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THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION SERIES VOLUME II
RECONCILIATION AND REALITY
BY
W. FEARON HALLIDAY, M.A.
THE SWARTHMORE PRESS LTD.
(Formerly trading as Headley Bros. Publishers, Ltd.)
72, OXFORD ST., LONDON, W.I.
1919
PATRI MEO
CUIUS PER QUANTUM AMOREM
ISTAM SCIVI CHARITATEM
SUPEREMINENTEM SCJENTIAE.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
I. THE GREAT HUMAN NEED
II. TRADITIONAL THEORIES
III. MASS-JUDGMENTS AND AUTHORITY
IV. THE DOCTRINE OF GOD
V. PERSONALITY AND GOD
VI. THE MORAL ORDER AND THE MORAL
LAW
VII. PROVIDENCE
VIII. SIN
IX. WRATH AND PUNISHMENT
X. SALVATION
XI. THE NEW NATURE
XII. THE METHOD OF SALVATION
XIII. CHRIST AND HIM CRUCIFIED
XIV. THE MEANING OF THE CROSS
XV. WAS IT NECESSARY FOR CHRIST TO DIE?
XVI. THE CROSS IN THE HEART
XVII. THE CROSS IN THE WORLD
THE central problem of Christianity is Reconciliation or Atonement. What is here attempted is to find a doctrine of Reconciliation and Atonement which gives a rational explanation of our religious experience and does no violence to our moral sense. It is also hoped that some who in their hearts have desired Christ, but who have been hindered by mental difficulty, may along the lines indicated in this book come to find assurance and peace.
My main object is to write out as clearly as I can that theory of Reconciliation which enables me to understand my own religious experience. If my experience is a true one, and my analysis correct, it will help those who have had the same experience, and who are confused by theories which to them are inadequate. I have criticized such theories and submit my own now to criticism only with the desire to get at the truth and with the confidence that on subjects so profound diversity of opinion may well exist without breaking the fellowship of those who, as redeemed by Jesus Christ, love Him in incorruptness.
This book would never have seen the light had it not been for the persuasion of several friends who are convinced that the position here occupied is vital, and in particular necessary as the basis of a living Christian ministry for these days.
My acknowledgments are due to the Rev. Dr. Maclagan, the Rev. N. Micklem, M.A., and the Rev. F. W. Armstrong, M. A., for giving many valuable suggestions, and to Dr. Oman for the help and inspiration of his writings, and for much that I have learned from him personally.
I cannot omit to mention also a friend, who typed my MS., and made many helpful criticisms, but who desires to remain anonymous.
I have to make an acknowledgment of deep indebtedness to Dr. Skinner. Many influences go to form a man's mind, and while Dr. Skinner no more than the friends already mentioned is directly responsible for any opinions here expressed, there is very little in this book which is of value which has been unaffected by the profound personal and religious inspiration which he has given, as both teacher and friend.
W.
F. H.
THAT there is a great human need requires no proof, in face of the fact that each generation seeks a satisfaction which it never fully finds in earthly things. Indeed the tragic thing about life in general is that men do not even seem to get the satisfaction which earth might afford; life has to be understood before it can yield its true joy. It is therefore necessary to analyse man's need, in order that it may be rightly interpreted.
Men are often hypnotised into states of'mind which are unnatural, and into thinking that they believe what no free man ever could believe because he never could be convinced of it. Organised society and organised Christianity in various lands are unconsciously public hypnotists. Thus it is that as a rule a man's thought and creed, when he is adult, are determined by the influences that surrounded him in youth. The dogmas which the Church has proclaimed have continued in their present form more because of this hypnotic tendency than because of. anything else, and many ministers could testify with what travail of soul they were born into the place of freedom, and realised that no dogma could be of God unless it were true, nor of salvation to them unless they could themselves see it to be true. One of the great purposes of true religion must be that men should stand upon their own feet, that their belief should be the outcome of their own convictions and held in the light of the whole of their experience. To beliefs which were life to the past we should never assent, unless they mean life at the present moment; and therefore no doctrine of God or reconciliation is adequate which does not satisfy the honest demand of the human soul.
What then is this demand? Is it not for permanent fellowship with man and with God? We have only to ask the reason of most of earth's sorrows to prove this. The deepest sorrows of life are personal, and are relative to the attitude of persons to persons. They come from the sense of personal injury or through personal loneliness; thus their source is lack of fellowship. The deepest instinct of the human soul is for fellowship as against isolation; solitude is the symbol of death. Our truest joys all spring from fellowship or are a condition of it. There are all kinds of joy in life,—the joy of health is the joy of a potential activity which would have no meaning in a solitary world; the joys of success and attainment have a personal reference to ourselves, our place or power in relation to our fellows, and therefore involve fellowship. In the measure that they do not, we fail of real joy. There are successes which isolate, and which bring sorrow in the isolation, victories which are defeats and gains which are losses, triumphs to which our hearts never consent, and achievements which leave us unsatisfied. When we look back upon our lives with the question: "What were the moments of true joy in them?" it is of humble and selfless moments that we inevitably think,—when, it may be, we felt another's sorrow as our own, and so brought comfort, because we were identified with the suffering; or when we went out of our way to help a little child who never dreamed that we would stoop; or when, resisting the voice of pride and self-importance, we took stand against ourselves for truth, and in that hour swept all the enmity from another heart, and healed the wounds of injustice; or perhaps when we ourselves were in perplexity, surrounded by a host of temptations and the call of many voices, but listening to the still small voice and answering "Not my will, but Thine, be done," we rose by that submission as into a larger world, and knew that in the midst of things that pass there is that which never dies,—these and such-like are the moments of our truest joy. Our great need therefore is for fellowship, that we in simple truth should dwell in souls that are worthy to be loved, and become ourselves also worthy to be loved; that as we look up into the great empty spaces of heaven, the symbol of the illimitable voyage that we have to travel when this world shall have cast us off, we may realise that they are not empty, for we are known and understood by the Unseen. In a word, is not our ultimate need that we should experience that love which is eternal?
We look upon our little children who live in our hearts more than they know, and can we bear the thought that time shall wither our joy, and that never again after the few short, struggling years shall we walk with them in Elysian fields? It is useless to reply: "But they soon also shall be old." Time never alters the great ties of life, neither does it reconcile us to the view that nothing is permanent but change. The sense of loyalty itself is the demand in the soul for permanence. And surely this is abundantly clear as we think of any of those friendships which have involved a selfless fellowship in the good. It is not the poet only but every human heart which says: "The best is yet to be." But who shall tell us where to find the answer to this riddle, if the answer is not in the very heart of things and in the God who made us, and if behind this struggling, suffering, toiling world there is not an eternal purpose of love unfolding with the years? Therefore must any right view of reconciliation reveal to us a God so glorious, and so rich in the things which alone can make humanity great, that, as we understand and yield to Him, the fever of our minds is assuaged, and into our hearts steals peace.
There is the question that arises when we are
"as
a man set down
In some strange jeopardy of enormous hills,
Or swimming at night alone
upon the sea,
Whose lesser life falls from him, and the dream
Is broken
which had held him unaware;
And with a shudder he feels his naked soul
In the great black world face to face with God."
This experience involves two questions, which yet are really one, in a man's mind: the question of the meaning and end of all life and the question of the meaning and end of his own life awakened, as he now is, by the voice within his own soul which calls him to some better state than he has yet attained.
What commonly happens under these circumstances is that a man despairs of finding the way out; he shrinks from seeing himself as he knows himself to be; he puts himself off with excuses, or says to himself " To-morrow I will think." And if he be not in close touch with any organised church, and be not in the hypnotic condition of those who never examine any traditional beliefs, he excuses himself because of the difficulty and the mystery of the problem, and, it may be, contends that the contradictory beliefs of various Churches and religions may well be left to annihilate each other. But this a man says at peril of his manhood, for by truth alone man lives. There may be, it is true, some men of high intuitive moral principle who, despite failure, still cherish and strive after their ideal, but as a rule, past failures cloud the spiritual vision, and as the apprehension of life's high and noble purpose fades, unconsciously a soul degenerates, and each failure makes the next more easy. Even when a man retains ideals lofty and righteous, according to accepted standards, yet respectability is likely to take the place of morality, pride and self-laudation are apt to grow with years, contempt for those who have not been as fortunate or as strong mars his outlook on life. The public virtues have not been violated, but the real joy of life has failed.
Further, there is the man who, having been brought up in a Christian atmosphere, is yet in conscious bondage to sin. If it is a question of what are called the ordinary vices, he may have a real thirst for freedom, but if by freedom he means only the power to be superior to drink, or lust, or temper,—respectability, in fact,—the result is that should he through any religious help gain either a temporary or permanent victory over certain vices, he thinks his problem solved, though in character he may be little better than he was, no humbler, no nobler, and no more sympathetic, He has availed himself of conventional Christianity as a refuge from conventional contempt, but he is not truly reconciled to man and God in. the fellowship of life. There are persons also of another type who feel the bondage and misery of sin, and who, behind their desire for freedom, have nothing of mere conventional regard. The cry of their souls is honest and instinctive. Their sense of misery even makes them sympathetic; they refuse to be hypocrites and to cast stones at other people. They hardly know the meaning of that real freedom which they desire, but their hearts cry out against the aimless hopelessness of life.
There are yet others brought up within the sphere of Christian influence and in the acceptance of traditional beliefs, who find that as their reflection deepens the more uneasy grow their hearts. The best that is in them criticises the Christianity which they know; for the God presented to them in current theory is repugnant to their secret moral sense. It may be that some of the things against which they have had the hardest struggle in their lives are connected with hereditary tendencies, or are things into which they fell through ignorance. They know in their hearts that only part of the responsibility is theirs, and they cannot reverence a God who should think it a mercy to free beings from a bondage which is not of their own making, and who is not willing or able to fulfil the obligations under which He laid himself to men by being their Creator. It is plain that the need of these people is for a new and truer view of God.
There are others who regard the churches as a refuge from fear, and church-goers as those who flee thither with no higher ambition than to save their own souls. It appears to them that the poor have often a greater sense of common humanity than those who gather at the table of the Lord. This current misconception represents a genuine failure in the theology of salvation as well as in Christian conduct.
The needs here outlined spring from failure in life's fellowship, and they can only be satisfied by the soul being made worthy of true fellowship and capable of understanding its meaning.
A right view of the Atonement must truly answer to all these needs. It must help the man who is lost to find his way, —nay, it must reveal the Good Shepherd finding him in the way. It must come to those in bondage and break their bonds, bringing them into the bondage of a love which is freedom. It must come to the man who is tired of himself and of his failures, and deliver him from himself as well as from his failures, by satisfying his highest demand, namely to be free from all self-regard. It must come to the man who feels that he has claims on God, as well as God on him, and cause him to reverence God because He is true, and to worship God not because He is free from obligations but because He meets His obligations, and also because He helps the humble and the honest to meet theirs. It must come to the man whose soul revolts against a selfish idea of salvation, showing him that true salvation involves all the selfless heroisms of life, and answers to all that is noble in the human soul. And to all it must come to give new meaning to life; it must be related to all that is good and true and legitimate, and in the light of its own truth, it must make life certain, assured, and joyous.
IT is not uncommon to hear men say that they have no satisfactory theory of the Atonement, but that some theory is needful to account for the facts of religious experience, for the Church's history is seen to show a real experience of reconciliation with God issuing in a new manhood, with a new attitude to life's task and a new desire after human good.
There has been much diversity of opinion about the nature of Paul's experience on the Damascus road, and as to the rationality of his views on reconciliation; but doubt there is none that the man himself was gloriously changed, and that not only in opinion but in character; Saul the Pharisee, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the Church became Paul the humble, selfless follower of Christ, sharing that love which suffers long and is kind, is never proud, never resentful, never violent, but which hoping all things and enduring all things never fails. It is evident that he had passed from death unto life. Similar has been the experience of Augustine and of Luther and of many others, the evidence of whose reconciliation we cannot doubt, but whose theories of Atonement do not satisfy us. But no criticism of their formulas can blind us to the reality of that spiritual world in which they came to live. We see depths in their experience which all their theories do not explain; yet they walked by a simple childlike faith. Thus we realise on the one hand that men are and have been reconciled to God and God's world, and on the other that many of the views which these people thought they held, and which they gave to explain the secret of their change of life, seem powerless to produce the same change in the men of to-day.
The reason for this is not far to seek. The language by which men have tried to explain their religious experience has naturally been symbolic; the symbols have been drawn from the life and institutions of bygone ages, from days of slavery and ransom, of sacrifice and the shedding of blood. Now a symbol may be a true symbol or an arbitrary symbol. For instance, "Father" is a true symbol of God; for in the very nature of things fatherhood is a condition which determines our view of and relationship to life; "King" is an arbitrary symbol, because kingship is an arbitrary and not necessary phenomenon in history. Even if it were argued that it is necessary, history proves that it is passing, and therefore it is not fundamental but empirical. Now we have to consider whether the symbols under which men try to express their deepest experience are true or arbitrary symbols, and further, what is the truth which these symbols are intended to convey. The failure to do this is the reason why many theories cease to convince the mind. The customs and form; of government of one age are often inadequate for the next, and theological constructions based on them cease to appeal to an age whose thought has transcended them. Most of the theories of the Atonement may be classified under three heads, (a) substitutional, (b) representational, and (c) moral influence.
