards believe.
   In the real movement of the spirit there is no such before and after.
   Each is necessary to each, so that no one can lay himself open to
   reality without faith or have faith without laying himself open to
   reality.

   This living union of repentance and faith is what finds itself
   succoured in Jesus Christ, who alone perfectly sets our failure in the
   light of our possibilities as children of God, thereby at once
   manifesting its sinfulness and giving hope of victory over it.

   Whether He Himself was without sin is a universal negative only
   omniscience could prove beyond cavil; and whether His moral interests
   were beyond all limitation from His situation or His age involves a
   universal affirmation which must always be at the mercy of private
   judgment. But it is not dubious that wheresoever men meet Him, in
   Scripture or in His true followers, conventional moral judgments are
   overturned. Responsibilities are attached to privileges, and moral
   compromises lose their appearance of wisdom and present themselves as
   purblind foolishness. Then our sense of our amazing moral failure is
   only equalled by our sense of our amazing moral possibilities.

   In His presence men realise that they are of unclean lips and dwell
   amid a people of unclean lips, even as the prophet did who saw God in
   His temple, because, in the presence of Christ, penitence and the
   vision of God are one inseparable experience.

   With whatever critical questions of text or narrative the life of
   Christ may be beset, this effect abides, and not always least with
   those who realise the difficulties most, and not always greatest with
   those whose relation to Him has the completest, most formal
   ecclesiastical expression. Nothing in history is more certain and
   nothing in experience more impressive than His influence in enabling
   men to estimate themselves with true humility, not by making them
   resolve to be penitent and abased, but by setting them before the great
   spiritual realities, which at once expose hypocrisies and give hope in
   truth. Where that effect fails, it is because men do not lay themselves
   open to the appeal. Till, by doing so, they are taught of Him, they do
   not believe in Him, even though, according to all the orthodoxies, they
   accept the doctrines regarding Him and, according to all the organised
   traditions, are counted His followers and called by His name. But,
   where it is present, He is a Prince and a Saviour to give repentance to
   Israel and forgiveness of sins, not apart and in succession, but in
   identity and intimate interaction.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER III

JUSTIFICATION

   Faith in God as gracious, it has been maintained, does not require for
   its exercise moral attainment. The sick, and not the whole, need a
   physician; and, the better the physician, the worse the cases that can
   make bold to go to him for cure. Precisely because God is gracious, He
   asks no minimum of good behaviour before He will aid, but the good-news
   is that He seeks and saves the lost, and admits publicans and sinners
   into His Kingdom. Moral attainment as a pre-requisite for faith is
   legal and Pharisaic, and not evangelical and Christian.

   Yet God's salvation is moral attainment, and by it alone the working of
   all things for good is to be measured. Therefore, it can have no value
   except to moral sincerity. With hypocrisy we can have no faith in God
   of a kind that would reconcile us with God in all He appoints to make
   us perfect as He is perfect; for how can we approve of the road, when
   we are not truly desiring its goal?

   But, if, as has been maintained, hypocrisy is inseparable from sin,
   moral sincerity would not appear to be any more within our reach than
   moral perfection. Are we not for ever condemned to the treadmill round
   of sin and self-deception, and self-deception and sin? Unchanging guilt
   and irremediable remorse we cannot face for ever; and, if we cannot
   alter the facts, are we not certain to try to deceive ourselves
   regarding them? Then, being left despairing and self-deceived, are we
   not certain to be further tempted?

   Till this vicious circle is broken, it is plain that we can neither
   have moral independence nor dependence upon God, Some way of escape,
   therefore, must be sought. But, the more earnestly we face the moral
   and the religious situation, the more we seem shut up within adamantine
   walls.

   1.The moral situation is that to grow in insight, to extend our idea of
   responsibility, to pass from action to motive, is to enlarge remorse
   till the pain leads us to curb our thoughts and to moderate our
   expectations. Who can escape the cultivation of hypocrisy, if, the more
   intensely and seriously moral a man is, the more bitterly he must feel
   that his morality only "shuts him up to disobedience"?

   Most manifestly this would seem to be the outcome of a conscience, no
   longer exercising a hard, external, legal judgment, but hungering and
   thirsting after righteousness, a conscience which nothing less can
   measure than the infinite claim of love. The moral problem is simply
   larger and more insoluble than ever; and we are more than ever in the
   toils of that hypocrisy with which we can have no right relation to
   truth either in faith or penitence. Thus shut up in the vicious circle
   of sin and hypocrisy and hypocrisy and sin, what can man do save cry
   out with the

   Apostle, "Who shall deliver me from this body of death?" And of purely
   moral answer there is none, the purely moral judgment allowing no place
   of repentance, though sought carefully with tears.

   2.But can any better success await a religious trust? A right
   deliverance from remorse might break the vicious circle and afford us
   room to be sincere, but, when we speak of pardon, what moral reality
   does it stand for which would give us a right to forgive ourselves?
   What is it save a legal fiction, farther away than ever, not only from
   moral sincerity, but from every form of spiritual reality?

   The difficulty springs from the inmost nature of the moral person, for,
   without imputation of our doings to ourselves, personality would have
   no existence. In all else we may change and become wholly different
   individuals, but the sense of responsibility abides, linking
   inexperienced youth and intrepid manhood and decrepit age into one, and
   insisting that, throughout all the change, we remain unchange ably our
   own selves. Nor, without this imputation, could we have any permanent
   basis for the self of our consciousness, the growth of our ideals, or
   the formation of our character. The word imputation has fallen into
   disrepute through keeping doubtful company, but the thing itself is the
   life-nerve of moral personality; and if the gracious relation of God we
   have spoken of plays fast and loose with the imputation of our own
   doings to our own selves, it would be more deadly for everything that
   is of moral significance in us than even to be overridden occasionally
   by the direct force of omnipotent grace.

   But imputation is a legal idea and necessarily creates a legal
   situation. Must it not, therefore, be dealt with legally? Must it not
   be either punished or condoned? And, if God's pardon is the acquittal
   of a judge, it can only be by some kind of legal condonation. This has
   seemed so evident that the endeavours after such a way of escape are
   ancient and numerous. By ignoring minor differences, however, we may
   reduce them to two -- the way of Compromise and the way of Composition.

   The way of Compromise introduces God's pardon purely to patch up the
   rents in human morality.

   The firsthand simplest view is that we can ourselves attain so much
   more merit in the future than the bare legal demands of the future will
   require, that it will compensate in God's eyes for falling below the
   bare legal demands of the past.

   Here we have the legalistic, moralistic spirit at its shallowest, to
   which the noble and austere form even of a legal morality has not truly
   appeared, and which has not even dreamt of a morality which demands the
   whole devotion of a perfect love to God and man. It has no
   consciousness of life's varied opportunity, no infinite standard of its
   demands, nothing save the most mechanical conception of character. Yet,
   mostly unconfessed, but not, therefore, less operative, this view
   dominates much theory and still more practice.

   More or less consciously, it directs such religious doings as penance
   and masses, and determines some ideas of saving faith. There are,
   moreover, many people neither obviously Catholic nor aggressively
   Protestant, nor, for that matter, of any markedly religious character,
   who are also possessed by the idea of so acting as to compensate for
   the past and have its evil condoned, and who are thereby made unable to
   meet their present duty simply because it is their present duty. This
   may cause them to have much anxiety about law and morality, but it is a
   law of mere observances and a morality without moral motive.

   The legal morality which, if it ceased to impute our doings to
   ourselves, would have no business to do upon the earth, cannot touch
   the imputation of wrong, or, when we face the moral reality with
   unaverted eyes, afford us any prospect save the bitter irremediable
   past. And if morality is a legal requirement and every breach of it
   legal guilt, and nothing can alter the past which is past for ever, or
   make it other than our own, is any better, any other possible way of
   comfort open than to hope that we can do something to make up for the
   past, and that God will overlook the rest?

   But if that be all, the comfort is not great, for such condonation
   deals efficiently neither with the past nor the future; and least of
   all is it adequate to the needs of the present. It may be better thus
   to lighten the burden of the past than to ignore it, but there is no
   real power in the hope of acquittal on good behaviour in the future to
   remove it from our shoulders. As our future can never be determined
   apart from our past, it is better to bring our past to bear upon the
   future in this way than not at all, but it is no right attitude to the
   future to see ourselves in its vistas creatures of transcendent merit,
   even though our past should need all conceivable future merit to cover
   its deficiencies. Above all, though our present task comes out of the
   past, and a very important part of it may be to face the consequences
   of past transgression, our service is in the present; and the service
   of the present never allows us to be more than debtors to its calls, so
   that, after we have done all we can, we remain unprofitable servants,
   with no merit in our best devotion to good, and much less superfluous
   merit to meet the demerit of past devotion to evil.

   The other form of legal condonation is by Composition. It looks beyond
   our own righteousness, and believes that the merit of another person
   better than ourselves can compensate for our deficiencies. This may be
   merely the transference of the merits of the saints, or it may be the
   more definite and comprehensive conception of a substitute who takes
   our place.

   The feeling by which this theory survives doubtless comes down to us
   from the days when the person was still submerged in the clan or city.
   When moral interests were communal and individual responsibility only
   vaguely defined, such transference of merit or guilt may not have been
   morally forbidding and may even at times have been morally impressive:
   but, as a theory of pardon which is to work legally in a legal
   situation, the essence of which is the ascription of guilt to the
   individual, it comes to shipwreck, not merely on details, like the
   difficulty of seeing how any one's merit could be transferred to
   another and also remain his own to secure him a higher place in the
   hierarchy of the saints, but because it fails completely to fulfil the
   legal condition of the very legal difficulty it exists to remove, which
   is that the sin wholly belongs to the sinner.

   It is proposed as a remedy at once for the distressed conscience of the
   individual and for the violated law of the universe; but, in respect of
   both, it remains an arbitrary solution which no subtlety can make
   moral. With respect to the individual the heart of the legal situation
   is that the guilt is ours, ours only, and ours always, that, in this
   aspect, the moral personality is quite isolated and impenetrable; with
   respect to the moral order, a true moral order does not need to
   vindicate itself at all, and, if it did so by transferring merit, it
   would not be moral, while, if it accepted the sufferings of the
   innocent for the punishment of the guilty, it would not even be legal.
   Nor can this apply less to the justice of God than to the justice of
   man.

   The theory, moreover, is even less religious than moral, for it turns
   the Father into a legal Potentate, intent by any device on maintaining
   his status and keeping His subjects in order. God would not be dealing
   with us as with sons, but, at best, He would be giving us some kind of
   State condonation for a cause foreign to ourselves and foreign to our
   filial relation to Him. To the name of forgiveness, as a true
   restoration of fellowship in His family, it could have no kind of
   claim.

   If pardon is to break the vicious circle of sin and hypocrisy, and
   hypocrisy and sin, in which we find ourselves imprisoned, it must
   neither be a compromise nor a composition, nor any device of
   condonation whatsoever, but must deal with the actual moral situation
   by means of moral realities, and the result must be power to look the
   whole moral situation straight in the face. It must not mean
   palliating, or ignoring, or transferring, but courage to open all
   cupboards, assured of finding no skeletons. To be forgiven ought to
   mean that all need has gone from us to think anything, either in
   ourselves or in our situation, other than it is. The essence of being
   justified is emancipation from moral juggling with ourselves by giving
   us power to look all reality in the face, but, as a mere legal fiction,
   it would only be another illusion, and could do nothing to deliver us
   from hypocrisy. From a peace of moral insincerity, which we can too
   easily attain, it is the very business of justification to set us free.
   Yet it will avail nothing to this end unless it so deal with our actual
   moral situation that we can, at one and the same time, have utter
   sincerity and peace.

   "Blessed," says the Psalmist, "is the man to whom the Lord imputeth not
   iniquity, in whose spirit there is no guile." The absence of guile, the
   absence of all desire to shield oneself in any way from falsehood or
   derive profit from anything save sincerity and truth, is here at once
   the condition and the consequence of forgiveness. But condonation for a
   reason wholly outside of our responsibility would only complete our
   self-deception by taking the most profoundly personal element, the
   imputation of our sin to ourselves, out of our lives; and the result,
   instead of being our deliverance, would be our spiritual annihilation.

   Yet, if the Lord is not a legal fiction, if He is, on the contrary,
   only another name for reality, if the one thing He must do is to impute
   to every man exactly what he is, how, except under some illusion or by
   some device, can we ever have any blessed sense of pardon? From the
   practical moral standpoint, the problem of all forgiveness arises
   precisely from this close partnership of sin with unreality. We cannot
   be forgiven without spiritual death so long as there is guile; and we
   cannot be rid of guile till we look out upon forgiveness. This is the
   legal situation which we may not ignore, yet the antagonism in it can
   never by any legal device be overcome.

   Here we come upon another of the indirect, personal ways of grace, the
   chief reason, indeed, why it is a curve of personal succour, encircling
   and embracing our need. Grace sets right our legal relation to God, but
   only by making it cease to be legal. It may not ignore any part of the
   moral situation, but its essential quality is shown in not treating it
   legally. Sin is not merely another name for crime, but has a religious,
   and not merely a moral significance. Iniquity is sin, because it is
   against God's purpose and uses the world for other ends than His, in
   short because it is alienation from God. Therefore, it cannot be dealt
   with merely by condoning its consequences, but only by a forgiveness
   which restores us to His fellowship, to our place in His family, and to
   the blessings of His goodness. Even in our human relations, this alone
   is true pardon. To forgive is not to overlook or condone the past, but
   so to deal with it that friendship is restored. And this can only be
   the work of the injured by taking pains to show that his own friendship
   remains unbroken. Demanding compensation from the culprit or his
   advocates is no step towards it. Thus the essence of God's pardon is in
   showing Himself so gracious as to give us faith in His love: and it is
   in this sense that we are justified by faith.

   But, it may be asked, is there any phrase in the whole theological
   vocabulary which stirs a deeper feeling of unreality? Surely it is far
   less truly ethical, far more arbitrary, to suppose that God justifies
   us because we have accepted certain beliefs, than that He does it on
   signs of amendment or in view of the moral elevation He foresees we
   shall attain?

   So certain does this conclusion seem that when, in deference to
   Apostolic language, we are said to be justified by faith, it is taken
   to mean, either that God condones the past because faith in the
   Church's creed guarantees the future by introducing us to the outward
   operations of grace which will complete our good resolve with love and
   holy works, or that faith as an inward grace is the germ of all God
   approves, and that, through the secure working of His omnipotence, He
   is able to accept it as though it were already the full fruition. But
   both explanations lead us back to the old legal solution, which turns
   out again to be nothing beyond the old legal fiction which makes God's
   judgment one thing and moral reality another. Faith, so conceived,
   becomes a condition for a legal acquittal simply because, as a mental
   state, it is plastic to the operations of omnipotence. Then we return
   to the old difficulty that, if so much depends on faith as a mental
   state, we must try to maintain it as a sort of tension or
   self-hypnotising, giving rise to a distressing and morally calamitous
   conflict between faith and intellectual honesty, and even between faith
   and moral sincerity.

   What prevents understanding is the legal or moral association of the
   word "justification," inherited from the Latin. But the original term
   was neither legal nor moral, neither to be declared just, nor to be
   made just. It meant simply to be put right with God, as the prodigal
   was put right with his father when he came back into the security of
   his friendship and the blessedness of his family. In other words, it is
   truly to be forgiven. And it is received as the father of the prodigal
   enabled his pardon to be received, by so manifesting his love that the
   son could not but commit himself to it and be assured that the past,
   however much it might have to be lived down, cast no shadow on the
   fellowship in which such a task was alone possible. In this sense we
   are put right with God by a faith which is of His giving by showing
   Himself one who, while we are yet sinners, beseeches us to be
   reconciled.

   We are justified by faith because faith is a discernment of God's mind,
   and not because it is a specially meritorious state of our minds; and
   its effect does not depend upon the nature of faith, but on the world
   of spiritual reality in which, on its own witness to itself, we are
   enabled to believe. We have forgiveness and all its fruits because by
   faith we enter the world of a gracious God, out of which the old hard
   legal requirements, with the old hard boundaries of our personality and
   the old self-regarding claim of rights, have disappeared, a world which
   is the household of our Father where order and power and ultimate
   reality are of love and not of law.

   In that world atonement is a veritable experience and not a legal
   fiction, in that world and not in any other. There the sacrifice and
   service of Jesus Christ are no longer the crude legal device of taking
   so absolutely personal a thing as guilt and transferring it to the
   shoulders of another, an innocent person, or the equally crude moral
   device of making His righteousness ours, but are the manifestation of
   our deepest and holiest relation both to God and man in a world, the
   meaning of which, in spite of everything that appears to the contrary,
   is love. They form the holy of holies of a new world with new and
   healing moral conditions, where legal ideas of meeting God's judgment
   fall away from us, and God's service rises upon our spirits, not with
   legal demands and threats, but as a Divine righteousness which we shall
   ever rejoice to pursue yet always rejoice to know is ever beyond us, a
   world even at the portal of which we may leave behind us all
   self-delusion and have courage to look upon ourselves as we actually
   are, seeing forgiveness has become a reality and a deliverance, because
   the whole moral order of our life is transformed.

   In that world alone is atonement ever preached by any writer of the New
   Testament.

   In a certain logical sense moral sincerity is still the preliminary
   demand. To be free from guile is a condition as well as a consequence.
   When Paul went to the outside world, he preached that men should repent
   and turn to God and do works meet for repentance. Only in the writings
   which he wrote out of the community, for the community itself, and
   interpreted by the spirit of its fellowship, did he speak of being
   justified by faith; and, even thus, it was only in that marvellous
   setting of personal devotion in the service of love which, as the
   filling up of the sufferings of Christ for his body's sake, was at once
   the outcome and the interpretation of his faith.

   John's order is equally illuminating. "But, if we walk in the light as
   He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood
   of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin." To walk in the light as He
   is in the light, to be morally sincere, to have no guile is the
   condition. But that means turning to Him who is the light and not an
   attempt of our own effort to expel our own darkness, even as Paul says
   in one breath, Repent and turn to God. Then the outcome of this world
   of light is to have fellowship one with another; and only thus, in
   bearing and forbearing with one another, have we the fellowship of
   Christ's sufferings, and enter into the sphere where Christ's blood,
   meaning His service and suffering, cleanses from all sin.

   As the Cross speaks to us within the family of God, the old world of
   moral actions for legal reward is crucified to us, and our
   self-regarding performance of moral actions is crucified to it. Then
   sincerity and peace are joined in such inseparable unity that penitence
   is made the way to peace, and peace the way to a truer penitence; and
   the vicious circle of sin and hypocrisy and hypocrisy and sin is turned
   into the emancipating way of sincerity and inward liberty and inward
   liberty and sincerity. In the Cross, therefore, above all else, we see
   the gracious relation of our Father towards us, because there, as
   nowhere else, is the utter service of our brethren, unconditioned by
   our merit, shown to be the essential spirit of His family. The true
   meaning and power of the Cross we discover only as we have this spirit,
   and love becomes for us the fulfilling of the whole law, and the spirit
   of mere legal judgment so leaves us that it would seem even less
   brotherly to refuse to share our brother's shame and help him to live
   it down, than to refuse to share with him in his undeserved poverty or
   affliction.

