Chapter IV: Part 4

Moreover, these activities of the mind or spirit fail to govern our lives as a whole precisely because they are contemplative and not active. We stand before the world gazing at it, setting our minds indeed to work upon it in certain ways, yet not fundamentally changing it. But we are active beings, with wills as well as contemplative minds, and our volitional action lies very largely outside the range which these activities and interests can control. And therefore it is that so little real unity is reached by means of them.

In Morality the practical instincts and impulses are for the first time included. Morality is the science or the art, or both, of living in society; of living, that is to say, as fellow members with other beings, who also have aspirations and ideals as legitimate as our own, so that our own claim to pursue our own ideals must be won by recognition of their equal claim to pursue theirs. And the man who, with full mastery of himself, if such a man exists, is following out a great purpose that is adequate to satisfy his whole nature, is a man who has achieved the conquest of Time in the completest way. It is essential to the pursuit of a purpose that we move from stage to stage, as we adapt means to our end, and yet all of it is one thing, thought and experienced as one. Indeed a test that we always instinctively apply to a biography is whether it enables us to see the different stages of a man's life as constituting one spiritual whole. That is just what we desire the biographer to set forth before us.

At the same time Morality conquers antagonism because it is the life of fellowship. It begins with the recognition that other men have as much right to live as we have, and we buy our rights precisely by conceding theirs. Its root principle is the recognition of this brotherhood or fellow-membership. And yet it, too, never reaches its goal; it fails in two ways; every man in this world, however perfectly he may achieve mastery of his own nature--and it may be doubted if any man has ever done even that by his own strength--is so conditioned by circumstances that he is never able to make his life a perfect masterpiece of art; and as regards the whole fellowship of which he is a member, and his own relation to it, he can find no absolute rules except the command to reach a state of mind which he cannot reach by his own will. There are no moral laws that are absolute except the law to love one's neighbour as oneself. All the rest have exceptions somewhere. "Thou shall not kill," was the formula of the old law. But we have altered it into, "Thou shalt do no murder." It is always wrong to murder, because murder is such killing as is wrong. But it is not always wrong to kill. And so we find no principle that can be made entirely binding and universal, except the law to love our neighbour as ourselves. But how are we to do it? Is there any man who seriously thinks that by taking thought he can make himself love somebody else?

All of these three then, and the last as emphatically as any, in spite of its comprehending a greater section of human nature, fail to reach their own achievement.

In the fourth stage, in Religion, all would find their fulfilment. For the purpose of God, if there be a God, is the principle of unity which the scientist is seeking. The nature of God, if there be a God, is that perfect beauty which would be the culmination of the life of Art. The righteousness of God, if there be a God, is the satisfaction of the moral aspiration. But we are not left so to conjecture what life would be like if we could carry our own spiritual faculties to their own highest development. We are given the express image of the person of God. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." We shall not indeed have perfect knowledge of the sphere of religion until we have seen how the whole of history and every detail of our lives is, after all, the result and work of creative Love; but while Science and Art and Morality struggle towards their goal and only realise their need for it, God gives Himself as the satisfaction of that need. It is His gift, not our discovery; but we see that in this principle all Time is gathered up, for if the life of Christ is the manifestation of the nature of God, then it is the manifestation of the root-principle of all history.[#]

[#] I am aware that the argument here is _per saltum_, but space forbids its full development. I hope soon to have completed a book which will fill in the outline sketch offered in this Lecture. Meanwhile I would refer to my essay on _The Divinity of Christ_ in _Foundations_, specially pp. 213-223, 242-263.

Then we see, too, how all men may be united in perfect fellowship, because all men loving God will find themselves loving those whom God so loves. This hope or conviction remains in the region of faith, not of knowledge; what of that? In the other departments also we have found no knowledge. We have only found approximation towards it. We have, as it were, converging lines which never meet; and we have also the point at which we see they would meet if produced. Is that not enough? Here we find is the principle that will give unity, as we work it out, to the whole scheme of our spiritual life. Morality says, "Love all men." How can I? Science says, "Realise the truth which explains the universe." How can I? But I can gaze upon the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ; I can meditate upon His Cross and Resurrection. I can see here and there how it may be true that this is indeed the explanation of all the sorrow, even of all the sin. For if it is true that the supreme manifestation of the love of God was historically conditioned by the supreme sin of humanity in the treason of Judas, then surely one begins to see how even out of the grossest evil the glory of God wins triumph for itself, which we too may share if we are first drawn to share the sacrifice.