(a) SUBSTITUTIONAL views of the Atonement are based on the idea that we are saved because Christ suffered our penalties and our deserts for us. Such views have obviously grown out of primitive theories of sacrifice, and call us back to ages in which the moral sense was not thoroughly awake. Underlying the sacrificial cult lay the idea that God inexorably demands the death of the body as the price of sin, and can be satisfied only by the shedding of literal blood. In face of such a view we are entitled to ask "Why?" But no answer is possible except upon the view that God's attitude to men is an arbitrary and legal one, and that He avenges all trangressions of His commandments by arbitrary penalties which have no necessary relation to the transgression or to the motives or disposition which lay behind it.
But further, when in the Substitutional view it is held that Christ died instead of us, we are entitled to ask whether it is moral and right that one man should undergo death as a penalty for another? That the suffering of the innocent should be taken in itself in lieu of the suffering of the guilty is self-evidently immoral. There is in this, moreover, no logical implication that the evil man is changed; he goes scot-free, and plainly does not get what he deserves. The human judge who so acted would rouse the indignation of any modern civilised community. Such a practice does obtain in China. But to do pagan China justice, one member of a family may be apprehended when the guilty member cannot be found, because according to primitive idea the family is regarded as the unit. In a land or age where such ideas are common property, theories of substitution may naturally arise and be intelligible; but they have lost meaning for many thousands to-day because the development of the moral sense has made the old ideas obsolete.
Substitutional theories also involve an impossible relation within the Godhead itself. The Father views man in a way different from the Son, and in the end God has to regard Himself as accursed in order to appease Himself, The result of this is that Christendom has had two Gods, or two irreconcilable aspects of one God. One is stern and legal, and the other is kind and redeeming. Men have therefore taken refuge in Christ from God, instead of realising that Christ came to save them from themselves for God.
It appears then that the language of the old sacrificial system involves an arbitrary, not a true symbolism; but, if the blood be taken to mean the life of a person, which life is yielded to love's demand, in the realisation that only by personal self-giving can man awaken the spiritual nature of his fellows, then it is not hard to understand both the appeal of the old language to men of deep experience, and the truth that underlies it.
These considerations of a general character give some reasons as to why modern men are not more affected by the teaching about the Cross.
Similarly, we may say, the modern mind instinctively rejects many theories which come under the head of
(b) REPRESENTATIONAL THEORIES, which are to the effect that Jesus Christ saves humanity by representing it. The representational theory is founded on the idea of the unity of humanity. Christ is held to represent human nature in perfection; what He does humanity does in Him; what He renders to God humanity renders through Him. According to the strict theory Christ represents the whole of humanity; but in fact His representation is usually limited to the body of believers.
It is true that humanity is a unity, but it is not one in the sense that a man is one. It is a unity of similarity; not of identity. It is a unity in virtue of reason, but that the person and not humanity is the fundamental reality is proved by the fact that reason has to be exercised by the person, and responsibility ultimately lies at the door of the personal will. It is necessary to distinguish between an abstract and a concrete unity. When humanity is spoken of as a unity in virtue of reason, the unity is abstract because reason has no existence apart from the activity in thought of the individual person. The living person is the concrete and therefore the real unit. When this is perceived the ground is cut from all realistic theories which imply the imputation of guilt because of the solidarity of the race. Such constructions are the outcome of loose thinking.
It is true that Christ is potentially the Saviour of all, but the question still remains,—how? Like all other theories which have held the field this contains truths, even though as a theory it is invalid.
The reason why the moral sense is dissatisfied with representational views of the Atonement is that before God no man can represent another. Such expressions are purely metaphorical and derive from the familiar fact that in ordinary human affairs one man may and does represent another. The difference between the religious view and the political is that in religion every man stands alone before God, but in the political view every man is a member of a community and is treated as such. It is easy to see how in politics one man must represent another, but it does not take much thinking to realise that such representation is a very superficial matter. No political representative ever did or ever could really represent all the various views and tendencies of those who voted for him. He stands for a few things in which common agreement is supposed to be found. But unless he is true to himself in that representation there is something not morally right, and, in the measure that he truly represents other people, he asserts that their convictions are identical with his, and he does so for practical reasons, for it is impossible that Parliament should be composed of all or the majority of the nation.
But such an idea of representation before God is unthinkable, for God knows what every man's convictions are, and, being freed from the partial limitations of our system of communications, He needs no one to tell Him what men think and what they are. Each man stands before Him in the naked light of reality. It is therefore clear that while Jesus Christ can represent God to us, if God be in Him, it is another thing to say that He represents us to God.
It is maintained by Dr. Forsyth and others that Christ, as the Perfect Man, represents humanity in a realistic sense, as if humanity were more than the sum-total of the individuals who could finally compose it. " You can never compound a saved world out of any number of saved individuals. But God did so save the world, as to carry individual salvation in the same act. The Son of God was not an individual merely; He was the representative of the whole race, and its vis-a-vis on its own scale." ("The Work of Christ," p. 116.)
Now it is one thing to say that Jesus is what every man should be; it is another thing to say that He can represent men before they are like Him. If He represents men who are different from Him, then He does not represent them, because they are different. And if He, the perfect Man, represents those who are like Him, then they need no representation, for they stand before God in their own perfection. Here again we have the schema of a human society forced upon ultimate Reality.
Another form of this theory is that of vicarious penitence. It is held that as there can be no forgiveness and reconciliation with God without repentance, so we cannot be forgiven and reconciled unless due confession of our sins is made, and that Jesus, being identified with us, expressed such penitence for our sin as was commensurate with its evil and God's wrath against it; thus Christ, representing humanity, made a perfect moral and spiritual atonement. It is first to be noticed that sin and penitence are here both regarded as quantities, and the latter has to be commensurate with the former. In a succeeding chapter it will he shown that such quantitive ideas are not truly representative of spiritual things, but contenting ourselves for the moment with this passing comment, we have to ask: "Is a vicarious penitence morally possible?" And the simple answer is "No." The idea rests on a false theory of representation. Sin is a state of soul; repentance is a judgment which comes from a changed state of that same soul, and there can be no repentance apart from that awakening change. Christ's confession of the world's sin can effect nothing unless the world itself is changed, and confesses its own sin. To say that God could be satisfied with Christ's confession of our sin is to say that God is blind to the simple reality that everything hinges on whether sinners are or are not repentant. If they are so, they are forgiven; if not, their sin remains. Further, this whole type of thinking supposes a corrupt moral nature in God, for He accepts penitence from a person Who has nothing to repent of in lieu of the penitence of those from whom reality demands it, which is morally impossible.
This
kind of thinking is plausible, and attractive to many minds, because Christ,
identifying Himself with us through the identification of love,
found that our sins were His burden and agony, which is simple fact,
and also because
His attitude to our sin is calculated to awaken in our own hearts a
true attitude to our sin. But these real elements of truth fall outside any
strictly representational scheme, and cannot save the theory from moral
criticism. [It must be said that if the foregoing arguments
are rationally founded, it will not do simply to retort that the Early
Church believed in Substitution
or Representation. The scope of this book precludes an exhaustive treatment
of this point, but it is necessary to say two things, (1) It is very
doubtful
indeed if the Old Testament sacrifices will bear a substitutionary
interpretation, and (2) While in the New Testament there are many passages
which seem to support the substitutionary or representational ideas,
yet there are many which do not, and that therefore we must differentiate
between
the experience of the early Christian Church and its theological expression.
It would seem that we have dropped into a vice of over-minuteness.
No one, when deeply realising his utter obligation to God in Jesus
Christ,
Who
loved him and gave Himself for him, would be likely, when giving expression
to
his soul about this fact, to utter it in any other words than such
as would involve " a life for a life." But neither would
this person be thinking for a moment that theologians would afterwards
sit down and, with mechanical theories of inspiration and with great
books on the grammar of the New Testament, dissect each sentence. As
well might the nightingale think of the scientist who, regardless of
the beauty of the song, was counting the accompanying sound-vibrations!
But further, it is utterly unreasonable to suppose that the thought-forms
of that day are the final forms of all thinking. It is true that the
experience may, and does, touch what is ultimate; that is another way
of saying that it may be true for all men. But the forms in which it
is expressed must necessarily be related to the mental heredity of
those who express it, and to the religious and social and political
environment in which they live. To realise this fact is not in the
least to despise these old forms of expression, much less to regard
the experience as being untrue, but it is to realise that we cannot
dispense with a belief in the presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit,
for at every stage of life it is evident that God shuts us up to Himself,
and that the truth by which men can live depends upon His living presence.
For, after all is said, true religion itself involves personal communion
with God; it is a working together with God in life, whether we think,
or feel, or act. It is not possible to have true religion apart from
this " rapport " out of which all true intuitions spring.]
(c) There is a third great basal theory which is recognised under the
heading of "Moral Influence," or "Inspiration." Justice
is seldom done to this theory, which holds that Jesus Christ is Saviour
in virtue of
His character, and not because of the metaphysical nature of His person.
Jesus is a perfect and inspiring example of a life reconciled to God,
manifesting a perfect love and obedience which unveil and oppose sin.
All this is true,
but
the opposition with which these theories are met seems to be based
upon a conviction expressed or implied that example, or knowledge which
may
arise
from it, are powerless to effect salvation. Many of the criticisms
on this theory seem to be unfair, being based on arbitrary views of
the
world as
a judicial system, but the criticisms which are founded on the impotence
which sin creates and which makes a perfect example inadequate to save
men who need a fundamental change not only of thought but of personality,
are
better founded. It will perhaps be realised in time that these theories
may be so developed that what the religious consciousness of their
authors is
striving to express may through a deeper view of personality be seen
to be adequate: for the holders of all these theories are seeking to
find
a rational
and living solution.
III. MASS-JUDGMENTS AND AUTHORITY
That the criticisms on the foregoing theories do not affect the truth which they seek to express will never be perceived until the nature of personality is understood. It is true that each person's place before God must depend upon what that person actually is, and especially upon the attitude of the mind and heart, but it is also true that personality is neither static nor independent, but is dynamic and dependent, and it is therefore important to remember that in all true judgments of persons, not only what they are and have attained must be considered, but also the direction in which their faces are turned, and the purposes and affections upon which their personalities are forming.
(a) In all religious thinking Mass-judgments are apt to be a snare and a delusion; for entities like "Humanity" and "Church" and "Nation" have no meaning and no reality apart from the persons who compose them. To God humanity is not a mass but a family of souls; and He would be less than a Father if He could be satisfied with any-thing less than individual touch with each. No theory of Atonement therefore is adequate which represents the work of Christ as a cosmic act of saving value to humanity apart from its meaning to the individual soul.
Politicians and jurists deal, as they must, with men in the mass; but their concern is not with that which fundamentally matters in man; their demand is right action; with right intention they are only concerned in so far as they must distinguish crime from accident. But intention and motive are the proper concern of religion; thus the man whose intentions are evil or whose motive is fear of outward consequences may continue to the day of his death a respectable citizen; but a religious man he never is. Hence the fatal and widespread misunderstanding that arises when theologians talk of humanity in the mass after the manner of the politicians. Again the religious method is essentially different from the political. For as their ultimate power the laws of Society have behind them force and constraint. This must necessarily be so in any system where men are dealt with in the mass, and where the power to alter the convictions and motives of persons is lacking. But the task of true religion is to create a society which is above legalism, because the persons who compose it, having the law written in their heart, need no compulsions to do what is right. We have therefore to be on our guard, when in our consideration of the attitude of God to man, lest we depose God from the throne of His true power, and lest, forgetful that He rules persons from within by the constraints of the moral sense and compulsions of love, we regard Him as an almighty Magistrate, careful of outward forms, outward sanctions, and external satisfactions.
(b) In the current ideas of authority lies a further source of much false thinking in theology. Two extremes are presented to us, legalism and licence; and of these it is difficult to know which is the worse. What then is Authority? Is it a power which we are forced to obey, or which we ought to obey? Unless we hold that might gives right, we cannot hold that mere power involves real authority. To hold that a true authority is that which men ought to obey without conviction, is to treat people as slaves and as means to an end which can never be their personal self-realisation, and therefore to do great disrespect to personality. Conviction must be a necessary element in real authority. It may be said that for working purposes in life there must often be authority which does not carry the convictions of the persons commanded. This is perfectly true of state process, but not of religious authority. For we cannot suppose that a deed is really good when it is performed only under external compulsion; motive and disposition are the real meaning of an action, and these are the concern of religion. Men cannot be forced to be religious, because religion comes through the awakening of the soul; and the soul is awakened and impelled by what it is convinced is true and right. But further, true religion must involve the whole man; it cannot be departmental unless there is no unity in God's relation to the Universe. Therefore a man's rational nature must come into it, and he must believe, not merely because he is told to believe, but because he cannot help it,—because indeed the thing which he believes has captured him. It is evident, therefore, that there are two elements in authority, there is an objective and a subjective element, and it is only in the union of these two that there is found a real authority. The call of God must appeal to the nature of the soul, it must prove its authority by evoking the soul to its own true life. No belief in God is truly founded which simply accepts "The Lord saith" of any priest. [When we speak of the authority of God, we must be very careful as to what we mean. We can only say that anything that God commands is binding when we implicitly define God as perfectly good, as All-wise and All-loving, who never ceases to regard the good of everything that He has made. The God who is a respecter of persons, such a God as has taken the throne so often in organised religion, is an immoral person who, we may be thankful, does not exist. But on the other hand, we cannot be sure that anything is a command of God unless it evokes in us the conviction that to obey it will help to bring a higher common good to all, as well as help us individually to rise in true nobility of soul above self-seeking. And a God who at the last day would condemn us because in humble honesty we adhered to this conviction, would be less worthy of respect than some of the creatures whom He has made.] A very important result follows from this, that in religion a man can own no authority which does not compel his conviction. Hence to consent without conviction to what others believe, or to a system of doctrine because it is hoary with age,or to recognise any priesthood or order of men without realising the spiritual necessity and present spiritual authority of such is a form of slavery. Into such slavery organised religion has often led men, but, from such, true religion would free them.
