The Hebrews theory.—The epistle to the Hebrews belongs to quite a different category from the writings of St. Paul. The dominant thought in this epistle is that of salvation by sacrifice, a perfectly true and spiritual idea, as we have already seen. The writer, like Paul, employs Old Testament symbolism, but in quite a different way. Probably this is due to the fact that he was an Alexandrian Jew whose thinking was shaped under the influence of Philo, whereas that of Paul was governed by the rabbinical schools of Palestinian Judaism. At this time Alexandria was the greatest intellectual centre in the world, a meeting place for Greek thought and Hebrew religion as represented by Philo. The influence of Alexandria is plainly to be seen in the epistle to the Hebrews, which, possibly, was written by the learned and courtly Apollos. Like Paul, the writer thinks of salvation as getting right with God and living a holy life, but he omits all reference to a judicial penalty, or the necessity for escaping annihilation by faith in the substitutionary work of a sinless Redeemer. In his view Christ is from first to last the priestly representative of the race, making a sacrifice to God after the Old Testament fashion, but in a more perfect way. He regards the Old Testament sacrificial offerings as being but the types and shadows of the one perfect and eternal offering which humanity through Christ is making to God. Most of my readers will at once admit that this is not fanciful, although the language in which it is expressed is so different from our own; it is quite faithful to the spiritual meaning of Old Testament sacrifice. When, therefore, this writer refers to the offering of the blood of Christ, he is thinking not only of Calvary, but of all that Calvary symbolises, the perfect spiritual offering of mankind to God, the sacramental realisation of our oneness with Him. This view is not worked out with the moral intensity which characterises St. Paul's, but it is unassailably true once we get the writer's point of view. As a theory it is quite different from Paul's, unless we are content to shed Paul's literalism, get rid of all thought of an angry God and a physical death penalty for sin, and betake ourselves instead to the inner spiritual region where self-sacrifice is realised to be the means of saving, not only the individual, but the whole race, by uniting it to the source of all being.

The Johannine theory.—There is a certain similarity between the view of Atonement set forth in the epistle to the Hebrews and that contained in the Johannine writings. It is easy to understand why this is so when we recognise that both are dominated by Alexandrian modes of thinking. These Johannine writings—the fourth gospel, the three epistles ascribed to St. John, and the book of Revelation—are all that have come down to us of what was at one time, no doubt, a considerable literature. How much the apostle John had to do with it cannot be determined with any certainty, but it is clear enough that these writings are not all from one hand, and that they are much later than the work of St. Paul. The all-important conception in the Johannine writings is that salvation is secured by the union of the individual soul with the eternal Christ, or Logos, or Divine Man of pre-Christian thought and experience. Here again we have a perfectly true and necessary idea, an idea implied in all spiritual experience worthy of the name; but as the root factor in a presentation of the doctrine of Atonement, it differs widely from Paul's way of putting things. When the Johannine writers speak of the blood of Christ, they mean the outpoured, forthgiven life of the eternal Son of God, the ideal humanity, perfectly and centrally expressed in Jesus of Nazareth. There is not from beginning to end a hint or a suggestion in these writings that a sinless being was tortured in order to appease the wrath of God against guilty ones, or that the penalty of sin in a world to come will be remitted to a penitent sinner in consideration of his faith in such an arrangement.

Underlying unity.—This is by no means an exhaustive examination of New Testament teaching on the subject of Atonement, but it should be sufficient to show two things: first, that the theories of the New Testament writers concerning the redeeming works of Christ are not, taken literally, mutually consistent; secondly, the truth implied in all the theories is precisely that truth of Atonement which we have already seen to be implied in all religion. The great thing which impressed the primitive Christian consciousness in regard to the life and death of Jesus was that this life and death were the most complete and consistent self-offering of the individual to the whole that had ever been made. In this self-offering was the one perfect manifestation of the eternal Christ, the humanity which reveals the innermost of God, the humanity which is love. To partake of the benefits of that Atonement we have to unite ourselves to it; that is, to employ the mystical language of St. Paul, we have to die to self with Christ and rise with Him into the experience of larger, fuller life, the life eternal.

It is just the same truth under every one of these different theories, but if we persist in regarding them literally we shall miss it, for by no kind of ingenuity can we square the theory of St. Paul with that of the other writers; the way of putting it is different. But once we see what the essential truth of Atonement is, we are no longer bound by the intellectual symbolism of Paul or Hebrews or any other authority; we can get beneath the symbol to the thing symbolised. The Pauline principle of dying with Christ, the Hebrews idea of the eternal sacrifice manifested in time, the Johannine thought about the outpoured life of the eternal Christ, are all one and the same. Jesus did nothing for us which we are not also called upon to do for ourselves and one another in our degree. Faith in His atoning work means death to self that we may live to God; as selfhood perishes on its Calvary, the Christ, the true man, the divine reality, in whom we are one with all men, rises in power in our hearts and unites us to the source of all goodness and joy. Institutional, forensic, external, the Atonement never has been and never will be. But vicarious suffering, willingly accepted, is the great redeeming force by which the world is gradually being won to its true life in God, for vicarious suffering is the expression of the law that in a finite world the service of the whole involves pain, although it is also the deepest joy that the human heart can know. The sacrifice of Jesus is the central and ideal expression of this principle on the field of time, but it only possesses meaning and value as it is repeated in our lives; the Christ has to be offered perpetually on the altar of human hearts. There is no justification except by becoming just, and no imputed righteousness which means availing ourselves of merits that are not ours. We are "justified by faith," indeed, but only in the sense that no man can become good without believing in goodness, and no man can really believe in the Christ revealed in Jesus without gradually becoming like Him. Here is Atonement, Justification, Sanctification, and all else that is needed to unite mankind to the life eternal which is to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.

No Old Testament prophecy of Atonement of Jesus.—It can hardly be necessary to point out that there is therefore no direct reference in the Old Testament to the atoning work of Jesus. All the beautiful passages with which we are so familiar, and which have become the language of devotion in reference to such sacred seasons as Christmas Day and Good Friday, can only be associated with Jesus in an ideal sense. The noble fifty-third of Isaiah, for example, and all similar passages about the prophetic conception of the suffering servant of God, have, literally understood, nothing whatever to do with Jesus. But the striking thing about such passages is that the men who wrote them were able to realise and express the very essence of the spiritual Atonement, the giving of the individual for the race. The pathetic and inspiring description, "He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from him, he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed," is perhaps the grandest presentation of the atoning life, the Christ man, that exists in literature. The ideal fulfilment of it was Jesus, as primitive Christianity quickly saw; but had the original writer no specific example in mind belonging to his own day when he wrote? To be sure he had; the case of Jeremiah would furnish it if no other. This brave and faithful advocate of the moral ideal, after standing alone in his resistance to the materialising tendencies of his time, was scorned and hated by his fellow-countrymen, flung into prison, beaten, tortured, and probably murdered in the end. He shared the captivity of the Jews under Nebuchadnezzar, a captivity against which he had warned them in vain. "Despised and rejected of men," he died, but in later days his name came to be reverenced as perhaps none had ever been before. For centuries afterwards he was referred to by the returned exiles as the prophet, in contradistinction to all other prophets. He had lived the atoning life and died a sacrificial death. It was not wonderful that the author of the fifty-third of Isaiah should have such a noble example in mind when he penned his deathless words, but these words were meant to have an impersonal meaning too. They stand as a description of the ideal manhood, the true servant of God, the saviour of the race in any and every generation. This kind of manhood, just because it is the true manhood, the eternal or divine manhood, must inevitably suffer in a selfish world, but these sufferings are never in vain; they are the Calvary from which the eternal Christ rises in redeeming might over the power of sin and death. Let any man ask himself what it is that is saving the world to-day, and gradually but surely lifting it out of the mire of ignorance and wickedness, and he cannot find a better answer than the fifty-third of Isaiah. It tells of Jesus, but it tells also of all the sons of God who in the spirit of Jesus have ever given their lives in the service of love.

When we go to the Bible in this common-sense way, entering with understanding and sympathy into the thoughts and aspirations of the men who wrote it, it becomes a living book, and a real help in our endeavour to live our lives in union with Jesus Christ. But to regard it as a sort of official document written by the finger of God, of equal authority in every part, and containing a full and complete statement of the propositions we must accept in order to make sure of salvation, is hampering and belittling to the soul. God inspires men, not books; and He will go on inspiring men to the end of time, whether they write books or not. I do not know anything which is such a serious hindrance and stumbling-block to spiritual religion to-day as this supposed authority of the letter of scripture. If only the average Protestant could emancipate himself from this intellectual bondage, the gain to truth would be immeasurable. I do not suppose there is a single man who reads these words who would make light of the religious opinions of a pious mother, but would he allow them to fetter him in the exercise of his own mature judgment? But surely your own mother stands as near to you as men who wrote centuries before she was born. If God spoke to the hearts of men centuries ago, He can and does speak to them now. If He spoke to Isaiah, He can and does speak to you. If your mother's way of stating truth is not necessarily yours, no more is Paul's. The deeper unity of the spirit forbids this blind obedience to the letter. Therefore, knowing quite well what use hostile reviewers will make of this sentence, I close by solemnly adding: Never mind what the Bible says if you are in search for truth, but trust the voice of God within you. The Bible will help you in your quest, just as any good man might be able to help you; but you must judge, test, and weigh the various statements it contains, just as you would judge, test, and weigh the opinions of the best friend you ever had. Nothing can make up for this quiet and assured confidence in the Spirit of Truth within your own soul. If God is not there, you will not find Him in the Bible or anywhere else.