   The sole moral demand is sincerity, for no restoration is possible till
   we come to ourselves, and arise and go to our Father and say we have
   sinned, but it is vain to demand sincerity unless, when we go to our
   Father, we find more than condonation. Only because faith in Christ is
   the discovery of something more, does it justify. In itself, and merely
   as an inward grace, faith, no more than any other state of mind,
   effects pardon by legal merit. Not faith, but the love of God it
   trusts, speaks peace; and it does so, because faith in it is not of
   ourselves, but is the gift of God, the manifestation of what we may
   call an atoning order, understood by the sufferings of Christ and our
   partaking of them.

   It is justification because it deals with sin itself, and not merely
   with its consequences, because it is not condonation, but the
   forgiveness that waits long and gives freely, and which has ready the
   kiss of welcome and the robe and the feast, being forgiveness precisely
   because it puts itself to the trouble and cost of restoring us thus
   abundantly to our Father and the fellowship of our home. Were it only a
   letter from the father to the prodigal, saying, Come home and nothing
   will be said about the past, the past would

   not require to have anything said about it, for its own voice would be
   loud enough. True forgiveness demands positive manifestation of a love
   which will triumph over the evil past and silence its voice. The Father
   must say by His whole bearing towards us, My son, let us share the
   sorrow and live down the shame together. And that is the meaning of the
   Cross. It works peace, not as an isolated event in the history of the
   world, but because it is the supreme manifestation of a redeeming love
   which works every day and in every event of every day. It is the high
   altar of sacrifice because it shows that the whole world is its temple.

   If the theory of substitution, legally interpreted, has, as it
   doubtless has, brought peace to burdened souls, if it has not hardened
   them in self-love, but has given them deliverance from self as well as
   sin, the reason is not that the theory is capable of some subtler legal
   interpretation which makes it truly meet some need of conscience, or
   that it is capable of some more comprehensive legal application which
   removes some difficulty in the government of God. The true reason is
   that the Cross of Christ has, in spite of the theory, interpreted and
   displayed to burdened souls the new world in which hard legal
   conditions do not obtain, but where these legal frontiers of our moral
   personality have been lost in a deeper moral fellowship with our Father
   and our brethren. There they have realised that the bearing of each
   other's burdens, whether of sorrow or of sin, is the surest of all
   realities, and that the bearing of sin in particular is the very heart
   of God's gracious relation to us which is love.

   Though the theory of substitution, legally interpreted, is at best a
   legal evasion, it has, for many, broken the sense of being shut up in
   the vicious circle of sin and hypocrisy and hypocrisy and sin long
   enough to lay hold on the true deliverance; yet how much greater ought
   to be the appeal of a gospel which shows us that we are self-enclosed
   within this circle only because we isolate ourselves from the whole
   gracious mind of our Father.

   But, though essentially a gospel to the sinful, the opening of the
   prison to them that are bound, it is not a gospel to them that call
   good evil and evil good. To the son who will go into the far country
   the father divides his living, and he goes. No force alters the
   substance of his soul or hedges in his career. Only by bitter
   experience does he come to himself. And it is not a new self, but his
   own true self he has so long repressed and wronged. Nor is it less a
   teaching of God because it is a teaching of life. Not till we are thus
   taught of God, Jesus says, do we come to Him. But, then, there are no
   conditions, no compromises, no compositions, no legal dealing with the
   past in any way, but simply arising and going to our Father and
   finding, in Christ, every manifestation of love which makes pardon a
   perfect restoration to a fellowship which, on God's side, has never
   been broken, but has always been a waiting and a longing, ready to see
   us on our return a long way off and to anticipate our confession with
   every token of forgiveness. Moral sincerity alone it asks, and makes no
   inquiry regarding moral attainment, yet it so displays the mind of God
   as to take away every reason for being insincere, and furnishes every
   reason for being open and manifest in His sight, and for putting away
   every hidden thing of shame, which means every secret deed and thought
   which shame would hide. It has no conditions about the past, and none
   about the future, but it has a very high condition in the present, for
   it is no less than God Himself, and the recognition that His will is
   alone wise and makes rich and adds no sorrow.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER IV

THE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN

   Justification, as we have conceived it, does not permit us to ignore
   our sins, but, on the contrary, enables us to face them in the
   assurance that they no more interrupt our fellowship with the Father of
   our spirits; does not modify our legal relations by special acts of
   grace, but manifests God as gracious to us in all His ways; does not
   condone offences, like pardon by the State, but is the assurance of a
   love which can be pained, though never alienated, and which, out of its
   pain, charges itself with the task of commending itself to us, so as to
   restore us to our place in the family and household of God, where, in
   forgiving, we learn the blessedness of being forgiven.

   Yet it may still not be clear how such a justification really
   justifies. If sin is forgiven merely by taking us out of the circle of
   legal morality into the circle of God's family, the consequences of sin
   would seem to remain, and, with them, our guilty fears, the spring of
   all our moral juggling. If the consequences of our sins still follow us
   as certainly as our shadows, the past is not delivered from despair nor
   the future from dread, and we cannot cherish the spirit of peace and
   find it to be the spirit of truth.

   A justification which condoned our guilt and assured us of escape from
   punishment on the day when God judges the secrets of the quick and the
   dead, may not have covered all our need, but at least it set a term to
   our fears. Its operation might be external, but the consequences of sin
   also are external. Precisely because they are now utterly outside of
   us, they are entirely beyond our amending from within. A Day of
   Judgment may be a metaphor, but if there is an absolute justice, it
   represents the tremendous reality of a final equivalence of sin and
   sorrow. As sin has a way of springing its consequences upon us at
   unexpected times, even a day when it will spring all its consequences
   upon us may not unreasonably be feared. Without provision against so
   great a fear, what right have we to cast off anxiety or what
   possibility have we of peace? To dismiss lightly this fear as mere
   self-love is no answer.

   Lack of clearness in our thinking leads to ambiguity in our terms,
   which again re-acts to the further confusion of our thinking. Among
   such ambiguous terms we ought to reckon "self-love," for it may be used
   with every shade of meaning, from abject selfishness to the highest and
   most self-denying moral reverence for ourselves. Butler has consecrated
   its use for the latter. Self-love, being concern for our highest good,
   is, he says, one of the two regulative rational principles of life --
   conscience being the other -- and is so far from being selfishness that
   as few people are guided by a reasonable self-love as by conscience. By
   imposing a little more precision upon language than can be looked for
   in ordinary speech, we might use selfishness for attention to self
   without heed to others or to the moral nature of things; self-regard
   for a prudent attention to the consequences of our actions; and
   self-love for the search for true blessedness among our fellows and in
   face of all reality. Such self-love would be concerned with our
   salvation, but its salvation would be our highest spiritual possibility
   in perfect relation to God and man, and not merely security against the
   outward disasters which may befall us.

   Yet self-regard also has its reasonable place, it being of the nature
   of vice, and not of virtue, to enjoy the present forgetful of the past
   and heedless of the future. And, if grave concern for ourselves ever
   could be justified, it ought to be by a danger looming vast and
   threatening through the haze of eternity. Least of all may a view of
   religion which starts from sincerity and ends with blessedness, ignore
   any consequences of sin in this world or the next, for to turn our eyes
   from the shadow of disaster is not to be sincere, and to steel our
   hearts is not to be blessed.

   Much anger against persons who are distressed about their souls is mere
   thoughtless worldliness, which is also seeking its salvation in equally
   self-regarding ways. Many cherish it merely because they do not wish to
   have their ideas of salvation by worldly success troubled by such
   questions as, Whose shall these things be when thy soul is required of
   thee?

   Yet dislike to anxiety about one's soul is not all for material
   reasons. There is also a right feeling that it is possible to be
   anxious about one's soul in this way till the soul is lost in seeking
   to save itself, for it may degenerate into a selfishness which
   considers only outward happiness without thought for the things of the
   spirit, which alone is true self-love, or even without facing the
   actual moral situation, which alone is true self-regard. To the fear of
   the consequences of sin all legal treatment of guilt appeals, but it
   does not deal with the fear that besets true self-love, for its fear is
   to be unworthy and not merely to be unhappy. Nor does it really meet
   the fears of self-regard, for the legal way does not morally and
   according to the nature of things deal with the past; and, therefore,
   does not truly secure the future from its consequences.

   In the first place, a succour wholly postponed to a remote, unknown day
   of judgment, would be an ill-tested security even against that day.
   With God the same and ourselves the same, why should the conditions of
   that day be different from this? Only if we are living down our past
   now, have we a well-grounded confidence of not meeting it again as an
   enemy in our path at any later time. In another life, where no secrets
   are hid and all things appear what they are, the consequences of sin
   may be evident as they are not here, but if the consequences which are
   evident are not met, what assurance have we against those that are
   unknown?

   In the second place, so long as our sins work harm in the lives of
   others or enslave our own souls, we may not try to escape their
   consequences. While they trouble the lives of others, should we even
   desire that ours be left untroubled? While habit establishes character
   both in good and evil, how can we be acquitted if, in our own
   characters, it still persist as evil? We may not seek to wash our hands
   of sins which continue to work evil without and within, so long as
   moral sensitiveness or perception of our moral continuity remain. And a
   deeper sense of God could only show us more clearly the evil effects in
   our souls and make us feel more keenly our responsibility for its
   effect upon others.

   Nothing can ever make past evil as though it had not been, or restore
   to us the years the locusts have eaten, or prevent the year of weeds
   being the proverbial seven years of seeds. Did the past never remind us
   of its existence again, either in this life or another, we could not be
   true to ourselves--without which we cannot be true either to God or our
   fellow-men--and take advantage of the immunity to cultivate oblivion.

   A true forgiveness, so far from offering us this way of escape, evokes
   a keener sensitiveness to the evil we have done in the world and to the
   evil we have planted in our own hearts: and to desire to escape the
   moral distress which arises from an evil past merely shows that God's
   pardon has not really touched us. Would we ignore the consequences of
   our sin which still work evil in the world, we have merely, in a
   selfish spirit, accepted legal condonation for a Father's pardon which
   wins us from self; would we overlook them while they still work evil in
   ourselves, we have merely accepted the succour of power which ignores
   our true nature and our true need, in place of the succour of love
   which concerns itself with nothing else. Neither God's pardon, nor any
   succour of love our highest faith might conceive--not though it
   afforded the clearest vision of life's blessedness and stirred every
   chord in our hearts--could, after that direct and immediate way, blot
   out the heritage of sin. To deal with this moral situation morally is
   beyond any operation of might, even though it were omnipotent.

   Once more God's gracious personal dealing with us is indirect and
   through ourselves, and not direct and by almighty fiat.

   Grace deals with all the consequences of sin, in ourselves and in the
   world, in the present and in the future, but only by first enabling us
   to accept them.

   To be at peace with God is to be at peace with all He appoints. But our
   sins were not appointed of God, and were not designed, by us or by
   anyone else, to work for His purpose, in accord with which alone can
   all things work for good or love be seen, even in a glass darkly, to be
   the meaning of experience. God is reality, and reality is against all
   who would interpret life by self-love and self-will. Sin is the attempt
   to get out of life what God has not put into it. Necessarily it is a
   hopeless and calamitous warfare, in which the blows are not light and
   the falls not soft. To deny this is vapid sentiment and self-delusion.
   As God's rule must, in the nature of things, be against everyone who,
   with the purpose of evil, would counter His purpose of good, the
   experience of God's wrath is overwhelmingly calamitous, not as anger
   outside of the moral order, but as the essential nature of its working.

   This experience of evil to him who works evil causes men to think that
   God needs to be reconciled to man, and not man to God. But it is only
   the shadow of our misunderstanding, as if, fleeing from a friend in the
   dark, we meet disaster as though he were a foe: and, as our friend only
   needs to show his face, we need only truly to see God's face to be
   succoured. Yet to show Himself is difficult, precisely because we are
   fleeing from Him in the dark.

   Hence the gospel is good news of a gracious God beseeching us to be
   reconciled in a form which speaks to all hearts. To be reconciled is to
   be forgiven, and to be forgiven is to be reconciled, yet Christ's whole
   manifestation of the Father depends on putting reconciliation first in
   our thoughts. We are not reconciled when, upon conditions, God has
   forgiven us, but we are forgiven when we know that He is waiting to be
   gracious. No word of religious insight says we need to beseech God to
   be reconciled to us. On the contrary, the Apostle conceived his own
   task and the task of the whole religious fellowship to be that, through
   them, God besought men to be reconciled to Him. But, before we can
   hearken, we must learn how all life, and more particularly the sternest
   experiences in it, suffering and death and corruption, is His pleading
   not to accept the world at its face value, but to seek farther for His
   purpose and our peace.

   Yet that is impossible till we have recognised the evil of our sins and
   accepted their consequences, for they are the reason why He must plead
   so often in severity and disaster. Deliverance from the guilt and power
   of sin must be central and dominant in all His dealing with us, for He
   can have no purpose with which they are in accord. The consequences of
   sin, therefore, determine most of our discipline and much of our duty,
   yet, so long as we are merely seeking to escape its consequences, sin
   is the last explanation of their hardness we would admit. As, in that
   case, we can do no other than err in all our attempts to understand
   life, we can do no other than be at enmity with it and with the God who
   appoints it. Even punishment for our sins is not something to be
   escaped by any device. Rather is it right to say with Luther that true
   penitence and sorrow seek and love it. This does not mean that we find
   it other than grievous or that we love it for its own sake; but it does
   mean that it also may be included by God among the things which work
   for good, and that sorrow is not associated by God with sin for any
   other reason. Then we can believe with the Psalmist, that to Him
   belongeth mercy, for He renders to everyone according to his work. But
   this equal rule can only mean that to Him belongeth wrath, so long as
   we are merely seeking to shun the evil consequences of our iniquities.

   No reconciliation to God which accepts the duty and discipline of life
   is possible without accepting the consequences of our sin by which duty
   and discipline are so largely determined. Because He deals with us as
   with sons. He cannot, without disaster, overcome them save by moral
   means. Yet, precisely because we are sons in the household of God, our
   individual tasks and trials are not to be regarded as necessarily the
   direct consequences of our particular sins or as a specially designed
   individual course of medicine. Forgiveness should deliver us from
   regarding even the certain consequences of our own sin as punishment,
   yet they are to be overcome, not by being looked upon as blessings in
   disguise for our own personal edification, but by finding sin and all
   its consequences taken up into a world where love suffers and atones.
   Life is what it is because the consequences of sin are what they are,
   but we can only judge that to be of God's goodness as we realise our
   place in the whole family of God, and not as we take life to be our
   mere private concern. God is not a supreme director of souls appointing
   each particular life as the special regimen designed exclusively for
   each person's particular ailment, as though his household were a
   hospital, but He is a Father, treating us all as His children in His
   family, who are as unable as He is to keep themselves apart from the
   sins and failures of His other children.

   Yet it is by this common regimen that we come to health. By helping
   each other's infirmities and sharing, according to the whole measure of
   our opportunity and not in the restricted measure of our own
   responsibility for evil, the sufferings and toils by which, in the
   family of God, evil is changed to good, we discover that, when we
   accept the consequences of sin and meet them in humility, everything in
   life works for their undoing. And if God condescend to use us as
   instruments to that end, so far from shrinking from the sorrow and the
   shame, we shall accept them willingly from the hands of God's love,
   which cannot do other than make large demands from us, because it would
   not be love were it not also wise.

   Life then becomes a sacrament of redeeming love, the one supreme Divine
   sacrament of which all others are symbols and interpretations.

   A symbol might be described as an interpretation to the heart; and
   because that is the only adequate interpretation if love is greater
   than all its gifts, symbols are the deepest and holiest things in life.
   When we speak contemptuously of mere symbols and insist that sacraments
   are special operations of grace, vehicles and not symbols, we are
   merely setting the working of omnipotence above the gracious personal
   love of our Father, which is the same as measuring a token of love by
   its material value.

   The sacrament of the broken body and shed blood of One who surrendered
   Himself to shame and agony and death, to the utmost evil life could
   impose, not in Stoic resignation, but for the sake of His brethren and
   in accord with the will of His Father, is the crown and consummation,
   because it manifests the most awful demands of actual defeat,
   desertion, contempt, despair and agony and death as all included in the
   gracious dealing of the Father with His children for victory over all
   the consequences of sin, without and within. It is the high altar of
   sacrifice, revealing to us that the whole world is God's temple,
   wherein all our common life, and all our dealings with our brethren,
   amid all the wickedness of man and even the fears and agonies and
   corruption of death, are the ministers of God for the deliverance of
   His children. In the Cross of One who did no sin and deserved none of
   its evil consequences, love makes its highest claim to trust and its
   largest demand for loyalty. For that reason it is the inmost sanctuary
   of pardon and reconciliation, where we can take up our discipline and
   duty, assured of finding them the way of victory, because we have
   learned the mind of Him who appoints them, and would ourselves also be
   partakers in the sacrifice and service by which sin and all its
   consequences must be overcome.

   To call us thus to be His fellow-workers is the crowning evidence that
   God deals with us as His children at one with Him in our choice and
   steadfast purpose, and never as mere subjects and dependents. It is
   this that changes our duty and discipline from trials and tasks into a
   service of a love which is not a mere emotion, but is esteem for us as
   moral persons, from whom no sacrifice is too great to demand, if it
   enable, not ourselves alone, but also our brethren, to live in the
   Kingdom of the Father.

   To be justified, then, is not to have the consequences of sin condoned
   or even obliterated, but so to be reconciled to God in spite of sin,
   that we can face all evil with confident assurance of final victory
   over it, and by God's succour transform all its consequences, whether
   the evil be natural or moral, the outcome of our own sin, or from our
   necessary fellowship with others in His family.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER V

THE WILL OF GOD

   That righteousness cannot come by the law would be oftener denied, did
   it not seem too remote from any immediate interest to be worth denying,
   because the law is thought of as ritual precepts no sensible person
   would disinter from the unreadable parts of the Old Testament, and
   righteousness as a theological notion which may well be left buried
   under the ashes of burned out controversies.

   But it is true of all righteousness and all law: and the higher the
   righteousness the less it can come by any form of imperative. Universal
   commands of practical reason as inevitably fail as formulated
   decalogues, for the failure is due to the nature of law, and not merely
   to some defect in its form. Moreover, it is a matter of sorrowful
   practical moment, and no more an abstraction than an antiquity.

   The first cause of the inadequacy of the moral law for righteousness is
   that it directs attention to the worth of our moral selves. Nor is
   there any kind of moral imperative which can deliver us from that
   dangerous moral attitude, because every moral law, whatsoever its form,
   is the law of our moral worth, and, the more it is strictly ethical,
   the more it disallows any motive save reverence for our moral worth. By
   extending the reverence to other persons and treating them always as
   ends and never as means only to other ends, we might seem to find in
   the service of others an object in which we may forget ourselves. But,
   if we esteem others as persons because we first esteem ourselves as
   persons, reverencing them for what we ourselves ought to be, we are not
   truly forgetting ourselves; and inevitably we are brought back to the
   idea of our own worth and even of our own moral progress.

   Yet, under no guise, is self-reverence the right moral motive or
   self-development the right moral end. Our task is to concern ourselves
   about doing good, and not about being good, and we must do good for the
   sake of the good itself and not for our own moral improvement. Here we
   have an insistent moral contradiction which is by no means confined to
   theory, for, what causes more practical distress than the way in which
   mere moral effort leaves us with our eyes directed towards ourselves
   that we may approve our own virtue, yet, at the same moment, stirs in
   us a conviction that our eye should be upon our duty, in utter
   forgetfulness of the whole question of our merit or our perfection?