On the other hand, one of the great dangers of the present time is an individualism which has no other idea of authority than that of caprice. This is as irrational as it is irreligious, but to understand why this is so involves an understanding of personality in its true nature. It has been shown that there can be no true authority apart from personal conviction, and that this conviction comes from the fundamental capacity of the soul to perceive truth as true. It follows that while truth is of all things the most independent of us, we must have the capacity for seeing that it is true before we can realise ourselves in truth, and further since truth is a unity, and the real ground of human unity, we find, when we get deep enough, that there is what is universal in personality as well as what is individual or idiosyncratic. That this is the case is proved by the fact that there is knowledge at all, for knowledge involves truth of which all can be convinced. If there be two clusters of thirty grapes upon a branch it can be proved to all rational men that there are sixty grapes in all, because thirty and thirty make sixty to every man. Our capacity for knowledge is a capacity for knowing what is, quite apart from what we wish might be. Men may and do have individual opinions on questions upon which there are not sufficient data to judge; even so, the very fact that men are a community, living in States, and asserting that there are rights and duties which all men should acknowledge, proves that in the very nature and capacity of personality there is a common and universal element. To this it will be answered: "How then is there so much division, disunion and disagreement its the world?" The reply to this involves a philosophical digression.
Man is distinguished from the animals by a power to think in abstractions (general notions), by an affection which is capable of universal sympathies, and by a power to act, not merely for instinctive self-preservation, but in order to carry out the aims of a rational foresight in the endeavour to bring all mankind into a fellowship of life and service It is only these higher aims which regard a man as part of the fellowship of life, that appeal to the conscience with authority. For only those things have authority which, if they failed to be carried out, would make the life of the world inharmonious or impossible.
The difficulty which has to be explained is, why the good is not universally approved, and why the individual, playing for his own hand, both wrecks himself and injures the community. The answer is that human personality is not created perfect in wisdom or goodness, but is gradually realised and developed through rational and spiritual and practical attainment. But the contention here is that every man denies the line of his true development unless he walks the road of conviction, and is open and humbly sincere in his judgments. Such judgments would always be right in intention though they might be wrong owing to lack of knowledge; this lack, however, experience would reveal and honesty would correct. But without the motive and disposition for a selfless good no progress could be made, and no principle of correction could be found.
It is necessary however, to realise, that what is true is more clearly apprehended in some spheres than in others, because in some spheres it is easier to be intuitively convinced, to discern what is of universal validity, and therefore what is authoritative. We have very little difficulty in mathematics or in geometry. We can prove that any three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, and make this so clear by an external illustration that the inward conviction can be brought home to all.
In the sphere of morality the case is more difficult. Morality concerns true rational action, but whether or no our action is true is proved only as experience may show whether or not such action is consistent with the good of all. To do anything which we see to be inconsistent with the rights of others is to be consciously wrong. In morality therefore, there is a criterion which is authoritative, namely that we should will nothing which is not for the common good. If this does not seem to be the case among primitive peoples, it is because they regard their own tribe as the only people to whom rights are attached. The history of moral growth is the record of the widening of the area of recognised moral rights, and a deeper knowledge of what these rights involve, and not the altering of the inner standard, so that the phrase: "It is right to do right" is authoritative because it appeals to all moral beings.
In art, proof is still more difficult. We have the subjective sense that an object is beautiful. Our affirmation of its beauty we make with certainty, and under the compulsion of necessity; for us it is authoritative. Why, then, does not everyone agree with it? Because our judgments on art are relative to the stage of personal culture and feeling at which we have arrived. But that our judgment is not purely a subjective and individual judgment is proved by the fact that the history of art shows a growing consensus of opinion that some things are beautiful and others are ugly. In this it is apparent that if men were all at the same stage of culture and feeling, the judgment of the individual would be the judgment of the community, and judgments on art would then have the objective authority of the community as well as the subjective authority of the person. Religion has the same kind of authority as art. Like art it is apparently subjective; like art a man's religion depends upon what he is; like art it has a history of innumerable varieties; but like art it also has the universal in it and develops in clearness with the rational and affectional development of personality. Like art true religion must be proclaimed true by the soul. External authority, as such, is powerless to evoke it. Religion concerns the total personal reaction of a man on the universe, the attitude which he has in all spheres of life's activity. Just as art commands a certain kind of personal culture, so religion depends upon a certain kind of attitude and disposition.. Its authority is vindicated to those who possess this. That is why our Lord said "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." No one can justly doubt the subjective authority of religion to the religious man; he, at least, does not doubt it himself. But that religion in its essential nature is not just a subjective imagination is proved by its universality, and by the fact that there is a growing consensus of opinion as to what compose the essential elements of true religion.
In all these things authority is shown to be both subjective and at the same time objective, for while in some cases the necessity is subjective (i.e. not necessarily felt by all) yet it is authoritative for the individual, not because it is his own opinion, but because it is held to have universal validity.
Behind all true religion there must be a selfless understanding of God as true, a seeking of the will of God rather than a care for personal comfort, and the realisation that, while we seek personal shelter in God, there can be no shelter except that which truth, righteousness and love demand. Religion sums up this life, and brings it into relation with the Unseen, fitting man not only for this present life but for any sphere to which God in His wisdom shall hereafter bring him. Thus in religion there are two moments; it has a purpose beyond this world and a succour beyond time; yet this world is the sphere of its realisation and development, and everything in this world may be a condition of its realisation and exercise. God meets man in the world that He has made for him; all its tasks, duties and loves are conditions for His communion with man and man's fellowship with Him. Rightly to order life is not merely therefore a matter of personal comfort, but a fulfilling the will of God; and the ultimate end which life offers is not merely the earthly comfort which may be attained through its exercise, but the deathless fellowship with those whom we love in God, for the service of whom this world has been the condition, and with God who has come to us in all that He has made, and whom possessing we possess for ever.
It ought now to be obvious that authority in religion must rest upon the soul's intuitive conviction of the presence and will of God who is true, and that authority is relative to the state and stage in which the soul is. This may occasion a difficulty. The highest thing that men of one generation knew, and in obedience to which alone they could worship God, is probably seen to be inadequate by the next. Is God in the inadequate? and can it therefore have authority? The answer is: "Yes." The inadequacy is seen to be such, oniv as men have been sincere with the good that appeared to them at any stage; and the soul is not judged by its attainment, but by its sincerity and moral surrender. But this leads to the further important question: How can we ever be sure of knowing the truth, when beliefs are thus subject to change? Reflection will make clear the fact that in the development of truth there are elements of permanence as well as elements that pass. The logical distinction between form and matter may perhaps illustrate this. That we should do unto others as we would that they should do unto us is a universal moral axiom; but it will lead to different kinds of conduct according to the ages in which men live. The simple elements of real religion are eternally the same; for faith can find no higher illustration than that of Abraham, who went out not knowing whither he went, believing like a child in the guidance of God, or of Moses who, suddenly awaking to find that the solitudes were not solitudes, and being conscious of his own powerlessness, freely submitted himself to the will of God, to be guided whither He would.
It will thus be apparent that the permanent element in religion is a certain attitude of soul, a finding of God and not self as the centre of life But as there can be no religion apart from a man's life with his fellows, it is plain that the ethical ideas of any given age affect and circumscribe a man's religious view, and that as his experience and knowledge increase, his attitude to God and man, itself unchanging, may find new and wiser forms of expression both in thought and conduct. Jesus brought Peter into a new attitude to God and man; but not at first did Peter understand all the implications for thought and life of the great change that had come to him. Not till after the experience of Pentecost and the vision of the sheet let down from heaven and the missionary work of Paul did he really understand that his religion involved the preaching of the Gospel, apart from the trammels of Jewish legal particularism, to all the world.
Parallel to this gradual development of the area of religion, whereby it becomes increasingly universal in its scope and appeal, embracing within its claim and its joy all that is human, there runs a corresponding intensive development from material and symbolic to spiritual conception. Thus righteousness and holiness first conceived as legal and outward are found to be personal and inward, qualities relative to faith and the attitude of soul and not to the external act or symbol.
We are now in a position to realise that truth as we know it is not apart from personal life, and, just as in the development of any true person there is that which is permanent and consistent amidst all the change to higher and nobler and deeper conceptions and all the progress of love towards catholicity of heart, so in the development of the knowledge of truth there is that which is permanent and that which is variable. But the inadequacy of what we deem to be true at any given time can only come to be seen when we have a true and sincere relation to it, that is, are true and sincere with ourselves and with our fellows. For truth is not something that may merely be called "The Law of the Outside World," neither is it an empty schema written on the heavens; it is our personal meaning and principle, and is revealed as we develop. It is because we are made in the image of God, and God is ever that which we are becoming, that God can appeal to us, and in that appeal awake us to our own meaning, and in that very awakening convince us of His authority.
(c) This conception of authority, however, brings us face to face with the fundamental question, the settlement of which is vital to any view of the Atonement, namely, whether revelation is a system of mysterious information or transaction, or whether it is the illumination of the real meaning of life, that we may find the whole of life in God. It should be obvious that, if it is the former, the whole of our task is simply to collect this mysterious information, to preserve it from age to age, and to carry out its demands, credulously and without question. It is true that the first premiss of this belief is "Thus saith the Lord," which is aided by a traditional assent, or the weight of traditional authority. But ultimately, the "Thus saith the Lord" must be accepted credulously, or as those who hold this belief would say: "What is finite reason against Infinite Reason? and how can our consciences be supposed to be adequate to judge the rightness or wrongness of Divine action? "This is an easy way to assurance, but also an easy way to damnation. It was the way of the Pharisees, who "had Abraham to their father," and who in their self-assurance were blind to the salvation that involved a personal conviction of moral and spiritual realities. And it were well for us to realise that this error into which the Pharisees fell is not the temptation of one age but of every age. It is inherent where revelation is considered as mysterious information, and where the demands and activities of God are thought to be outside the pale of reason and conscience.
This false attitude to authority has been shown in the treatment of the Bible, which has been regarded as a complete and infallible body of revelation which it is impious to question. We may rightly say that the Bible contains the revelation of God, but it is in an earthen vessel. It is a revelation in two regards. First, because it is the record of the religious development of humanity; and the self-revelation of God is involved in that development. Second, because the Scriptures not only unfold a clearer light as the soul of prophet and disciple became purer and purer, but reveal the perfect light of God in the perfect Person of Jesus Christ, in whose soul the spirit of God was unhindered, so that it could be truly said of Him that he that had seen Him had seen the Father. It is true that the story of Jesus is recorded by men who were not thus perfect; but they spoke with an insight which He had awakened, and as they remembered His words, they found in them unsuspected depths of meaning and spoke of things greater than they knew.
This same superstitious and external view of authority has similarly caused Church dogma and sacramental practice to become a system of taboo, which it was sacrilegious to question or touch; and has resulted in priesthoods, whose prerogatives were also taboo, and whose authority so involved the people in slavery to superstition that even the virtues were subtly changed, and men were not humble unless they were credulous, nor consecrated unless they were fanatical.
This constitutes a large part of our difficulty to-day. The way of truth is obscured for us by the shadows of the old darkness; we doubt our own convictions when they are at variance with the consensus of past days, and we go in danger of questioning whether conviction be the road to truth.
Our attitude to the teaching of the Church is thus determined. The Church is a fellowship of souls having certain experiences and certain views; it is for us neither slavishly to assent nor lightly to disagree. We must ask, are these experiences genuinely Christian, and are these dogmas a right expression of them? Antiquity is no criterion of truth, else Buddhism would be superior to Christianity. The continuance of a belief may be a test of its vitality, but only if it has been held in an atmosphere of freedom of thought.
If on the other hand revelation is not a system of mysterious information, but the unveiling of a common life in God, in which we meet Him in all our tasks, our sorrows and our joys, and realise over all a Father's love and a Father's presence, a Father who judges us not by what we attain but what we strive for, who in His deep humanity is sorry for our childishness, but who in His deep wisdom sees that weak though we are we must take up the task of life as our own task, and the problem of life as our own problem, so that in all our attaining we may be developed, then our attitude towards theology and religion is changed; and real humility does not then consist in credulous assent, but in the attitude of soul in which we seek to know and do: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure."
OUR convictions concerning God determine the character of our religion and in particular of our doctrine of reconciliation.