As I become absorbed in that contemplation I find in the first place a new power to love all men, as I remember that He died for them just as He died for me. In the degree in which I really believe that this is the manifestation of the power of God and the governing authority of the universe, I find this thought over-ruling other thoughts and temptations to hostility or enmity. As I remember that those whom I am inclined to despise or hate are those for whom He thought it worth while to die, my contempt and my hatred are rebuked and cancelled.

And similarly, if I realise--or in the degree in which I realise--that here is set forth the power that governs all things, that this is the way in which God rules the world, and that Calvary is the mode of His omnipotence, I begin to find myself indifferent, and that increasingly, to those things which are called sorrow and pain.

But we shall only find this as we expect to find it. All through our spiritual life we may be perpetually in contact, as it were, with the means of receiving what is good, and never receive it because we are not expecting it. We have not expected peace of mind from our worship, we have not expected a sense of security against evil; that is why we have not found it; but it is our fault. And certainly most of us have not expected to find fellowship from worship. We have known something of the grace of Jesus Christ, perhaps even of the love of God; but of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, of the sense of being linked to one another because all dominated by that one power, most of us have found nothing, because we have not expected it.

But if we are expecting this, all the testimony of the saints in every generation goes to show that we shall find what we have expected.

The power that can give us security against the transitoriness of the world and against the instincts of antagonism is there in the faith that we place in God. "I will put my trust in God," the Psalmist says, "I will not fear what flesh can do unto me." This is not because flesh will not do such hurt as it can to the man who puts his trust in God--the Jews crucified Christ--but because to the man who puts his trust in God, anything whatever that happens becomes part of God's purpose for his life, and therefore he will not fear it. For "all things," sorrow as well as joy, pain as well as pleasure, sin as well as righteousness, "all things work together for good to them that love God."

*LECTURE VI*

*GOD IN HISTORY*

"I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty."--Revelation i. 8.

We have considered the two great instruments of God by which He fashions the spiritual life of man, and we have considered that spiritual life itself in the outline at least of its four main departments; and now, as we close our line of thought, we need still to consider how it is that, in these fields and by these instruments, God carries forward His work.

The conception of God as at work in human history, guiding it, controlling it, and judging men by its course, is the great contribution of Israel to the religion of the world. It is linked of course with that belief in the union of perfect righteousness with the divine, power which we usually speak of under the somewhat cumbrous title of Ethical Monotheism. We remember what was really at stake in that great day upon Mount Carmel when Elijah confronted the priests of Baal; it was whether the conception of God as righteous and demanding righteousness should prevail, or the conception of God as a capricious Being, needing only to be propitiated, and in connection with whose very worship licentiousness was tolerated and even encouraged.

But, after all, the greatest souls, at least in every highly-developed religion, have believed that God is righteous in Himself. What gives to Israel its supreme significance in the spiritual history of mankind is the conviction that this righteous God is daily and hourly at work in the history of men; and that conviction gives to the faith of Israel a primacy and supremacy over all the other partial faiths, even though they may be superior in certain departments.

If we think of some of the conceptions by means of which we try to bring before our minds the meaning of the word "God," we may find that with regard to several of them, other nations had advanced further than Israel before the coming of the Lord.

God is Spirit. The Hindu knew that, and knows it still, quite as much as Israel.

God is Law. The more thoughtful at least among the ancient Romans, and particularly the great Roman Stoics, knew that with a vividness that was scarcely ever attained in Israel.

God is Beauty. Assuredly the ancient Greeks knew that as Israel never realised it at all.

But the conception of Israel that God is at work in history means that the God of Israel gives to these other gods or conceptions of God, each its own time and place of emergence and decay. The God who is revealed to us in the Old Testament is Himself the Being who appoints that the Indian or the Roman or the Greek should reach these particular convictions; and in these partial apprehensions of the Divine, before the full revelation came, the faith of Israel is determinative and regulative for all the other faiths; and moreover, it is this faith that God is at work in the actual daily history of men, which makes the faith of Israel the natural and proper introduction to the Incarnation, where God Himself took flesh and lived among men and died at a time and in a place--in Palestine and under Pontius Pilate.

This exaltation of the Holy God, actually at work within men and at their side, while it leads to a sense of awe before the Holiness of the Almighty, also leads to a sense of the dignity of this world, and of man's life in it, which is lacking, as a rule, from other great religions, and that too in proportion as those other religions are spiritual. For the Hindu, for example, this world and all that is in it is mere illusion. He is spiritual enough but he is not material enough; and we find there that contempt for the things of the body which invariably issues in a contempt for moral conduct; for our moral conduct here, while we live upon this planet, is wrought out through our bodies. But the religion of Israel, and especially its completion in the Incarnation, wherein God Himself came in the flesh, gives at once a dignity to this world of ours, to our bodies, and to all the material side of life.