   And the worst of this conflicting moral state is that, for moral
   reasons, we must not so much as try to escape from it, because it is
   the only shadow to prevent a consciously moral person from sunning
   himself in his own righteousness. Yet the protection is as little
   secure as it is pleasant, for, being a cold shadow, we are always
   tempted to escape from it, and the effort to hold ourselves to our
   place can itself be made a ground for self-satisfaction.

   The other cause of the inadequacy of the law for righteousness is that
   law deals in negatives. Decalogues only say, "Thou shalt not"; abstract
   schemes of universal laws only mean, "Do nothing in this case not
   applicable to every similar case"; even conscience, like the daimon of
   Socrates, is active mainly in prohibitions. This further increases the
   danger of self-complacency, because merit exists only on a negative
   standard which does not go beyond prohibitions, which maintain
   self-righteousness by making us think only of the evil deeds we have
   not done. A merely moral attitude towards life can thus be put on as
   blinkers to make us walk in a narrow beaten path, with the whole vast
   horizon of life's possibilities hidden from our eyes. We are satisfied
   when we have not actively committed wrong, and we fail to recognise
   that the supreme sin is to be deaf to life's calls and blind to its
   opportunities, to recognise no suffering which does not cry in our
   ears, and see no duty which does not point along the accepted,
   formulated track.

   A dull and prudent common-sense, so long as its bleared eyes see in us
   neither gross self-indulgence nor obvious sophistry, may approve, but,
   even to true moral insight emancipated from conventionality, the soul
   is lost which sees no visions and dreams no dreams of life's
   measureless possibilities. This leaves us in the impossible position of
   being moral only as we walk by rule, while yet we know--the more
   certainly as our morality is really moral and not merely
   respectable--that no rule can show us the highest way.

   A righteousness, therefore, which is by the law, cannot escape from
   being self-righteous yet distressed, because, in a merely moral frame,
   the spirit cannot, in self-forgetfulness, respond, like a harp with
   many strings, to life's varied moods. Life is full of joy and sadness,
   tenderness and pathos, admiration and just anger. It can be ludicrous,
   and, to him who can see, it hardly ever fails to be sublime. But, with
   mere moral rules, string after string breaks, as interest after
   interest dies. From the saddest of all life's failures, which is to be
   left with one wailing note of peevish anxiety, any kind of moral
   purpose should save us; yet, if the only note which drowns it is from
   the hard chord of formal conscientiousness, it also is no divine music.
   If it has no hell in its experience, it also has no heaven ; if it has
   no agony of failure and despair, it also speaks to no heart of the
   beauty of goodness and the divine joy of living; and, if there is heard
   in it none of the pessimism of the disenchanted, neither is there any
   echo of the triumph of the redeemed. It lacks the child-like soul
   which, through much tribulation, enters the Kingdom, the soul for which
   the formulation of goodness is nothing and self-forgetfulness in
   pursuit of it everything. Upon no morality of imperatives can this
   spirit nourish itself. It needs a blessed, that is a religious
   morality, a morality of reconciliation to the moral goal and not merely
   of rules about the moral road, a morality, in short, which is a joyful
   discovery of God's gracious will with us and all His children.

   Neither direct resolution on our part, nor direct moulding of our wills
   on God's part, could remove contradiction from a morality which is
   based on reverence for our moral worth, yet which denies that the
   promotion of our moral worth is a right moral end; while, only as these
   opposites are at once recognised and harmonised, are we set free from
   the danger of self-righteousness, with our eye upon ourselves and the
   measure of our service in prohibitions.

   But that is impossible either for a grace which works directly on us or
   a will which works directly in us; and is possible only for an indirect
   personal relation, which works on us by persuading the will which works
   in us. Then we best seek what we least pursue. This result we may thus
   formulate. As our moral worth is made secure in God's valuation of us,
   and our moral progress in being the end of all His dealing with us,
   God's will alone is the measure and the end of our duty, to the
   exclusion of all consideration of our moral worth or any task of our
   moral progress.

   I. This delivers us from directing attention to ourselves.

   By being thus enabled to commit our souls to God in well-doing, we are
   enabled to reverence ourselves as made in the image of His creative
   freedom, yet without self-approbation; and to realise its measureless
   possibilities, yet without distressing concern about our moral state.

   Reverence for ourselves without thinking highly of ourselves, and
   achievement of our moral worth without making our own goodness the end
   of our striving, which are impossible by ourselves, are possible
   through a God whose relation to us is gracious just because He sets
   absolute value on us as made in His image and directs all His dealings
   with us towards the end of perfecting it as He is perfect. Thus we have
   the liberty of His children, and it alone is His salvation. It is not a
   goodness which can be imposed upon us, but, like all that is of
   spiritual value, must be of our own insight, choice and purpose.

   Only for this high end is God's mind good towards us; for it certainly
   is not as a mere benevolent desire to see His children happy. To
   deliver the soul from the sin which is its ruin and bestow on it the
   holiness which is its health and peace, is the end of all God's
   dealings with His children; and precisely because He cannot merely
   give, but must enable us to attain it ourselves, if we are really to
   have the liberty of His children, the way He must take is long and
   arduous. Thus the love of the Father, in our Lord's teaching, just
   because it means simply an infinite value set on the possible worth of
   every moral person, never for a moment means any sparing of the trials
   or tasks by which evil is undone or good achieved. Yet, knowing this
   austerity to be love, we can trust God to have a worthy purpose in the
   most trivial events and a measured care in the most appalling
   calamities, so that, whether He count our hairs or crumble our states,
   He is alike gracious.

   Similarly the Kingdom of God is perfect blessedness in the perfect rule
   of love, the very essence of it being that every soul is there as an
   end and not as a means merely to another end: yet, being the rule of
   love in freedom, we enter it only as we realise our own true kingdom in
   its rule. Into such a kingdom we cannot be driven by overriding even
   our evil wills; yet we are ever called to reflection by finding that
   any other rule is no light disaster.

   The Kingdom of the Father, therefore, is a realm into which we enter
   only as we discern it to be our own right rule, so that, if anyone
   could be used for another end than his own moral worth, were that end
   the promotion of the Kingdom of God itself, there would not be, in
   Christ's sense, any Kingdom of God to enter. To enter the Kingdom,
   nevertheless, is to be concerned with God's rule, because our salvation
   being God's end, His will alone need be our end. We are to seek the
   Kingdom of God and its righteousness, leaving all the rest to be added:
   and because salvation, being the supreme good, is most surely added, it
   is no more a right object of anxiety than our raiment. The Apostle so
   little regarded his own salvation as the direct end of his own striving
   that he could desire to be anathema for his brethren's sake. Seeing we
   are saved as self loses its dominion and love rules, this disregard was
   the highest proof of God's success, for God only succeeds as attention
   is withdrawn from ourselves, and not least from anxious feeling of our
   spiritual pulse and valetudinarian anxiety about our spiritual health.

   The solution of this apparent contradiction is found in the essential
   nature of the righteousness of the Kingdom of God, which is to be
   altogether a righteousness of God.

   But what are we to understand by a righteousness of God, if both a
   forensic righteousness--a righteousness into which, on certain revealed
   conditions, God admits us, and a sacramental righteousness--a
   righteousness which, by certain appointed means, God imports into us,
   have been set aside as impersonal operations of power, arbitrary and
   not ethical in their working? In what other way can God confer His
   righteousness? And if a righteousness of God is not a righteousness God
   confers, can it be more than a righteousness He demands? But, would not
   a righteousness God demands simply exact more from us than our own
   consciences? And if our own righteousness is already a great deal more
   than we can fulfil, what gain could accrue from finding one still
   larger?

   Understood in that external way, neither a righteousness God demands
   nor a righteousness He confers could deliver us from
   self-righteousness. On the contrary, nothing deludes us into
   self-approval more than spacious ideals, the contemplation of which
   seems to suffice without the weary and discouraging task of seeking to
   realise them, except it be our skill in appropriating righteousness
   which does not belong to us. There is nothing great or good in the
   world with which we can in any way associate ourselves but we seek to
   reflect upon ourselves some of its glory, and the greatest of all moral
   illusions would be to transfer thus externally to ourselves the
   righteousness of God.

   Yet a righteousness of God is both a righteousness He demands and a
   righteousness He confers. God's righteousness is, in the first place, a
   righteousness He demands. It is a righteousness beyond that of the
   Scribes, beyond the austerest human prescription, a righteousness, not
   finite at all, but infinite. And in the second place, it is also a
   righteousness He confers. In a new world where love both bears and
   forbears, all our worth is of God and not of ourselves.

   But there would be no deliverance in either, were it not also a
   righteousness God looks after. We can face larger demands and find them
   freedom and not slavery, we can feel the terrors of a guilty conscience
   disappear from our lives and find the result not license but
   obligation, because we are dealing with a righteousness which every
   duty God requires and every discipline He appoints are designed to
   forward, so that our whole life, in its most casual relationships as
   well as in the friendships which have struck their roots into the
   depths of our being, in its most trivial happenings as well as in its
   brightest glories and its darkest catastrophes, in its pain of broken
   endeavour as well as in its triumph of successful enterprise, is one,
   infinitely varied, uninterrupted means of grace.

   In that case, all ways of salvation by personally appointed discipline
   and, still more, by publicly arranged rule, by contract with ourselves
   or with others, or by any way which turns our attention to ourselves,
   spring from lack of faith to commit our salvation to Him who alone can
   know either what our full salvation is or the right means for its
   advancement.

   Even when we make use of what we specially call the means of grace, it
   should not be with the direct object of forwarding our salvation. They
   are special means only for enlightening us regarding the true means of
   grace, which is life, and for enabling us to make a diviner use of life
   in humbler service. The public use of such means of interpreting and
   rightly using life, above all, may not be neglected, because no one can
   understand God's meaning in life in isolation, but only in the
   fellowship of the saints: yet no use of them is in itself religion,
   however vitally necessary for religion their right use may be.

   If God alone can look after our righteousness, no room is left for us
   to act upon the idea of ourselves at all, not even upon the idea of
   ourselves as examples. However frequently that motive is urged in the
   name of religion, it is no more a right religious motive than the idea
   of commending ourselves to God by our visible observances. We may not
   cause our brother to offend, but whatsoever this may require should be
   because it is our own immediate task of loving service, which it would
   not be anything other than right for us to do on its own account, and
   not as a work of consciously shining example. Action for the mere
   purpose of example is both morally futile and morally dangerous. It is
   futile because, were its motive recognised, no one would be influenced,
   at least for good, and this is readily betrayed by the externality and
   formality of the action; and it is dangerous because, the figure we
   shall make in it being our object, we cannot help sunning ourselves in
   our own approval, which the more certainly involves us in
   self-righteousness that we seem to be doing more than the requirement
   of our own duty.

   All real faith in God ought to teach us that no one can look after our
   righteousness except God. As it is God's righteousness for us, it must
   be too far above our knowing to be our own direct aim, and too
   wide-reaching in its application to be our own self-imposed task.
   Therefore, it must be God's aim, not ours, the object of God's care,
   and not of ours.

   The one object of our care is the will of God, because, if it is the
   will of God for our salvation, our salvation ceases to be an object for
   our own wills, and God's will, which, by caring for our salvation,
   proves itself the will of love, becomes our sole right object. Because
   our highest good is utterly secure in it, we can forget ourselves
   altogether and set before ourselves, as our one end, what God will have
   us do. Then, and then only, the insistent problem of self-love and
   self-forgetfulness is solved for us, and our moral selves are saved, in
   the only way they can be saved, by being delivered from self-regard.

   II. It delivers us from a morality of negative precepts.

   This deliverance we have by finding in God's will the purpose of a
   salvation which is of a quality and in a measure far beyond any purpose
   we can set before ourselves or which it has entered into our hearts to
   conceive, and not merely by committing to Him the highest salvation
   which, by our best insight, we think we require.

   Progress in religion is largely in more spiritual conceptions of
   salvation, and, with that, in a fuller assurance that God's mind in the
   matter is far beyond our own. Even in the Old Testament there are
   crude, material ideas of it. The prayer, "Say unto my soul, I am thy
   salvation," was originally only against mortal enemies, who were to be
   as chaff before the wind, the angel of the Lord driving them on. The
   long history of revelation is mainly the history of the fellowship
   which, by the slow training of God's ordinary dealings, illumined by
   conspicuous manifestations of His will, taught us to put a deeper
   meaning into this prayer. Yet a time of great individual, and still
   more of national material stress, is apt to show that the lesson has,
   even now, been very imperfectly learned. Seeking first material
   deliverance, men set their own negative goodness against the enormities
   committed against them: and the effect is a self-righteousness which,
   however much we may trust in it ourselves, we never approve in others.

   It is not as though even material deliverance did not concern us, or as
   though, did it mean the well-being of our souls, in time or eternity,
   we could be content to save ourselves as best we might, without seeking
   God's salvation. But to be anxious about God saving us in that material
   way assumes an individual, or, at most, a national God, from whom we
   seek special favours such as a true ruler of the world cannot grant,
   and, on arbitrary conditions, such as a really moral governor can never
   have laid down, and this fosters a very negative and self-righteous
   kind of self-regard.

   There is only one right way of escaping this negative and anxious way
   of being saved, and that is by seeing, not only that it is God's
   concern, and not ours, but that it must be according to His mind not
   ours. Then we commit it to Him by committing ourselves wholly to His
   will of love: and then only can we discern the large demands which at
   once teach us humility and exalt our hopes.

   God's will of love is, as love must always be, love to others. To say
   that God is love, and to say that He cannot be served except through
   His children, is to say the same thing. In respect of our relation to
   God, as well as to man, "He that loveth his brother abideth in light,
   and there is none occasion of stumbling in him." To love our brother is
   to discern, amid all mental perplexities, the real meaning and purpose
   of life for all that concerns our faith in God, and to find, amid all
   practical difficulties, the right guidance of God's will, so that we
   shall neither lead ourselves astray nor fail anyone whom God has made
   our neighbour. In this reverence for man as man we have a discernment
   of the measureless positive requirement of God's will of love beyond
   what any might of reasoning or any force of practical ability could
   provide, before which we realise the vanity of trust in our own
   righteousness and enlarge our conception of God's salvation.

   Only as we come to it thus round about through the love for whose sake
   we would be ever worthier, the love which brings out of us our best
   and, without whose succour, our best would never be known to exist, can
   we discern the nature of our true worth and reverence it in humility
   and not self-esteem. Such a love must make our salvation its first
   concern, but it must itself be the measure of what it seeks for us: and
   it can only be concerned with what, in our inmost souls, we really are,
   for love seeks in us its own worth, and cares nothing for doings apart
   from the spirit in which they are done, and cannot regard any fruit as
   really good which is not from a good tree. God, therefore, cannot be
   satisfied with anything done by us, unless it is both of our own
   purposing and performing, or deem anything less to be for our
   salvation: and this it seeks as love and not self-interest, even at its
   wisest.

   As God alone knows our full salvation and how it is to be wrought out,
   it is no part of our task to set up our own ideal of our saved selves,
   or to fashion our hearts into the likeness of it. Our true salvation we
   realise and work out only as we follow all the positive behests of
   God's love to serve Him by loving our brethren as our brethren in
   Christ. By therein discovering what is vital and ridding ourselves of
   what is accidental and extraneous, we arrive at a positive, though
   never a final, knowledge of what God would have in His children and in
   ourselves in particular, in such a way that we are set free from all
   merely negative fears of defilement, and lay ourselves open to the
   infinite demands of love, which at once humble us in respect of our own
   efforts and, for the very same reason, exalt us in respect of God's
   mind with us.

   To love our brother, in this moral sense, is not sentiment, which is
   mostly a substitute for real feeling, not even emotion which must ever
   vary towards different persons, but esteem for every individual
   according to his value to himself and his Heavenly Father. Because he
   is our brother, we must never look upon him as one of the masses, and
   never wish him to be wise only with our wisdom, or to be ruled only by
   our conscience; but we must ever realise how he stands alone in his own
   kingdom, for the sublime reason that he can be conscious of God's own
   reality, feel in his heart God's own ideal, and, above all, have in his
   keeping a choice of good or evil of eternal import. To love man as our
   brother, and for no other reason, is to reverence him simply because
   consciousness of truth, conscience of right and consecration of will
   are the true objects of esteem, though no robe of office adorn their
   possessor, no station set him on a pedestal, no wealth give him power,
   no learning add to his merit.

   Apart from reverence for man as man, religion becomes an appanage of
   the leisured, guarded by scholars, directed by ecclesiastics, providing
   comfort mainly for the well-to-do. Thereupon it degenerates into a
   convention to hide reality from us and shelter us from its rude
   attacks, a convention, moreover, capable of little more than
   prohibitions. But, with this reverence, we discover the religion,
   without which the richest are poor, and with which the poorest are
   rich, which saves the soul, by showing us through our brethren the love
   of the Father, the religion which is not merely another wrapping to
   hide from us the strange, disturbing, far-reaching fact that we stand
   alone in the world, solitary, naked, exposed, but which truly unites us
   to God and man, by consciousness of truth, conscience of right and
   choice of good, the only truly personal ties.

   Till we have discovered that this union greatly matters and that, in
   the last resort, nothing else does, we reach at best Phariseeism and
   never the religion of Jesus Christ. It may prophesy in His name, or
   even in His name do many wonderful works, yet nothing can be more
   certain about His ministry than His repudiation of a religion which
   only the learned could understand, only its professional
   representatives maintain, and only the leisured practise, and His
   demand from the fisher-folk and the day-labourers of a better
   righteousness.

   Nor is it enough to say that the day-labourer can succeed where the
   scribe and the priest fail, because the better righteousness is moral
   and not ritual. The deeper reason is that it is positive and not
   negative. As Stevenson tersely puts it, in the Gospels no one is damned
   for what he does, but for what he does not do. The highest is to love
   much because we have been forgiven much, and the nearest to God's
   perfection is ourselves to forgive. We have already seen how we are
   approved as we discern Christ in our brethren, serving them under all
   conditions. And it does not stop with esteem for good men in
   indifference to their trappings. Truly to love Christ is to be enabled
   to reverence man as man, man as God yearns over him and has hope of him
   in his worst estate.

   The result is necessarily a positive righteousness, because a love
   which turns us away from all kinds of self-regard, even regard to our
   own salvation, lays us open to every appeal of need. Then we have a
   salvation God's care is ever enlarging as well as safeguarding,
   because, when we never lack a heart to feel or a hand to help, we shall
   never soften life's discipline to what we cannot evade or limit life's
   duties to the avoidance of transgression. Otherwise the most blessed
   trials cannot touch us and the holiest duties never rise above our
   horizon, till we may come at length to live unscathed except by
   individual loss, and undirected except by external prohibitions. But
   prudence and prohibitions concern neither the truly moral nor the truly
   religious. They regard merely what is respectable, and can issue in
   salvation only from the discreditable, with self-approval for all else.

   With the growing and ever more positive claims of love upon our
   sympathy and our service, our moral imperatives lose all limits. As
   love calls us, we reach out to infinity and discern that we never can
   come to an end of what it appoints for us. But, as we also discern that
   it is love which demands, and that we love only because God first loved
   us, we find therein also the measurelessness of our own Divine
   possibilities, and are no more tempted to wish to come to an end. On
   the contrary, we learn how small a mistake every other failure may be,
   compared with shutting our ears, in self-satisfaction with our own poor
   negative rulings, to the only voice which, by calling us to the true
   service of life, can at once save us from missing its divinest uses and
   deliver us from mere moral stress into the joy of the Lord, which is
   strength as well as peace.