The views of God which obtain at any time are usually coloured by the circumstances of that time, for men's thoughts are influenced and often moulded by their surroundings and heritage, so that it may almost be said that as man is, so is his God. Even though we believe that in Jesus Christ is given a full revelation of God, it remains true that we fail to understand what Jesus really means because of what we are: and fuller understanding of His meaning can only dawn upon us as we are progressively willing to be identified in life with each new unfolding of that revelation as it comes to us.
It is not possible to arrive at a satisfactory and consistent doctrine of God from a mere searching of the Scriptures or collection of sacred texts; for the Scriptures embody not only God's revelation to man but man's idea about God. Hence some canon of criticism is necessary which may be applied to Scripture itself: that canon is that nothing can be God's revelation to the individual, whatever it may be to others, which does not evoke his insight, conviction and conscience. [The same applies to the mass, but it is possible for an individual to see a truth which is not apprehended by others and vice versa.] Theology, however, has not been dominated so much by the Scriptural conception of God as by philosophical notions of successive ages. To these a test must be applied: Are they rationally possible? Are they consistent with the moral sense, and the facts of life? Can they form the basis of a living religious experience?
In this chapter it is only possible to deal with certain main conceptions which have been normative of the doctrine of God held by the Church. If they are found inadequate it will, be necessary to return, driven by philosophy itself on the one hand and by the religious demand on the other, to a simpler belief in God which lies behind the thought and experience of Jesus Christ.
Jesus has kept His hold upon men throughout the ages; yet the history of the Church is a tale of how He has been misunderstood. From the first it was so. As the earliest generations of Christians passed away, the emphasis in the Church's teaching began to be laid not on the moral and spiritual wonder of Christ's person, but on speculations concerning His metaphysical relation to the Godhead; and so the Jesus of history became in time the Christ of speculation. The important things about His life came to be those of miracle, and men's mind were occupied with the wonder of His miracles as wonders.
But in this preoccupation with things that happened to Jesus, and with powers that He is supposed to have possessed, men missed the real religious question, namely, what He was in Himself. Thus, the primary interest of Athanasius lay in resurrection and incorruption; he failed to realise that the quality of the life is the first issue, its continuance the second, and that bodily incorruption is not a matter of spiritual importance. Men were interested in signs but not in meanings, and Reality is a system of meaning.
The defect of the Logos theology in general is its abstract and impersonal character; its God is the God of philosophica explanation, not the God and Father of Jesus.
When philosophy of the mythological kind, or else of a dry and abstract order, has been brought in to establish the doctrines of the Church, the result has been disaster. These philosophies are now discredited and out of date; the modern man cannot properly believe them, for he cannot think them. This creates a position of much peril for the organised Churches which have claimed Divine authority for their theological dogmas, since many of these are now seen to be either erroneous or unintelligible. [The more one knows of the Church Councils the more one realises the need of a new doctrine of the Holy Spirit in history.]
It is therefore necessary to analyse this doctrine of God, and try to find the root-cause why theology on the one hand is so out of touch with religion on the other.
It has been argued that all attempts to define the nature of God are inadequate because to define is to limit; but this is only true if the definition involves a limit. To say that God is good is not to limit Him; it is indeed to exclude evil, which as involving what is partial and negative would limit Him. There can therefore be no objection to the attempt at definition. Definitions have always fallen into two sections,—metaphysical and moral, and strange as it may seem, rnetaphysical definitions of God seem to have had more influence on theology than any others. It is not necessary to go into all the attributes which are specified; it is necessary however to ask: Is the root conception which has underlain the idea of God possible? God is defined as holy, just and good, which terms are excellent provided that our ideas of holiness,justice and goodness are adequate. God is also defined as omnipotent, transcendent and immanent. It is now necessary to enquire in what sense these attributes are true.
There is here no question of denying what may be called God's Transcendence, Immanence and Omnipotence; but there is no doubt that these terms have generally been wrongly used. Many theologians, who would acknowledge that spatial and quantitative ideas are out of place in religious thinking fall into this error, using symbols as if they were realities, and metaphors as if they were spiritual facts. It is easy to see the quantitative conception in a statement like the following: "What Christ presented to God for His complete joy and satisfaction was a perfect racial obedience. It was not the perfect obedience of a saintly unit of the race. It was a racial holiness. God's holiness found itself again in the humbled holiness of Christ's 'public person.' He presented before God a race He created for holiness." [Dr. Forsyth: "The Work of Christ," p. 129. It is true that here Dr. Forsyth emphasises our living union with Christ, and therefore regards Christ as representing those who afterwards should be united with Him. But this does not avoid the criticism made above.] Here holiness, which is a quality, is treated as a quantity.
Statements like this abound in modern writers, who in their contempt for what they term individualism show a strange misconception of the nature of moral personality. Very often the whole universe of discourse in which many theologians move is spatial and external. They confound grand generalisations with spiritual thinking, and spatial metaphors with spiritual realities. The evil may be illustrated by dealing with one or two conceptions, so that we may clear the ground for a truer method.
This discussion may be premised with the observation that truth which is vital for life must of necessity be simple; for if the way of life be open only to those who are mentally subtle it is difficult to believe that God is good. The simple, however, is not necessarily what is apparently obvious. A simple and apparently obvious view, for instance, is that the earth is flat, which judgment comes because we go beyond the experience of a part to make an assertion about the whole of which we have no experience. In no sphere has the false judgment, which is apparently obvious, been more frequently made, than in that of theology. The doctrine of God has been arrived at externally through consideration of the world of nature and of history, involving judgments beyond experience, rather than by thinking in terms that are spiritual and personal.
II
It will be found that most of the difficulties in connection with the doctrine of God have arisen because we have thought of Him in spatial terms.
It has long been a commonplace in theology that God is Transcendent and Immanent; but both these terms are spatial. To say that God is Transcendent is to say that God is outside the world, but not identified with it. But if we speak of the Universe, "Transcendent" could only mean that He was a part of the Universe, but not identified with our part. From this conception derive both the Epicurean thought of God as of One in a far-off tranquil world and the more modern notion, of Deism.
The doctrine of Divine Immanence on the other hand is well illustrated in the Stoic thought of God as the soul of the world. These systems of Immanence proclaim a diffused, depersonalised God regarded as life or more abstractly as Reason. The result is Pantheism with no distinction between God and the world. In both cases there is an inevitable tendency to think of God materially. The two doctrines leave us in the dilemma, Is God a part of the Universe? then He is limited; or is God, the whole Universe? then we have lost Him as He is.. identical with us. But to religion the thought that God is in the world is just as necessary as that He is above the world.
Now, as has been said, Transcendence and Immanence are spatial terms; therefore before their applicability to God can be appreciated, it is necessary to discuss the nature of space, than which there is no more difficult subject in philosophy.
The limits of this book render a technical discussion impossible; it must suffice to say that space is here taken to be the relation and form under which we apprehend matter. [Space is not to be regarded as a mere form, but as a relatively abstract relation of the material world. vid. Prof. Watson's "Kant's English Critics."] To apprehend God in terms of space therefore is to apprehend Him in terms of that which is related to the material, in terms that is of what is phenomenal and not real.
It will help to a solution of this difficulty if it be realised that at the same time we are living in a world that is seen and that also is a world that is unseen—our bodies are in space, but we are not in space. It is because we think of one another as in the body and therefore in space, that the confusion arises. These two worlds—the spatial and the spiritual—are not only distinct, but have contrary characteristics. It is impossible to take a lump of matter from one place and put it in another without creating a vacuum and filling a vacuum. [This is behind the difficulty which so many people find in thinking of God as possible in a world which contains anything else; it is this thought which ultimately drives many to pantheism.]
But it is far different in the spiritual world. A man communicates his thought without losing it; his friend may receive it and assimilate it and both are the richer. So is it also with love. The reason is that thought and love are not spatial; they cannot be weighed or measured by a rule nor have they colour nor shape, andy if the term " form " be used in connection with them, it is only in metaphor. So it is that self-conscious personality, which is an active agent, thinking, loving and willing, while manifesting itself in this material world, is itself non-spatial. The fact is that men have never seen one another but only one another's faces; the face is the medium through which the self is expressed; time changes its every atom, but the personality which is manifested through the face retains its identity. All the noblest things in life are connected with this unseen and spiritual world, loyalty and love and truth. The importance of events and deeds is not in themselves but in the meaning which we find in them, and the value which they have for personality. But meaning and value are not spatial terms.
Terms therefore such as Transcendence and Immanence may be used only symbolically or metaphorically of that which is spiritual and personal.
Now, strangely enough, there is nothing known to us which can be called at the same time Transcendent and Immanent except personality. In friendship men are transcendent from one another because each is self-conscious; they are immanent in one another through love and understanding. But in neither case is the relationship spatial. If then we cannot do otherwise than think of God as both Transcendent and Immanent we have a key to the meaning of this, not through the outer world of nature, but through our own personalities and experience.
To this it may be replied that while this explanation covers God's relation to persons, it yet does not cover His relation to the world. This difficulty will be dealt with under the heading of Providence. It will suffice for the present to notice that the clearest way to arrive at a knowledge of God is not, as would at first seem obvious, through a study of nature, but through the study of the soul. Indeed it is profoundly important which avenue of approach is chosen, for as there will be no question that spirit is higher than matter, that moral and spiritual qualities are more important than physical powers, that it is better to be noble in character than perfect in physique, so in respect of God also no true judgment will affirm that His mere powers over nature are as fundamental qualities of Deity as the personal qualities of holiness and love. This being the case, we do well, in our search for the knowledge of God, to begin with personality, and seek through personality to find the key to nature. [Strange as it may seem, this is also the easier road, for though our knowledge of personality is limited, we have more certain knowledge concerning moral and spiritual things, than we have as to what Nature ultimately is. The more we seek to find what Nature is, the greater is the mystery, but the truer we are to the moral and spiritual demands of which we are conscious, the more certain we are that the real meaning of life is personal. It may also be added that if we are to have right judgments on Nature we need the unbiassed mind, the humble spirit, and the love for truth which are essentially qualities of personality. In the understanding of our own natures, and in the acquirement of a right relation to life, we are on the road, not only to understand nature, but to have some power over it.]
We may take a similar line in relation to history, though this also will come up for discussion under the heading of "Providence." Recorded history is concerned for the most part with men in the mass; the secret motives, hopes and fears, and often the vital things upon which history turns are unknown to us. Again, men often act, not as rational beings, but as creatures still swayed by the primal impulses of non-rational nature. Therefore any true judgment of history should be based, not upon the partial and external view which is alone possible to us when we view things externally, but upon a real understanding of the nature of personality and the stages of its development. Thus, once again, personality is the key to our problem, and it should again be clear that the best way to the understanding of God is not through the things we know least, but through that which we know most intimately, through personality as we experience it, and through the moral demand of which we ourselves are conscious.
III
Again, it has always been held by theologians that God is omnipotent, but what this really means in the light of the facts of life has not been sufficiently apprehended. God is said to have all power, His will being irresistible, and His purpose sure. Behind these statements there has been the thought of God as an external world ruler or governor after the analogy of an earthly emperor. It is obvious that the forces which carry out this will must be either cosmical or personal. A full discussion of this involves the question of Providence; but for the present we content ourselves with the answer to the question: Is the God which the ordinary views of Omnipotence involve either existent or possible?
Let us first consider God's Omnipotence relative to cosmical forces It is assumed that God's action on and with these forces is direct. This being the case every earthquake and every storm must be the outcome of His activity and present direct willing. But the moral objections to this theory are very great; for vast masses of innocent men and women have perished and numberless homes have been desolated, and that not because these people were sinners beyond their fellows. It is not possible to avoid this conclusion by saying that on the whole justice is done; for a justice which is not perfect is not justice. [God's relation to the world and presence in it, which the religious consciousness demands, is not denied, but the question at issue is the nature of the relation. Vid. Ch. VII.]
The problem is no nearer a solution when we regard God's government of the world as through the direct and irresistible determination of human agents. There is far more direct evidence of human failing and selfishness than of the finger of God. Here, however, the problem is in a clearer form. Is it possible to reconcile the Omnipotence of God—as a direct force—with human freedom? It is easy to theorise as to what "must be the case if God is God, " when we have a certain fixed conception of God which involves our theory, but can any individual say that his actions are the outcome of the Omnipotence of God? If God's Omnipotence is a direct compelling force then our freedom is an illusion. If this is so, then God is as responsible for our sins and follies as for our successes; we deserve neither blame nor praise, and our belief that we are responsible for our conduct is inexplicable. Such a view of Omnipotence is an indictment of God's moral nature. It is easy to generalise in thought, and to assume that God's will is manifest in the great events of history; but when on analysis there is seen to be no basis for the distinction between a small event and a great one, there appears to be no reason why the interference of Omnipotence should be but partial.
What men call great events no less than small come through human decisions. Why should these be in some cases the result of God's Omnipotence, and not in others? As a matter of fact, all theories of Omnipotence notwithstanding, the moral sense of mankind asserts that ,men are responsible for all their actions if they are sane.