CHAPTER XII

SALVATION, JUDGMENT, AND THE LIFE TO COME

The inwardness of Salvation and Judgment.—We come now to the consideration of a group of subjects which are usually treated in quite separate categories. I mean the punishment of sin, the nature and scope of Salvation, Resurrection and Ascension, Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. The reason why I feel that these subjects ought not to be treated in separate categories is because they are all descriptions of states of the soul and imply each other; they are inward, not outward, experiences. This statement will, I trust, become clearer as we proceed.

So far we have examined pretty thoroughly the nature of sin and its effects in the world, but have said very little as to its penal consequences, and yet the consideration of these consequences has been the determining factor in most of the theories of Atonement, ancient or modern, which have occupied the field of human thought. It is true, as I have said, that the idea of Atonement is not necessarily associated with that of sin, and actually precedes it both historically and psychologically, but it cannot be gainsaid that in Christian thought the desirability of finding some means of escaping or minimising the punishment of sin has tended to overshadow everything else in popular presentations of the Atonement. But what is the punishment of sin, and who administers it? What is the Judgment and when does it take effect? How does Salvation stand related to punishment and judgment? What has Death to do with the matter? What are we to understand by Heaven and Hell, and what is the bearing of either upon Salvation and Judgment? Everyone knows how popular evangelical theology would answer these questions. Sin, we are told, will be punished in a future life by the committal of the impenitent soul to everlasting torment. Salvation is primarily a means of escaping this, and secondarily being conformed gradually to the moral likeness of the Saviour. Judgment is a grand assize, which will take place when the material world comes to an end; Jesus Christ will be the Judge, and will apportion everlasting weal or woe, according as the soul has or has not claimed the benefit of His redeeming work in time to profit by it. Death is the dividing line beyond which the destiny is fixed eternally whether we die old or young. Heaven is the place into which the redeemed enter—whether after death or after judgment has never been clearly settled—there to praise God eternally in perfect happiness; Hell is the place of never ending torment to which unbelievers are to be consigned.

Now it does not require a very profound intelligence to see that popular theology is a mass of contradictions in regard to these things. By eternal the ordinary Christian usually means everlasting; why should punishment be everlasting? The worst sin that was ever sinned does not deserve everlasting punishment, and I have never yet met the Christian who would really and truly be willing to see a fellow-creature undergo it. There is no understandable sense in which justice could demand such a terrible sentence, even if it involved no more than everlasting unhappiness; how much more unthinkable it becomes if the punishment is to be everlasting, fiendish torment! If Salvation is first and foremost deliverance from this punishment, how is it that it does not take effect immediately? Justice would suggest that it ought to do so, for some sinners live a merry life until the eleventh hour, and then give God "the last snuff of the candle" as Father Taylor put it, whereas others repent early but never manage, all through a long life, to escape the suffering caused by their own deeds in youth. In some cases, at any rate, on this side of the grave, Salvation does not involve the least remission of penalty, while in others apparently no penalty will ever be endured either on this side of death or on the other. The poor drunkard who repents does not find that repentance gives him back his wrecked constitution, but the selfish, grasping, cruel-hearted wrecker of homes and lives may just be in time with his trust in the "finished work," and go right home to glory while his victims struggle and suffer on amid the conditions he has made for them on earth. Curious justice this!

Christian thought never quite consistent about Death and after.—There is no need to labour the point; popular evangelical views of the punishment of sin are incredible when looked at in a common-sense way. But they are even more chaotic on the subject of death and whatever follows death. It does not seem to be generally recognised that Christian thought has never been really clear concerning the Resurrection, especially in relation to future judgment. One view has been that the deceased saint lies sleeping in the grave until the archangel's trump shall sound and bid all mankind awake for the great assize. Anyone who reads the New Testament without prejudice will see that this was Paul's earlier view, although later on he changed it for another. There is a good deal of our current, everyday religious phraseology which presumes it still—

"Father, in thy gracious keeping Leave we now thy servant sleeping."

But alongside this view another which is a flagrant contradiction of it has come down to us, namely, that immediately after death the soul goes straight to heaven or hell, as the case may be, without waiting for the archangel's trump and the grand assize. On the whole this is the dominant theory of the situation in Protestant circles, and is much less reasonable than the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, however much the latter may have been abused. But under this view what is the exact significance of the Judgment Day and the physical Resurrection? One would think they might be accounted superfluous. What is the good of tormenting a soul in hell for ages and then whirling it back to the body in order to rise again and receive a solemn public condemnation? Better leave it in the Inferno and save trouble, especially as the solemn trial is meaningless, seeing that a part of the sentence has already been undergone, and that there is no hope that any portion of it will ever be remitted. Truly the tender mercies with which theologians have credited the Almighty are cruel indeed! It is difficult to speak with patience of the solemn, non-committal way in which many present-day theological writers discuss everlasting punishment. Many of them have an "open mind" on the subject, whatever that may be, and warn the rest of us not to dogmatise on the great mystery. It does not seem to occur to them that the Christian fundamental of the love of God renders the dogma of everlasting punishment impossible, for it implies that God will do the most for the being that needs the most, and surely that must be the most unhappy sinner. Others speak of a "larger hope," a second opportunity for accepting divine grace, and so on. But these theories do not meet the case at all. While sin remains in the universe, God is defeated; everlasting punishment involves His everlasting failure. How often we bear preachers speaking about the obdurate human will, which to all eternity may go on resisting good. There are not a few who defend the abstract possibility of everlasting punishment by insisting that it is impossible to coerce the will, and therefore that to endless ages a soul may go on choosing evil and rejecting good. But this is an entirely new argument; it implies that a sinner might choose the good on the other side of death, and that if he does not he continues eternally to pass sentence upon himself, God being helpless in the matter. This is not the way in which advocates of everlasting punishment used to talk. It is a little more hopeful than the conventional dogma, for it makes the sinner to some extent his own judge and executioner, and places stress on the undoubted truth that if a man keeps on doing wrong things he becomes hardened. I have heard this view defended in private by a bishop, who apparently never saw that in adopting it he had given up entirely the orthodox Protestant view that there is no chance for a man after death, and that the thing which determines our post-mortem destiny is not our conduct, but our belief. Repentance at the eleventh hour, however bad the previous life may have been, is, according to the theology of this particular bishop, enough to secure admission to heaven. If, therefore, a power of eternally choosing evil remains on the further side of the great change, surely there is some hope that that power might not continue to be exercised. But if not, what becomes of the whole fabric of popular Protestant theology concerning the plan of salvation, the Judgment Day, and the atoning merits of the Redeemer?

No, this kind of incoherent theologising will not do. No one really believes it, and the churches will have to give up professing to believe it. In our ordinary everyday concerns we take quite a different view for granted all the time, the view that "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap." The harvest may be long in coming, but it comes at last. Neither do we choose our friends on account of their chances of heaven or hell. We like or dislike a man because he deserves to be liked or disliked, and not because he believes something that will get him into heaven. Neither, thank God, do we want to see even the wicked left to the consequences of their wickedness; we want to see them helped to live differently, and it is hardly probable that this impulse of our better humanity will change after death. Love cannot be false to itself; in the presence of need it must of necessity keep on giving itself until the need is satisfied and the victory won.

But if popular theology concerning the last things is untrue, or at least misleading and inadequate, what is the truth? Do we want a different set of terms or not? I think not, but we want a different perspective. These terms ought to be construed as states of the soul, rather than as external conditions. Let me try to explain what I mean.