   A salvation which God thus immeasurably enlarges for us, as we realise
   ever more fully the measureless positive claim of the service of love,
   will ever humble us by the sense that we have not yet laid hold of that
   for which the love of God has laid hold of us, yet will always sustain
   us by the sense of the high end toward which it directs and upholds our
   going. By forgetting ourselves in service, we shall thus find ourselves
   again in the love that requires it, and humbly yet joyfully know that
   love values nothing we do except as it springs from what we are.

   That is the experience which makes all casuistries a crime both against
   our moral personality and God's grace, a crime against God and His
   children, or we might say against love, as the moral esteem which
   comprehends both. In the same spirit in which they have sought to
   enclose the Divine mind within dogmas to be imposed from without on the
   human mind, worldly men, using religion to exalt the visible
   institution of the Church in which they exercise dominion, have sought
   to formulate the Divine will in systems of casuistry to be imposed as
   external rules of conduct. In both cases they turn into finite rule
   what ought to be a growing vision of infinity, but the moral danger of
   the confessional is the greater because it can do no other than work
   with a system of negations, turn pardon into political condonation, and
   sap the insight as well as the courage by which we could learn to
   forget men and regard God alone, and so to be free with the liberty of
   His children.

   But the danger does not end with the confessional. All churches are in
   danger of measuring by a standard of visible respectability, which may
   be even clumsier and less penetrating, and which has not even the poor
   excuse of being an attempt to guide the erring. How worthless this
   negative and parasitic morality is we see when the conditions which
   sustain it are changed and the external judgment which guides it is
   removed. Possibly the chief Divine end of great upheavals, overthrowing
   all conventional standards and accepted beliefs, may be to demand of us
   what we, of our own insight, know to be true, and, of our own
   conscience, discern to be right. At all events, in morals and in
   doctrine alike, the more we are intent on reality and disregard mere
   appearance, the more we look out on what has not entered into the heart
   of man otherwise to conceive, and the more we are confident that they
   are the things which God has prepared for them that love Him.

   The practical effect of reconciliation to God is thus to find ourselves
   in an order of love which is our succour, so far beyond our own
   contriving and for ends so far above our own conceiving, that we have
   no concern except to serve in it. Practically, as well as
   theoretically, we, thereby, attain such a perfect unity of morality and
   religion that we can only be absolutely dependent upon God as we are
   absolutely independent in our own souls, and only absolutely
   independent in our souls as we are absolutely dependent on God. A saved
   soul, in other words, is a soul true to itself because, with its mind
   on God's will of love and not on itself, it stands in God's world
   unbribable and undismayed, having freedom as it has piety and piety as
   it is free.

   Instead of being hostile to our trust in God, as at first appeared, our
   independence is the last proof of our utter dependence, being complete
   only when we have a faith in God which would so deliver us from
   self-regard, which is the mother of all base compliances, that we can
   stand alone against the world. Only as we do what we veritably see to
   be right, do we prove that we believe what we veritably see to be true;
   and without both, nothing has either religious or moral value. By the
   mere fact that an action is what Kant calls heteronymous--the verdict
   of other people's consciences--it is made morally worthless, however
   much it may be visibly moral, even as what is not of our own insight
   into a reality worthy of our trust is thereby made religiously
   worthless, however much it may be, in mere statement, sound doctrine.

   We serve God only as we are true to our own souls, and we are true to
   our own souls only as we serve God. Neither is possible without the
   other: for what are our own consciousness of truth, our own moral
   ideals, our own personal resolve and consecration save in a world the
   ultimate reality of which corresponds to them; and how shall we know
   that we live in such a world except as it gives us freedom and
   independence in standing for them?

   If to be saved is to be wholly in accord with God's will of love, to be
   saved in spite of ourselves is as impossible as to be saved by
   ourselves, for except by our own truth, our own ideal and our own
   intent, there is no accord. Yet, towards that end we are in no way
   forwarded by aiming at our own well-being, either for time or for
   eternity, even while no other end than truth and righteousness is our
   true well-being. Nor is there any solution except we find in grace the
   will of love which has a right to ask us to deny the self that opposes
   its service, because it is a true fellowship of persons which maintains
   both the separateness and the intimateness of a moral self-surrender,
   as opposed to a mere subjection, which allows no separateness and no
   response.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VI

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

   Except by the will of God, it is not in man that walketh to direct his
   steps amid life's measureless possibilities or to have any confidence
   in dealing with them which is not vanity. Yet even God's will gives
   insight and courage only as it is our own law of liberty. As a rule
   from without, even a perfect standard of it would leave our souls
   oppressed, our lives routine, our world bounded by prison-walls, our
   moral horizon confined to the duties commanded. Being followed from a
   regard to God, it might deliver us from the worldly prudences for
   worldly success, which above all other causes deny us the noble uses of
   the world, but it would still leave our world a place of straight ruled
   highways, dusty with many anxieties, with the burden of routine worship
   added to routine duty. Not till we find the will of God to be the
   perfect law of liberty, and are free in it by seeing it to be wholly
   personal, wholly concerned with our own insight and reverence and
   purpose of good, does it give life more and more abundantly.

   Yet it is never merely individual. We are not free as we are
   Ishmaelites. In isolation from the inspiration of human achievement and
   the influence of our fellows we have no scope in any sphere, and least
   of all in the highest. A conscience judging God's will by tradition or
   common opinion is corrupt, but a conscience repudiating all guidance
   except its own constitution is barren. In the sense of a rule plain to
   each individual in every age and social condition, and independent of
   all the ideas which are the measure of human progress, there is no more
   a natural morality than, in independence of the increasing insight of
   prophetic souls, there is a natural religion.

   We have no width of moral outlook except from the summit of mankind's
   highest ideals, and every ideal has a history, and without the
   influence of those who have before us seen life's opportunities, few
   duties would intrude upon our privacy. Except as we live in sympathy
   with the thoughts, are inspired by the lives, are strengthened by the
   fellowship of those who, by willing to do God's will in the actual
   tasks of life, have discerned by its guidance life's increasing
   purpose, and, with whatsoever outward defeat, have won its victories in
   their own souls, conscience may forbid, but cannot enlighten.

   This heritage from those who have been open to receive and do the will
   of God and this fellowship with their spirit of victory and peace
   create the true Communion of Saints: and it is a first essential task
   of our true liberty to take our right place in the midst of it.

   Being then heirs of its promise, we shall not need to trouble ourselves
   about its precise frontiers. Many societies professing to represent
   exclusively this august body have not been conspicuously either
   communions or saints, and the immense zeal spent in discussing their
   claims is worse than wasted, but when we ourselves belong to the
   Communion of Saints so as to find our freedom in it, we shall not fail
   to discover our kindred, or be doubtful of their fellowship, because we
   shall be in the true apostolic succession.

   This situation involves another antagonism which, being mechanically
   opposed, must be for ever in conflict, but which a truly personal
   relation, not working directly on us, but indirectly through us, turns
   into perfect harmony. The result may once again be expressed in summary
   form. God's will of love cannot be known apart from those who have
   discerned its guidance and cherished its fellowship, yet we cannot know
   it either by copying their example or by being absorbed into their
   company, but only by realising our own freedom in the midst of them.

   The first wrong way of belonging to the Communion of Saints which makes
   it impossible to know the will of God as our own will, is by so
   accepting tradition that the past makes void God's living word.

   The prevalence of the misconception that the use of the heritage from
   the past is by accepting it as authoritative antiquity explains the
   contempt with which all dependence upon the Communion of Saints has
   been repudiated, for it seems to mean the imposition of an external
   authority of standards of belief and action in a way to repress all
   true moral independence. Naturally this resentment is not diminished
   when superior persons insist on subjection to external authority as the
   only state for which the bulk of mankind is fitted. In particular when,
   as its head, Jesus is set up as a standard to which we ought so
   directly to conform as to make it a sin to go round by the way of our
   own discernment of duty, He is vehemently rejected as the heaviest of
   all impositions on our freedom. As this is the chief rock of offence,
   we may confine our attention to the question of our dependence on that
   Supreme Example.

   As men have sought to deduce from the sayings of Jesus a whole and
   rounded scheme of the Divine mind, without themselves needing to have
   the mind that was in Him for its interpretation, so they have tried to
   solve all life's practical problems by asking the one question, What,
   inferring from what Jesus did, would Jesus here do?

   No view of what His life was can make that other than a searching test,
   a test so searching that nothing, it might well seem, could go deeper.
   Nevertheless, to attach God's rule, in this external way, to Christ's
   example only obscures and misrepresents the significance of His perfect
   Sonship for making us sons of God. Except as we see as He sees, He is
   no revelation; and except as we determine our lives as He determined
   His, He is no reconciliation.

   To depend on Jesus as an external authority for the will of God is not,
   as is so often maintained, a right conclusion from the belief that He
   is pre-eminently the Word of God. On the contrary, the proof of His
   Divine commission is in setting us free from the slavery which hinders
   us from being our true selves, living our own life, and dealing with
   God's world as our true heritage; while, to remain a mere pattern to be
   copied would mark His failure to establish a living relation of God's
   children to their Father. The reason for the belief that God was in Him
   perfectly, reconciling the world to Himself, and that the Spirit was
   not given by measure unto Him, is just the way in which He sets us
   free. Did He rule from without, He would fall into the rank of mere
   human teachers, whose authority fades as they remove into the past. But
   He lives eternally in the present, because God's will of love is so
   perfectly manifested in Him that it needs no appeal except to the
   hearts of those who are willing to lay themselves open to be convinced.
   Faith in any truth He never needs to ask except by showing us how to
   look at it so as to know it to be true; nor obedience to any command
   except by manifesting the spirit in which we shall discern it to be our
   duty. Only what speaks to the image of God in us has a right to be
   called a word of God; and only what thus speaks to the image of God
   alone, and has no need of extraneous aid, has a right to be called His
   absolute Word.

   To-day, as in the past, no one can come near Him in sincerity, without
   having new depths of sympathy and humility stirred by being made to
   feel more deeply life's real suffering and see more largely life's real
   service, and without being enabled thereby more adequately to interpret
   the world as God's by a worthier discipline and a nobler duty.

   No imitative life, nevertheless, is inspired, and no inspired life is
   imitative: and the mere imitation of Christ is so far from being an
   exception that it is beset by special limitations.

   First, this method of directly copying Christ's example can be employed
   only for immense problems and imposing situations; whereas, in His own
   life, nothing is more striking than what He said and did to ordinary
   people casually met in ordinary circumstances, which would not have
   suggested to us any kind of spiritual situation. Though He never said
   or did anything except what everyone should have said or done in the
   circumstances apart, at least, from His special vocation as the
   Messiah, even in the same circumstances nothing but the same power of
   dealing with their moral possibilities would have discovered any moral
   possibilities. The chief question is how to discover the great in the
   small, the mind of Christ in matters so ordinary that we should never
   be arrested so as to ask ourselves what Jesus would do.

   Second, no one ever does encounter the same conditions as another; and,
   even if we could successfully apply His example to our situation, the
   exactest imitation would only be lifeless, unedifying mimicry. The
   quality of all He said and did was derived straight from His amazing
   insight, which was just perfect love. Though echoed to the letter,
   therefore, the soul of it would still be wanting, and would no more be
   His example than a death-mask is a living face. Our life also, if it is
   really to be living, must, like His, follow our own insight. As His own
   understanding of God's love was the fulfilment of His law, so our own
   understanding of it alone can be the fulfilment of ours.

   Finally, this external use of Christ's example does not help us to
   overcome our worst moral failure. The supreme moral defect is not the
   lack of a good conscience, but the limitation of our insight,
   especially into the claims of our own vocation, which makes it so
   extremely easy to have a good conscience. The comfort of that
   limitation explains the readiness to impose rules, and, even when they
   are hard, to accept them, because we seem to know where we are and when
   we can stop. Even when rules are found insufficient, it may seem
   possible to find an external standard in an example: and, in a state of
   pupilage, pattern is much greater than precept and much longer of
   profit. Thus the Apostle could say to his recent converts from
   heathenism, "Be ye followers of me," though, even then, he indicated
   that it was no mere copying, by adding, "as I also am of Christ Jesus."
   But, when we imagine that we can finally direct our lives by mere
   imitation of the life of Christ, we fall into a misleading and
   distracting encyclopaedic estimate both of Christ's life and our own.
   How, we are asked, can the life of Jesus have been perfect? Was He
   interested in art? Did He concern Himself about public service? Are we
   in our complex time to have no other interests than sufficed for His
   simpler age? And then we find that many interests which have nourished
   themselves from His spirit, are ruled out by His example. And His
   example, moreover, being thus tabulated according to interests, becomes
   a mere catalogue of doings, wanting altogether the spirit which
   dominated His real life and made it at once so large and effective. He
   also had His special vocation as Messiah, dominating all His interests,
   and it was part of His true perfection to restrict Himself to its
   performance and not to engage in all conceivable human activities. But,
   when we follow Him in a mere spirit of imitation, we are led to
   conceive our own duties as the overtaking of a great number of tasks,
   leading generally to doing many things in a spirit of restlessness, and
   not as the fulfilment of our own vocation, which, however restricted,
   is complete in its place in God's general purpose. Not till we abandon
   the hope of having a conscience satisfied that it has overtaken all
   possible duties, and learn to live with one never satisfied, even
   though concerned only with our own task, does the example of Christ
   become an inspiration to enable us to see our own service, and cease to
   be a pattern to enable us blindly to copy His.

   True conscientiousness does not arrest itself at infallibility, even
   under the guidance of Christ's example. It is not determined by
   undeniable duties, but by steadfastly following the light, however dim;
   and it is seldom faced by questions of right and wrong at all, but is
   constantly faced by better or worse, wherein it must ever choose the
   things that excel. Thus alone does man truly do God's will and ever
   advance in the knowledge of it.

   The influence, therefore, of Christ's example is not to be directly our
   pattern, but to inspire and succour the faith which sees love to be
   life's final meaning and last word of power, and so to enable us to
   discern for ourselves its guidance and to set our hope unwaveringly on
   its victory. Instead of saying, Look on me and I will show you the
   exact life which is adequate to the will of God, Jesus says, Come unto
   me all ye who labour and are heavy laden seeking to meet these external
   standards, for I am meek and lowly in heart. This means a heart ready
   to accept what God imposes upon it, and only what God imposes. For this
   reason His yoke is easy and His burden light, and we find rest for our
   souls. The ease is not because the task is small or because we can deal
   lightly with its obligation. To deny self and take up our cross is not
   easy. But if the spirit of our following is meekness and lowliness of
   heart, we find that the will of God is the will of love and so is the
   perfect law of liberty, which is the realisation of our own souls, as
   well as the consummation of all things.

   The second wrong way of belonging to the Communion of Saints which
   makes it impossible to know the will of God as our own will, is
   mystical.

   Mysticism is here used in the sense, already explained, of impersonal
   absorption in the Divine and not in the sense of the mysterious depths
   of life which are inseparable from everything truly personal. Nothing
   passes so far beyond the senses as those personal relations which evoke
   the finer sympathies. So far do they pass with the living into the
   unseen, that it may well be that those who, after they had served their
   generation, fell asleep, have left more behind them than their
   achievements and their example. Most of all the Captain of our
   salvation has been included, with a warm sense of trust and
   companionship, in the most enduring part of living fellowship.

   That sense of touching through experience the deeper things which give
   experience meaning, may be called mystical, and then mysticism is just
   another name for religion. But it is not the mysticism here meant.
   Mysticism proper seeks to pass beyond all the ordinary forms of
   experience to a corporate oneness, which is effective as we merge our
   personal will in it till absorption mechanically effects agreement.

   Vague ideas of relief from the burden of our personal life by
   absorption in some wider life are probably always floating in the
   public mind. Being survivals of tribal ideas, in few of us are they
   extinct, but, in times of great national crisis, they well up with
   special force, and we have much talk of the State or the Church as
   super-personalities. At most they could be only super-individuals, but,
   so conceived, they would still be only Brocken shadows of the misty
   tribal mass morality up through which mankind has slowly and painfully
   climbed, and which, when the storms lift it, again surges round our
   heads. What they lack is precisely the moral fellowship which alone is
   personal, wherein we are free as we are more perfectly directed by
   love, and loyalty to others and loyalty to ourselves confirm each other
   and are never in conflict, and fellowship is an emancipation and never
   a subjection.

   As all social combinations are a mixture of tribal and ethical bonds,
   we must expect the revival of such ideas respecting them, and we may
   even have to admit their utility for a time But the essential quality
   of the Communion of Saints is to be ethical and not tribal. Wherefore,
   such ideas in connection with it work only confusion of mind and
   perversion of spiritual issues, till the insight and courage of the
   saints to hear and do only what God demands may become an offence.

   Instead of spending time on considering this mystical relation to the
   Church as the body, we can deal with the problem more concretely and by
   way of pre-eminence by again considering the true relation of the
   members to the Head.

   When the mystical way is taken, salvation is separated from His
   teaching and example and made to depend directly on His person. So hard
   a

   distinction has sometimes been drawn between His person and all that
   ever manifested it, as to make it appear that we could depend upon Him
   for salvation, though nothing He ever said or did found any echo in our
   hearts or made any demand upon our lives. His person becomes a
   mysterious vehicle of forces, effective as they do not work through
   truly personal moral relations either with God or man, but directly and
   overwhelmingly by forces of omnipotence. But this has no relation to
   Jesus that even suggests the dealing of men with Him in the Gospels,
   and it reduces His life to little more than an interesting relic of
   antiquity. The essence of the Gospel appeal is humble, patient,
   suffering love, among us as one that serveth and not as one that
   sitteth at meat: and with such an appeal a mystical communication of
   spiritual force is in no way concerned--except that it is used as an
   example of ascetic renunciation of the world, though Jesus Himself said
   emphatically that it was nothing of the kind. The main concern is with
   the risen Christ, not as One manifested to be the Son of God with
   power, according to the kind of holiness which He manifested in His
   life, but as the one Divine omnipotent power in which we lose the
   isolation of our personal being, though the fact that it was once
   humanly manifested may be valued as bringing it nearer.

   As Pascal says, we touch the risen Christ only through His wounds, but
   when it is for an ascetic renunciation to sink ourselves in His glory
   or to absorb ourselves in the Church as though it were His glorified
   body, and not His body only as we, in our mortal conflict, manifest the
   spirit which brought Him to the cross, we merely substitute for
   reconciliation, in our whole personal life, to the God and Father of
   our Lord Jesus Christ, a vast shining abstraction of power, which does
   not transform but wrongly removes the burden of the world. If it do not
   spare us the conflict, it merely sets us in it as tools of the most
   High, and does not send us forth with high hearts to the battle in
   which we must win our souls as the children of God.

   The end of our whole relation to the Communion of Saints is not to save
   us from the burden and responsibility of being persons, but by showing
   us that persons are the only storehouses of God's purpose which do not
   pass away, to inspire in us ever deeper devotion to the personal values
   which are life's meaning and goal, and the only unchanging end of this
   ceaselessly changing world, for the sake of which we can endure all
   things as well as hope all things.

   The third, and least Christ-like way of all of conceiving the Communion
   of Saints is to regard it as the institution of One, who, by rising
   from the dead and ascending to glory has ended all humility of appeal.