This erroneous view of the working of Omnipotence is behind many of the contradictions of theology, and of the difficulties of religious life. Faith is often regarded as the outcome of a direct mechanical action of God on the soul. If so, why does not everyone believe, for who can resist omnipotent might? and how could omnipotent goodness withold the gift of faith? Again salvation is often regarded as being mediated through a magical and mysterious grace in the sacrament, but if God so works why does He not save us by an act of His power without any appeal to our insight and conviction, and why not save us all? The fact is that the world still lieth in the wicked one, and if God works by an irresistible might then the insoluble problem is to prove He can be good.
Such a view of Omnipotence leaves no room for freedom. It recognises man's dependence upon God, but it does not recognise his moral independence, and the outcome is that religion is deprived of moral meaning, and the moral sense is violated.
The error lies in this, that starting with the indubitable premiss that "God's purpose standeth sure," men have followed on to make dogmatic statements as to how that purpose is being worked out. But had they begun by a reverent enquiry, in the face of life's facts, into what that purpose can be, they would have realised that it concerned persons more than events, and the self-realisation of personality rather than a punctilious regard for an outward legal order.
We are now in a position to question the view that God governs after the analogy of an earthly emperor. Without doubt this idea has come into religious thinking because men have thought of God's rule in terms of the human instruments of government familiar to themselves. Only with a deeper insight into life comes the realisation that the victories of mere power are barren and hollow compared with the victories of love, and the dignity of mere office is as nothing to the high dignity of being worthy to be loved.
Our concern is not to deny God is Omnipotent but to find a new definition of power. We have defined as power that which touches the external form of life, and that in an inadequate way, for no matter what apparent victories of this kind may be won, the external form always, in the end, reverts to the mould corresponding to the inward spirit. True omnipotence must be a power which affects the whole, the inward spirit, and therefore the outward form through which that spirit manifests itself. This involves the apparent contradiction that Omnipotence must be a power which affects freedom, which, conquering the inward spirit and love, attains its end because its end is freely adopted by beings who find in it their own end and make it their purpose. This is only accomplished through God in Christ and Him crucified, for He alone accomplishes the change in the whole man by the awakening of insight and conviction and the compulsion of love. This is what the Apostle Paul means when he says, "For the word of the cross is . . . unto us which are being saved the power of God," "Seeing that Jews ask for signs (the evidences of external Omnipotence) and the Greeks seek after wisdom: (theosophical speculation) but we preach Christ Crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto Gentiles foolishness; but unto the called themselves, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the 'foolishness' of God is wiser than men; and the weakness' of God is stronger than men." [1 Cor. 1:22-25.]
It is true that this Omnipotence does not attain its end at once, but the patience of God is no denial of Omnipotence but the assertion of a wonderful and loving foresight. From the nature of the case an Omnipotence which deals with mechanism can attain its end at once, but not an Omnipotence which deals with free personality.
Thinkers have been led disastrously astray when, in accordance with a curious tendency of the mind, they have looked rather to the outward, and legal order of society than to the intimate and personal order of the home to find the key to life's problem. Hence their solutions have tended to be external rather than inward, legal rather than personal, conventional rather than real. Society is made up of persons; therefore the personal problem must be solved before the general problem can be unravelled. Our Lord thought of God always in personal not in artificial terms; the Fatherhood of God was for Him the solution to the problems of religion and of life. Those who first knew Him did not begin their discipleship with the idea of His divinity as set forth in later Church theology. As they progressively came to understand His perfect Sonship, they came to understand at the same time and in the same degree God's gracious Fatherhood. God for them was inevitably "God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." To approach Christianity in this way is the vital necessity. Jesus Christ is then seen to be first, not the mouthpiece of an infallible revelation, nor the medium of some supreme transaction, but the supremely religious man, who in Himself embodies the truth of which His life and words are the expression, and who, because of what He is in Himself, gives these words and actions their real meaning. He did not elaborate theories about Creation nor the Trinity nor about Atonement; His thought of Providence was not of a mental problem to be solved, but of a gracious Person to be loved and apprehended in life.
Therefore for us also any solution of the wider problem must be an outgrowth of the understanding of God's Fatherly dealings with us as His children; it must transcend a mere legal order, and be based upon the demands of moral and spiritual personal life. It is evident, therefore, that we must analyse the nature of moral personality if we are to have any key to the nature of God or man. This is the more necessary as the very thought of reconciliation with God presupposes a common ground between God and man, and because we cannot know God as something apart from our experience and thought as men. If we could know man, it would not follow that we should perfectly comprehend all that is in God; but that is not knowledge which consists in asserting what is not in our knowledge or experience as rational beings. We do not deny that God is absolutely greater than man, or that He is the ground of our being and of all being, but we assert that we can only know Him if the key to that knowledge is in the nature of our personalities as moral and spiritual beings. We cannot talk of that which lies outside our experience, except to say that something does lie outside our experience, and we can make no assertions about that which lies outside our possible knowlege. But while this is true, and while we may not comprehend God, it is possible to know Him for we are made in His image.
WE have shown in the foregoing chapter that our doctrine of God must be enunciated in personal terms. But the nature of personality itself equires further elucidation.
I
We must needs seek God in the highest that we know. That highest is self-conscious and self-determining personality; for it is personality that gives value to life, and personality alone that has an absolute value in itself. We hold it as intuitively certain that a man falls below his real self and meaning when he sacrifices truth for gain, that to possess the whole world through dishonour would be to sacrifice life's truest possession, "For what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul." It follows that personality is the element of real value in the world, and that the world itself is only a condition for its manifestation and development. The real progress of civilisation is judged by the measure in which persons are valued rather than things, and by the measure in which the acknowledged aim of life is a personal and not a selfish development.
It has already been shown that a person is not a mere individual. A person is a self-conscious being, rational, affectional, and self-determining. These very attributes show the universal nature of personality, for to be rational is not consistent with a selfish individualism; to love rightly is to have a heart open to all that is noble, and to will rightly is to will what is consistent with the good of all; or in other words to be irrational is to surrender one's true self to selfish animal impulse; to have wrong affections is to do the same thing, and to have an evil purpose is to seek the fulfilment of what has behind it the primal animal impulse of selfish self-preservation or gain. It is evident therefore that personality in its essence is spiritual and social, and that apart from what is spiritual and social it has no meaning. Thus the essential nature of man is not mere individuality but personality.
It may be objected here that selfishness seems to be almost ineradicable in men and women, but this is to say that personality is not truly realised; and that there is a conflict between it and mere individuality. Thus though personality is our real nature, it is also an attainment. The infant has no personality and the savage very little. It is only by denying himself that man realises himself, that is, asserts his true self. This denial and assertion is always the apprehension of a wider and deeper life, and is not to be confounded with an ascetic denial of life for selfish reasons. Rather it is the realisation that other persons have their rights, or the finding our good in the good of others. It is therefore evident that the more individual or idiosyncratic a man is the smaller his personality, and that the end of personality is to be without limitations and to be identified with truth and love, and with these not merely as abstract ideals, but in relation to social and personal life. Knowledge that does not issue in a higher order of personal life and a deeper life, not only for one's self but for others, is useless. All the discoveries of science and the wonders of art are personal attainments and have their real meaning only for personal life.
It is important to note that everything can be subsumed under what is either personal or impersonal; and of these the impersonal is lower. Therefore it is quite illusory to talk of what is spiritual as if it were not personal. Like Reason, Love, and Will, the spiritual is simply a personal quality; for these may be abstracted by thought, but in life are never found except as activities of personality. Thus to say that the world is rational is ultimately to say that it is a personal order.
It is not therefore to limit God to ascribe personality to Him; it is to do the only thing that is possible to us; for if God is to have any meaning for us He must be a living personal reality. If a non-living impersonal reality were the basis of life, man must resign himself to hopeless pessimism; for then he is greater than God, but not great enough for his own needs.
II
Religion presupposes that God is personal; for its end is personal touch with a God who can enter into personal relationships with man. The great failure of religious thinking has been its lack of thoroughness in respect of this conception. In ordinary life the difference is clear between a personal and a business relationship, or between a personal and an official relationship; the one touches the whole of life, but the other, touching a mere sphere of life's activity is therefore incomplete.
In a personal relationship we recognise the other person not as a means but as an end of absolute worth, and we become the servants of that end; that is, we recognise the other person as a self-determining moral being and realise that this involves a common standard and reciprocal duties. We are never dealing in a truly personal way with anybody when we let individual interests, whether our own or another's, come between us and our sense of right, which if it is true should be also their own. Recognising the other person as a "free" moral being we do not seek to override that freedom but to appeal to it. Lastly it is our duty and privilege to love the other person, if not for what he actually is, still for what he may become.
It is easy to see therefore that a personal relationship is direct, immediate, and not indirect and intermediate. It is this that is vital for religion, and it is this that is so often forgotten, as for instance when we think that the merits of saints or Calvary as an external transaction can avail for us. The reason is that, as we have noted before, in the nature of human society as at present constituted, our personal relationships are few, and our indirect or partial relationships are many. All legal relationships are of this partial and impersonal character, and also most business relationships. Wherever, men are governed in. the mass or dealt with in the mass the relationship is necessarily indirect. It is because, as we look out upon it, humanity seems a mass to us that we are apt to think it is a mass to God; so to think, however, is to limit God and derogate from His true omnipotence; for what every man most deeply needs, whether he knows it or not, is that throughout the whole activity of his life, God should come to him personally and deal personally with him.
It is now possible to examine some of the ways in which this impersonal view of Gods dealings with His. children have been expressed.
III
In the light of what we have said we have to examine the distinction of which so much is made between the Divine and the Human. What is the Divine? It can be no other than perfect spiritual personality. What is the human? It also is spiritual personality, for man is not man because he has a body, but because he is a self-conscious spirit. The respect due to God is that due to a perfect person who is worthy of trust and reverence. If God be respected because of His power and not because of what He is in Himself, such respect is not that of moral and free personalities but at the last analvsis of those who are afraid. Thus exhortationsv to surrender to God because of His infinite power and greatness result in a real degradation of personality, in false humilities, and often in the immoral self-humiliation which rests on the supposition that the baser one can think oneself the more pleasing it is to God. Real humility on the other hand rests upon a free judgment of reality which removes one as far from pride as from a craven spirit.
The infinite power and wonder of God is also used like some unknown quantity to bridge over difficulties which a wrong method of thinking cannot otherwise compass. This is very evidently the case with the doctrine of the two natures in Christ, the doctrine, namely, that Christ has the nature and attributes of God as well as the nature and attributes of man. For He could not be two personalities in one, and His real nature must not be confounded with His bodily constitution. In practice the thought of the Divine nature of our Lord has involved a simple addition of cosmic knowledge or cosmic power, but even if it be granted that this was true in fact, still cosmic knowledge and power are not superior but inferior to spiritual personality. Those things which are looked upon as human, His meek and lowly and pure heartedness, are infinitely more divine than mere knowledge or power. This also was His estimate who did not think it undignified nor derogatory to His place as master that He should wash the disciples' feet. In His picture of the last judgment the reward is not to those who had worked miracles but to those who possessed a right disposition, which manifested itself in ordinary life.
In any consideration of the Atonement this is of great importance, because so many in laying stress upon the infinite value of the sacrifice of Christ, find the value in the fact that He was God, and therefore so much greater than man in dignity and power and knowledge. To these theologians the cross would be valueless unless its value be found, not in the intrinsic nature of Christ Jesus, and what He was in facing it as He did, but in the fact that the action of One so much more than man possesses an infinite merit. The mysterious and unthinkable conception of the Divine nature as being radically different from personality, as we can in any way be cognisant of it, is also used to explain why our Lord could "be made sin for us," and how He could, as representing God and the human race at the same time, be the Saviour of all men. Some theologians seek to find the solution by saying that Christ identified Himself with the race and by attributing mysterious properties to Him. Such mysterious conceptions are no doubt of use to theologians in trouble with their solutions, but it would be better to own that we cannot solve a problem than to think we have solved it by an appeal to what we cannot understand. It would not matter much if such methods did not raise great difficulties for religious people who seek to have a reason for the " faith that is in them."
To say these things is not in the least to throw doubt on the statement that Jesus was "the Son of God," that "there is no other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved," and that "in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." [Our Lord was a sinless and perfect person, and we come to a new principle when we think of perfection, for we never become perfect as God is; His is not a developed perfection, it is an absolute relation to things. It is through this avenue and through what is involved in the consciousness of our Lord, and in His redeeming work in the soul and in the world, that we believe the doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus which the Christian consciousness demands, can be truly founded. Unitarianism. does not produce, logically, the Christian temper and experience.]
We are, however, contending that His unique place must be owing to what He was in Himself, in His personality. No one can believe in Him who does not seek to stand for the things for which He stood; but when once this attitude be taken, the contrast between Jesus and oneself will make the words "my Lord and my God" the expression of a real experience. To think that we are honouring God more by the credulous acceptance of an out of date scholastic metaphysic which has been rendered meaningless by the development of philosophical thought is indeed strange, and we may also add, at bottom irreligious, for it involves a wrong attitude to truth.
To many it may seem that we are taking away without replacing. Where, it will be said, is there in this view anything to take the place of the majestic thoughts that are in such a poem as Derzhavin's "Ode to the Almighty."
O
Thou Eternal One! Whose presence bright
All space doth occupy—all motion guide
Unchanged through Time's all-devastating
flight,
Thou only God! There is no God beside;
Being above all beings! Mighty One!