The true Salvation.—In the first place if sin is selfishness, salvation must consist in ceasing to be selfish, that is, it represents the victory of love in the human heart. This may be represented as the uprising of the deeper self, the true man, the Christ man in the experience of the penitent. We may even go so far as to say that this can come about, and does come about, without any strongly marked feelings of contrition or sudden change of attitude. Wherever you see a man trying to do something for the common good, you see the uprising of the spirit of Christ; what he is doing is a part of the Atonement. In church or out of church, with or without a formal creed, this is the true way in which the redemption of the world is proceeding. Every man who is trying to live so as to make his life a blessing to the world is being saved himself in the process, saved by becoming a saviour. Ordinary observation ought to tell us that untold thousands of our fellow-beings, even among those who never dream of going to church, are being saved in this way. This is the true way to look at the matter. The Christ, the true Christ who was and is Jesus, but who is also the deeper self of every human being, is saving individuals by filling them with the unselfish desire to save the race. It is this unselfish desire to minister to the common good which is the true salvation. I do not mind what name is given to it so long as it is recognised for what it really is; there is no stopping-place between sinner and saviour. This is the way in which men like Robert Blatchford of the Clarion are being saved while trying to save. Conceive how differently such a man might have lived his life. He might have lived it so as to be of no use to anyone, or indeed in such a way as to be a hindrance rather than a help to poor overburdened humanity. It matters comparatively little that this man should think he is destroying supernaturalism and scoffs at the possibility of a future life. His moral earnestness is a mark of his Christhood and his work a part of the Atonement. Not another Christ than Jesus, mind! The very same. Mr. Blatchford may laugh at this and call his moral aspirations by quite a different name. Well, let him; but I know the thing when I see it. This is Salvation.

Conversion.—But in the history of mankind the change from selfishness to love, from darkness to light, from death to life, has often meant something much more pronounced than this. A man may have been living a bad life, and become suddenly impressed by some appeal to his better nature made in the name of God. He may have felt humiliated and distressed by his new-found consciousness of sin. He may have prayed earnestly for forgiveness, and felt that forgiveness has come and that the peace of God has entered into and possessed his soul. He has deliberately and solemnly consecrated his life to Jesus and feels that henceforth he is, as it were, in a new world. This change is rightly termed conversion, a turning round and going right. Such a man may be able to say with St. Paul, "To me to live is Christ," and the words would be literally and grandly true. After this he may go on believing all kinds of things about verbal inspiration, the precious blood, the fate of the impenitent, and I know not what else, but the quality of the new life is always the same; it is dominated by the spirit of love instead of the spirit of selfishness; it is harmony with God. Often this change is very complete and beautiful, but in every case it involves a long and slow ascent to the stature of the perfect man in Christ Jesus. It is no delusion, either, that in the endeavour to live the new life divine help is forthcoming. The Holy Spirit of truth and love is ever present with a child of God to guide him to higher and ever higher heights of spiritual attainment. Without this blessed religious experience, the experience of those who are "called to be saints," this world would be a poor place to live in. I may perhaps be pardoned for adding that in my judgment even the earnest redemptive endeavours of men like the editor of the Clarion have indirectly been made possible by it. Take out of the world what Christian saints have owed to their fellowship with Jesus, and there would be very little of hope and inspiration left. Still, what I want to emphasise here is the fact that, however crude the various theologies may have been in which this experience has clothed itself, it is always the same; it represents the victory of love in the human heart.

Salvation and penalty.—But does this kind of salvation do away with the penal consequences of past sin? If not, what is its relation to them? To answer these questions we must look a little more closely into the nature of such penal consequences. Perhaps it would help to clear up the subject if I were to say frankly before going any farther that there is no such thing as punishment, no far-off Judgment Day, no great white throne, and no Judge external to ourselves. I say there is no punishment of sin in the sense in which the word "punishment" is usually employed. We are accustomed to think of punishment as a sentence imposed by some authority from without and containing within itself some element of vengeance for wrong-doing. But in the divine dealings with men such punishment has never existed and never will. What has already been said in a previous chapter on the subject of pain should help to make this statement plain. We have seen that pain is life pressing upon death and death resisting life. If there were no life, there would be no pain. We may say therefore that pain is life, or some finite expression of the universal life, seeking to burst through something that fetters and hinders it. Apply this to the region of morals and let us see how it works out. If a man has been living for self, he has been making a mistake and preparing for himself a harvest of pain, for sooner or later the divine life within him, the truer, deeper self, will assert itself against the decisive efforts of sin. It is just as impossible for a man to go on eternally living apart from the universal life as it is for a sand castle to shut out the ocean; the returning tide would break down the puny barriers and destroy everything that tends to separate between the soul and God. For, after all, what is our life but God's? To try to keep it for ourselves is like trying to catch and imprison a sun ray by drawing the blinds. To save the self we must serve the All. When, therefore, we remember that the spirit of man and the spirit of God are one, we know of a surety that the infinite life behind the human spirit will assert itself irresistibly against the endeavours of sin to enclose that spirit within finite conditions. The essence of sin is the declaration, "Mine is not thine, and I shall live for mine alone." This is trying to live for the finite; it is enclosing the soul within barriers; those barriers must be broken if the soul is to be saved, and broken they will be just because the deeper self of every man is already one with God. In the stable-yard of my house there was at one time a tree, which was cut down and the place where it grew covered with flagstones and a wall built round it. But the roots of the tree were not removed, and so that buried life has reasserted itself, the flagstones have been shattered, and now the wall is coming down. Here is a figure of our moral experience. A man may go on living for self all through a long career; he may bury his better nature deep underneath the hard shell of materialism and self-indulgence, but it is all in vain; sooner or later, on this side of death or on the other, that buried life shall rise in power and all barriers be swept away. This uprising of the Christ in the individual soul, for such it is, must inevitably mean pain to the man whose true life has been entombed in selfishness. The pain may begin here or on the farther side of the change called death, but it is itself not a mark of death, but of life. The fact that a soul can suffer proves its salvability beyond dispute. An everlasting hell is in the nature of things a contradiction, for the finite cannot eternally bar the way of the infinite reality whose uprising is the cause of its pain; if it could, it would itself be infinite, which is absurd. Sin is essentially the endeavour to live for the finite, the separative, the divisive, as opposed to the infinite, the whole-ward, the All. Which will win in this encounter?

The real judge.—And who, pray, is the Judge? Who but yourself? The deeper self is the judge, the self who is eternally one with God. The pain caused by sin arises from the soul, which is potentially infinite and cannot have its true nature denied. If you go and live over a sewer, you will be ill. Why? Because you were never meant to live over a sewer. The evil therein attacks you, and the life within you fights to overcome it, and in the process you have to suffer. It is just the same with your spiritual nature. You cannot continue to live apart from the whole, for the real you is the whole, and, do what you will, it will overcome everything within you that makes for separateness, and in the process you will have to suffer. This is what the punishment of sin means. It is life battling with death, love striving against selfishness, the deeper soul with the surface soul. It is our own spiritual nature that compels us to suffer when we sin, and there is no escaping the sentence; if we sin we must suffer, for we are so constituted that what sin does, love with toil and pain must undo. No eleventh-hour repentance can evade this issue; in fact, it may be the beginning of it. If we have been treading a wrong road, repentance is turning round and taking the way back. If we have been living a false life, repentance is the beginning of the true, and just in proportion as the false has been accepted, so will the true find it difficult to destroy the lie. You are the judge; you in God. If you have failed to achieve that for which you are here, you will have to achieve it here or elsewhere, and the correction of your failure will inevitably mean pain.

"The tissues of the life to be, We weave with colours all our own; And in the field of destiny We reap as we have sown."

There is nothing horrific about this law of the spirit. In a true and real sense it is our own law; we make it. Being what we are, we cannot let ourselves off. Pain is at once the consequence of sin and the token of our divine lineage. But there is nothing individualistic about this sinning and suffering. All the love in the universe comes to the help of the soul that tries to rise. It will even enter the prison house along with it and accept the cross in the endeavour to hasten the emancipation of the sinbound soul. In fact, it must do so, for as long as there is any sin to be done away, love cannot have its perfect work. This it was which brought Jesus to earth, and this it is which turns every follower of Jesus into a saviour. Love must strive and suffer with sin until God is all in all.

The spiritual resurrection.—It follows from this that the true resurrection is spiritual, not material, and this is the sense in which the word is most frequently employed in the New Testament. In the fourth gospel Jesus is represented as saying, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." This is a great saying, and the writer of this particular gospel meant every word of it in the sense I have just indicated. He makes the eternal Christ the speaking terms of the earthly Jesus and tells us that the uprising of this eternal Christ within the soul of the penitent sinner is the real resurrection.

The resurrection of Jesus.—But this subject of the resurrection demands a further examination. We have already seen how inconsistent popular Christian doctrine is about the matter, and yet Christianity started with the belief in a resurrection of our Lord, a belief which has continued down to the present day. What are we to say about this?