   He who humbled Himself was exalted. He who came as a country workman in
   mean garments, comes as the Son of Man with glory on the clouds of
   Heaven. This is taken to mean the close of the rule of meekness and the
   opening of the rule of might. After a short and fruitless attempt at
   saving men by service and sacrifice, God, it would seem, went back to
   domination and compulsion, overriding when He had failed to persuade
   and fashioning subjects when He had not succeeded in winning sons. Thus
   the life of Christ becomes a temporary episode in God's dealing, and
   ceases to be an eternal revelation of His mind concerning what is truly
   coming from above with power. By this interpretation the practical
   application, as well as the theory of Christianity, has been so changed
   that there has often been no hesitation about claiming the Christian
   name, while repudiating the whole method of Christ as shown in His
   actual life and death and in the nature of the demands He made and of
   the blessedness He offered. As an interpretation of our own experience,
   it turns the Jesus of the Gospels in to a mere cause of confusion. In
   place of His humble fellowship, in which the last is first and the
   first last, and no man is called Rabbi and Christ is the sole
   authority, and that only because He is the one perfect teacher, we have
   the Church as a state, whose officials claim a greater submission than
   any other state has ever required, for their authority extends to
   belief as well as action, and to the heart in this life and its
   destinies in the next, where no other state has ever imagined that its
   writ would run. And even where the claim is much more modest, the
   Church is far too much associated with the idea of power and far too
   little committed to the faith that love is the only way of winning the
   victory of the Kingdom of God.

   The joyous spirit of His followers, so downcast before, shows that in
   some sense they took the Resurrection to mean that all power was given
   to their Lord in Heaven and in Earth, but it was because His method had
   been vindicated, and not because it had been changed. To Peter it meant
   that He was a man approved of God, His method, which seemed to be
   defeat, being shown to be God's way of victory. To Paul it declares Him
   to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness,
   the spirit He manifested in meekness and lowliness. For both, the
   Resurrection merely made plain the meaning of the life and death of
   Jesus, that the moral order of love is the will of God, the last, the
   Divinest victory over all evil, the natural, the all-prevailing, the
   irresistible dominion, such as is given to no overriding might; and it
   called them to like service in the assurance of like victory, not
   because God had substituted power for love, but because He had shown
   them that love in the end alone is power, and its fellowship the one
   perfect bond at once of liberty and order.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VII

THE RULE OF GOD

   The will of God can claim all our concern, to the exclusion of concern
   even for our souls, because it is the will of love. By this faith
   works. It is not by our love; nor is it even by God's love as mere
   benevolent emotion existing in His heart and nowhere else. Faith is the
   assurance that love, in spite of all that appears to the contrary, is
   the final order of the world, so that to accept its will is to have all
   right uses of the world. Thus it is the assurance that love,
   interpreted by what God values and, therefore, by His holiness, is the
   final power as well as the final good in this present life, so that,
   though, for any other end than God's purpose or by any other guidance
   than His will, nothing is ours, however much we may seem to possess,
   and nothing good, however much it may seem to be desired, yet for His
   end and by His guidance, all things are ours, however much we may lack,
   and all things work together for good, even if, as immediate
   happenings, they are calamities.

   This love will not refuse us any real good, yet we may not measure it,
   either for this world or the next, by any standard of outward
   prosperity or ease, or any measure save the mind of God. Therefore, we
   cannot make any form of our own good our aim: and much less may we make
   the happiness of winning it our motive. Faith, righteousness and love
   are not united by the hope of a reward beyond themselves, but any bliss
   we may hope for must be measured by them and be by possessing them,
   and, even so, not by our own foresight, but by God's.

   Yet morals have so frequently been made to depend in a purely
   eudaemonistic way on religion as to make it appear that there is no
   other connection between them. For this reason, in spite of the fact
   that, throughout all human history, the basis of morals has been
   religious, philosophical ethics has sought to derive it entirely from
   the peculiar nature of conscience, without any reference to religion.
   Even when God is introduced as a compendious name for the validity of
   the moral order, the absoluteness of moral obligation has still been
   derived from some universal legislation of conscience which has some
   kind of infallibility.

   But conscience is no more infallible than any other human authority.
   The absolute nature of its requirements depends on no inerrancy in its
   verdicts, but on the absolute rule which, in so far as it is conscience
   of right, conscience reveals.

   The essential form of every verdict of conscience is that it is sacred.
   We may freely question whether it is right, but we may not at all
   consider whether it is convenient. This absoluteness can be derived
   only from an unseen and eternal reality which is, by its nature,
   sacred, and cannot be derived either from conscience, which makes
   mistakes, or from any accumulation of utilities, which can be valued
   only by comparison and from which we may select as we prefer. Many
   attempts have been made to show how the idea of the sacredness of duty
   came to be attached to certain useful actions and even to maintain its
   abiding validity in respect of them. Sacredness, we are told, is a
   social feeling which makes us accept the maxims which embody the wisdom
   of the past, justified because they may be a shrewder dealing with the
   real utilities than our own judgment of them. But, if society is a mere
   group, its claims are not sacred. They should be measured by mere
   utility. Moreover, if utility is to be measured by material profit, and
   pleasure is our only rational motive, they neither have sacredness, nor
   do they need it, for we can do no other than choose them when we see
   them. Nor, if the struggle for existence is the rational view of the
   world, can we pass from utility for ourselves to consideration for
   others as sacred, and not merely as convenient. Conscience is then at
   best an inherited instinct, which, as it is useful for the race, we can
   only hope will continue to act blindly and never become rational. Yet
   it is a vain hope, for how can conscience impose absolute obligation on
   those who are sufficiently enlightened to discern that it is a mere
   instinct of the herd? How can we be loyal at all costs to mere
   irrational instincts knowledge must outgrow?

   The substance of all this is that, while conscience is corrupt if it
   derive its motive from religious reward, it is not conscience at all
   unless its sanction derives its sacredness from the religious reality,
   which, name it as we like, is just the Rule or Kingdom of God.

   Till conscience of right stand above all prudences, there is no
   beginning with any rule of God, yet till the Rule of God is the meaning
   and purpose of all that is without, there is no true beginning with
   conscience of right. All who ever stood up, especially if it were
   against the whole world, and said this is right and this alone, have
   been assured that the ultimate nature of things was on their side. That
   no other soul accepts it in no way shakes their confidence. The
   efficiency of Touchstone, "I will bandy with thee in faction; I will
   o'er-run thee with policy: I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways,"
   is for them only the faith of the simple fool, even though he be highly
   placed, subtly skilled and abundantly equipped. God's world, they know,
   is not built that way. The natural order of it is the love which is the
   fulfilling of the law, and not the selfishness which knows no law
   except its own direct advantage; and the blessings which make rich and
   add no sorrow are truth and beauty and goodness, and not place and
   wealth and outward fame. God is not mocked. The name of the wicked
   shall rot, the noisiest clamour of self-assertion die down, the
   kingdoms of violence be self-destructive; yet we only know this as we
   find God's will to be our own right will, whatsoever may happen.

   From first to last, it is necessary to affirm, and not merely to admit,
   that God's Rule does not exist anywhere as a rule which imposes itself
   otherwise than by our own insight into truth, conscience of right and
   purpose of good. Conformity to outward rule is, at best, manners and
   never morals. Only what is seen in its own light to be true is
   rational, and only what is submitted to on its own claim is righteous.
   Yet we can find neither by merely reflecting the world around us. As an
   inference from the way the world rules us and from the visible order of
   life and society, we might as readily speak of a Rule of Satan as of a
   Rule of God.

   This contrast between the absolute nature of the Rule of God and its
   limited operation may again be set forth as a harmony of opposites. The
   Rule of God is an order which is outside of us, but it exists only as
   it is accepted from within.

   The Rule or Kingdom of God exists as an objective reality--in the
   strict sense the only existing order of the world. Yet, as a gracious
   personal rule, all its characteristics are determined by the limitation
   that it cannot operate except as it is received as our own rule. To
   this personal nature of God's Rule are due all the contradictions which
   have met us, and which not only seem to exist, but actually do exist,
   while that rule is not received. Though it is the ultimate reality,
   except as the perfect law of liberty, it is wholly inoperative; though
   the measure of all that is final, except as it is our own end, it
   measures nothing in the world. But, for the very reason that it imposes
   itself from within and only from within, as the law of our liberty and
   only as the law of our liberty, as the realm of moral esteem and only
   as the realm of moral esteem, is it the final, the rational, as well as
   the righteous order of the world.

   If the result of this forbearance, however, is that the whole world
   lieth in the Evil One, how, it may be asked, is God's Rule a reality
   which makes any practical difference in the world for any mortal?

   To that there is only one answer It can be known to exist without as we
   receive it within. The prophetic method of discovering that God's Rule
   is not only reality but the final reality, by accepting it and finding
   that, by it, we can rule our own world, is the sole way; and we too can
   only approach the question aright as we consider what the fellowship of
   prophetic souls, in the long conflict of the ages with sorrow and sin,
   has made of it.

   All prophetic knowledge of God, being moral and not metaphysical, has
   concentrated its interest on this problem of God's rule in an evil
   world, not only asking what God's will is in general, but, through many
   centuries giving practical heed to it amid all kinds of overwhelming
   conditions; and the result, though so burning a practical interest was
   necessarily interwoven with the temporal and local, is so astonish
   ingly agreed, that, in the absence of all other dependence, we can
   explain it only by insight into the nature of reality.

   The prophets all travelled the same hard road and met the same strange
   antagonisms in their own thoughts. As nothing else illustrates so
   clearly the nature of their faith, we cannot do better than make the
   most important of these antagonisms the heads of our study.

   I. We must pass through the sense that God's rule is small and
   oppressed to the discovery that it is universal and triumphant.

   The prophets never think of the spiritual conflict as relative and due
   to irregularity of development, but always as the absolute opposition
   of an organised kingdom of evil to the one indivisible Kingdom of God.

   This conception is usually dismissed lightly as in conflict with the
   theory of evolution: and it is inconsistent with the theory that the
   sole force in evolution is accidental variation of organisms and
   selection from them entirely by elimination of the unprofitable through
   the struggle for survival. But the Apostle Paul, at least, was somewhat
   of an evolutionist, for whom the psychical--the natural and
   instinctive--was first, and the spiritual--the rational and moral--was
   later, yet no one held more strongly the absolute contradiction between
   what he called the Tyranny of Darkness and the Kingdom of the Son of
   God's love: and, indeed, the reason was this theory of evolution. If
   evolution be development of the spiritual from the physical, progress
   cannot be simply more efficiency in dealing with the physical
   environment, but must introduce sharp difference of principle.

   Something of this we can see as far back as the decisive moment when
   progress begins to depend on the purpose of the living creature, for
   there we have a distinction in principle between acceptance of things
   as they are, which is stagnation, and venture upon a wider environment,
   which is progress. The next stage distinguishes between the life which
   shuts itself up in itself and the life which enlarges itself by the
   society of its fellows, which again is a difference of principle.
   Finally, we come to the real difference in principle of which the
   Apostle was thinking, between the natural man in his instinctive group
   and the spiritual man in ethical relations. With this we have not
   merely stagnation and progress, but sharply opposing ideas of good,
   which divide the world into hostile camps.

   At the stage of natural instinct, when the family is a blood and bread
   grouping and all wider tribal associations mere extensions of the
   family, the ties are individual, but they are not personal, not,
   therefore, moral, but, at best, the material out of which, as it is
   personally employed, goodness and badness may be made. But, the moment
   we enter on personal relations, we pass from instinctive association,
   to a moral fellowship in which we rightly take our place only by
   reverence for all its members, and so from lower and higher stages
   which shade into each other, to consciously conflicting principles, or,
   more accurately, conflicting reverences. Forthwith we find ourselves
   between antagonistic religions, or, as the prophets viewed it, between
   religion and idolatry, between esteeming God, by love towards His
   children, and setting up in self-love an idol of His gifts, to which we
   sacrifice His children.

   These principles of regard for men as ends and material things as
   means, and of regard for material things as ends and men as merely
   means, are not only in hard contradiction, but they organise their
   adherents in opposing camps, giving a sense of a deadly conflict in our
   earthly state, which is by no means confined to the prophets. In days
   of great stress it has given Ahriman as large a place in men's fears as
   Ormuzd in their hopes, and made Satan cast the shadow of terror on the
   love of God.

   The doctrine of evolution, turning attention to origins and away from
   issues, and wrongly interpreted by organisms and not by the purposes of
   living creatures, only seemed to heal the breach with the promise of
   even, if tardy, progress, because long years of unparalleled abundance
   never challenged this conclusion. Now that we are once more being made
   to pass through the Valley of Decision, there are not wanting signs
   that the pleasant chiaroscuro is vanishing and that we are in danger of
   returning to the prophetic sense of a world of absolute conflict
   between good and evil, without being able to attain the prophetic
   assurance that, nevertheless, it is of God.

   The ascription of the world to God, in spite of all its evil, was the
   essential prophetic achievement. Along with the most pessimistic view
   of the might of the Kingdom of Darkness, in intimate connection with it
   and even by means of it, there was the conviction that this is God's
   world, with the only final might in it His Rule, which is always about
   to come, yea, in some effective sense is already present, so that it is
   possible to live in it now and to manage our present experience by
   means of it.

   The amazing thing is the way this optimism always rises out of what
   might seem the depths of despair. The Kingdom of Evil has annexed the
   heart's allegiance as well as the whole outward life of man. No satire
   that ever was written gives so black a picture of men and society as
   the dirge prophet after prophet chants. Yet ever over this morass tower
   the walls of the city of God. Isaiah confesses himself a man of unclean
   lips, dwelling amid a people of unclean lips, a people untruthful and
   determined to be deceived, their morals utterly corrupt, their religion
   mere trampling of God's courts. Yet from their polluted capital is to
   go forth the law in righteousness and the word of the Lord in truth.
   Then the perfect reign of peace will replace all the base idolatries
   with their murderous strifes. And, as we find at the beginning of
   revelation, so we find at the close. The world is sunk in calamity,
   hatred of good, crime and, above all, idolatry, yet over it the New
   Jerusalem is coming down from God out of Heaven. Most pessimistic of
   all is the teaching of Jesus. The highest morality turns out to be mere
   respectability, the purest religion mere formalism, and the insincerity
   is such that the Prince of this world is the Father of Lies: yet
   nowhere is the Kingdom so real or so near.

   The reason for this pessimistic judgment is the same as the reason for
   the hope which rises out of it, the reason for both being that all
   forms of evil are traced to the one root of idolatry, or, as our Lord,
   going back still farther, finds it, of hypocrisy. It is self-delusion
   over against God's reality and truth. The Kingdom of Evil is idolatry,
   so organised by hypocrisy that it is able to set itself up as the true
   order of the world. Valuing its neighbour only for itself, it makes
   possession the end and man the means, and turns the whole world into a
   temple for its idol, where it worships with all its mind and with all
   its heart and with all its strength. By the dazzling liturgy of all the
   worldly interests which appeal to selfish desire, it blinds its own
   eyes as well as the eyes of others, till its idol is accepted as the
   only true might in the world, over against which a rule of love seems
   mere fantasy and cloud-land. Nor did this idolatry ever erect a ritual
   so imposing as the material conquests of the present order of
   competition with its vast mechanical equipment; nor was it ever so much
   taken at its face value as when thus enormously staged; nor has society
   ever been set by it on a more selfish foundation or been so robbed of
   the true uses of the world; nor has it ever issued in vaster
   destruction.

   This radical judgment of evil as one organised idolatry which
   repudiates all the personal values God's grace affirms, and calls good
   evil and evil good, and employs all the resources of civilisation to
   embellish the temple of its hypocrisy, is vital to the whole prophetic
   outlook. Only by seeing it did the prophets also see that there was a
   good so high and the victory of it in men's souls so blessed, that no
   material loss or suffering could be too great to achieve it, and that
   for this, in spite of all the appalling misery, the government of the
   world is one wise, holy, and gracious rule.

   The average dull view of human nature, as never very good or very bad,
   and of sin as mere transgressions of useful laws, without any radical
   conflict between good and evil, left their contemporaries with the idea
   of God as chiefly concerned with the material well-being of His
   peculiar people, and with their hope turned to horror at the
   ghastliness of His failure, when destruction and desolation came upon
   them.

   This ancient experience, even if we could give no ground for it, is
   confirmed by our own. A half and half morality always means a hopeless
   view of humanity; whereas a view of man as involved in a widely
   organised and radical corruption, always means a high estimate of his
   possibilities and an absolute sense of the moral significance of life.
   But it is also within our power to discover reasons.

   The bearing of this view of sin as idolatry, springing from selfishness
   and organised by hypocrisy, upon the universality of God's Rule is its
   simplest aspect.

   When a nation, thinking of itself as God's chosen people, not for high
   service but for high privilege, proclaims its virtue and its innocency,
   and appropriates God for its own domination, its judgment of good and
   evil must be external and negative. But if it have any conception of
   this arraying of the world powers against the good, it can neither be
   so sure of its acquittal nor so sure of the necessity of its material
   superiority for the purpose of God. Only as we see that all our battles
   are inside this great world conflict of worship and idolatry, are we
   ever truly delivered from particularist conceptions of God.

   But we can also see how the prophets pass through this pessimistic view
   to their large optimism, to their discovery of a triumphant Divine
   Rule.

   Having traced evil to one root of illusion, they could trust that some
   day it might be cut as it were by one stroke. They felt like the
   physician who, having gone behind the fever to the malaria, and behind
   the malaria to the one prolific form of life that permeates everywhere,
   never ceases to dream that it may, being one, suffer one annihilation.
   Similarly, the prophets, being concerned with principles and not with
   visible progress, cherished the expectation, not that all earthly
   imperfection and limitation will pass, but that idolatry will no longer
   delude, will, indeed, cease as the dominating order of the world. Their
   hope was not a Utopia, with wealth fairly distributed and society
   justly organised, but a new worship which sets the children of God
   above the gifts of God, though they also expected that a juster use of
   God's gifts would follow. It was not that God would, by almighty fiat,
   amend our doings and order our society, but that His wisdom would
   succeed in enlightening our hearts' regard and transfer our loyalty to
   His own kingdom of good, and that, from this, the amendment of our
   human relations would proceed.

   Nor, in our many schemes for a better world have we found a shorter cut
   to a righteous social order; nor can there ever be success so long as
   it all seems to be a matter of material well-being, because there is no
   reason, in that case, why each one should not do the best he can for
   himself. Only if God's spiritual purpose with man is the true good and
   God's rule for it the true order of the world, and we are in accord
   with it through the heart's reverence for its purpose, so that we
   esteem God in His children, can we ever rightly organise or distribute
   anything.

   This expectation of the manifestation of God's rule, not by effort and
   slow moral progress, but by illumination and the working of God, leads
   to the second point.

   II. We must pass through the sense that God's rule is not even
   beneficent to the discovery that it is love.

   The prophets were all men, who, being of tender hearts and large
   sympathy, had tried hard to understand the world on principles of
   general benevolence, and who had been driven, by stern experience, to
   see that God's Rule could not mean that He wished to see us all
   enjoying ourselves, taking care that none should be hurt, and glad to
   keep us from error for any reason and from evil by any motive, so long
   as our feet were kept from falling and our eyes from tears. Their need
   for religion was overwhelming and their thought was directed specially
   to the question of God's rule, because they could not pass by that way,
   yet were determined to press through to victory over the ills of life
   and not be content with a withdrawal from them, either ascetic or
   emotional.