Whom none can comprehend and none explore;
Who fill'st existence
with Thyself alone:
Embracing all—supporting—ruling o'er—
Being whom we call God—and know no more!
In its sublime research, philosophy
May measure out the ocean deep—may count
The sands, or the sun's rays; but, God ! for Thee
There is no weight nor measure; none can mount
Up to Thy mysteries. Reason's
brightest spark,
Though kindled by Thy light, in vain would try
To trace Thy counsels, infinite
and dark;
And Thought is lost, ere Thought can mount so
high,
E'en like past moments in eternity.
Thou,
from primeval nothingness, didst call
First chaos, then existence. Lord!
on Thee
Eternity had its foundation; all
Spring forth from Thee; of light, joy, harmony,
Sole origin: all life,
all beauty, Thine.
Thy word created all, and doth create;
Thy splendour fills all space with rays divine;
Thou art, and wert, and
shalt be! Glorious! great!
Life-giving! life-sustaining Potentate.
There is truth in this sublimity that evokes the soul. But grander than the vast worlds that seem to know no farthest bounds is God's self-revelation in the souls that He has made. The sublime in nature moves us to wonder only because it evokes the soul to its own height and speaks to it of its own immortal destiny, else the might of nature and the vast solitudes of her spaces would crush the spirit with an all-conquering terror. The very meaning of heroism is that this has been livingly understood and exemplified. When, facing a might before which he is as nothing, a man yields up his life for truth, he thereby makes the affirmation that he is greater than mere might.
Not long ago, after a wreck, a boat was so full that not another person could be carried. A man swam to its side and pleaded to be taken on board. One of his loved ones was in the boat in an agony for his life. Another man who was in the boat, realising the situation in a moment, calmly gave up his place, accepting the ocean as his grave. Thus he showed himself greater than the ocean that never knew its cruel triumph; the soul that was capable of such heroism was greater than the worlds which pass away. Therefore it is no belittling of the Son of God to find His greatness in the nature and perfection of His personality. The realm of personality is vast and almost unexplored; the illimitable spaces are but the symbol of the Spirit who is the ground of their existence. Wonder and awe and gratitude should grow as man reflects that he is made in God's own image, and that God the All-true, All-good has sheltered him down life's long pathway by His own personal relationship. We also can find no fitter words than those with which Derzhavin closes his wonderful ode:—
O
thoughts ineffable! O visions blest!
Though worthless our conceptions all of Thee,
Vet shall Thy shadowed image fill our breast,
And waft its homage to
Thy Deity.
God, thus alone my lonely thoughts can soar;
Thus seek Thy presence,
Being wise and good
'Midst Thy vast works, admire, obey, adore;
And when the tongue is
eloquent no more;
The soul shall speak, in tears of gratitude.
IV
Due also to this tendency to think spatially, externally, and quantitatively is a constant tendency to find more reality in general notions and terms than in concrete conceptions. Thus it has been thought that the world or cosmos is greater than the person., because the person is regarded as an individual, a unit. But that which has an absolute worth in itself cannot be transcended by another worth, and indeed it is personality that gives value to the world. Thus to regard personality in any man as being without absolute value in itself is not only to destroy the principle that personality has an absolute worth, but ultimately to take away any real value from the world itself.
A more subtle form of this type of thinking, however, is to regard the individual person as being of less value than humanity. This comes because humanity is thought of as being greater because an aggregate, and the less must be subordinated to the greater. In this appears the notion that mere quantity increases value. It may be so in commerce which deals with material things, but never in the moral and spiritual sphere. [It is only fair to add that many theologians whose thinking is liable to this charge, also in their statements involve views which are not compatible with it.] In the desire to show that Christ is potentially the Saviour of all men, and therefore of humanity, theologians often fail to realise that humanity is not really a mass, but an aggregate of persons, and that the truth is not that what is sufficient to save humanity is sufficient for the individual person, but the contrary, namely that from the very nature of personality what suffices to save an individual person suffices for any number of persons, and therefore for humanitv. It is therefore obscure and misleading to say of Christ "If He might have been, yet He certainly was not, a man only, amongst men. His relation to the race is not that He was another specimen, differing by being another, from everyone except Himself. His relation to the race was not a differentiating but a consummating relation. He was not generically, but 'inclusively' man." [Moberley, " Atonement and Personality, " p. 86.] Another theologian, as we have seen, puts it " 'It is the reconciliation of the world as a cosmicl whole.' 'You cannot compound a saved world out of any number of saved individuals, God did so save the world as to carry individual salvation in the same act. The Son of God was not an individual merely; He was the representative of the whole race and its vis-a-vis, on its own scale.'" [P. T. Forsyth, " The work of Christ," p. 77 and p. 116. This quotation an the following ones from Dr. Moberley, are criticised less for what seems erroneous than as examples of a method which seems to me necessarily to lead one wrong.]
This whole type of thinking involves that humanity is to be regarded as mass. The very use of the term "individual" in the way in which it is used reveals the mass-conception, and when we talk of the reconciliation of the cosmos as involving something more than the salvation of the individual, the external character of the thought is patent. The term individual is misleading unless we realise that the individual is a person, and that a person is not a unit in the spatial sense at all. Dr. Moberley seems to realise this, though his statements illustrate spatial thinking of another type, when he argues that "The fact of our own distinctness one from another, is not (as has already been urged) so bald or so ultimate as we sometimes make it. The father is reproduced in the son; we know not how deep may be the community between brother and brother." (Op. cit. p. 86, 87,ff.) Here follows an argument to show the solidarity of humanity, but the end of which is to prove that our Lord is capable of representing humanity because He is capable of indwelling and possessing us in a way that we are able very imperfectly to approach. Here there appears a distinction which is not defined. We are told that we are not "to think of the significance and power of His humanity as limited to His sole individual self-hood," (Op. cit. p. 88.) "If Christ's humanity were not the humanity of Deity, it could not stand in the wide inclusive consummating relation in which it stands in fact to the humanity of all other men." (Op. cit. p. 90.) It turns out that the reason for the necessity is to make a certain theory of the sacrament possible, and so we have behind it a mystical, yet spatial conception, for the necessity is because the greatness that Christ needs in order to be the Saviour of humanity is not only that of moral and personal perfection, but of a mystical character which will enable Him to dwell in others in a sense in which we cannot personally dwell in each other. "No mere man indwells in spirit in or as the spirit of another: whatever near approach there may be seen towards this is really mediated through the spirit of Christ. If I grow at last toward unity of spirit with my friend, it is not really that I am in him or he in me; but rather that the grace of the indwelling Spirit which dwelt in Him, and made Him, in His own way, what He was, is not denied even to me. Experience in man here as elsewhere gives but a faint anology of the meaning of the Divine. (Op. cit. p. 89. 90.) Dr. Moberley insists that the humanity of Christ is "Divinely spiritual" but that this is not the case is proved by the fact that throughout he seems to be striving to prove that the wonder of the humanity of Jesus, and indeed its differentia, is that it can have local existence in men. It is an exceedingly subtle illustration of the tendency to think spatially, and it also illustrates how the bringing in of such terms as " Divine humanity " leads us back to impersonal and therefore unspiritual constructions. ["High Priesthood and Sacrifice," p. 217] There are two kinds of quantitative thinking, the concrete, when we regard the cosmos as greater than the person; and the diffused, as when it is thought that Christ can have local habitation in men through the sacraments. Though apparently different these are in the same "universe of discourse," the spatial and quantitative, and differ only in the same way as our conception of matter differs when we see it as a concrete object or thing and when we think of it as ether or electricity. The latter seems more spiritual, but this is simply because it is more rarefied and diffused.
Before we leave this discussion we have to note the realistic and false idea that Christ is humanity as apart from particular men. Dr. Du Bose says "The Incarnation was in humanity and not only in a man." [Op. ib, p. 217.] "The concrete universal of humanity which may be found in Jesus Christ belongs to it not as humanity but as God inhumanity." [Op. ib, p. 297.] The real impulse behind this type of thought is to prove that Christ is worthv to stand for humanity, and worth is found in greatness, not in personality, but in some unknown quantity. It is the almost ineradicable human failing of "respect of persons" which issues at last in disrespect of personality.
We are reluctant to labour argument over these conceptions, but they are important because they are illustrations of a sublety of thought, or rather of imagination, which burdens theology to the hindrance of clear and simple views of religion. The metaphysical greatness of our Lord, His power or wisdom, or omniscience, can alter no moral demand, nor be taken in lieu of our defects.
THE SUBJECTIVE AND THE OBJECTIVE
Perhaps nothing in a discussion on the Atonement needs more careful consideration
than the question as to what is subjective and what is objective. The matter
is so vital that a further discussion here will be pardoned. It is a frequent
argument against certain theories that they are subjective. The point of
the criticism is to make sure of the necessary and vital faith that the Atonement
is not a matter of individual idiosyncrasy or feeling; therefore, it is
said, there must be an objective element in it. But often, objectivity is
made synonomous with externality. Now an external act, even the Crucifixion,
is nothing in itself apart from its meaning. Its meaning is found in the
motives and purposes of those who participate in it. True objectivity,
therefore is not externality, and we must enquire what it is. [Externality
does not give actuality or existence to any spiritual reality. It can, at
the most, be a sign of its actuality and existence, but it is
vitally important, because it may be the medium through which meaning is
conveyed. We yield to none in emphasis on the absolute importance of the
historic Jesus, and emphasis on the necessity for the historic framework
of Christianity. The whole question is one of a right relation between
fact and meaning.]
Individual judgments which depend upon any individual idiosyncrasy are subjective. Our judgments as to taste, in matters of appetite, are subjective. Judgments resting upon mere feeling are subjective. Many judgments upon art are subj ective. In these matters we cannot demand that others judge as we do; they are individual. Objective judgments on the other hand are not mere individual judgments. Mathematical judgments are objective. Two and two make four, not only to one man, brit to all. That the "three angles of any triangle are together equal to two right angles" is an objective judgment, and that not because it can be proved by an external illustration, but because the proof must be recognised by anyone who understands. The reason is that those are rational judgments, and persons are rational beings. The question of a sensus communis, or common agreement, is more difficult in art and religion, but the difficulty is not an insuperable one because of the nature of personality and the essential unity of persons. It is a question of development and self-realisation. This will be clearly seen in moral judgments, which are acknowledged to be objective and not mere matters of individual taste. At the same time while on analysis there are found to be certain root judgments upon which all men are agreed, yet the stage of civilisation or of personal development tends to fix the area over which a man's moral judgment is operative. Thus to the savage the enemy is a thing with no moral rights; to the Christian, he is a man with moral rights; and the obiectivity of the Christian judgment is proved in this matter from the nature of personality, and because it can be shown that if this is not so, no man has anv real claim to moral rights. To the Christian every man is a child of God and of infinite worth, and the basis of morals is that every person is an end in himself. This is the ground of all human rights.
Thus in morals judgments are objective, though they are not universally recognised, because they are essentially rational and derive from the real meaning of personality and life.
So it is with art and religion. Judgments in these subjects are objective when they are necessary for all and can be derived from the nature of the case; but the realisation of this may depend upon the state of the person appealed to. This is the reason why our Lord was so emphatic about purity of heart and humble openness of mind to reality. Truth is objective and righteousness is objective, but a certain attitude of personality is necessary to their realisation, or, as we may put it, in order that they may have the chance of making their appeal to us.
It follows from this that both individual and objective judgments are subjective, in the sense that they are both judgments made by the subject, (any other judgment is impossible) but as to whether they are objective and universally valid judgments, or so-called subjective and purely individual judgments, depends upon their intrinsic character.
The special importance of this is not merely the guarding against the mistake, often fraught with disaster, of regarding the external as the objective, but also because it is necessary to realise that every real judgment involves personal conviction. Every real judgment of this kind is a self-realisation, and without this self-realisation there can be no moral and spiritual, that is, no personal advance. The understanding of this is vital for religion. It puts aside credulity as valueless, and reveals mere external authority as a foe to spiritual freedom and reality. Catholicity is at bottom a matter of soul; mere outward uniformity of assent has no moral value; mere numbers have no moral weight, for all the world might be Thugs. The test of truth must always be its answer to my need [as a rational spiritual person; not my wish as an idiosyncratic and capricious individual] and therefore to all men whose needs are as mine,—in short, intuitive certainty, necessity and universality.
VI. THE MORAL ORDER AND THE MORAL LAW
TfiE question of the moral order and the moral law confronts everyone who begins to think about the problem of reconciliation. In the theology of a former day God's function in the universe was largely regarded as magisterial. Sin had to be punished in order to satisfy the holiness and justice of God and to vindicate the moral order of the universe. In revolt against these stern and rigid ideas of God there came a reaction, and a sentimental theology represented God as almost too lenient and kind to condemn a sinner, and as ready to pass over iniquities by saying nothing about them. The pendulum has swung back again and the present generation knows too much of terror and agony as the consequences of sin to regard the Framer of the universe in a soft and sentimental way. Indeed no one can picture Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane saying in an agony of soul " If it be possible let this cup pass from me," without realising that no theory of Atonement is adequate which does not recognise the awful guilt and misery of sin, and that in the nature of things there is something stern and immutable.