When Christ stood before Pilate, the Kingdom of God was in appearance, at least, undergoing judgment at the hands of the kingdom of this world; but it is not merely a contrast of good with evil. It is a contrast of the perfect with the very imperfect, but yet not merely evil, power. Pilate is not Satan; and the Lord Himself, in the moment of His trial, recognises that the authority by which He is condemned is an authority that is derived from God--"Thou couldest have no power at all against Me, except it were given thee from above." The kingdoms of this world, which are to become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, are not simply something evil. The contrast of Church and World is not the contrast between good and evil; but it is the contrast between two stages in the work which God is accomplishing in history, and those two may often come into conflict.

Let us then ask what is the central principle of God's guidance of His people, so far as it may be deduced from the tiny fragment of history that we really know. In that fragment at least, we may say, I think, with little hesitation, that its method and its aim is spiritual growth, or, if you like to put it an expansion and enrichment of personality.

We are sometimes inclined to think our own personality is something that is given to us from the outset, and entirely belongs to us; but that idea will not stand examination for a moment. Individual personality is a social product. It can only be developed under social influences. A man may be born with many great talents, but if his environment does not encourage their development, these talents will remain for the most part undeveloped and unknown--either to himself or to anybody else. Indeed the greater the talent with which a man is endowed, the more difference is made to him by the kind of surroundings in which he is put. A man of very few gifts and little natural capacity will be much the same, whether he has abundant opportunity for mental and spiritual growth or little opportunity; but the man of great capacities, needing for their development the encouragement of surroundings, is an entirely different being according as those surroundings are favourable or the reverse; and so we reach the curious result that the greatest personality, while no doubt he must have brought into the world something given to him by God that was capable of development, is yet more entirely dependent upon the society in which he is living than people with a less wide range of gifts.

Again, it is only within a society which has developed some character for itself, which has indeed a personality of its own, that individual personality can reach very much development. You cannot have genius in a savage tribe. Genius is the focal expression of the personality of a whole people. It is that people coming to life, and possessed of voice; and you do not find it where there is little social development. It is only as the tribe or the nation begins to have some definite character of its own that it is itself sufficiently organised to develop from its own individual member those gifts, and elicit those activities, which are the signs of genius.

We find then, that individual personality, or spiritual life, is dependent upon the spiritual life of society; and we need to notice that this society has every mark by which we distinguish personality in the individual. It has aspirations: it has a predominant character; it has claims, and it has duties. It has in fact, in the literal sense of the word, corporate personality, and just as the many instincts and impulses which are to be found in human nature, and may be very discordant with one another, are welded together to make up the single life of a human being, so the whole gifts and instincts and ambitions and aspirations of all the individual citizens are welded together, to make up the personality of the whole society.

Moreover, every nation is in itself not only the combination of individual citizens, but also of minor groups within itself, all of which have these same marks, and all of which are in the real genuine sense persons, spiritual individuals with a life of their own.

Now, as we look over the history of the development which thus goes on side by side in the individual and in society, we find that its principle in the fragment of history that we really know has been that isolated excellences should be brought to perfection first; and after something like perfection has been reached in the separate departments taken singly, the combination of them is brought about, in order that the richer and fuller life may be perfected, in which all of them find a place.

European history derives its whole life from Palestine, Greece and Rome; and in each of those three peoples, some one excellence was developed to a peculiar degree. Rome perfected and has bequeathed to us the instincts for social order, as embodied in law. The history of the Roman people is of significance, precisely because one may there trace the growth and working out of this instinct for social or political life. There has never been anything to rival it in history. No modern nation has shown the same extraordinary political sense and sanity. The Romans were not great political philosophers. They did not think very much about the principles on which they acted; but simply because of their peculiar gift in this direction they welded together a social order which lasted throughout their Empire in a wonderful way; and to this day the law of Europe is to an enormous extent the law of ancient Rome.