   Their own sufferings caused the prophets less perplexity than the
   sufferings of their nation. As they understood them more clearly and
   felt them more compassionately than others, it was no easy task to
   renounce the central religious conviction of their contemporaries, that
   God could not suffer any great disaster to befall the only nation which
   worshipped Him. But when they saw that the supreme conflict was not
   between peoples, but between religion and idolatry, between good and
   evil, they saw the folly of this hope, because they then discovered a
   higher victory, to win which material defeat might be necessary. In
   view of this spiritual end, far above even national prosperity or even
   existence, they learned that love is a moral value set on man as made
   in God's image and not regard to the material well-being of men or
   nations. Hence it became plain to them that, as the supreme disaster,
   so universal, so calamitous, is strong delusion to believe a lie, under
   the tyranny of which nothing can profit, for deliverance from it, no
   price is too high.

   Starting from their own austere reverence towards their own
   responsibilities, they were freed from all sentimentalism and made
   solemnly conscious of the tremendous issues of human choice. To love
   their neighbour meant to hold him in the same high and serious
   reverence, a reverence which was rooted in the conviction that, though
   nothing should be spared to help him, every man's destiny lay in his
   own hand, and could not in the nature of things be in the hand of
   another. And, as they conceived that their own relation to men should
   be without isolation yet with out intrusion, without hardness yet
   without softness, with large forbearance yet also with high demands, so
   they conceived God's. The essence of God's Rule lay in respect for what
   was in a man's own heart. With that His salvation was alone concerned,
   and, therefore, in the sense of overriding him, God Himself could not
   determine man's destiny. To be kept right was nothing; to be right of
   his own insight and choice everything. For that reason, God could not
   constrain; but also, for that reason, He could not spare any pain or
   conflict or arresting experience which might open men's eyes to the
   vanity of the idol they worshipped. Thus, by the hard road of learning
   that, as mere pleasant experience, life is mostly toil and trouble, or
   as the Preacher, in days when men were seeking an easier way than the
   prophetic faith, sums it up, "vanity of vanities, all is vanity," the
   prophets arrived at the discovery that the task of love is not to keep
   us happy, but to give us moral victory.

   The Kingdom of God is thus a moral rule only to be introduced by moral
   means. Yet it does not come by the slow moral progress of the race, but
   is of God's manifesting and not of man's achieving. The prophetic hope
   is in a Day of the Lord, and not in a steady, if slow, success in
   reforming the world, because, being concerned with the central
   reverence of our hearts, it looks forward to a day of enlightenment and
   not to a slow process of amendment.

   This Day of the Lord is always connected either with the actual
   experience or, more often, the well-grounded anticipation of times of
   great conflict and distress. Though the supreme blessing of God's
   Kingdom is a peace which includes nature as well as society, so little
   is it concerned with the subjugation of nature or the establishing of
   political guarantees that it always seems nearest when faith in both is
   most broken.

   Isaiah, speaking from the midst of a people, idolatrous, self-deceived,
   utterly corrupt, sees the leopard lying down with the kid as well as
   men beating their swords into ploughshares. The splendour of his ideal
   requires for its description all the resources of poetry; and yet he
   looks at it through disasters only to be described by a mythology of
   doom, after he has exhausted every figure of God's wrath and man's
   desolation. Moreover, they are disasters which cannot end while
   everyone continues to be a hypocrite as well as an evil-doer. With
   Jesus the Kingdom is still nearer and is more impressively and
   comprehensively described as simply the Rule of the Father, but the
   catastrophe which is to usher it in is the more terrible that He
   employs no figures and says simply, there would be such tribulation as
   had not been since the world began, yet it was only the beginning of
   sorrows.

   The reason for this mixture of boundless terror and boundless hope is
   that the Kingdom of Evil which is to be overcome is delusion and not
   imperfection, and the Kingdom of God which is to come is reverence for
   God through His children and not higher development or better
   organisation. Its ground is the austere reverence which, being free
   from sentimentalism, is solemnly conscious of the tremendous fact that
   human choice, though immediately only between better and worse, is
   ultimately between the kingdom of light and the tyranny of darkness. In
   the nature of things, the dominion of evil is a vast illusion and has,
   in its whole order, nothing save calamity both for individuals and for
   societies. Against all resistance to the truth in unrighteousness, the
   wrath of God is revealed from Heaven, as it works out from the heart
   through the intellect to the body, till the Kingdom of the Father of
   Lies finally shows itself to be chaos and self-destruction. That is the
   natural effect of the idolatry and self-deception of the human heart,
   and would always be the result but for the restraining hand of God. At
   times, however, He suffers this rule of falsehood to let loose all its
   natural confusion and agony, to the blotting out of the possessions and
   organisations by which man had hoped to safeguard himself. Yet, as this
   giving place to wrath is the work of love and not of anger, we may have
   confidence that it is not permitted without the knowledge that it will
   serve to disillusion man, and that a time of special trial may also be
   the dawning of new and nobler reverences. Because man's only good is in
   truth and righteousness, no disaster is too great, if it show him the
   destructive forces of error and evil.

   As little as the prophets, can we interpret the world by benevolent
   sentiment. If God's love mean the will to prevent everyone from being
   hurt and to keep us all within safe domestic rules and the household
   amenities, it is not, at this moment, playing a very successful role in
   the world; and it takes a great deal of blind, self-satisfied
   prosperity to have much regard for its efficiency even in the happiest
   times. Interpreting even by our own poor willing to do God's will, we
   cannot help seeing that to be a saint is no guarantee of prosperity,
   while, if we interpret by the cross of shame and agony as the sign of
   victory, we see that progress always has blood "on its garment and on
   its thigh." As between the millionaires and the martyrs, we can find no
   sort of guidance through life at all on mere principles of beneficence.

   In our own day it is easier to see the elements of evil than the
   elements of hope. In so far as we have not met life's austerity by mere
   kindliness, we have met it by hardness, which is worse. Only mockery
   could describe our system of competition as


   "So began contention to give delight and be

   Excellent in things aimed to make life kind."

   Competition was not contention to make life just and noble and worthy
   of the true dignity of man. Efficiency in it was not power to produce
   wisdom or beauty or goodness, but was power to override others, a
   wholly brutal thing, which quite naturally ended in being a wholly
   murderous thing. What gain could come to our mortal state, what right
   uses of nature or what blessedness of fellowship, by suffering apparent
   success in it to increase the illusion that this was the true, the only
   possible order of the world?

   Yet, on the other hand, what would be the gain of disaster unless there
   were other and Diviner elements in our hearts and even in our society,
   and, especially, unless there were among us those who, of their own
   insight, faith and courage, were committed to a quite different
   ordering of life, even though they too may need the lesson to teach
   them that this requires a transformation of our hearts' desire and
   trust and reverence, and not merely an amendment of our ways? The
   burning up of the wood and hay and stubble would merely render us
   homeless were there no gold, silver and precious stone to be displayed
   by the conflagration. But, if the end is disillusionment, and if we
   cannot doubt the riches of God's "goodness and forbearance and
   long-suffering," we cannot doubt that God sees His way to the new
   before He suffers the destruction of the old, even though we know that
   the new must be a moral order, and, therefore, be of our own insight
   morally received. If, however, the world is ripe for judgment in both
   senses of needing it and being able to profit by it, the permission of
   evil is of love and not of anger.

   III. We must pass through the sense that the Rule of God is not even
   just to the discovery that it is atoning.

   Most of us, like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, have to learn by stern
   experience, which is sometimes bitter with remorse as well as
   disappointment, that we cannot travel through life by the way of mere
   beneficence, but, unless we are wilfully obdurate and blind, we learn
   young: and prophetic souls, if they do not learn without pain, usually
   learn without delay. But to discern that we can no more pass by the way
   of justice than by the way of beneficence required, even for prophets,
   a longer and sterner lesson. Like the friends of Job, their people
   hoped to resolve their perplexing thoughts about the inequalities of
   reward by looking deeper into the hearts of men and waiting longer to
   see the consequences of their actions in their lives. Obvious
   calamities were thought to be the result of hidden crimes, and obvious
   crimes were punished, if not in a man's own life, in the lives of his
   descendants, while a good man was never forsaken and his seed never
   begged bread. The prophets were readily content to forgo approval and
   reward for themselves, and they even learned in time to bear "the
   defaming of many and terror on every side," yet the sufferings of the
   righteous, their blood shed like water, their name a hissing and a
   reproach, remained long an agonising mystery. Yet they wrestled with it
   till it blessed them with the supreme discovery that here was love's
   highest victory, and not, as they had feared, its deepest failure.
   Indignation at wrong as the spring of unblessed sorrow did not die and
   opposition to it rose to new heights of daring, but indignation became
   itself a pity and opposition a peace.

   The supreme union of condemnation and commiseration is in Him who was
   so in the Father and the Father in Him, that He never seems to have
   taken any other way than this of suffering for sin as well as from it.
   Where is there denunciation so terrible as what He said to the
   hypocrites who cloaked oppression and injustice with religion, yet what
   comes throbbing from the heart of God's compassion like the lament over
   Jerusalem, the city of these same hypocrites, ending, however, still
   more terribly than any denunciation, with, "But ye would not"?

   In this hot indignation and uncompromising opposition, which is yet
   pitiful and gentle, we have the highest interpretation of life, at once
   by man's responsibility and God's love; and in it we see finally the
   means whereby God limits Himself to a success to be won from within and
   not to be imposed from without, yet is able to establish His rule by a
   better way even than justice.

   This better way is an atoning rule, a rule of the Family of God, where
   there is no claim of rights and no nice balancing of merit and reward,
   but where we succour the erring only as we bear with them and for them.
   This was the great discovery of the prophets which transformed all
   their ideas of the sufferings of the righteous, till they were able to
   give them sublime expression in the servant of the Lord who bore "our
   griefs and carried our sorrows." This same glory of the Lord is
   perfectly seen in the face of Him who gave His life a ransom for many,
   for even His sacrifice is no substitute for man's responsibility, but
   is love's sole way, because our responsibility is love's first care.
   Love suffers, and does not compel, to make us members of God's family,
   in the only way we can truly belong to it--in the liberty of God's
   children.

   But an atoning rule which suffers all things to maintain our
   responsibility, has also a right to allow us to suffer, to the same
   end, and especially to permit evil to destroy itself. The Day of the
   Lord, though the manifestation of God's victory in the earth, the
   breaking in of His Rule, shows itself by winnowing out a holy remnant
   and, by no means, by obvious expansion of good influences and the
   inclusion of multitudes; and, though the description of its blessings
   are vocal with the melodies of peace, its effect is to create a sharper
   cleavage and set the battle more definitely in array. In this, the only
   song of triumph ever truly sung in the earth, these strangely
   conflicting strains of universal dominion and a very little remnant, of
   utter peace and intensified conflict, ever mingle, and they harmonise
   into a song of final triumph because God's victory is by the
   sacrificial service of love, and not by the crushing weight of power.

   Poetry has never touched a more pathetic theme. "Except the Lord had
   left to us a very small remnant we should have been as Sodom, we should
   have been like unto Gomorrah." Then, smaller still, "I and the children
   whom God hath given me." Finally, Jeremiah alone in the stocks of what
   passed as God's House, opening, in the solitary anguish of his heart,
   his cause unto God, appearing as the forerunner of Him who trod the
   wine-press alone, whose disciples forsook Him and fled, while the
   people, for whom He gave His life a ransom, passed by reviling and
   wagging their heads. But, even thus was the arm of the Lord revealed,
   for thereby the fleeting and futile nature of all that denies His truth
   and conflicts with His will is made manifest, and "a light to lighten
   the Gentiles and the glory of God's people Israel" is set up in a dark
   and erring world.

   With this discovery of redemptive service the conception of the purpose
   of calamity also changes. At first God's judgments are conceived as in
   the world only to purge. "The Light of Israel shall be for a fire, and
   His Holy One for a flame." Only a remnant shall return, and from it
   directly the holy nation shall spring. But as the hope grew beyond the
   nation, the means for realising it was seen to have another end than
   mere destruction of the wicked. The remnant becomes a redemptive
   priesthood and not merely a selected strain, a transforming and not
   merely a destroying ferment. Finally, as it is embodied in Him who gave
   His life a ransom for many, the Kingdom of the Father has a heaven
   where the angels rejoice over the one sinner who repents. As we share
   in this joy, we have blessedness in sorrow, peace in conflict, and find
   ourselves on the side of what is unassailable by outward defeat or
   death or any mortal power. And, with this experience, we have no more
   temptation to avenge the wrongs out of which are to come the rights of
   humanity, and no distress at the denial of our wages and the payment in
   defamation and persecution whereby the conflicts of God's world shall
   be turned from a curse into a blessing.

   Christ's followers still come, not bringing peace but a sword. From the
   ferment of freedom they have started in the world; actual wars have
   sprung: and perhaps in all wars of Christian peoples sacrifices are
   maintained by ideals and emotions this thought of redemption by service
   has created. Whether that kind of conflict is right or not cannot be
   determined merely by regard for life, for, till the cause of freedom
   stands above fear of them that kill the body, it has no real existence.
   Nor can the question be settled merely on grounds of non-resistance,
   because what we are not to resist is our own wrongs, so that we shall
   not waste our lives in futile resentments, to the repudiating of our
   positive task of reconciling service, while we are to resist the
   organisation of evil in the world with all our might. Yet there must
   ever be, as the world advances to the possibility of better ways, more
   doubt whether war is the way to fight with all our might. Moreover, it
   will be increasingly difficult to find a war in which to engage, when
   our hopes move from flying down on the shoulders of the Philistines and
   spoiling the children of the East, and we no more obey tribal impulses
   and seek mere material ends.

   But, if atoning rule is the Divine method, it must be able to show,
   even for society, that it is providing a more excellent way, a way more
   heroic and more effective. Therefore, its true conflicts are sharper
   and its victories such that even victory in war might be far indeed
   from being their guarantee. The battle it has to set in array is
   between the use of men as means for material ends, and the measuring of
   material ends by their uses for men.

   That is the only war which will ever end war, for, though effective
   political guarantees may come out of victory in that warfare, all
   guarantees are vain without it. And it is also the only way to end
   social strife. No abiding success is to be won by suppression of vice
   and the establishment of good customs, or even the imposing of sound
   doctrines. The winnowing of an age of conflict is, on the contrary, to
   destroy our possessions, weaken guarantees, overthrow moral conventions
   and depose mere orthodoxies. Its real gain is to strip men of their
   wrappings, to shake their outward safeguards, to force them to ask what
   they truly believe and upon what cause they are prepared to stake their
   lives. Most people live by parasitic faiths and are directed by
   conventional morals, but in a time of conflict these are ruthlessly cut
   down. The first result is disaster. Even what is true, but not truly
   held, is denied, and what is right, but not rightly done, is rejected.
   The foundations are shaken and institutions totter and the individual
   is homeless. But parasitic faiths and conventional morals can be shaken
   only because they are not on the true foundation. God's rule never is a
   question of good customs but always of men resolute to follow what they
   see to be true and right, heedless of man and mindful only of God.
   Wherefore, what seems disaster may be only winnowing.

   The real power of the atoning Kingdom of God appears not in any mass
   movements, but in those who see on which side true strength lies, and,
   with it, mankind's real and abiding gain, because they have discerned
   the final blessed order of the world. As citizens of God's Kingdom they
   go forth into the world, their souls waiting only upon God, made able
   to live their life and die their death in peace, no power on earth
   strong enough to hinder them from doing their task and realising their
   own blessedness in it, turning poverty into riches, defeat into
   victory, and discovering, as they serve God, not for themselves alone
   but also for their brethren, that God's will of love can be done on
   earth as in heaven. If, to the impatience of our little day, the road
   before them seems long, still they have seen the goal, and the goal
   alone matters; and if the length of the journey speaks of the patience
   of God's method, it speaks also of the magnitude and perfection of His
   purpose, for which He also bears, as well as forbears.

   By this conception of God's Kingdom as the rule of love, which, though
   only to be accepted in freedom, and as moral esteem, not sentiment, is
   being introduced by His hand, and not merely by human effort, our whole
   moral attitude should be determined.

   This Kingdom, however much its personal rule in freedom may expose it
   to positive failure and not merely to limitation of success, is yet the
   only reality. It may rule only the loyal few, while over against them
   still stands the vast organisation of the deluded many, and to all
   appearance, evil may possess the kingdoms of this world, yet the earth
   is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. The situation is not that the
   earth is one--let us trust--of God's few failures, but that God's Rule
   cannot be the order of the world, without limit or suspension, like the
   law of gravitation, because it is of the nature of love to endure
   restriction and even rejection, seeing it has respect for persons with
   their responsibilities in the world they create for themselves, and
   cannot be content with any lower success than the acceptance of its
   order as blessedness and freedom. Yet it alone has might and dominion.
   God's Rule, being real and, by God's operation, always at hand, we live
   in it, and not merely for it, so that we can afford to be gentle
   towards all men and do our tasks positively and in the spirit of peace,
   and cease to strive and cry.

   As taught in the Gospels, this attitude towards life has been called an
   interim morality. But there is no other true morality. Moralities which
   accept the Father of Lies as for ever the Prince of this world, are
   always compromises, agreements with Hell to be at peace with it, yet,
   even with that seeming lightening of their task, are anxious,
   distressed, negative, denunciatory, querulous, and never the possession
   of the soul in patience. Genuine morality is, in a sense, always
   interim, always apocalyptic, always confident that the thing it sees to
   be right has the might of the universe on its side. For it the
   equinoctial gales are the herald of the spring, and the sowing of the
   seed in the bitter March weather is cheerful with the promise of the
   summer and the harvest.

   This type of service alone has counted in the moral history of mankind.
   And, for our own lives also, it is what we may call the apocalyptic
   moments which are the times of vision and courage, when the mists
   clear, and truth and beauty seem the nearest, most real, mightiest of
   all things, and compromises with evil mere folly, and the highest
   demands alone sure guidance, and querulousness and resentment of wrongs
   mere lack of vision, and all scheming to restrain evil mere waste of
   effort, and pity for wrongdoing as folly takes at least an equal place
   in our hearts with indignation at its criminal purpose and its
   injurious success.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER VIII

ETERNAL LIFE

   A life, every event of which was directed to its chief good, would be a
   blessed life on the one condition that it could not be cut off before
   its good were realised. But this assurance is certainly not ours, if in
   this life only we have hope. It is true that we have spoken of
   reconciliation to our lives, and that, to be reconciled to anything is
   just to find it good. Nor is this good so outside of them that
   reconciliation to them could only mean the willingness to endure the
   ills of time because they may be profitable for eternity. Yet it has
   never meant, for any higher religion, that we could be reconciled to
   the present by the present itself. On the contrary, the larger our
   sympathies and the higher our aspirations, the more we realise that our
   days are few and evil, and that it is always the blindness of
   worldliness, and never the insight of faith, which reconciles us to the
   world as it is. Such contentment is sensual and thoughtless and far
   from divine, and, even when the soul has been fed into abeyance,
   endures for, at best, a few sunny years of health and youth and
   prosperous ease. The shadow of failure and struggle and sickness soon
   falls on it; and, if, by great good fortune, they are escaped, all face
   death's gloomy portal. Worldliness, therefore, under no condition, is
   long justified in her children, and the sunniest worldly face always
   ends in being clouded and peevish. No question of reconciliation to our
   lives even arises till we have insight into this vanity of man's whole
   mortal state: for, only then, can we discover the purpose in them
   stretching far beyond our uncertain and troubled years upon earth,
   which reconciles us to them as we now live them.