I
"The universe," says Dr. Denney, "is a system of things in which good can be planted, and in which it will bear fruit: it is also a system of things in which there is a ceaseless and unrelenting reaction against evil." There is a vital truth here; it is that "the moral order is the ultimate reality of the world and we can only realise our true nature by it." (Dr. Oman). ["The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation," p. 202.] We shall further discuss this question under the heading of Providence, because a deep philosophical question underlies it, the solution of which is very difficult. It is a fact that nature reacts against sin; but here we will confine ourselves to the personal sphere, and seek to answer the question as to what the moral law is and as to how it can be vindicated.
The moral order cannot be a legal order, for, it must first be noted, the legal is always less than the moral. In legal judgments the action is regarded externally. A man may never come under the judgment of a law-court, and yet his life may have been thoroughly selfish and iniquitous. He may have lived respectably in order to escape penalty, his motives may have been entirely self-regarding. On the other hand, the law may have to punish a man for an action which in some way endangered society, and which nevertheless was quite free from any evil motive or intention. It is true that in later years the law has increasingly laid stress on the element of purpose, but that is only in the case where the law is broken, and then only relatively to the extent of the penalty. We have therefore the broad distinction that the law is external and that it deals with the external order of life, that it is never adequate when we include the inward and spiritual side of moral personality. In the main it has to treat of man as a unit in the mass, not as an end in himself; it deals with punishment and not with redemption, and its penalties have as their end the restraint of the wrongdoer himself and others from future crime, through fear of penalty.
Theology will never come to its own until it realises that the legal sphere is never the religious, and that it is thoroughly inadequate because it does not cover the whole range of personal life. The moral order cannot therefore be a legal order.
What then is the moral order? God must vindicate righteousness in His universe. He cannot say that sin does not matter; we could not reverence Him if He did. On the other hand He cannot, as we have seen, treat sin in a merely legal way. On reflection it will appear that God can only completely vindicate righteousness by making men recognise it and love it. In other words the moral order or moral nature which God must vindicate is not something external, a set of rules or a moral code, but it is a man's true nature and that which man ought to affirm. Therefore the problem of vindicating the moral order in man is the problem of bringing home to man what he is and what he ought to be. We can see this by an illustration. If a father would reprove his child, let us say for lying, he can thrash the child, or inflict some other penalty, but this of itself may only persuade the child that lying does not pay, or has pain associated with it, or is disagreeable to the father. The father can only completely vindicate righteousness by making his child see that lying is wrong; thus only he gains a real victory for righteousness. In the same way God can completely vindicate the moral law only by effecting the real penitence of sinners, and their voluntary and glad acceptance of righteousness as the law and motive of their lives.
It must be borne in mind that the word law has two senses; there is the legal and judicial which is external, and which has been shown to be insufficient. There is however a deeper meaning. The law of any being is simply its real meaning, its plan or purpose, the fulfilment of which is its fulfilment. It may not be its conscious plan or purpose, and indeed it never can be, except when self-conscious persons understand their own meaning and, finding in it God's purpose for their lives, make it their own. But the real law is organic, living and vital, and is not to be con-founded with externality, or objectivity in its false sense. This may be made obvious by illustration. Our hands were meant to be used in certain ways; they are therefore adequate for certain muscular movements. But let us bend them backward too far, and they are broken. We have violated their law and denied their purpose and they are useless. We may also notice that the penalty is an inability to develop truly. Thus the moral law is the true law of our being, it is our plan and purpose, and can only be vindicated by being fulfilled. And, since we are conscious moral beings, "being fulfilled" means being voluntarily accepted. [It is likely that this conception of law will be misunderstood, as it will be thought that if law is the immanent nature of any given being, it must therefore develop according to that nature or law. How then can we account for the varied standards of morality and for the fact that human development is not always on moral lines? The fact is that we have to find place both for law and freedom. The action of a self-conscious and self-determining and self-legislating being is not neccssayily deter-mined by its real meaning; and it must also be remembered that man's development is gradual, and that knowledge of the data of life is never complete, a fact -which affects the judgment. Our Lord says that the people who would put the disciples in prison would think that they were doing God service, and in this case He evidently refers this error to a lack of knowledge, and not to a lack-of moral purpose.]
That the moral order is our immanent meaning as well as the immanent meaning of the world is proved by the fact that we destroy ourselves, sometimes our bodies, but always our souls, when we deny it, and also by the fact of conscience, which is ours and yet not ours, and which would unite our meaning with the meaning of the whole. The law of any free being can only be a law of this kind, fixed yet breakable, an ideal without which there is no fulfilment, but an ideal which may not be fulfilled. Thus this law is vindicated either by the blessedness which results from the keeping of it or by the misery which results from violating it, and in either case it is shown to be holy and just and good.
The possible objection may be anticipated that such a moral order as has been described can only be subjective and not objective, and that unless the moral order is external to and independent of the individual person there is no basis for a moral community. We must refer to what has already been said about the objective, and call attention to the fact that we are not dealing with what is physical, but with what is rational and spiritual, and therefore that this moral order, though subjective because inward, is also objective, being the inherent meaning of all moral and spiritual persons, and therefore the same for all. It is absolutely vital to understand that in every personality there is that which is individual and that which is universal. Individual differentia are not denied, for even self-consciousness is an individual differentia, but morality, beauty, truth, and reason are universal; and the more a man develops in personality, he at once becomes more truly himself, and more catholic or universal. It will thus be seen that subjective and objective are not distinguished by being the one internal and the other external. That which is universal is objective, even though it has no existence except as something inward and personal. The moral law is not the less objective because it is not an external code.
The reason of the difficulty in apprehending the position here stated, comes because men and women are imperfect and sinful, and because what is commonly called our "nature" is not our true nature. We are prone to sin, but although sin is, alas, too common, it is not natural in the true sense of that word, but strictly unnatural; for sin is the violation of our own true nature and involves the reaction of nature as a whole against it.
That the moral order must be rooted in the moral nature of the person, is proved by the fact of moral responsibilty. Unless this were so, how could we have the sense that right has for us an imperative demand? It is true that the demand is usually thought of as external, which is correct in the sense that it is not simply our subjective demand but the demand of truth, or of the moral law, or of God, but no demand could awake in us the sense of right, unless it appealed to our own inward sense of right. Hence, the sense of right must be part and parcel of our nature. Further, this sense of right demands that we yield to no command, however great the power behind it may be, which is not also right's own command. This proves that the moral law, written not after the outward form of legal enactment, but on the tables of the heart, is the common term between my personality, and God's and men's. It proves further that the moral order cannot be wholly vindicated unless it win from us our own consent.
Furthermore, not only have all men this common sense that there is a right, but actions are only moral as they are done because they are thought to be right, just as belief is only religious when it is held as a conviction of truth. Nothing is so subversive of moral judgment as the mistaking of external mass-judgments for true moral judgments, and the thinking that a command is necessarily right because it is the command of a multitude. Nothing so proves the slavery of the world to-day as this very thing. If this is felt to be an unfair judgment let us ask whether the criterion of many religious people be not what God is said to have said, rather than the apprehension of what God has said, in the realisation of the things which never violate conscience and truth. The formula " Thus saith the Lorcl " has often been the chain of many slaves, who all their life-time were subject to bondage, and is generally adopted by priestly ecclesiastics in the interests of their traditions and authority.
II
But we may ask, Is not God to punish men for their sins,as well as to deliver men from them? And does He not actually punish them in the natural order of things? To quote Dr. Denney again: "The Divine punishment is the Divine reaction against sin, expressing itself through the whole constitution or system of things under which the sinner lives." ["The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation." p. 203.] The answer is "Yes, sin brings its own punishment, the punishment however is inherent in the sin, it is not a personal retaliation on God's part."
The deeper aspect of this question is dealt with in the chapter on Providence. It is enough for the present to consider the question—In what sense is history a revelation of the moral order?
It is too often taken for granted that history as we know it reveals the Divine reaction against sin, and the Divine judgment upon it. This is only partially true; it could be perfectly true only if history were the record of all souls, showing us all the results which sin has produced in the case of each person. But written or ascertainable history is no more than a partial outward record of the interaction of persons. What happens at any particular time takes its form from the stage of development and the state of character of the persons whose actions compose it. Only in a very partial way therefore does history positively reveal that moral order which is the real nature of personal life.
It is erroneous to regard God as dealing with history, directing and controlling the affairs of men, except in so far as men are open to Him. But as this is dependent upon the measure in which they freely yield to Him it will be seen that this is only a partial element in history. It is, however not the only way in which God is manifest in history. The very nature of evil is to be destructive, and the vain and unsatisfying character of a successful pursuit of evil is a proof that the nature of things reacts against evil, and is not in harmony with its pursuit.
But when we look at history as a whole, we cannot be blind to the fact that iniquity often seems to prevail; might has, from the outward point of view, often triumphed over right, the wicked have flourished like the green bay-tree. When evil is overthrown, we are inclined to say that God has judged it. Is God similarly present when evil is victorious? Surely not. It is therefore obvious that we cannot trace God's hand direct1v in mere historic happening.
It is nearer the truth to say that historic happenings are the resultant of various forces, material and spiritual. In the measure that the persons whose activities make history are true or are not true to the moral order which is the real meaning of their nature, in that measure history contains a moral expression and a moral judgment. Considering the defect of character of the men and women who have made history, whose passions and self-interest have struggled with nobler things, all mingled confusedly together, the result is not as bad as we might have expected, and for a very real, though subtle reason. The worst of men are swift to react against injustice to themselves. Our code as to how men should act to us is almost perfect. The great defect is manifest relative to what we think is due to others. Pride, the sense of self-preservation and the desire for possession, contain in them an extraordinary instinctive apprehension of inflicted injustice. History abounds with r,cords of savage races rising to untold heights of heroism against injustice,—an injustice which they would not have been at all loth to inflict upon others. This is one of the greatest elements in the struggle of history, and it is as apparent to-day as it ever was. It forms a negative safeguard against injustice, making courses of injustice dangerous of pursuit. But the pity of it is that it is so one-sided, and that it therefore enlists the moral sense as far as it is consonant with one's selfish demands, and ceases when the moral sense would command it to go further. [It is well to notice certain stages in the vindication of the moral order. When evil men struggle against evil men for evil purposes, " making a wilderness and calling it peace," the very misery of the situation is the vindication of the moral order. When men who are not good themselves, resenting injustice directed against themselves, strive fiercely with the unjust, this reaction against injustice is a vindication of the moral order. When at a higher stage, Christian men, who have not yet risen above the idea of justice as a legal order which must be vindicated, resist the unjust, and seek to overthrow them, not because of personal malice, but because of moral horror against wrong, the moral order is vindicated in a higher degree. And when the Christian, seeking to stand for that for which Jesus stood, holding that Christianity consists, not in dying to resist an enemy's material demands, but in dying to capture an enemy's soul, suffers injustice without reviling, offering no defence against death save that of a righteousness which is adamant and a love which desires the sinner, then the moral order finds its supreme personal vindication. For in this case the unrighteous man who is always apt to see his own image in both God and man, and to read self-interest into every act, cannot misunderstand the situation. So the moral order is vindicated by the resultant state of both; in the case of the Christian because he has stood for that for which Jesus stood and thus vindicated the moral order in himself; the evil man has gained no victory, for he met no foe; lie smote himself in smiting the man who stood for him, with the result either that having quenched the light in slaying the man who stood for him he suffers the punishment of the moral order in a deeper misery and degradation; or he awakens to remorse, and thus the moral order is vindicated in his change. This is the victory of the man whom he wronged, and not his only victory, for having identified himself with an order in such a way that if every man did the same the Kingdom of God would have come, he has supremely vindicated not only his own soul, but the moral order in the exhibition of it.
The
moral order is supremely vindicated and illuminated in the Cross which, that
He might overcome evil, the Son of God endured: its demands were fulfilled
in what Jesus was, and afterwards in those who, " looking on Him whom they
had pierced," identified themselves with Him. Darkly, terribly, though
negatively was the moral order vindicated by Judas, and Caiaphas and Pilate.
who would wish
to have the soul of dereliction that did what they did; who would not rather
be vanquished than victor in that tragedy? In this instinctive judgment of
our souls we add our testimony to the indestructible moral order of the nature
of
things. Many raise questions as to the ultimate fate of Judas, Caiaphas, and
Pilate (and of the innumerable tribe of which they are examples); one thing
at least is clear in this connection, that they must for ever suffer defeat,
unless
Jesus gains the victory in them.]
The appeal to the moral sense is one
of the most tragic things in history,
because
so
often itis a selfish appeal. Passion
and self-interest lead to the suppression of vital facts,
lies are used
to evoke
the moral
sense to anger,
and masses of mankind are driven
in moral indignation into actions they
never would
have committed, had they known the
truth.
The subversion of the highest leads
to the lowest; have any conflicts
been so intense and so desperate as those
called "religious?"