We may as well admit at the outset that the gospel accounts of the physical resurrection of Jesus are mutually inconsistent and that no amount of ingenuity can reconcile them. Matthew speaks of a Galilean appearance, and says nothing about the ascension. Luke says a great deal about the Jerusalem appearances, nothing about Galilee, and tells us that the ascension took place from Bethany. The end of St. Mark's gospel has been lost, and the last few verses are a summary of the accounts in the other gospels concerning the post-resurrection appearances of the Lord. John's version is, of course, less historical than the synoptists, and puts the last appearance at the sea of Tiberias. A minute discussion of the problem thus raised would be unprofitable for our present purpose, but I hope we can take for granted the broad fact that without a belief in a resurrection of some kind Christianity could not have made a start at all. It is almost indisputable that in some way or other the disciples must have become convinced that they had seen Jesus face to face after the world believed Him to be dead and buried. The earliest apostolic utterance on the subject in the New Testament is the familiar passage from 1 Cor. xv: "For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen by Cephas, then of the twelve: After that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time." This statement is clear enough and almost unquestionably authentic. It places beyond doubt what the apostolic church thought of the resurrection of Jesus. The little group of disciples must somehow have become convinced that their Master was not really dead, but alive and reigning in the world unseen, interested as much as ever in the work His followers were doing, and spiritually present with them in the doing of it. This conviction had immediate and important spiritual results. It gave these simple men a new and greater confidence in Jesus and in the power of the life He had lived. They saw that this life was, after all, the strongest thing in the universe. They realised that in the end nothing could stand against them; evil could do it no real harm, for God was behind it. Even before the crucifixion they had looked upon Jesus as the Son of God in a higher and more spiritual sense than that title had been used before, but now henceforth they thought of Him as such in a higher way still. According to Paul He was "declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead." If we try to put ourselves in the place of these first Christians, we shall realise better the effect of the resurrection upon their feelings and behaviour. Let us suppose that we had known Jesus in the flesh, that we had learned to understand a little of the moral and spiritual beauty of the ideal revealed in His life, and that afterward we had seen Him die in blood and shame; I think it would have taken a good deal to convince us that evil had not gained the day. Now suppose after this we had absolute proof—I will not say how—that our Master was still alive, and that His spirit was with us and helping us, would it not make a very great difference to our outlook upon life and our confidence in God? We could not but feel the littleness of the power that had tried to destroy Jesus, and we should not be afraid of it any more. This is precisely what appears to have happened in the experience of these Galileans. Defeat and failure were somehow turned into victory and success; they had seen Jesus again.

Theories of resurrection.—But how are we to account for this new-found confidence of theirs that they had really once more looked upon the face of Jesus? The subject has been discussed so exhaustively that no possible explanation of it has been left altogether untouched. Such a unique event as the raising of a physical body from death is one which the average western mind of the present day would reject as incredible if we had never heard it before, consequently there exists a widespread tendency among liberal Christians to try to account for primitive Christian belief in the resurrection of our Lord in some other way. Thus we have the hallucination theory, the apparition theory, the swoon theory, and others of a similar character. I should suppose that most thinkers who take the point of view of the New Theology would hold one or other of these explanations or some modification of them, but I confess I have never been able to do so. It seems to me that no such explanation of the universally held Christian conviction that the physical body of Jesus actually rose from the tomb is sufficient to account for it. The passage already quoted from 1 Cor. xv is alone enough to illustrate this statement. It is clear that the earliest Christians were absolutely certain that the body of Jesus after the resurrection was the body of Jesus as they had known it before, although apparently it possessed some new and mysterious attributes. In my judgment, also, insistence upon the impossibility of a physical resurrection presumes an essential distinction between matter and spirit which I cannot admit. The philosophy underlying the New Theology as I understand it is monistic idealism, and monistic idealism recognises no fundamental distinction between matter and spirit. The fundamental reality is consciousness. The so-called material world is the product of consciousness exercising itself along a certain limited plane; the next stage of consciousness above this is not an absolute break with it, although it is an expansion of experience or readjustment of focus. Admitting that individual self-consciousness persists beyond the change called death, it only means that such consciousness is being exercised along another plane; from a three-dimensional it has entered a four-dimensional world. This new world is no less and no more material than the present; it is all a question of the range of consciousness. It is this view, the view that matter exists only in and for mind, that leads me to believe that less than justice has been done by liberal thinkers to the theory of the physical resurrection of Jesus. What is the physical but the common denominator between one finite mind and another? It is a mode of language, an expression of thought as well as a condition of thought. Imagine a being free of a three-dimensional world trying to converse with a being still limited to a two-dimensional world, and we have a clew to what I think may have happened after the crucifixion of Jesus. The three-dimensional body would behave in a manner altogether unaccountable to the two-dimensional watcher. The latter, knowing only length and breadth, and nothing of up or down, would see his three-dimensional friend as a line only. The moment the three-dimensional solid rose above or sank below his line of vision, it would seem to have disappeared like an apparition, although as really present as before. To the two-dimensional mind it would seem as though the solid were a ghost. Does this throw any light upon the mysterious appearances and disappearances of the body of Jesus? The all-important thing after Calvary was to make the disciples aware, beyond all dispute, that Jesus was really alive, more alive than ever, and that His murderers had been helpless to destroy Him. When we remember that to the ordinary Jewish mind the thought of personal immortality was anything but clear, and that to many of them death was synonymous with annihilation, we can see how enormous was the change that had to be wrought in the mental attitude of those who had seen Jesus die a violent and bloody death. To see Him return triumphant was the one thing required to counteract their feeling that all was lost, and the best means of demonstrating this victory over death was to enable them to behold Him in the body with which they were already familiar and which they loved so well. For, after all, that body was but a thought-form, a kind of language, a mode of communication between mind and mind; it was no more and no less a thought-form than an apparition would have been, and, from the point of view of monistic idealism, it is no more difficult to believe in the reanimation of a physical body than in the use of any other thought-form to express a fact of consciousness. Here, then, we have a being whose consciousness belongs to the fourth-dimensional plane adjusting Himself to the capacity of those on a three-dimensional plane for the sake of proving to them beyond dispute that—

"Life is ever lord of death, And love can never love its own."

This seems to me the most reasonable explanation of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, and the impression produced by them on the minds of His disciples. Most of my New Theology friends will probably reject it at first sight, but at least it is consistent with the philosophic position assumed throughout this book, and seems to me to present fewer difficulties than any other in face of the New Testament accounts. But no theory of the resurrection of Jesus is absolutely indispensable or of first-rate importance; the main thing to be agreed upon is that Christianity started with the belief that its Founder had risen from the dead in order to demonstrate that death has no power to destroy anything worthy of God. In consonance with this idealistic view of the subject the ascension becomes understandable; it simply means that when Jesus had done what He wanted, the body was dissipated. No doubt primitive Christian thought naively regarded heaven as a place above the sky to which the physical body actually went, and Hades, or the under-world, as the place from which the spirit of Jesus returned to reanimate it before ascending to the abode of the Father. Plainly enough this is what Paul thought about it, but such a conception is now impossible to anyone; it could only exist under a geocentric view of the universe which has long since passed away. But when Paul speaks even about the resurrection of the saints, this is what he means. All the good who have died are waiting in the under-world, the shadowy home of the departed, in a state of existence which is only a sort of dream or sleep compared with that which they have left. From this under-world Jesus returned, "the first-fruits of them that slept." All who believe in Him will do the same sooner or later, will resume their physical bodies, and, like Him, ascend to the world above the sky. But seeing this geocentric cosmogony has been impossible for centuries past, why should we go on trying to squeeze Paul's language so as to mean something else than what it meant at first? Granted that he was right in believing, in company with all the rest of the primitive church, that Jesus showed Himself to the disciples after His crucifixion, what more do we need? Paul's theory as to the resurrection of every physical body is just nonsense in the light of our larger knowledge of the universe and its laws, and we may as well say so.

Paul's mystical view of resurrection.—But we should do Paul an injustice if we were to limit the value of his utterances by his views about the resurrection of the human body. I have already pointed out that Paul employs physical symbols in a mystical way, and in nothing was this more so than in his use of the idea of a resurrection. With him, as with the writer of the fourth gospel, the spiritual resurrection was the uprising, going-forward, issuing-forth, of the Christ or divine man within the soul. When he speaks in this way he allows the thought of a physical resurrection to drop out of sight. Thus he writes: "If we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection." "That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead." "If then ye be risen with Christ seek the things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.... For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God." Even if this last sentence is not Paul's own it has a distinctly Pauline ring. In his maturer thought the great apostle seems to have escaped the limitations of his early Pharisaism. He ceases to speak of the sleep or the under-world, and begins to think of death as the gateway to the immediate presence of his dearly loved Master. "For I long to depart and to be with Christ which is far better." Here, surely, we are listening to the voice of Paul the aged.