To ancient Greece, it is hard to say what we do not owe. Her peculiar characteristic is intellectual passion; a passion for reaching perfection in just what the intellect is particularly qualified to grasp, truth and beauty. No doubt the ancient Greeks themselves thought a great deal about their ordinary politics and their military activities, and the wars between the various States; but these matter very little. The Greek people are significant for evermore not because of the Athenian trireme or the Macedonian phalanx, but because Aeschylus stood in astonished awe before the operation of the Divine Justice; because Sophocles reflected the whole of human life, even its ugliest manifestations, in the mirror of a soul so calm and pure, that as we look at that reflection all life seems bathed in peace and beauty; because Euripides entered into the sorrows of simple folk; because Thucydides, with a still unrivalled zeal for the genuine truth of history, said the wise word about nearly every political condition that has arisen since his time; because Plato dreamed "a Vision of all time and all existence," proclaimed that it can never be just to do harm to any man whatever harm he may have done to us; proclaimed also that "God is in no way unrighteous, but in all ways absolutely righteous, nor is anything more like to God than whosoever among men shall become perfectly righteous;" foreseeing also that if a perfectly righteous man should come on earth he would die, scourged and crucified.[#] There is nowhere before the New Testament anything that comes nearer to its own highest truths, not in the Old Testament itself, than what you will find in Plato.

[#] _Republic_ i. 335*d*; _Theaetetus_ 176*c*; _Republic_ ii. 361*e*.

This influence,--the influence of this intellectual passion--has been the driving force in nearly all the movements since that time. It has been said there is nothing in the world which moves that is not Greek in origin, and it is almost true; it is from the Greeks that we have learnt "the use of reason to modify experience" and they derived it from the intellectual passion for truth and beauty.

To Palestine we owe the inspiring and governing faith of which I have already spoken--the one faith that can give real significance to these other two, faith in the Holy God at work in history.

It is noticeable that each of these countries was conspicuously weak in those other qualities which were not especially entrusted to it. Ancient Rome was not at all specially religious and was conspicuously unintellectual. The people of Greece again are not conspicuously religious, though in their cults there is a haunting beauty; and they were not at all politically successful; the history of Athens, the flower of Greece, is the history of a State in which almost every generation threw up a supreme genius who proceeded to change the constitution in accordance with his magnificent ideas; the result was political instability of an appalling character.[#] And Palestine has contributed very little to us as regards social organisation, and is markedly lacking in the scientific and artistic gifts. We have only to consider the great images that are set before us, let us say in the Book of Ezekiel, or again in the Book of Revelation, to see that there is no attempt in these efforts of the imagination to achieve a beautiful or harmonious whole. The symbolic elements are added one to another because of the value of their meaning; but there is no effort to visualise the whole; and if we try to make it, we quickly find that such a thing was never intended.

[#] It is of course true that the Greek genius gave us what we now mean by civilisation, namely, the combination of political unity and personal freedom. On this see the admirable first chapter of Mr. Edwyn Bevan's _The House of Seleucus_. But it remains true that the race from whose intellectual genius this whole product sprang had not in any considerable degree the capacity for controlling their own invention.

Each of these then reached a genuine supremacy in its own department; and the history of Europe is to an enormous extent the history of the inter-action of these three forces as they mingle and combine in the polities of the barbarian invaders who wrecked the Roman Empire. We watch the periods of domination of each successively. Christianity grew up within the Roman Empire, and the fascination of that great Empire cast a glamour about it in the minds even of those who destroyed it, so that the life which emerges out of chaos in the Middle Ages is predominantly very Latin. The Renaissance is precisely the invasion of Greek influence, and the Reformation is very largely the rediscovery of the Hebrew.

For a while the three new forces worked together, carrying men's thought and action forward; and then in the 18th century it would seem that there was, in England at any rate, a torpor due to their exhaustion; when revival came it was because Wesley and his friends revived the Hebrew element in our life, because Newman and Pusey with their friends revived the Latin element, and because F. D. Maurice and the Broad Church movement revived the Hellenistic, and this, with its passion for more adequate comprehension and expression, is the dominant force of our time. We watch these three influences still at work; but as they interact upon one another and within the persons of the new races, a new product is gradually being produced, and in those corporate personalities which we call nations, we see a character being born which is something that history has not known before.

The first requirement of personality is always freedom--freedom as we have already said in its two senses, that conduct is not dictated from without but is governed by the whole person, and not by isolated elements; and the corporate persons need freedom just as much as the individual; hence the need, the vital and absolute need, for political sovereignty in any State which is conscious of itself as a person, that is as having a single spiritual life.