   But, if reconciliation have this dependence upon another life, it may
   be asked, why we have left so late the question of whether God has some
   sunnier garden for the tender plant of our affections which has sprung
   up in the shadow of our mortality. Would it not have been the most
   obvious requirement of a right method to have begun with this question
   of a future life? And, if we could have found its proof in some
   incontrovertible argument for immortality, such as the indissoluble
   unity of the soul, or better still in some indisputable fact, such as
   the return of a traveller from the unseen or intercourse with the
   spirits of the departed, should we not have had something much surer to
   go upon and our task have been greatly lightened?

   In reply, let us say that, if there are arguments, they should be
   weighed; and, if there are facts, they should be investigated. Both may
   at least help to meet objections. Nor may that be a small service; for
   hopes which do not rest on intellectual grounds may still be hampered
   by intellectual difficulties. But can either arguments or facts afford
   us the kind of assurance which would enable us better to depend on God
   or be freer in ourselves? Would they not, as the main ground of our
   hope, rather increase the danger of making the future life and our
   prospects in it our direct aim and business in such a way as to corrupt
   both morality and religion? Could they do other than reinforce a
   religion which derives its moral sanction from bliss and woe in another
   world? Religion and morality, thus joined, are in effect mere
   other-worldliness. Morality becomes a mere extension of worldly
   prudence, utilitarian and hedonistic, distinguished only from a
   non-religious ethic by having a longer arm to reward and punish, and
   religion a kind of police magistrate who would fall into desuetude, if
   people would learn to behave themselves without needing to have the
   fear of him before their eyes. Utilitarian morality, so guaranteed, has
   even been regarded as the foundation-stone of religion; and the attempt
   to show that goodness has its own law and its own motive has been
   denounced as the most subtle of all attempts to prove religion
   unnecessary and baseless. The significance of this way of making men
   moral by religion, regarded mainly as the guarantee of well-being in a
   future life, appears in its nakedness when some bluff, worldly person,
   more interested in the rates than in religion, defends religion as a
   cheaper and more effective way than prisons and work-houses of keeping
   men honest, law-abiding and industrious.

   Thus conceived, heaven and hell are pure appeals to a selfish
   self-regard. As that is more effective as it is more material, heaven
   is apt to be a place of very material bliss and hell of very material
   misery. Even when these rewards and punishments are more spiritually
   conceived, if they are still sought in the same self-regarding way as
   material blessings, there is no real deliverance from the worldly
   temper. In practice, a life even of ascetic devotion, lived for another
   life, is not so unworldly as its outward form might lead us to suppose.
   A truly unworldly life must be lived not for our own benefit, material
   or spiritual, either here or hereafter, but for God's purposes now.

   But if, to arguments, which might be too immaterial and doubtful to
   stake upon in that way of worldly investment in the future, were added
   a convincing material demonstration of a future life, the effect would
   be still more other-worldly and utilitarian. Such walking by sight, at
   all events, would never do anything to enable us, in any spiritual and
   inspiring and self-forgetting sense, to walk by faith.

   Can it be supposed that the grim silence of the grave has not itself a
   religious meaning? Theologies in abundance have invaded its mystery,
   and religions have followed them. But have they followed religiously?
   Is religion concerned with another life in that direct and external
   way? Is not its true business within this world and amid the life in
   which God has immediately placed us? In respect of eternity as well as
   time the evil of the day is sufficient, and we are not to take thought
   for the morrow. No more are we to be merely prospective saints in glory
   and not mortals doing our best with this life such as it is, than a
   child is to be merely a prospective man and not a child. The ignorance
   which cuts off the child from the tasks of manhood, by enabling him to
   attend to the tasks of childhood, not only prepares him better for the
   future, but allows him to live at the same time his own true life.
   Similarly we should give ourselves to the tasks of this life, as sons
   of the Kingdom, citizens of the Realm of God now, grateful that a thick
   veil prevents us from being distracted by the more glorious activities
   of another. As the sense of his manhood is rightly there for the child,
   not in the direct aim at being a man, but only in the presentiment of
   the responsibility of his maturity as he rightly discharges the duties
   of his childhood, so should we be sobered and encouraged by our hope
   only as it blossoms out of right living of our present life.

   May it not be that one at least of the reasons why religion fails to
   touch so many of the most genuinely religious souls, more especially at
   the time of life when they most willingly respond to generous impulses,
   is the absence from the common religious teaching of the assurance that
   religion is blessedness in our present life? Success with prudent,
   worldly people, who, having made a competency for this life, are warned
   by declining years of the advantage of securing a further competence in
   the world to come, is but poor compensation for that failure. Young and
   generous souls are, and ought to be, intensely conscious of life.
   Nothing could convince them, nothing should convince them, that life is
   not their immediate and urgent concern. When, therefore, persons, who,
   in spite of their chilled blood, are manifestly as tenacious of life as
   ever, exhort those standing on life's threshold, with all life's
   glorious possibilities before them, to say with an aged, imprisoned
   saint, "It is better to depart and to be with Christ," the result is
   merely a sense both of unreality and of dismay, as though religion,
   finding no meaning of any sort in this life, had, in desperation, to
   fling itself upon another. Weakness, captivity and old age have a right
   to be weary of life; youth and vigour under the open sky have not. Even
   in Paul the aged the mood is only of nature, and not of grace. The true
   religious note is his triumph over that natural impulse, the glorious
   assurance that this life, to its last dregs, would have meaning and
   value. This note of eternal youth is the true hope of immortality,
   which delivers from the abject fear of poverty, from warping cares,
   from cramping personal ambitions, from the paralysing sense of failing
   powers and of life's narrowing opportunity, and enables us to tread
   God's own high road, which, because it carries us over time's crude,
   material dominion, affords an outlook upon eternity, not at the end
   only, but throughout all life's pilgrimage.

   The only truly religious hope of immortality so lives with God now as
   to know that God is not the God of the dead but of the living. It does
   not say, Let us live for the life to come, but, Now have we eternal
   life. Instead of having us miserable now to be happy hereafter, it
   would give us present possession of a blessedness of such a quality
   that we know it cannot end. By having already in it victory over mortal
   terrors, it gives us a right to be assured of victory over the last
   enemy, death.

   Only by finding a blessed and endless purpose in this life, can we have
   a triumphant hope larger than this life can contain. The hope of
   another life connected with this, at most, by some link of
   responsibility, a link which must not be too firmly riveted if that
   future life is not to be as miserable as this appears to be, never can
   be more than a dubious hypothesis, without power to act upon us except
   as a consideration of prudence. And to many it seems very dubious
   indeed. How should their present unsuccoured evil state afford an
   encouraging prospect of being compensated for in the world to come?
   This transference of all good to another life seems like an empty
   promise to silence their immediate just demands; for is there not cause
   to fear that a blank cheque upon the future, upon which nothing can be
   raised for our present necessities, may never at any time be honoured?

   For that reason the first object of religion is not to demonstrate the
   reality of a future life, but to reconcile us to God in this. Though we
   cannot be reconciled to life if there is nothing beyond it,
   reconciliation to God does not mean that, though evil in itself, this
   life can be tolerated without being angry with God, because of the
   compensation waiting for us in another life. We should not be
   reconciled to God because we believe in another life, but we should
   believe in another life because, being reconciled to God, we find a
   meaning in life which is ever expanding and a purpose death cannot end.
   Being no less than the infinite goal of holy love, it can give us
   nothing less than the assurance of eternal approximation to itself. As
   we realise this in every appointment for us of discipline and duty, we
   have the present assurance of a life blessed in an eternal hope which
   is now fulfilling itself. Thus we rightly and religiously believe in
   another life, because we are serving the purpose of a love for which
   this life is too small.

   Such a hope is the power of an endless life, and not merely the
   expectation of an ulterior reward, which, by making us serve God only
   because He has heaven to bestow, corrupts the very assurance of love by
   which all hope in God lives. By accepting His will of love as, in spite
   of all our failure to be worthy of it, our own law of liberty, we
   discover in it a purpose endless and blessed as love itself, and know
   that already we have eternal life which has in it at once a glorious
   personal hope and deliverance from the dominion of anxiety about the
   future.

   Yet the hope of another life, without which all realisation of the ends
   of goodness are for ever beyond our reach, cannot be given by any
   direct method of promise or gift, without making it an end to be served
   for its ulterior reward, which turns us away from the service of
   goodness for its own sake. But again what is not possible as a direct
   work of omnipotence is possible by the personal, and, therefore,
   indirect, ways of God, which give heed to right receiving as well as to
   abundant giving.

   The result once again admits of a summary statement. While blessedness
   in another life cannot be either a direct gift from God or a direct
   object for our own attainment, without corrupting morals by religion or
   religion by morals, the possession of eternal life, which we have by
   reconciliation to God's eternal purpose, gives us a right relation to
   ourselves, to our neighbours, and to God, and, therefore, an adequate
   moral subject, an adequate moral sphere, and an adequate moral order.
   Only as we see how religion provides these for us, do we understand the
   true dependence of morals on religion, and are no more tempted to make
   morals wrongly and selfishly dependent on religious motive, or to make
   religion a mere appendage to morality, or to keep religion and morality
   in separate compartments.

   First, grace, by reconciling us to this life in such a way as to show
   us how it has its fulfilment in another, puts us in a right relation to
   ourselves, and so provides an adequate moral subject.

   Without this succour of religion morality ends in an insoluble conflict
   of interests. A moral subject must be an end in himself. The laws he
   obeys are the laws of his own freedom, and the reverence by which he
   obeys them is reverence for himself as a moral person: and both would
   cease, were the moral subject regarded merely as a means to an end,
   even were the end the race or the Kingdom of God. But, on the other
   hand, self-realisation is not the moral end, and, except for the higher
   service we can thereby render, it may not be made any part of the moral
   end. A true morality does not keep its eye on beautiful motives or a
   beautiful character, but simply on doing right. Morality is thus faced
   by a problem it cannot solve--the eternal and infinite significance of
   the moral subject for all he does, along with the unceasing requirement
   to forget himself in his moral task. It never can say how the moral
   subject is the sole final end, yet how a true moral attitude makes our
   tasks alone, and never ourselves, our conscious object.

   But neither can religion find the solution merely in the hope of
   immortality. Without a hope beyond the grave, we are rather things than
   persons, with the strange addition that we resent our certain goal,
   which is corruption. A moral subject, therefore, as an end in himself,
   would not seem to exist at all without some enduring value. To deny
   ourselves is not to be indifferent as to whether this be so or not. It
   is a victory over time, not a disregard to eternity. The secret of not
   living to ourselves is a reverence for ourselves which, even now, knows
   the power of an endless life. Self-denial is not self-annihilation. How
   can we not live to ourselves, if we altogether cease to live?
   Self-denial, moreover, is not, in itself, a moral end at all, but is
   good only as it is a necessary means to a moral end. Yet, while it is
   thus true that the denial of self is wrongly conceived when it is
   thought to raise us above the hope of immortality, a mere hope of
   immortality would leave us in the immoral position of making our moral
   end the perfection of our immortal souls, which, if it did not require
   us to live to ourselves, would leave us still living for ourselves.

   We cannot have a true moral subject, his morality at once springing
   from his own worth and blessedness, yet forgetful of both and mindful
   only of call and opportunity, unless, by reconciliation to God in a
   world which serves our eternal good, we have the power of an endless
   life wherein law and love are one. Not till we have won this victory,
   have we a subject who is at once utterly loyal to himself and utterly
   forgetful of himself. But, with it, the least perfect can be an
   adequate moral subject, as the highest and holiest cannot be by any
   merely moral achievement.

   Second, grace, by reconciling us to this life so as to show us its full
   significance in another, puts us in a right relation to others, and so
   provides us with an adequate moral sphere.

   The ethical meaning of love is to treat every man as an end in himself,
   reverencing him, not for what he is, but for what he ought to become.
   Yet, how are we to continue to say what he ought to be, when, if the
   whole story end at the grave, we know it is what he never will be? Our
   reverence, no doubt, derives a tenderness from the sense that all our
   relations are at the mercy of change and death, but would it continue
   if we placed behind them total evanescence and lost all sense that the
   frail vessel of our mortality has an immortal content? If we have to
   serve our fellow-men in view only of their possibilities in their few
   earthly years, not as promise but as achievement, how can we reverence
   man simply as man or confidently set his worth above his pleasure,
   especially when he affords us small ground, in his attainments or
   character, for esteem? Without this reverence for man as man, because
   of measureless possibilities in him, no one ever stands with
   effectiveness for any deep and revolutionary justice, anything beyond
   the most superficial judgment of rights and purely traditional views of
   possession. Nor can he have enduring patience in face of the slow
   progress of the ages, unless he believe that all right human relations,
   even in things material, have value beyond this life and are taken up
   into the eternal Divine order. Many, no doubt, have had a deep sense of
   justice who would not have admitted that they were influenced by any
   consideration of an immortal soul: but, partly, heroisms are often
   nourished by faiths which have suffered intellectual eclipse, and,
   partly, the belief in immortality has been regarded as a mere argument
   about the future and not as a sense of a for ever and for ever in human
   relations. As long as we regard this life as all that belongs to man,
   we shall always have a society that is a mere welter of struggle for
   right, where the first duty of the strong will seem to be the defence
   of his own, a state which, however it be regulated from without, will
   always be moral chaos. Only as a society of immortals can we ever hope
   to base order upon a righteousness in whose regard the last may be
   first, and weakness and need a greater claim than attainment and
   possession.

   But, again, that can never be helped forward by the mere expectation
   that another life will be linked to this by the tie of merit and
   reward. Trust in legal equity, according to which every man, at some
   time or another, shall meet the reward of his deeds, is one of the
   commonest and strongest causes of hard indifference to sin and
   suffering. The assurance that, for every soul of man, there is, even in
   this imperfect world, the eternal working of the eternal Father, that
   the soul's true good is His end and things but means, alone can nourish
   in us that love which reverences man for the possibilities of the image
   of God in him and make us prompt to succour and slow to condemn. And
   what else can provide for us a right moral sphere except that
   sympathetic reverence?

   Lastly, grace, by so reconciling us to this life as to show us its full
   significance in another, provides an adequate moral order.

   Because the moral order is valid though not yet realised, it does not
   follow that it would still be valid though it were never to be
   realised. Morality is not a castle in the air, or, as Huxley conceived
   it, a precarious and short-lived revolt against the cosmic order. It is
   life's ultimate meaning or nothing. And, if the ultimate meaning is a
   moral order which is love, it is absurd to say that it could be valid
   though the final actual order were death.

   Love is self-abnegation, not self-regard, but it is not
   self-destruction or self-disregard. Therefore, only if love is itself
   our best self-realisation, has even love the right to avert attention
   from ourselves to the fulfilment of its own behests; and it can be so
   only if the world is so constituted that to be delivered from self is
   to be saved.

   This gives a due place to self-love, while delivering us from a
   utilitarian morality, which makes self-love the measure and the end of
   morals. Utilitarianism says, conscience is only self-love wisely
   judging what really pleases us; a true morality says, right self-love
   is only conscience wholly determined by God's will of love, which
   serves what is worthy of God's image in us and blesses us because it is
   in accord with the true order in which God has placed us.

   This moral order, however, cannot be provided by a mere belief in
   another life, linked to this only by moral retribution. That belief is
   rather the bankruptcy of a moral order, a confession of trust only in
   motives which are not moral at all but material, because, however they
   be spiritualised, they still work upon the self in the same way as
   material advantage. An order of love which is at once self-sacrifice
   and self-realisation, which does not work by promises, but is full of
   promise in all its working, which has not a foot of earth in it above
   which there is not the whole expanse of heaven, alone will avail. It
   avails because it can say, For great is your reward in Heaven, because
   its heaven is just its own perfect rule, so that, living in it, we know
   that we are amid the things eternal.

   Here we see the true relation of morality and religion. "Nothing," as
   has been said, "should be done for religion, but everything with
   religion." But in the world of religion, which at once enables us to
   deny ourselves and find ourselves, mere morality should rejoice to lose
   itself, because it finds the love which is immeasurably more than the
   fulfilling of its law. When that is seen, religion will again make good
   its claim to be the heart of life's business, and not, as it has been,
   even for many professedly religious people, something that may be good
   business on its own account, but the last thing that could be imagined
   profitable for the business of life, the essence of which still remains
   to fight for our own hand. Then the lives which, without religion, are
   both self-indulgent and miserable, will at once become both austere and
   blessed.
     __________________________________________________________________

                                     INDEX

   Arminianism, 19, 30-3, 37, 82

   Atonement, 213 ff.

   Atoning Rule, 289 ff.

   Augustine

     Conflict of, 30

     merit, 130

     moral independence, 60

     substance of soul, 35, 50

   Augustinianism, 19, 22

     basis of Church, 34 ff.

     Reaction from, 32

     starts wrong, 86

   Authorities, the, 5 ff., 20, 23

   Beatitudes, 93. ff., 114

   Bergson, 55

   Buddha, Buddhism, 116, 118

   Butler

     mysteries, 163

     self-love, 221

   Calvin, 24

     body of elect, 36

     dogma and theory, 19

     responsibility, 47

   Casuistries, 250

   Catholicism, 34 ff. and Evangelicalism, 170 ff.

   Character and disposition, 47 ff., 73-4

   Christ

     's Cross, 155, 158, 215 ff., 230

     An infallible, 6

     Faith in, 149 ff.

     Faith mystical, 161

     Person of, 150, 265

     Repentance through, 200

     sacrifice of, 213

     as revelation, 166

   Church

     Augustinian, 34 ff.

     body of Christ, 266

     Divisions of, 70

     and idea of Grace, 171 ff.

     a super-personality, 264

   Communion of Saints, 254 ff.

   Conscience

     Direction of, 51 ff.

     and guilt, 208

     Infinite demands of, 102 ff., 203, 261-2

     and progress, 254 ff.

     and reality, 270 ff.

     Conversion, 77 ff.

     Cosmic process, 24, 45

   Deism, 190

   Dependence and Independence, 58 ff.

     inseparable, 190 ff.

     Mixture of, 3 1

   Discipline and Duty

     and the Cross, 230

     and Eternal Life, 306

     and reconciliation, 126

   Dualism, 89, 276 ff.

   Eighteenth Century, 25

   English Christianity, 37 ff.

   Eternal Life, 299 ff.

   Ethics

     and theology, 59

     utilitarian, 301, 312

   Evolution, 145, 274-6

   Experience, Life

     and belief, 153, 157

     Common use of, 175

     one, 55 ff.

     and reconciliation, 117, 119 ff.,

     299-300, 305 ff.

     Whole of, 85, 101, 173 ff., 181

   Faith

     Augustinian, 29-30

     in Christ, 145 ff.

     a gift, 140 ff., 160 ff.

     Ground of, 5, 11, 38

     Nature of, 28, 61, 136

     Practical, 28, 33

     and unbelief, 139 ff.

   Family, The, 276 ff.

   Fellowship

     of Saints, 170 ff.

     of the Spirit, 164 ff.

   Fichte, 64

   Finality, 4 ff., 85, 103

   Free-will, 45-51, 65

   God

     the absolute force, 4 ff., 14, 22, 24, 32, 40 ff.