The moment we succeed in disentangling ourselves from all literal and limiting New Testament statements about the connection between sin and physical death, the physical resurrection, the distant Judgment Day, and such-like, we find ourselves in a position to appreciate the beautiful spiritual experience in which these very terms become symbols of inner realities of the soul. Till we can do this, New Testament language is sure to be a hindrance to any true apprehension of the moral value of the gospel of Christ. The only salvation we need trouble about is the change from selfishness to love, "We know that we have passed from death unto life because we love." This change is equivalent to a resurrection, the uprising of the eternal Christ within us. It is also an ascension, the uplifting and uniting of the soul to the eternal Father. But such a resurrection and ascension may be preceded by a great deal of pain when the soul is shedding the husk of selfishness. There is no dodging the consequences of sin; that is absolutely impossible. A saviour may suffer with and for the sinner, but the sinner must suffer too. The suffering is not a mark of God's anger, but of his love; so far from salvation being a means of screening us from it, the pain is a means by which the salvation takes effect. It is the true self asserting its dominion over the false. Heaven and hell are states of the soul, and the latter implies the former. It is life that suffers, not death. When a guilty soul awakens to the truth, hell begins, but it is because heaven wants to break through. The aim and object of salvation are not the getting of a man into heaven, but the getting of heaven into him. There is nothing horrifying about the law of retribution, although it is inexorable in its operation. It is an evidence of our divine origin, our own true being asserting itself against the fetters of evil. But it is the Christ that saves us, not the retribution; the retribution only shows that the Christ is there, and that from the Calvary caused by sin, and from the tomb in which the true self lies buried, He will rise in glorious majesty in the soul and unite us in the bonds of love to the eternal divine humanity which is God.

Physical death of minor importance.—It follows from what has now been said that all these familiar terms imply each other, and that death, judgment, heaven, and hell cannot properly be regarded as the "Last Things." They are all here now, here within the soul, just as infinity and eternity are here now. It is not a matter of hither and yonder, but of higher and lower. Physical death is not the all-important event which theologians have usually made it out to be; it is only a bend in the road. My own impression is that when we individually pass through this crisis, we shall find the change to be very slight. It will mean the dropping of the scales from the eyes, and that is about all. The things we have been living for on this side will only profit us in so far as they have gone to the building up of a Christlike character. If a man has been living for false and unworthy ideals, he will quickly find it out; the only possession he can take to the other side of death is what he is. Belief in the atoning merits and the finished work of a Saviour will not compensate for wasted opportunities and selfish deeds; these latter will light the fires of retribution as the soul awakes to its true condition, and then, and not till then perhaps, will the indwelling Christ obtain His opportunity. Nor will the absence of a formal creed shut any good man out of heaven; it is impossible to shut a man out from what he is. What we sow we reap, and we do so just because of what we fundamentally are. Every road to evil ends in a cul-de-sac. Sooner or later every soul will have to learn that it is no use kicking against the pricks; we must learn by the consequences of our mistakes that, being what we are, the children of the Highest, we cannot permanently rest in anything less than the love of God. Salvation and Atonement are just as operative on the other side of death as on this. The blind soul goes on for a while in its blundering selfishness, and the Christ spirit, the spirit of universal love, goes on seeking to win it to the truth. In the end the truth must prevail if only because we shall have to learn that the lie is not worth while.

Evidence for immortality of the soul.—No doubt there are some readers of these pages who profess themselves agnostic or indifferent with regard to the question of immortality, and I am not going to argue with them. It seems to me probable that before very long it will be impossible to deny it. The mass of evidence for the persistence of individual self-consciousness after death is increasing rapidly and is being subjected to the strictest scientific investigation. Men like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge, men whose words are entitled to respect from the point of view of modern science, have publicly admitted the importance of such evidence; before long the scientific world in general will have to take it into consideration. But to me such evidence does not greatly matter, and I know very little about it at first hand. I build my belief in immortality on the conviction that the fundamental reality of the universe is consciousness, and that no consciousness can ever be extinguished, for it belongs to the whole and must be fulfilled in the whole. The one unthinkable supposition from this point of view is that any kind of being which has ever become aware of itself, that is, has ever contained a ray of the eternal consciousness, can perish.



CHAPTER XIII

THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM Of GOD

Order of the subject.—From the consideration of the true significance of such terms as Salvation, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell, we now turn to one which might be thought to occupy a relatively inferior position and to precede them in order of time. But if we have been right in holding that such terms as we have already examined represent states of the soul beginning here and now, we have considered them in their rightful place, for now we have to see how these states of the soul find expression in human institutions. In a word, I wish to devote some space to the consideration of the great subjects of the Church and the Kingdom of God in relation to one another. What is the Church? Where did the idea spring from? What had Jesus to do with it originally? What is the Kingdom of God, and how do the various Christian societies which call themselves churches stand in regard to it to-day? To answer any of these questions we must try to place ourselves to some extent in the intellectual and moral atmosphere of those amongst whom the ideas first arose. Let us take the Kingdom first.

Origin of the idea of the Kingdom of God.—At the time when Jesus came every person of Jewish nationality was looking for the establishment of what had come to be called the Kingdom of God. For many generations the Jews had been a subject race. There had been one brief period of national splendour and prosperity, namely, the reigns of David and Solomon. After generations were inclined to idealise these two reigns, especially the former, and to look upon them as a kind of golden age. David they looked upon as an ideal monarch; they called him a "man after God's own heart," and the imagination of poet and prophet loved to dwell upon his winsome personality. They thought of him as in a special way the king chosen by God, and the Israel of his time as a true kingdom of God, a kingdom of righteousness, peace, and plenty under the favour of the Most High. The real Israel of David's day was far different from this, but compared with the days that followed it was indeed a time of unexampled greatness. A similar tendency to idealise the past is observable in nearly every nation which has entered upon a period of suffering or misfortune, as we can see from the legends about King Olaf and Frederick Barbarossa. But Israel always looked upon herself as in a special way a theocratic kingdom, a chosen of God. At its best this idea was a fine one, one, it led to the thought of a special spiritual vocation for the sake of the other nations of the earth; at its worst it meant the assertion of national privilege and contempt for everything which was not Jewish. After the great captivity in Babylon the Jews were never without a foreign master, and the northern kingdom of Israel disappeared from history. But in quite a remarkable way Jewish poets and preachers united to keep alive the popular belief that God would yet "restore the kingdom to Israel." Hence there grew up a firmly held conviction that God would sometime raise up a prince born of David's line who with supernatural help, and with a strong hand, would drive out the invader and establish a kingdom which should outshine even that of David himself. This was the root idea of the kingdom of God, as we meet it in the New Testament, and as it is described in some of the most beautiful passages of the Old.

The Messiah of Jewish expectation.—As time went on this idea was deepened and clarified and became more and more associated in popular expectation with the advent of the Messianic deliverer whose work it should be to inaugurate it. At the time when Jesus was born this expectation had become very keen. Everyone was thinking of it, from Pharisees and Scribes downward. At the moment the foreign master was the Roman, whose rule, though milder than that of the Ptolemies, was quite severe enough; the people were impoverished and unhappy. What they were looking for was a Messiah, a transcendent but quite human personality of royal descent, who should expel the Roman eagles and inaugurate suddenly and completely an era of peace and prosperity the like of which had never been known before, a true kingdom of God. One extension of this idea was that Israel should replace the Roman empire as the suzerain of all the other nations of the earth. "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall rise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.... And the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on thee. Therefore thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee forces of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought. For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.... The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee, The city of the Lord, The Zion of the Holy One of Israel." This fine passage shows pretty clearly what was the general idea as to the nature of the anticipated kingdom of God. It meant that the Jewish Messiah was to take the place of Caesar and reign with undisputed sway from his capital of Jerusalem.

But we should do an injustice to the subject if we failed to allow for the fact that according to the prophetic ideal this kingdom was to be a blessing to the world, and to abolish all violence and oppression; the kingdom of God was to be a kingdom of universal peace and joy, a kingdom of righteousness based on social justice. It was because of this widespread expectation that the austere preacher, John the Baptist, obtained his hearing in the wilderness of Judea. All John had to preach about was the kingdom of God, which he declared to be near at hand. He believed that he had been sent to herald the coming of the Messiah, and from his words we can gather what people thought about the Messiah: "Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." According to the Baptist, the Messiah would spare no kind of sham or hypocrisy; he would root out and utterly destroy every kind of social evil, no matter what. John insisted that it would be of no use for Jews to imagine that simply because they were descendants of Abraham they would escape this general visitation; hence his words to the Pharisees were particularly scathing: "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" It is clear, therefore, that, in the opinion of the man who has now come to be regarded as the forerunner of Jesus, the kingdom of God was to be an earthly kingdom, was to come suddenly, and was to be inaugurated by a sort of general judgment or clean sweep of all the elements that made for oppression, cruelty, foul living, and pretentiousness of every kind. It had not the remotest reference to a world to come or a Divine Redeemer whose principal duty it should be to suffer and die in order to secure a blessed immortality for those who believed in Him.