But that life and freedom are exercised only in the citizens who are members of the State. We cannot surely assert that the corporate person is immortal, as the individual is; and therefore, to destroy a State is to inflict a more irreparable loss than to kill a man, which is one reason at least, perhaps the chief reason, why a man should die for the political freedom of his country, and even, if need be, kill for it; but, as freedom is the first requirement of personality, fellowship is its first duty, for it is true of corporate personalities quite as much as of individuals that they only find themselves and fulfil themselves in their inter-action upon one another, and the nations of the world do in fact need one another, and need one another's full life.

In economics we found out long ago that in order to be wealthy, a country needs rich neighbours who may afford good markets. It is so in every other department. We need the gifts of the other peoples. We need that they shall be free and vigorous. Indeed the chief lesson which the world at this time needs to learn is just this--that all the nations of the world need one another, each needing also that the others should be free, in order that they may bring their contributions to the common life in which all share.

But we should, I think, be reading the signs of the times amiss if we did not also take account of the fact that there has been growing up lately a new type of corporate personality, not known to history before, and exemplified by your own United States and by the British Empire; the conception of sovereign States linked together in a single life, and exercising therein a joint sovereignty in dealing with those who lie outside the federation, is something of which history bears no record; and we need to try to understand its principle, and see what it is capable of contributing to the life of men in order that we may not fail to use our opportunity, and bring our contribution.[#]

[#] See Appendix V. _On Providence in History_.

There is our outline sketch of the way in which the history of our own civilisation has grown, within which the Church and Nation are at work. We are members of both. What duty falls upon us as the result of that dual membership? The Christian citizen is called of necessity to fulfil one of three functions--prophet, priest and king.

The prophet is one who is called to testify to the ideal unflinchingly, not considering consequences, not perhaps considering ways and means of reaching the ideal, but simply insisting on its nature and calling men and nations to penitence so far as they fail to reach it. It may require more courage than the office of the king or statesman, and yet in itself it is the easiest, because it is relatively simple.

In all modern nations, and more so in the degree in which they are democratic, every citizen partakes of the duty of kingship. He has some share in determining how his nation shall act, either in the management of its own internal affairs or in its dealings with other people, and one who has this responsibility and is also a Christian, is involved in the absolute duty of trying to think, and to think with genuine effort, how he may be actually guiding his nation toward the ideal. He must not be content with pious platitudes leading to no action, nor content to consider only his own country's welfare; but as a member of the Church of Christ which embraces all mankind, he is called to think out and, having thought, to pursue in act the methods by which his nation may genuinely be doing its part to build up the one great Temple of God--His Holy City.

The priest is prophet and statesman, both at once. He, as minister of the Word of God, must perpetually insist upon the true ideal, and bid men to guard against all self-contentment so far as they fail to reach it; and yet he must be ready to take his stand by the side of every individual or group of individuals, even of the nation itself, nerving each to do the best of which it then and there in the circumstances of the day is capable. And meanwhile he is a wretched human being like the rest, terribly liable to pride if he upholds an ideal higher than is usually recognised; terribly liable to worldliness, alike in his own soul and in his teaching, if for a single moment he forsakes the Divine Presence; and uniquely exposed to the deadliest of all temptations; for while we preach what neither we nor anybody else can practise, we are sorely tempted to be content with spiritual mediocrity ourselves.

But above all, at this time the necessity, I think, is for a clear testimony concerning the purpose of God for His people, and His kingdom that shall surely come. We have made our precepts so tame; our efforts for peace and fellowship have been so much less exhilarating than other men's efforts for war; we have been very mild; and that is not the spirit of Christ, or of His Kingdom. The spirit of Christ is the spirit of all heroism in all ages.

In 1848, a little republic was founded in Rome to stand for justice and purity of government amid the corrupt States all round. It was attacked by those States, and at last it yielded; on the day when the capitulation was signed masses of people were gathered together in the great Piazza outside St. Peter's, and there rode among them the man whose faith and heroism had sustained that siege for more weeks than the wiseacres thought it could last days. When the cheering had subsided, he made no acknowledgment, but simply said:

"I am going out from Rome. I offer neither quarters, nor
provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches,
battles, death. Let him who loves his country with his heart
not with his lips only follow me."

And they streamed out after him into the hills. His name was Garibaldi; and because of his heroism and theirs the kingdom of Italy is in the world to-day.

But the invitation of Christ is in exactly that spirit--"I offer neither quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, death." "If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me."