     Dependence on, 77

     Doctrine of, 4

     Enmity against, 123 ff.

     Love of, 164, 287

     Purpose, end of, 43, 46, 236 ff., 268

     Relation of, 70 ff., 80 ff.

     Relation to, 52 ff., 97, 152, 172

     Service of, 252

     Will of, 53, 232 ff.

     Wrath of, 226

   God, Rule, Realm, Kingdom of, 269 ff.

     Apocalyptic, 85, 179

     Blessedness in, 108, 133 ff., 137, 152

     Righteousness of, 238 ff.

     Society of, 180

     Victory in, 128

   Gore, 152

   Grace

     Controversies on, 28 ff., 39

     Doctrines of, 189-92

     intermittent, 162

     irresistible, 36 ff., 69 ff., 72, 120, 151, 171, 186 ff., 236

     Limitations of, 71, 175, 273 ff.

     as love, 41 ff.

     Means of, 175 ff., 241

   Harnack, 36

   Hodge, 32, 76

   Hypocrisy

     and Kingdom of Evil, 279

     and privilege, 196 ff.

     and unbelief, 144, 167 ff.

     Vicious circle of, 202 ff.

   Illumination, the, 3 ff.

   Immortality

     Arguments for, 300-303

     True hope of, 304 ff.

   Imputation, 46, 204 ff.

   Individual

     and person, 58, 64 ff., 69, 72, 88

     Problems of, 20, 24

   Infallibilities

     Basis of, 8, 14 ff.

     Defence of, 13

     as foundation, 5 ff.

     and revelation, 145-6

   Isaiah, 285

   Jesus

     as external authority, 257 ff.

     and catastrophe, 286

     and hypocrisy, 198

     Life of, 112, 153, 158

     as Lord, 194

     Pessimism of, 116, 279

     Presence of, 263

     Resurrection of, 268

     and sacred doings, 81

     Sinlessness of, 200

     and the world, 81-3, 96

   Justice and love, 134

   Justification, 202 ff.

     by compromise, 205 ff.

     by composition, 207 ff.

     by faith, 211 ff.

     by fiat, 5, 38

     by substitution, 217, 218

   Kant

     action on a maxim, 65

     heteronymous morality, 252

     a moral type, 60

   Lord's Prayer, 83 ff.

   Love

     as emotion, 129 ff.

     and faith, 128 ff.

     and fellowship, 256

   Luke, 95

   Luther, 36, 227

   McTaggart, 47

   Mechanical explanations, 44, 185 ff.

   Merit, 31, 61, in, 130, 196

   Moral

     attainment, 195 ff.

     law, 182, 232 ff.

     order, 53, 270, 312

     selves, 232

     sincerity, 67, 199 ff., 209 ff., 219

     sphere, 309

     subject, 307

     worth, 233, 236 ff.

   Morality

     a blessed, 114 ff.

     Interim, 297

     Legal, 205 ff., 220

     Necessitarian, 51 ff.

     Rules of, 21

   Mysticism, 81, 161, 168, 263 ff.

   Old Testament, 156, 232

   Pascal, 265

   Paul

     the aged, 304

     and atonement, 214

     and Kingdom of Evil, 275

     Method of, 142

     and resurrection of Christ, 268

     and salvation, 238

   Peace-makers, 109

   Pelagianism, 29 ff.

   Penitence, 193 ff., 203

   Personality, Moral, 41 ff.

     not absolute, 68

     annihilated, 28

     Autonomy of, 42 ff., 95

     independent, 31, 58 ff.

     self-conscious, 54 ff.

     self-determined, 44 ff.

     self-directed, 51 ff.

     Succour of, 41 ff.

   Pessimism, 116, 124, 277 ff.

   Phariseeism, 195, 202, 247

   Pope, the, 6, 35, 186

   Poverty of Spirit, 97 ff.

   Prayer, 176

   Pre-destinarianism, 24

   Progress

     and ideals, 255

     by struggle, 15

   Prophets

     Faith of, 162

     False, 9, 109

     Founded on, 181

     knowledge moral, 274

     Principles of, 275 ff.

     and revelation, 146-8

   Providence

     Belief in, 88 ff., 126

     Long ways of, 10

   Rationalism, 3, 19

     Pelagian, 20 ff.

   Reason, Process of, 23 ff.

   Reconciliation, 118 ff.

     and eternal life, 305

     Nature of, 226

     and peace, 108

     and revelation, 163 ff.

     and will of God, 251

   Redemption, 113 ff.

   Reformation, The

     conception of grace, 36 ff.

     and Rationalism, 3 ff.

   Regeneration

     and efficacious grace, 5, 32, 38, 76

   Religion

     a convention, 247

     and morals, 58 ff., 111, 114, 190, 301 ff.

     and redemption, 116

     secular, 81 ff., 178

     sentimental, 134

   Remorse, 47 ff.

   Resolution, 39, 62 ff., 97, 108

   Responsibility

     and free-will, 45 ff.

     and God's power, 39, 90, 190

     and independence, 31

     and privilege, 196 ff.

   Revelation, 160 ff.

     historical, 164 ff.

     Meaning of, 145 ff.

     and mysteries, 163

   Reward and punishment, 110, 302, 312-13

   Righteousness

     Civil, 63

     of God, 238 ff.

     by law, 232 ff.

     Negative, 243

     obligation of, 270

     Positive, 248 ff.

     an external reality, 65 ff.

   Romanticism, 19

     Augustinian, 22 ff.

   Sacraments, 177, 229-30

   Sacred and secular, 81, 173

   Salvation

     Anxiety for, 220-1, 243 ff., 269

     God's end, 237 ff., 284

     idea of, 246

     mystical, 264

     by rule, 241, 249-50

     and will of God, 242, 245 ff.

     Work of, 80, 201

   Scripture, 6, 153, 155, 163

   Self

     -approbation, 76, 196 ff.

     -consciousness, 46, 204

     -denial, 309

     -depreciation, 195-6

     -esteem, 196-7

     -love, 312

     -reverence, 233, 236 ff.

     -righteousness, 243 ff.

   Semi-pelagianism, 29, 87

   Sin

     as blindness, 234

     Consequences of, 220 ff.

     and hypocrisy, 203 ff.

     as idolatry, 279

     and moral order, 208, 226

   Stevenson, 248

   Sub-conscious, 77 ff

   Substitution, Theory of, 217

   Theology, 59, 121, 163, 171, 188, 302

   Twentieth-Century, problem of, 25

   Unbelief, 141 ff.

   War, 293

   Will

     as force, 31, 188

     Free-, 44 ff., 95

     Good, 113-15

   World, the

     Blessedness in, 99, 102, 119 ff., 137, 157

     to come, 173, 302 ff.

     End of, 266

     evil, 70, 115

     as God's, 70, 97, 99, 115

     Grace works through, 43, 119

     Question of, 68

     Relation to, 131

     of self-consciousness, 67 ff., 96, 102

     of self-love, 125

     Victory over, 90, 97 ff., 102, 121
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Pages of the Print Edition

   [1]i  [2]ii  [3]iii  [4]iv  [5]v  [6]vi  [7]vii  [8]viii  [9]ix  [10]x
   [11]xi  [12]xii  [13]2  [14]1  [15]3  [16]4  [17]5  [18]6  [19]7
   [20]8  [21]9  [22]10  [23]11  [24]12  [25]13  [26]14  [27]15  [28]16
   [29]17  [30]18  [31]19  [32]20  [33]21  [34]22  [35]23  [36]24  [37]25
   [38]26  [39]27  [40]28  [41]29  [42]30  [43]31  [44]32  [45]33  [46]34
   [47]35  [48]36  [49]37  [50]38  [51]39  [52]40  [53]41  [54]42  [55]43
   [56]44  [57]45  [58]46  [59]47  [60]48  [61]49  [62]50  [63]51  [64]52
   [65]53  [66]54  [67]55  [68]56  [69]57  [70]58  [71]59  [72]60  [73]61
   [74]62  [75]63  [76]64  [77]65  [78]66  [79]67  [80]68  [81]69  [82]70
   [83]71  [84]72  [85]73  [86]74  [87]75  [88]76  [89]77  [90]78  [91]79
   [92]80  [93]81  [94]82  [95]83  [96]84  [97]85  [98]86  [99]87
   [100]88  [101]89  [102]90  [103]91  [104]93  [105]94  [106]95  [107]96
   [108]97  [109]98  [110]99  [111]100  [112]101  [113]102  [114]103
   [115]104  [116]105  [117]106  [118]107  [119]108  [120]109  [121]110
   [122]111  [123]112  [124]113  [125]114  [126]115  [127]116  [128]117
   [129]118  [130]119  [131]120  [132]121  [133]122  [134]123  [135]124
   [136]125  [137]126  [138]127  [139]128  [140]129  [141]130  [142]131
   [143]132  [144]133  [145]134  [146]135  [147]136  [148]137  [149]138
   [150]139  [151]140  [152]141  [153]142  [154]143  [155]144  [156]145
   [157]146  [158]147  [159]148  [160]149  [161]150  [162]151  [163]152
   [164]153  [165]154  [166]155  [167]156  [168]157  [169]158  [170]159
   [171]160  [172]161  [173]162  [174]163  [175]164  [176]170  [177]171
   [178]172  [179]173  [180]174  [181]175  [182]176  [183]177  [184]178
   [185]179  [186]180  [187]181  [188]182  [189]183  [190]184  [191]185
   [192]186  [193]187  [194]189  [195]190  [196]191  [197]192  [198]193
   [199]194  [200]195  [201]196  [202]197  [203]198  [204]199  [205]200
   [206]201  [207]202  [208]203  [209]204  [210]205  [211]206  [212]207
   [213]208  [214]209  [215]210  [216]211  [217]212  [218]213  [219]214
   [220]215  [221]216  [222]217  [223]218  [224]219  [225]220  [226]221
   [227]222  [228]223  [229]224  [230]225  [231]226  [232]227  [233]228
   [234]229  [235]230  [236]231  [237]232  [238]233  [239]234  [240]235
   [241]236  [242]237  [243]238  [244]239  [245]240  [246]241  [247]242
   [248]243  [249]244  [250]245  [251]246  [252]247  [253]248  [254]249
   [255]250  [256]251  [257]252  [258]253  [259]254  [260]255  [261]256
   [262]257  [263]258  [264]259  [265]260  [266]261  [267]262  [268]263
   [269]264  [270]265  [271]266  [272]267  [273]268  [274]269  [275]270
   [276]271  [277]272  [278]273  [279]274  [280]275  [281]276  [282]277
   [283]278  [284]279  [285]280  [286]281  [287]282  [288]283  [289]284
   [290]285  [291]286  [292]287  [293]288  [294]289  [295]290  [296]291
   [297]292  [298]293  [299]294  [300]295  [301]296  [302]297  [303]298
   [304]299  [305]300  [306]301  [307]302  [308]303  [309]304  [310]305
   [311]306  [312]307  [313]308  [314]309  [315]310  [316]311  [317]312
   [318]313  [319]314  [320]315  [321]316  [322]317  [323]319  [324]320
   [325]321  [326]322

   [327]i  [328]ii  [329]iii  [330]iv  [331]v  [332]vi  [333]vii
   [334]viii  [335]ix  [336]x  [337]xi  [338]xii  [339]2  [340]1  [341]3
   [342]4  [343]5  [344]6  [345]7  [346]8  [347]9  [348]10  [349]11
   [350]12  [351]13  [352]14  [353]15  [354]16  [355]17  [356]18  [357]19
   [358]20  [359]21  [360]22  [361]23  [362]24  [363]25  [364]26  [365]27
   [366]28  [367]29  [368]30  [369]31  [370]32  [371]33  [372]34  [373]35
   [374]36  [375]37  [376]38  [377]39  [378]40  [379]41  [380]42  [381]43
   [382]44  [383]45  [384]46  [385]47  [386]48  [387]49  [388]50  [389]51
   [390]52  [391]53  [392]54  [393]55  [394]56  [395]57  [396]58  [397]59
   [398]60  [399]61  [400]62  [401]63  [402]64  [403]65  [404]66  [405]67
   [406]68  [407]69  [408]70  [409]71  [410]72  [411]73  [412]74  [413]75
   [414]76  [415]77  [416]78  [417]79  [418]80  [419]81  [420]82  [421]83
   [422]84  [423]85  [424]86  [425]87  [426]88  [427]89  [428]90  [429]91
   [430]93  [431]94  [432]95  [433]96  [434]97  [435]98  [436]99
   [437]100  [438]101  [439]102  [440]103  [441]104  [442]105  [443]106
   [444]107  [445]108  [446]109  [447]110  [448]111  [449]112  [450]113
   [451]114  [452]115  [453]116  [454]117  [455]118  [456]119  [457]120
   [458]121  [459]122  [460]123  [461]124  [462]125  [463]126  [464]127
   [465]128  [466]129  [467]130  [468]131  [469]132  [470]133  [471]134
   [472]135  [473]136  [474]137  [475]138  [476]139  [477]140  [478]141
   [479]142  [480]143  [481]144  [482]145  [483]146  [484]147  [485]148
   [486]149  [487]150  [488]151  [489]152  [490]153  [491]154  [492]155
   [493]156  [494]157  [495]158  [496]159  [497]160  [498]161  [499]162
   [500]163  [501]164  [502]170  [503]171  [504]172  [505]173  [506]174
   [507]175  [508]176  [509]177  [510]178  [511]179  [512]180  [513]181
   [514]182  [515]183  [516]184  [517]185  [518]186  [519]187  [520]189
   [521]190  [522]191  [523]192  [524]193  [525]194  [526]195  [527]196
   [528]197  [529]198  [530]199  [531]200  [532]201  [533]202  [534]203
   [535]204  [536]205  [537]206  [538]207  [539]208  [540]209  [541]210
   [542]211  [543]212  [544]213  [545]214  [546]215  [547]216  [548]217
   [549]218  [550]219  [551]220  [552]221  [553]222  [554]223  [555]224
   [556]225  [557]226  [558]227  [559]228  [560]229  [561]230  [562]231
   [563]232  [564]233  [565]234  [566]235  [567]236  [568]237  [569]238
   [570]239  [571]240  [572]241  [573]242  [574]243  [575]244  [576]245
   [577]246  [578]247  [579]248  [580]249  [581]250  [582]251  [583]252
   [584]253  [585]254  [586]255  [587]256  [588]257  [589]258  [590]259
   [591]260  [592]261  [593]262  [594]263  [595]264  [596]265  [597]266
   [598]267  [599]268  [600]269  [601]270  [602]271  [603]272  [604]273
   [605]274  [606]275  [607]276  [608]277  [609]278  [610]279  [611]280
   [612]281  [613]282  [614]283  [615]284  [616]285  [617]286  [618]287
   [619]288  [620]289  [621]290  [622]291  [623]292  [624]293  [625]294
   [626]295  [627]296  [628]297  [629]298  [630]299  [631]300  [632]301
   [633]302  [634]303  [635]304  [636]305  [637]306  [638]307  [639]308
   [640]309  [641]310  [642]311  [643]312  [644]313  [645]314  [646]315
   [647]316  [648]317  [649]319  [650]320  [651]321  [652]322
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Pages of the Print Edition

   [653]i  [654]ii  [655]iii  [656]iv  [657]v  [658]vi  [659]vii
   [660]viii  [661]ix  [662]x  [663]xi  [664]xii  [665]2  [666]1  [667]3
   [668]4  [669]5  [670]6  [671]7  [672]8  [673]9  [674]10  [675]11
   [676]12  [677]13  [678]14  [679]15  [680]16  [681]17  [682]18  [683]19
   [684]20  [685]21  [686]22  [687]23  [688]24  [689]25  [690]26  [691]27
   [692]28  [693]29  [694]30  [695]31  [696]32  [697]33  [698]34  [699]35
   [700]36  [701]37  [702]38  [703]39  [704]40  [705]41  [706]42  [707]43
   [708]44  [709]45  [710]46  [711]47  [712]48  [713]49  [714]50  [715]51
   [716]52  [717]53  [718]54  [719]55  [720]56  [721]57  [722]58  [723]59
   [724]60  [725]61  [726]62  [727]63  [728]64  [729]65  [730]66  [731]67
   [732]68  [733]69  [734]70  [735]71  [736]72  [737]73  [738]74  [739]75
   [740]76  [741]77  [742]78  [743]79  [744]80  [745]81  [746]82  [747]83
   [748]84  [749]85  [750]86  [751]87  [752]88  [753]89  [754]90  [755]91
   [756]93  [757]94  [758]95  [759]96  [760]97  [761]98  [762]99
   [763]100  [764]101  [765]102  [766]103  [767]104  [768]105  [769]106
   [770]107  [771]108  [772]109  [773]110  [774]111  [775]112  [776]113
   [777]114  [778]115  [779]116  [780]117  [781]118  [782]119  [783]120
   [784]121  [785]122  [786]123  [787]124  [788]125  [789]126  [790]127
   [791]128  [792]129  [793]130  [794]131  [795]132  [796]133  [797]134
   [798]135  [799]136  [800]137  [801]138  [802]139  [803]140  [804]141
   [805]142  [806]143  [807]144  [808]145  [809]146  [810]147  [811]148
   [812]149  [813]150  [814]151  [815]152  [816]153  [817]154  [818]155
   [819]156  [820]157  [821]158  [822]159  [823]160  [824]161  [825]162
   [826]163  [827]164  [828]170  [829]171  [830]172  [831]173  [832]174
   [833]175  [834]176  [835]177  [836]178  [837]179  [838]180  [839]181
   [840]182  [841]183  [842]184  [843]185  [844]186  [845]187  [846]189
   [847]190  [848]191  [849]192  [850]193  [851]194  [852]195  [853]196
   [854]197  [855]198  [856]199  [857]200  [858]201  [859]202  [860]203
   [861]204  [862]205  [863]206  [864]207  [865]208  [866]209  [867]210
   [868]211  [869]212  [870]213  [871]214  [872]215  [873]216  [874]217
   [875]218  [876]219  [877]220  [878]221  [879]222  [880]223  [881]224
   [882]225  [883]226  [884]227  [885]228  [886]229  [887]230  [888]231
   [889]232  [890]233  [891]234  [892]235  [893]236  [894]237  [895]238
   [896]239  [897]240  [898]241  [899]242  [900]243  [901]244  [902]245
   [903]246  [904]247  [905]248  [906]249  [907]250  [908]251  [909]252
   [910]253  [911]254  [912]255  [913]256  [914]257  [915]258  [916]259
   [917]260  [918]261  [919]262  [920]263  [921]264  [922]265  [923]266
   [924]267  [925]268  [926]269  [927]270  [928]271  [929]272  [930]273
   [931]274  [932]275  [933]276  [934]277  [935]278  [936]279  [937]280
   [938]281  [939]282  [940]283  [941]284  [942]285  [943]286  [944]287
   [945]288  [946]289  [947]290  [948]291  [949]292  [950]293  [951]294
   [952]295  [953]296  [954]297  [955]298  [956]299  [957]300  [958]301
   [959]302  [960]303  [961]304  [962]305  [963]306  [964]307  [965]308
   [966]309  [967]310  [968]311  [969]312  [970]313  [971]314  [972]315
   [973]316  [974]317  [975]319  [976]320  [977]321  [978]322
     __________________________________________________________________

            This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
               Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
                   generated on demand from ThML source.

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