Jesus' idea of the kingdom.—How far Jesus shared these ideas at the commencement of His own ministry it is impossible to say, but it seems clear that He was attracted by the moral earnestness of John and wished to associate Himself with those who were looking for a kingdom of God which should mean the establishment and realisation of the moral ideal in all human relations. But at the baptism a purpose long forming in his mind appears to have taken definite shape. He felt Himself called to preach the good news of a kingdom which could begin at once in the heart of any man who was willing to become the instrument of divine love and the expression of the ideal of human brotherhood. He went into the wilderness to think this out and then came back to teach it. I do not think He imagined that it could be realised quickly and easily, but it seems fairly obvious that at first He expected that men would be so glad to hear about it that they would hasten to avail themselves of it. All through His ministry He spoke of little else, and it was because of what He had to say about the nature of the kingdom that His followers were attracted to Him. Hence, too, we have the deathless teaching preserved for us in the synoptical gospels: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.... Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." The meaning of Jesus is perfectly clear and perfectly simple. It is that if a kingdom of universal brotherhood is ever to be realised on earth, it can only come by the operation of universal good will. This has been much too simple for most of the theologians, and so they have endeavoured to twist and torture it out of all recognition. As time went on, however, Jesus came to see that it would not be realised as quickly as even He had thought. Men could not or would not understand; they were looking for a kingdom which should mean plenty to eat and drink, and universal dominion for the sons of Abraham. Even His most immediate followers were unable to divest themselves of this notion, and it is plain enough that they went on hoping even to the end that Jesus would head a revolt and establish a kingdom in which they themselves would hold positions of dignity and importance: "Grant that we may sit, the one on thy right hand and the other on thy left in thy kingdom." The striking rebuke which Jesus administered to these pretensions, by setting a little child in the midst of the jealous men, will never be forgotten while the world lasts. Jesus did believe in an earthly kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy, but it is evident that He would have nothing to say to violence as a means of realising it. He even believed that the kingdom had already come in the heart of any man who was desirous of being at one with God and man and denied himself in the effort to do it: "And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you."

Early Christian idea of the kingdom.—An important fact, which I do not think is generally recognised, is that the first Christians thought almost precisely what the Jews did about the kingdom of God. Most people are accustomed to think of Christianity as having been from the first a religion which had principally to do with getting men ready for the next world. We can hardly think about it apart from ecclesiastical buildings, choirs, baptisms, confirmations, prayers for the sick and dying, and so on. So much have we been accustomed to think of it in this way that the average man reads his New Testament with these assumptions in the background of his mind. But this is certainly not New Testament Christianity. The apostles and their followers believed like the Jews in the sudden establishment of an ideal commonwealth upon earth. This was how they understood the Lord's prayer, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." They did not even wish to separate from Judaism, and it is clear from Paul's letters that there was at one time a great danger that the new faith might become a mere Jewish sect. The Christians differed from the Jews, not in their ideal concerning the kingdom, but in their greater moral intensity and enthusiasm, as well as in their profound conviction that the Lord Jesus was God's chosen instrument for realising this kingdom, and that He would presently return to earth and do it. Any unbiassed reader of the New Testament can see for himself that the primitive Christians lived in hourly expectation that this was what would happen. Of course they also believed in their Master's continual spiritual presence with them, but the dominant thought in their minds was that of a dramatic second coming and the inauguration of a reign of righteousness and universal peace, the making of a beautiful world, something like the Utopia of Mr. H. G. Wells. Nor was this altogether a delusion. If it had been, Christianity would soon have died. But, on the contrary, it lived and grew because of the great truth behind this belief, namely, that the Spirit of Christ working in the hearts of men is gradually producing this ideal kingdom in our midst. If, with this view of the character of early Christianity in our minds, we go afresh to the gospels or to the letters of Paul, we shall find it abundantly confirmed. There is no getting away from it. All the earnestness and enthusiasm of these first Christians were centred upon the belief in the near advent of a divine kingdom upon earth with Jesus as its head. This belief even affected the practice of these early Christians in regard to the disposal of their property. To understand this, let us put ourselves in their place and ask what we should do if we were possessed by the conviction that the whole existing social order might come to an end to-morrow morning or next week, and that after that no child of God would ever want for anything. I think we should be sure to feel that the holding of personal property would not matter much. If, in addition to this, our hearts were filled with a divine enthusiasm, an overmastering love for Jesus and for all our brethren, we should not want to keep anything back that could serve to make anyone happier for the short time that intervened before the glorious coming of the Lord. This was just how the primitive Christians felt. They had no organised economic system; no one was compelled to give anything, but under the pressure of the new spirit they willingly gave everything. What did it matter? they thought; they were only like pilgrims within sight of home, or watchers waiting for the morning.

Origin of the idea of the church.—Where, then, did the idea of the church come from? It is as plain as anything can be that the primary interest of early Christianity was the kingdom of God. It took the conception over from Judaism with a deeper moral content derived from the preaching and the life of Jesus. Its first adherents did not even know that they had a new religion; they only thought they had found the true Messiah, although the Jewish nation as a whole had rejected Him. What they wanted above everything was to see the kingdom come upon earth, and we now know that they were mistaken in imagining that it would be established speedily and suddenly by the visible second coming of Jesus on the clouds of heaven. But seeing that they were thinking of it in this way, how did the church arise and why?

It is doubtful if Jesus ever used the word "church," for the two verses in Matthew in which He is credited with it are probably of late date and point to a time when the ecclesiastical organisation was fairly well established. Still the word itself has an interest and a history of its own apart from its Christian use. The ecclesia, as most of my readers may be aware, was the assembly of the citizens of any Greek city-state. It was the custom for the whole body of the members of a Greek self-governing community to be called together from time to time for the transaction of public business. This assembly was the final authority in matters affecting the communal welfare, and even after the various Greek states became absorbed in the Roman empire this custom was allowed to continue. It was the policy of the Romans to permit a large measure of self-government to their subjects of any alien race, and therefore the ecclesia of any particular city-state continued to be summoned as usual to decide upon matters of local importance. There is a reference to this in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts, where we read that the preaching of Christianity in Ephesus caused a riot which the town clerk—a thoroughly typical town clerk!—succeeded in allaying by reminding the demonstrators that if they had any real cause for complaint, the matter ought to come before the regular ecclesia. This properly constituted ecclesia to which the level-headed town clerk referred was the general assembly of the citizens for the transaction of public business.

It was quite natural that the primitive Christians should have come to adopt this word, and to an extent this very idea, as a convenient description of the new Christian community. After the departure of their Master the Christians held together, and wherever their missionaries went, new communities sprang up, animated by a spirit of loyalty to Jesus and a desire to realise His ideal for mankind. It was quite natural, too, that the apostles should recognise all these communities as being in reality one community for fellowship of faith and love; it was the ecclesia, or assembly, or society of Jesus, the beginning of the church of Christ, as it soon came to be called. There was no elaborate organisation; nothing could have been simpler. Every Christian seems to have thought that as it would not be long before the Master came again, the wise and right thing to do was for His followers to hold together and witness Him to the world, until that great event took place.

Church only exists for the sake of the kingdom.—But how far did Jesus foresee and intend this? It is difficult to say, but his choice of twelve apostles whom He carefully trained to continue His work is evidence that He contemplated the formation of some kind of society to give effect to His teaching. The number twelve points to the probability that He thought of this society as a kind of new Israel, a spiritual Israel, which should do for the world what the older Israel had failed to do, that is, bring about the kingdom of God. I have already pointed out that in my judgment Jesus did not believe, as His contemporaries did, that that kingdom could be established suddenly from without, but held that it could only be achieved by spiritual forces working from within. His ecclesia has lived and grown. It has survived for nineteen centuries, and is likely to survive for many centuries more. It has played a leading part in the making of modern civilisation. But it is no longer a unity, and many different theories exist as to its meaning and worth.

The sacerdotal theory.—Broadly speaking, however, there are two outstanding views as to the scope and function of the ecclesia, or church of Jesus. One is the sacerdotal, and the other is what, for want of a better name, I may term the evangelical. In outline the former is as follows: before Jesus finally withdrew His bodily presence from His disciples He formally constituted a religious society to represent Him on earth. This society was to be the ark of salvation, the "sphere of covenanted grace." Its principal work was to call men out of a lost and ruined world and secure for them a blessed immortality; those who were members of this church, and only they, were certain of heaven. Membership therein was clearly defined; the gateway was baptism. Those who were baptized in a proper way, even though they were unconscious infants, were members of the church of Christ and all others were outside. Within this sacred society souls were to be trained in rightness of living, and, to an extent, made fit for heaven. The Holy Spirit abiding in this society would sanctify the individual members and guide them into all the truth. It is even held that Jesus definitely appointed the way in which this church was to be governed. Its affairs were to be managed by a threefold order,—bishops, priests, and deacons. But here a division has taken place amongst the sacerdotalists themselves owing to the necessity of finding some final authority, some living voice, within this visible society to which appeal in the last resort could be made. Romanists have found this in the bishop of Rome whom they regard as the episcopal successor of the apostle Peter. Devout Anglicans take their stand upon the faith as defined by the first four general Councils, while in administrative matters they regard the bishop as independent. The Greek church also insists upon its autonomy.