The cross, when our Lord spoke those words, was quite a real thing. To take up the cross did not mean bearing life's little inconveniences with equanimity. It meant literally to put the rope round one's neck, and be ready simply for anything that might come. That is the spirit in which we are summoned to work for Christ. Can we rise to it? The Prince of Peace was not a "mild man." This is the vision that His disciple had of Him:

"His head and His hair were white, as white wool, white as snow;
and His eyes were as a flame of fire; and His feet like unto
burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His
voice as the voice of many waters. And He had in His right hand
seven stars: and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged
sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in its
strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one dead."

Can we present the figure of Christ as endowed with anything like that compelling power? If so, we are worthy ministers. It not, we are making dull the one great adventure of the world.

There is only one way in which we can succeed. It is that we cling to faith in God, the Author of the drama, in which we play our part; God, Himself the Guide along the path we are to follow; God, not only the Guide, but the very Way in which we are to walk; God, not only the Guide and Way, but the Strengthener within our souls, enabling us to follow; and God the Guide, the Way, the Strengthener, Himself also the Goal to which we would come. "For in Him we move and live and have our being."

Yea thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinning
He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed;
Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.

_I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty._

*APPENDIX I*

*ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS*

It is very difficult for the modern reader to recover the frame of mind in which Apocalypse has its origin, but we may do this more easily if we look for parallels outside the field of religious history. It has been well said that the mediaeval man looked upwards and downwards--to Hell and to Heaven; his view of the world is on a vertical plane; the modern man has a horizontal view, looking to the past and future--the past as it has existed, and the future as it shall exist, in the history of human society upon this earth. We need if possible to combine these two, but it is a very difficult achievement. With our point of view we inevitably read Apocalypse as if it were a literal history of the future written before the event; but this is not its primary significance. The religious consciousness from which it springs was highly indifferent to the lapse of time: very likely the seer expected the speedy realisation of his vision so far as he thought about things in that way at all, but this was not his primary concern. Let us take a parallel, as was suggested a moment ago, from another field. The socialistic movement in its early days seemed committed to an immediate expectation of the millennium following upon a catastrophic change in the structure of human society. The arrival of the millennium now seems postponed indefinitely and evolution has taken the place of revolution as a method, and yet a socialist who is really in the movement does not feel any breach of continuity; he knows that he is one in spirit with the earlier writers and that they were never mainly concerned either with the date at which the millennium would come or the means by which they imagined it brought about, but precisely with the contrast between the ideal as they conceived it and the actual as they saw it.

We may take another instance from a slightly different department of thought. Dante imagined that the Mount of Purgatory was the immediate antipodes of the Hill of Zion, but if some traveller had gone round the world and assured him that the Mount of Purgatory was not there, it would not in the smallest degree have affected his doctrine of Purgatory. So it is with the apocalyptists; there is an immense amount of machinery provided by which this world is to be abruptly changed into the Kingdom of God, and because that Kingdom is so present to the consciousness of the writer, he can speak of it as even now about to appear upon the earth. But this is not what chiefly interests him: his point of view is vertical, not horizontal; all time-spans are foreshortened into a moment, because his whole interest is in the contrast between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world; we therefore do him wrong in supposing that the postponement of his hope is any grievous disappointment, or any proof of real error. The date of its fulfilment was never a matter of much concern to him.

So we may, I think, reverently believe that our Lord Himself passes through the experience of the apocalyptists at moments of great exultation, as, for example, when the seventy return and say that the devils are made subject to them, or when He realises the imminence of the fall of Jerusalem, and therefore the removal of the chief barrier to His Kingdom's progress. All time is foreshortened; Satan falls from Heaven and the Son of Man appears in glory; but this is no forecast of history as we understand history. One evangelist tells us of a parable which He uttered precisely because of His perception that the disciples erroneously supposed "that the Kingdom of God was immediately to appear." All His insistence upon the coming Kingdom is focussed in the Passion, as has been shown in the text. When the revelation of God's inmost nature was completed in the completion of His own self-sacrifice, this brought with it the power that could change the kingdoms of this world into the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ. From then onwards "He cometh with the clouds"; but the completion of His Kingdom when "every eye shall see Him, and they which pierced Him," lies still in the future. The contrast of tenses in this passage can hardly be accidental; from the moment when He was lifted up from the earth in the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension (which are the revelation in successive phases of the one unchanging glory of God) His coming is a present fact; but our perception of His coming is something still growing as His Spirit guides us into all the truth, until at last we know even as we are known.

*APPENDIX II*

*ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY*

It may be objected that the Church should never in any circumstances employ force--at any rate, physical force. But I believe the objection is due, partly to a latent Manichaeism which holds that matter is always evil, or at least "unspiritual," and partly to a very just fear that force may be wrongly used if its use is permitted at all. Yet there are some cases where the Church would plainly be not only at liberty, but morally bound, to use force.

Suppose a clergyman begins to give teaching that is absolutely at variance with the doctrine of the Church, the Church may appeal to his better feelings and ask him to resign; but if he will not, the Church must assuredly have the right to turn him out, and that, if necessary, by force.

No doubt in a civilised country what the Church does as a rule is to ask the State to act against the man, on the ground that he has broken contract and holds his position on false pretences. This is what the Mediaeval Church called "handing the offender over to the secular arm."

But let us imagine the situation in a Mission Church where a convert has, for penance, been excluded from attendance at public worship for a period. Suppose he insists upon coming; then certainly the congregation would be right forcibly to remove him. Again, supposing the use of force as discipline may be of advantage to moral development (and up to a certain stage I am sure it may), and supposing there is no civilised State to employ it, the Church will be right to do what is best for the character of those for whom it is concerned. But no doubt all this is purely preparatory to the positive spiritual work of the Church, which must always take the form of appeal and not of force.

There is, however, so much confusion on the subject of moral and spiritual authority in general, that it may not be out of place to add here some remarks upon it.

The word "authority" is derived from a Latin word which may perhaps be best translated by "weight."

When we speak of a man of weight, or an opinion that carries weight, we have something very near the original meaning of the term authority. Sometimes we are inclined to think of authority as best represented by the political ruler, or the military commander. But these are not really typical kinds of authority. They are very special cases where authority is clothed with compelling force. But in the spheres of which we are thinking there is not necessarily present any compelling force at all. When we think of authority in religion, in its connection with morals and such questions, there is no force, at any rate necessarily, present at all, and the Church's authority in the true sense is not any the less because it does not practise the methods of the Inquisition: nor was it any greater in the days when to its own proper authority it added coercive power, appealing to people in the name of what is in itself not authority strictly speaking, at all. For if I believe just because the Church is an assembly of the saints of God and its formularies are summaries of their experience, then I am believing on the ground of the Church's authority. But if I believe because an officer of the Church threatens me with the rack in the case of disbelief, I am believing not because the Church has authority, but because I dislike physical pain.

So authority always in the end means weight--what carries weight with our judgment. We can weigh one authority against another; we may weigh the authority of one theologian with that of another by considering which has shown the greater knowledge of the subject in question and the sounder judgment in dealing with it. In moral questions we do as a matter of fact perpetually come back to the man of moral weight. And what constitutes his weight is to begin with a certain uprightness in his own character, and then a certain sympathy and insight which enables him to understand how he would apply to the circumstances of other people the principles by which he lives in his own. So, for example, Aristotle in the end determines all moral questions by reference to the standard which the man of moral sense would use; everything in the last resort is determined simply by his judgment. Virtue, he says, resides in a mean between two vicious extremes, and the mean is to be determined by a principle which the man of moral sense would use. Later on, after an interlude of two or three books wisely interpolated, he comes to ask, Who is the man of moral sense? and he turns out to be the man who has the right principle enabling him to determine the mean between vicious extremes; that is to say, that his standard of judgment in the end is simply the good, sensible man, and for practical purposes that does well enough, because for practical purposes we do know whose judgment we value, we do know who it is whose approval we should care to win, whose approval would of itself assure us that our conduct was right, and whose disapproval would of itself go far at least to assure us that our conduct was wrong, or at any rate that the matter needed careful reconsideration.

There is indeed another method than this of reliance upon the authority of a wise man, and it is represented by the other great thinker of Greece, by Plato. Plato's ideal method in moral questions was to try to determine the purpose of the whole universe and then determine how in any given circumstances a man may serve that purpose. The basis of his morals, in other words, was what we should call theological; and so far as we are able to apply this, it is the only finally satisfactory method; so far as we can say that the principles of Christianity imperatively demand some particular action or attitude of mind, we shall not care how little other authority we can quote, but shall say that we can see quite clearly that our allegiance to Christ and His religion involves a certain point of view for us; and if no one else has taken that point of view, provided we can find no flaw in our reasoning, we shall say none the less, This is the point of view which we, as Christians, are bound to take.