This sacerdotal view has exercised enormous influence in Christian history, and I have sufficient of the historic imagination to be able to say that at certain times it has undoubtedly worked on the whole for good. But did Jesus really found a church of this kind? I am quite sure He never thought of such a thing, and historical criticism of Christian origins does not leave the sacerdotalist much to stand on. Jesus appointed neither bishop nor priest, and never ordained that any merely mechanical ceremony should be the means of admission to the Christian society or be necessary to the eternal welfare of anyone. In the early church the bishop or elder was the president of the little Christian society meeting in any particular locality. Primitive Christian organisation was anything but rigid and formal, and was as far as possible from the sacerdotal model. I do not say that the sacerdotal mode of organisation which gradually grew up was wholly mischievous, nor do I say that the primitive Christian organisation would be the best under all circumstances. All I maintain is that in founding His new society Jesus did not ordain any particular form of organisation.

The evangelical theory.—The other view of the meaning of the word "church" to which I have already referred, is that it is the totality of the followers of Jesus. Under this view organisation is a secondary matter. There are many reasons why Christian societies should organise themselves differently from one another. Temperament plays a great part in the matter. But theories of church government have ceased to be the burning questions that they once were. Most sensible men are now satisfied that forms of government matter much less than the kind of life which flourishes in the society itself.

What the church exists for to-day.—But what does the church exist for, using the word in its primitive sense? What ought it to exist for to-day? What is the justification for all the vast number of Christian organisations which exist throughout the world? This is a subject upon which a clear note needs to be sounded, for a great deal of mental confusion exists in regard to it. Two inconsistent views of the work of the church, as well as of the constitution of the church, have come down the ages together and exist side by side in the world to-day. The first is that the chief business of the church is to snatch men as brands from the burning and get them ready for a future heaven. The Fall theory has had much to do with this. The assumption behind it is, as we have seen, that the world is a City of Destruction, as Bunyan calls it. It is a ruined world, a world which has somehow baffled and disappointed God, a failure of a world which, when the cup of its iniquity is full, will be utterly destroyed as a general judgment. When that dreadful day comes it will be bad for all those who are outside the fellowship of Christ, for, like those who have died without availing themselves of the means of salvation, they will be relegated to everlasting torment in the world unseen. This view of the fate of the world as being at enmity with God, and of the duty of the church to persuade as many as possible to believe something or other in order to secure salvation in a future and better world, has been held by sacerdotalists and non-sacerdotalists, Catholics and Protestants alike. It is still implied in most of our preaching and in the hymns we sing. I admit that there is a certain truth in it, the truth that man is constituted for immortality and ought not to live as if this world were all that mattered. But on the whole, it has been thoroughly mischievous, and there is nothing which is acting as a greater hindrance to the spirituality and usefulness of the churches to-day. It is based on an entirely false idea as to the relation of God and the world.

To save the world.—But alongside of this view a far higher and nobler one has been present to the minds of Christians in every century, namely, that the work of the church is to save the world and to believe that it is worth the saving. If what I have already said be true, this is the idea which was in the mind of Jesus when He founded His ecclesia. To Him the purpose of the ecclesia was to help to realise the kingdom of God by preaching and living the fellowship of love. Ever since His day those who have been nearest to Him in spirit have been going forth into the dark places of the earth trying to win men to the realisation of the great ideal of a universal fellowship of love based on a common relationship to the God and Father of us all. This is what Augustine aimed at in his City of God. It was what Ambrose had in mind when he excommunicated the emperor Theodosius for having ordered a cruel massacre of some of his rebellious subjects. It was the ideal of the mighty Hildebrand, grim and arrogant though he was, when he compelled princes to bow their haughty necks and do justice to the weak. It was what Bernard of Clairvaux meant to declare when he defied the cruel and sensual king of France to approach the altar of Christ. Savonarola realised it for a brief moment in Florence, Calvin in Geneva, the Covenanters in Scotland, the Puritans in England, the Pilgrim Fathers in America. They all failed because the world can never be saved by the imposition of ideal institutions from without and by force; it can only be by the spirit of Christ working from within. But to some extent they all succeeded, too, for the world is a better place to live in because of the gradual and cumulative redemptive effort of the Christian ecclesia, the Church of Jesus. On the other side of the ledger we have to set many things that ecclesiasticism has done,—cruel persecutions, infamous tortures, burnings and massacres, devastating wars, and fierce religious hatreds. But these things have never belonged to Jesus; they are the very negation of His spirit. The true church of Christ in any and every age consists of those and those only who are trying like their Master to make the world better and gladder and worthier of God. The word "church" has become so hateful to many because of the admixture of other ideals with this that I sometimes wish something could be done either to get rid of it or to change it for another which shall fully and clearly express what Jesus really came to do. I maintain that the church has nothing whatever to do with preparing men for a world to come; the best way to prepare a man for the world beyond is to get him to live well and truly in this one. The church exists to make the world a kingdom of God, and to fill it with His love. No greater mistake could be made than to estimate the church of Jesus by ecclesiastical squabbles and divisions, or even by Psalm-singing and go-to-meeting talk. Look for the spirit of Jesus at work, and you have found the church too.

Modern industrialism and the church.—Judged by this standard where are the churches to-day? We have seen that the only gospel which Jesus had to preach was the gospel of the kingdom of God; everything He ever said can be included under that head. His Church, or Christian society, or whatever else we like to call it, has no meaning unless it exists for the realisation of the kingdom of God. We cannot state this too strongly. The whole of the other-worldism of the churches, the elaborate paraphernalia of doctrine and observance, is utterly useless and worse than useless unless it ministers to this end. Unless it can be shown that I am wrong in this supposition—and I think that will be pretty hard to do—a fairly good case could be made out for burning down most of the theological colleges in the land and sending the bright young fellows in them to do some serious work for the common good. For it must be confessed, as I said at the beginning, that the churches are to a large extent a failure. We cannot but recognise, for one thing, that our modern civilisation, with all its boasted advance on the past, is still un-Christian. It puts a premium upon selfishness. Modern industrialism is cruel and unjust and directly incites men to self-seeking. The weak and unfortunate have to go to the wall; little mercy is shown to the man who is not strong enough to fight his way and keep his footing in the struggle for existence. We are all the time making war upon one another,—man against man, business against business, class against class, nation against nation. We talk of our freedom, but no man is really free, and the great majority of us are slaves to some corporation, or capitalist, or condition of things, which renders the greater part of life a continuous anxiety lest health or means should fail and we should prove unequal to the demands made upon us. If a man goes under, his acquaintances will pity him for five minutes and then forget all about him. There is no help for it; they cannot do anything else, they have their own living to get. They are like soldiers in the heat of battle; they must not pause to mourn over a fallen comrade or they may soon be stretched beside him. I do not mean, of course, to make the foolish statement that present-day industrialism is unrestrainedly individualistic: thank God it is not that. But the principle of competition still exercises a sway so potent as to stamp modern social organisation as un-Christian. We may just as well recognise that fact and state it plainly. The glaringly unequal ownership of material wealth is anti-social; it is good neither for the rich man nor for the poor, for it is to the interest of every man that the body politic should be healthy and happy. That so large a number of our total population should have to exist upon the very margin of subsistence is a moral wrong. We have no business to have any slums, or sweating dens, or able-bodied unemployed, or paupers. Poverty, dulness of brain, and coarseness of habit are often found in close association. Some amount of material endowment is required even for the development of the intelligence and the training of the moral faculties. Wealth possesses no value in itself; it only possesses value as a means to more abundant life. If there is one thing upon which Christianity insists more than another, it is the duty of caring for the weak and sinful, but at present this duty is only recognised to a very limited extent.

Christianity and Collectivism.—In what I am now saying I am well aware that I have come to a phase of my subject which thousands of my countrymen are stating so clearly and forcibly as to compel attention; but what I want to show is that the present unideal condition of the civilised world is an indictment of the churches and their conventional doctrines. We seem to have forgotten our origin. I have long felt, as I suppose every Christian minister must feel, the antagonism between the Christian standard of conduct and that required in ordinary business life. There is no blinking the fact that the standard of Christ and the standard of the commercial world are not the same. Our work is to make them the same, and to that end we must destroy the social system which makes selfishness the rule and compels a man to act upon his lower motives, and we must put a better in its place. We must establish a social order wherein a man can be free to be his best, and to give his best to the community without crushing or destroying anyone else. In a word we want Collectivism in the place of competition; we want the kingdom of God. Charity is no remedy for our social ills and their moral outcome; the only remedy is a new social organisation on a Christian basis. I do not believe that any form of Collectivism, as a mere system superposed from without, can ever really make the world happy; it must be the expression of the spirit of brotherhood working from within. Neither do I feel much faith in any sudden and cataclysmic reformation of society. The history of Christendom proves that no institution can be much in advance of human nature and survive. Covenanters and Puritans found that out when they tried to make men godly by Act of Parliament; Savonarola found it out when the wild passions of the Florentines, restrained for a brief hour, broke their chains and destroyed him; the Christians of New Testament times found it out when their beautiful experiment of social brotherhood came to an end in the horror and darkness of the break-up of Jewish national life. But at least we can recognise the presence of the guiding Spirit of God in all our social concerns and work along with it for the realisation of the ideal of universal brotherhood. We can show men what Jesus really came to do, and, as His servants, we can help Him to do it. We can definitely recognise that the movement toward social regeneration is really and truly a spiritual movement, and that it must never be captured by materialism. I deplore the fact that, for the moment, the main current of the great Labour movement which, perhaps more than any other, represents the social application of the Christian ideal, should appear to be out of touch with organised religion. This cannot continue, for I observe that the men who lead it are men of moral passion, and often men of simple religious faith. It could hardly be otherwise. It seems to me in the nature of things impossible to sustain a belief in the moral ideal without some kind of belief in God, and assuredly God is with these men in the work they are doing and have yet to do. In fact, the Labour Party is itself a Church, in the sense in which that word was originally used, for it represents the getting-together of those who want to bring about the kingdom of God.