That has been the method by which, as a matter of fact, most Christian reforms have been carried out. That was the way by which, in an instance to which I shall return in a moment, slavery was abolished. Slavery had been tolerated by the Christian Church for centuries. The authority of the Christian Church might therefore have been quoted as substantially in favour of it. A very large number of Christians did, in fact, favour retaining it, because, of course, the abolition of the slave trade was an interference with property, and heartrending appeals were made in the name of "the unfortunate widow with a few strong blacks," as in our day appeals are made against legislation in the name of the widow who has shares in breweries. But Wilberforce's point of view was simply this, that whatever the Church may have said through all these centuries, when you look at the Christian principle of the right way to treat human beings it condemns slavery; and if all the Christians in all the ages had denied that, it would not have altered the fact that, as we see it--so Wilberforce and his friends would have urged--as we see it, slavery is condemned; that is enough for us; we go forward in the certainty that we are carrying out the will of God. Wilberforce brought people round to his point of view; now you will hardly find a Christian to defend slavery as an institution. Some day, perhaps, it will be the same with war.

But in most moral questions the authority to which we appeal is not that of the good and wise individual, but that of the moral sense of our civilisation. We can very seldom give an adequate reason for those points on which we have the strongest moral convictions. For example, in argument I suppose we should most of us find it very difficult to produce a case for monogamy as against polygamy anything like so strong as the feeling which we have in favour of the one against the other. That feeling is implanted in us by the experience of our civilisation, a civilisation which has, in fact, emerged from one into the other, and these very strong instinctive feelings, which are common to great masses of people and for which usually any one individual in all that mass can only give a most inadequate reason, are something to which an enormous volume of human experience has contributed. Generation after generation has come to feel that certain relations of the sexes are, as a matter of fact, the only ones that can be maintained with real wholesomeness, and this belief becomes so strong in the community that it is received with the air we breathe all through the formative years of our life, and the result is an intense conviction for which, as I say, we can hardly give any argument--an intense conviction that one sort of thing is right and the other wrong; and what most of us mean by our conscience is just this body of feeling concerning right and wrong which has been implanted in us as the result of the accumulated experience of civilisation. From the point of view of the individual it is usually more an emotion than a reasoned judgment; and it is much more of the nature of prejudice than of an argumentative conclusion. When people talk about conscientious objections to obeying the law, it is always quite impossible to distinguish between their prejudice and their conscience; there is no standard by which to determine. But the fact that it is unreasoned in the individual does not mean that it is irrational, or without reason in itself. What has been built up by the steady pressure of whole centuries of experience has enormous weight of pure reason behind it, even though the individual cannot himself give the reason, and even though there may be no individual alive who can give it; it has come out of the logic of experience; it has been built up in the strictly scientific way by a whole series of facts. There is an enormous inductive background, an enormous scientific basis for the moral convictions of the better, more self-controlled members of any civilised society. The moral verdict of society, and the conscience of the individual, which is his own echo, for the most part, of that moral verdict, is a thing of quite enormous authority.

But, it will be urged, the authorities clash. The verdict of European civilisation is for monogamy; the verdict of certain other civilisations is quite as emphatically against it. Does this mean that the whole distinction of right and wrong is a mere matter of convention? No, it does not. But even if it did, the thing would not be as bad as people often imagine, because convention is not something artificial in the sense of contrary to nature or fictitious; a convention is simply the expression of human nature working on a large scale. Man is a being whose nature it is to set up conventions, and a convention is a product of human nature, a property and mark of human nature, just as much gravitation is a property and mark of mechanical nature; and it only becomes contrary to nature and a nuisance when it has survived the purpose for which it originally grew up. But none the less there is something more than any convention or social growth about the distinction of right and wrong; the distinction in itself is absolute and fundamental. It is the distinction between recognising oneself as member of a community and not so recognising oneself. Morality is always recognition of a claim on the part of other persons, the recognition that their point of view and their interests have to be taken into account in the determination of my conduct. As man is by nature social, as by nature he is designed to live in communities, the distinction of right and wrong, that is the recognition of the claim of the community and of the members in it, is absolute and final.

But what is the content of the two terms right and wrong, what actual action shall be called right and what wrong on any given occasion, may vary easily according to circumstances, according to the degree of social development and the like. There is conduct which is right at one stage of society and wrong at another, precisely because at one stage it tends to the health of society, while at another it will be bad for the health of society; just as there are ways in which it is good from time to time to train children in which it would not be well to train grown-up people; and there is conduct which is appropriate to earlier stages of society, because beneficial to society, which becomes inappropriate and harmful at any other stage. What is right and what is wrong may depend very largely upon circumstances, stage of development, spiritual receptiveness, and a host of other things; but the distinction between right and wrong itself remains unaffected by all these, and absolutely fundamental and invariable.