The New Theology and Collectivism.—The New Theology, as I understand it, is the theology of this movement, whether the movement knows it or not, for it is essentially the gospel of the kingdom of God. No lesser theology can consistently claim to be this; systems of belief which are weighted by dogmatic considerations have not and cannot have the same power of appeal. This higher, wider truth, which sweeps away the mischievous accretions which have made religion distasteful to the masses, is religious articulation of the movement toward an ideal social order. This fact ought to be realised and brought home to the consciousness of the earnest men who are labouring to redeem England and the world from the power of all that tortures and degrades humanity and stifles or destroys its best life.

This, then, is the mission of the New Theology. It is to brighten and keep burning the flame of the spiritual ideal in the midst of the mighty social movement which is now in progress. It is ours to see God in it and help mankind to see Him too. It is ours to show what the gospel really is and has been from the first. We shall not suffer the world any longer to believe that Christianity and dogma mean the same thing. Our business is to show that the religion of Jesus is primarily a gospel for this life and only secondarily for the life to come. We have to demonstrate that material things have spiritual meanings, and that wealth has value only as it ministers to soul power. We have to make clear to the world that the reason why we want to lift any man up and give him a chance of a better and happier life here is because he has an immortal destiny and must make a beginning somewhere if he is to reach the stature of the perfect man at last. We believe that faith is the one indispensable qualification for this work, as for any work that is worth the doing, or ever has been worth the doing, in the history of mankind. It is the victory that overcometh the world.



CHAPTER XIV

CONCLUSION

A personal word.—The task which has occupied the greater part of my winter resting time has now been accomplished, as far as opportunity affords. What has been said in these pages is no more than an outline statement of the teaching which has been given from the City Temple pulpit ever since I came into it. There is not a single thought in this book with which my own people are not already quite familiar, and chapter and verse for it can be produced from my published sermons which have been appearing week by week for years past in the Christian Commonwealth and other periodicals. If space had permitted, I should like to have said much more, for necessarily many phases of the subject have had to be left untouched; it has only been possible to deal with those of fundamental importance. For example, I should like to have included some examination of the great question of Miracles, the place of Prayer in Christian experience, and the value and significance of Biblical Criticism. But as it has not been possible to do this I must add a word or two to indicate my position in regard to these matters.

Miracle.—It seems probable that before long we shall see a rehabilitation of belief in the credibility of certain kinds of miracle, and that this rehabilitation will proceed from the side of psychical science. Already there are signs that this rehabilitation is on the way. The power of mind over matter is being recognised for therapeutic purposes, for instance, in a way hitherto undreamed of, and is receiving a large and increasing measure of attention from the medical profession. This appears to me to throw a considerable amount of light upon the healing ministry of Jesus, which, as the late Professor A. B. Bruce has pointed out, rests upon as good historical ground as the best-accredited parts of the teaching. Given a time and a mental atmosphere in which men expected miracles of this sort, and given a personality of such wonderful magnetic force as that of Jesus, such miracles would be sure to happen. That they did not happen apart from such conditions is evident from such hints as the statement that, "He could do no mighty works there because of their unbelief." There are other kinds of miracle recorded in scripture which are not so easily credible, but I am not always prepared to brush them aside as mere childish fancies. As a rule it will be found that they belong to the poetry of religious experience, and that some valuable truth is contained in this particular form of statement. To this order belong the accounts about the horses and chariots of fire on the hillside round about Elisha, the whirlwind in which Elijah ascended to heaven, and Jesus walking on the sea. These accounts are forms in which the oriental imagination is, even to-day, wont to clothe truths too great for prosaic statement; they are poetry, not history, and the western mind ought to make allowance for the fact. Sometimes we can discern in scripture records of an event, which to the stolid western imagination seems utterly incredible, a genuine historical truth. Such, for instance, are the passage of the Red Sea—a stirring and dramatic incident, thoroughly well told—and Joshua commanding the sun and moon to stand still. In the latter case we have two lines of poetry from a book which has been lost, and a comparison with similar poetry in almost any literature gives us a clew to its meaning. The poet represents the old warrior as declaring in magnificent style that the sun of Israel shall not go down, and that day and night shall be alike to him until her enemies are discomfited. Any reader with a shred of sympathetic imagination ought to be able to feel the force of the sentiment which provoked this utterance without either accepting or rejecting it as a literal statement of fact; the best things which have been written in the books of the world are seldom literal and exact statements of fact. It has been well pointed out that myth and legend are truer than history, for they take us to the inside of things, whereas history only shows us the outside.

Prayer.—Prayer is a vital necessity to religious experience, and without it no religious experience has ever existed or ever can. It is not primarily petition but communion with God. Our intercourse with our friends does not chiefly consist in asking them for things! But when communion does become petition, there is a real place for it as well as for the answer to such prayer. It is not too much to say that no true prayer has ever gone without its answer. This is quite consistent with the assertion that prayer does not change God; it only affords Him opportunity. It is impossible to improve on what God already desires for us before we pray, but upon our prayer depends the realisation of that desire. Everything that the soul can possibly need is present beforehand in the eternal reality, and the prayer of faith is like going into a treasure-house and bringing forth from what is contained therein all that the soul needs day by day. Prayer, therefore, cannot be too definite, but it should be as unselfish as the worshipper can make it in order that the highest can operate in response. The same law holds good in this as in all other activities of the soul; selfishness draws away from the source of life, whereas love is instantly at one with infinity. I question whether many people realise the enormous value of definite and systematic prayer; it is the secret of all spiritual power. Everything that we can possibly want is waiting for us in the bounty of God, and what we have to do is to go and take it. "Believe that ye have received them and ye shall have them."

The Bible and the young.—One thing that urgently needs to be done for the young people in our Sunday-schools and various Christian societies all over the world is to issue a series of well-written popular manuals presenting in succinct form the best results of Biblical Criticism. The way the Bible is taught to young people at present is most regrettable, for in after years it leads them to doubt and distrust the very foundations of Christianity. If the teachers only had a little more intelligent acquaintance with the sources of the scriptures, this danger would be avoided and the Bible would become a far more interesting and helpful book both to young and old. At present it is interpreted by many people in a way which is an insult to the intelligence and harmful to the moral sense. Will anyone seriously maintain that the trickeries of Jacob and the butcheries following the Israelitish invasion of Canaan, not to speak of the obscenities which are to be found in so many parts of the Old Testament, are healthy reading for children or a mark of divine inspiration? Is it not time we adopted the more excellent way of facing the truth about the Bible records and presenting what is valuable in such a way as to help and not to hinder the growth of a true knowledge of the relations of God and man?

In conclusion, let me say emphatically that no one but myself is responsible for a single word in this book. Among the many wild and unjust criticisms which have been published concerning my views, none is wider of the mark than that I have borrowed from this man or that in my statement of them. I am not conscious of owing a scintilla of my theology to any living man. In so far as it coincides with anyone else's views I am thankful, for it shows that the same eternal Spirit of Truth is speaking to others than myself. But I hope I may be permitted to say with due humility that in thinking out my position, "I conferred not with flesh and blood." Perhaps some people will maintain that this makes my teaching all the worse, but if so I cannot help it. It can hardly be denied that in its main bearing, to say no more, it is seen to be rising spontaneously in every part of the civilised world. Again, no thinker can ever succeed in completely closing the circle of his system of thought, and I cannot claim to be an exception. But I trust it will be seen that what is contained in this book is at least a self-consistent whole: every arc of the circle implies every other. It only remains to reiterate my conviction that the movement represented by the New Theology is only incidentally theological at all; it is primarily a moral and spiritual movement. It is one symptom of a great religious awakening which in the end will re-inspire civilisation with a living faith in God and the spiritual meaning of life. If what I am trying to do can contribute in any way toward this grand result, I shall be humbly thankful to the Giver of all good.