It is obvious, therefore, how careful we must be in the affirmation that God expresses His judgments in history. Put while this is the case we cannot doubt the accomplishment of the purpose of God. To understand this however we need to analyse more deeply and to avoid temporary judgments. The nature of evil is destructive, the nature of good is constructive. Time and experience test results, and upon these results the moral nature of man reacts. For example the lust of power has in it the elements of ultimate decay. This lesson we see written plainly in history, and may, if we will, call it the Divine reaction in the nature of things, as it certainly is. But the annihilation of the Albigenses, a God-fearing and inoffensive people, cannot be called a judgment of God upon sin, or a Divine reaction in the nature of things against iniquity. "There were present at that season some that told Him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices, and Jesus answering said unto them; 'Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans, because they suffered such things?' I tell you nay."
This may seem to be a digression, but that it is not so will appear, first when we remember how often it has been alleged that Christ suffered the punishment of our sins, and secondly when we consider how the death of Christ could vindicate the moral law. We shall return to these problems again,but the position so far established is that only in some very general sense can punishment be seen to work itself out in history, and that Christ's death upon the Cross can in no way vindicate the moral law unless He can reveal it in Himself and make it accepted and fulfilled in those who understand it.
THE, problem of providence is so difficult that it is seldom treated in books on the Atonement. But no work which does not deal with it can really satisfy the mind or heart. Until we have a solution which in some sense satisries us, we are almost bound unconsciously to believe in two Gods, the God revealed in nature and history, and the God revealed in Jesus Christ. The same problem takes a different form in other minds. Nature knows no mercy: as the tree falls so it lies; and yet in Jesus Christ mercy seems to be at the heart of all things. Does God then deal with men in two different ways, not easily related, personally in Christ, and impersonally in nature?
There is also a conflict between those who hold that nature is a fixed order, which functions automatically, and those who hold that the Universe is plastic in the hFnds of God. And there is a conflict between the popular Christian view of Providence, which ascribes all the events of life to the foresight and love of God, and the view of those who, finding life strangely mixed with good and evil, justice and injustice, can hold no clear view of God, because He seems to be represented differently in different events. And lastly, there are those who find no difficulty in believing that it is just that nature should react against wilful sin or ignorance, but who cannot understand why nature should destroy indiscriminately by earthquake and by flood.
These questions demand a book for themselves but we hope to indicate a position from which a solution may be found. Whether or no the position here set forth and the necessarily short outline and proof attached be thought adequate, there cannot be much doubt that Ritschl is right in holding there can be no real. doctrine of Providence apart from Redemption.
I
The doctrine of Providence involves a doctrine of creation, the most difficult problem to thought. It is only possible here to state results. It is not true to say that God is the Great First Cause in the sense in which we always use the word causation; for every cause in this world is dependent upon some prior cause, and all that we mean by causation is a change in existence, while the problem of creation is the problem of the creation of existence.
We here take for granted that God is the ground,—the continuous ground, of the world's being. The notion of ground is a much wider and deeper one than that of cause. It is important to notice that many of the difficulties in connection with Providence arise because we ascribe every-thing to God as cause, which notion is not only inadequate to explain the world's existence, but also to justify it as amoral order.
In philosophy however, we cannot begin with the notion of God; we have to start from experience. The notion of God comes because experience, when we understand it, has no satisfactory explanation without God. But what is it that meets us in experience? There is nature, and there is spirit; two orders once thought of as inorganic matter and living beings. Investigation has proved that what we thought was dead matter turns out to be a living mass; that the Universe, as we know it, consists only of experients and their experience, the forms of life which comprise it varying from highly differentiated beings such as man, down to simple undifferentiated monads. No form of life of which we are conscious is at this lower end of the scale, but the regress which we know involves this further regress, and we have every reason to believe that higher forms have reached their present stage through a continous development from earlier stages of life.
The natural order is developed through the action, reaction, and interaction of the living beings which compose it, and new stages are reached through what Wundt calls creative synthesis. The question then arises: What is the relation of God to this living system which we call nature at the stages before self-conscious personal life? We have noticed in connection with personal life that man is free, and that yet He is not free to do anything. The meaning of his life is expressed in a moral order, and he can only attain his fulfilment by working out his life in conformity with this. In other words, while God is in a sense limited by man's freedom, man cannot achieve, by his freedom, the destruction of the fundamental moral order, in which not only is expressed God's purpose, but also man's meaning. On the other hand, the end or purpose of life is only attained through God and man together; man cannot attain it without God, without recognition of the moral order of reality, but neither can it be attained until man makes God's purpose His own, and actively develops himself in its realisation. This does not in any sense involve God as finite; a God who could not limit Himself to achieve His purpose would not be truly omnipotent. This self-limitation is necessary because of the nature of that purpose, which is the creation of a realm of persons or ends. Personality is such that it cannot be created perfect, like a machine; for as we know it it is essentially realised through free activity, which involves at once moral independence, and utter dependence upon God, whose will is expressed in the moral order. The same principles are at work, though in a more obscure way, in the living system of nature, before it arrives at the stage of what we call personal life. Sub-personal beings then are not determined in the sense that their every act is caused by God; they realise their nature by the exercise of a kind of freedom. This is necessary for their development, and without it man, who has come from this order, could never be what he is. But it is noticeable that in their action and reaction an order is produced which is afterwards the condition of personal life; this order is not without God and, if man deals with it in a wrong way, it reacts against him. We may illustrate this by the body. The human body is a system of myriads of living beings, in which the man is as the chief monad. If he does not act according to the order or meaning of his body, this living system reacts against him.
We have seen that this living system of nature produces an order through its activity, which has in it spontaneity, or a lower order of freedom. That it produces an order shows that an order is its meaning, and God's purpose is expressed in it, but because there is in it what corresponds at a lower stage to freedom in the higher, we cannot put down particular events of nature to the personal direct act of God. They are incidents in the self-development of life. While, however, in nature we have a living development and in a sense a free development, the purpose of God cannot be defeated. While everything is not fixed, all the possibilities are known, and the limits fixed. The mule is an illustration of the way in which nature sets a limit through sterility. Owing to the inherent nature of the living beings which compose nature, each of which strives for self-preservation and development, an order is inevitably produced; an order which is the condition of and ultimately related to personal life. We see also a balance in nature in this that undifferentiated forms are so much more numerous and fertile than more highly differentiated forms. The flies upon which the swallows feed form by their far greater fertility an equilibrium with the swallows, which have a higher order of instinct.
The result is an order, which, because it is an order, expresses intelligence and purpose, which are in it, though they are not,—at the lower, or instinctive stages, —of it; in this order there is a manifestation of God Who is the ground of its existence.
While this is an order, it is not strictly speaking a moral order until we arrive at the stage of what we call personal life, but it is the ground out of which the moral order develops, and it is moral in this sense, that as we have seen it reacts against evil. When we regard the end for which it exists, and the goal of its development, we can regard the whole as a moral order and affirm that the meaning of the world is ethical and personal. Its development is from within, a development of perception and ultimately of conscious meaning.
It is difficult to think that God interferes with this order from without. If He does, we are involved in endless difficulties as to why He does not interfere in a different manner; why for instance, earthquakes indiscriminately destroy the evil and the good. It may help us if we realise that before personal life, in the full meaning; of that term, develops, God's government of the world is general. It is, however, as personal as a world at a non-self-conscious stage will permit, for, as we have seen, there is no interference with individual spontaneity. We may illustrate this from experience, though illustrations are necessarily imperfect. Whenever we have the government of men in the mass, there is a general order or rule which is the outcome of a purpose which is for the general good. Without such an order which is for the general good, the real individual good cannot be obtained, for the individual would else live amidst conditions of disorder, but this order, though good and beneficent in itself may bear hardly at times upon the individual, who through ignorance or accident, does not conform to it. Only in a system in which each individual is perfectly developed, and in which there is a perfect regard in each for every other individual could this be avoided.
II
The relation of God to His creatures is of a higher kind when they arrive at the stage of self-conscious personality; for then men are capable of being influenced through insight, conviction, and personal relationships. [It is true that we may use our intelligence to further animal and selfish aims, but this is not our real meaning, and it is, as has been shown, destructive of the self. A rational personal order is attained not through unintelligently yielding to the animal instincts of self-preservation and competition, but through co-operation, which involves a higher conception of the self in our self-identification with other selves.]
Also when this stage arrives the religious sense awakes. Let our relationships with one another be what they may, there are desires and needs which our life with one another never can supply. In a very real sense, we live alone, and alone each of us at last must pass into the Unseen. As intelligence develops,the vast spaces of the Universe together with the complex character of life and of circumstances beyond our control, awakens the sense of solitude and of dependence; and as in nature there is relation and correlation this need involves a relationship to God and a relationship of God to us. We have before seen that God is personality in perfection, and religion always has implicitly in it the fact of personal relationship with God. This involves that God must desire to come to us at all times and in every way possible. The result is what we should expect. He comes to us as we reflect upon the order and happenings of life. There is no happening that may not mediate Him, as all the circumstances of life are related to moral and spiritual demands—to the fuller realisation of our life as we learn to stand in moral freedom over against the world; to the right use of the world and the mastery of circumstance and desire; and to the deeper appreciation of our utter dependence on truth and love and on God whose will is expressed in these things.
The great difficulty is that while the control of Providence must be related to human freedom, freedom involves the possiblity of actions contrary to God's will, and of consequences to ourselves and others which would not result if we made His will the principle of our action. This helps to explain. how it is that the hand of God seems to be withheld, and why tragedies like the recent war take place. It is not that God wills them; but we are free, that is, self-determined, and if we go our own way, without regard to the moral order in the nature of things, and deny the guidance of God, such things must occur; for the inevitable result of not using freedom rightly, is that, sinking back into a lower stage, we are determined by the objects of selfish desire. The passions which lead to such evils as war and which these in turn arouse, close the soul to the influence of the Spirit of God; for the very condition of His activity in the soul is a humble selflessness which lays it open to His demand in the recognition of the things of love and righteousness. The result, however, is that we sink back not simply into the animal state, but into something which is worse, —a condition of degeneracy. Through the misuse of the intellect, in the search for pleasure and self-satisfaction we become debased, and, curiously enough, deprive ourselves of pleasure and satisfaction. It will be found physiologically, that the pleasures of sense are not enjoyed by the uncontrolled and therefore satiated, but by those who are controlled and therefore sensitive. The moral order expressing itself in Nature steadily tends to deny pleasure to those who selfishly make it the one end of life, and the higher satisfactions which come not because we seek pleasure, but as a result of seeking what is good for its own sake, are denied altogether to the evil.
It will be thought that this view of Providence which recognises actions and conditions in life which result, not because God's will is followed, but because it is denied, does not answer the demand of the religious sense relative to the omnipotent control of God over everything. But, as it fits the facts of life we have to ask whether we are not attaching our religious sense to an idea of Omnipotence which is not valid, and whether we are not failing to understand what real power involves in relation to a world which is a personal order of life. As long as we think of power in terms of physical force, and of government as external, we naturally expect God's omnipotence to control and design every single happening. But such a view raises insuperable difficulties; for innocence is not always protected, neither is justice always outwardly triumphant. It is only because the death of Jesus is not allowed to stand in its own true and natural light that we do not feel this problem of the apparent non-interference of God on behalf of innocence at its acutest point. There are many to-day whose minds are darkened because their idea of omnipotence conflicts with their experience. There are godly parents who have prayed for noble and God-fearing sons, but the angel of destruction has not been turned from his course, and they hung broken on the wire or are buried in No man's land. It will not answer the moral problem to say that God might have interfered in their cases, but that they died because He willed it.
But it does not follow that we deny the religious sense, which finds God in every circumstance of life, and which says that "all things work together for good to them that love God." The solution of this difficulty is the happy experience of many a humble child of God. Just as on the one hand the moral order of the world reacts against iniquity, so on the other, it is behind those who act rightly, and God transmutes into a good, for the soul which handles life aright, those things which exist because His will has been denied. "Sweet are the uses of adversitv." To find God in adversity is to assert the freedom of the soul over against circumstance and the victory of the soul over against sin. To stand for truth is to stand for an order which is victorious and shall be victorious. The result is, not only a deeper and truer character, but a wider and purer vision. We see beyond this "little while" of our struggle, and even here, live in the city of God which remaineth. We know that God's purpose for us and those we love cannot be defeated by earth's happenings; sorrow and joy both minister to us that which is eternal, and we apprehend the ever-present God, guiding and enabling us amidst the difficulties of life. The first result is the victory of the soul, and finally there will be the clear victory of the order of life in which the soul lives. There is no doubt of the victory of Christ upon the Cross, and He who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured it, despising the shame, did not doubt the victory of the Kingdom of God, which should vindicate the Divine order which He apprehended and for which He stood.
"Vain
are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts:
unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amidst the boundless main,
"To
waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thine infinity,
So surely anchored on
That steadfast rock of Immortality."
It will appear that upon this view we are left defenceless; but that is far from being the case. But we must here notice that as a matter of fact no sufficient defence against injustice and death is found by those who hold that God's omnipotence is revealed in every happening of life. The worldly man will always think of defence in an external manner; 'the spiritual man realises that defence is of a higher order. A beautiful soul is a real defence in the midst of life, because it not only appeals to the good in others, but being creative also tends to evoke it. It attacks the problems of earth's wrongs at the heart, and sometimes brings with it, even to the degraded, the consciousness of another and better world.
"When
sudden—how think ye, the end
Did I say without friend?
"Do
you see ! Just my vengeance complete,
The man sprang to his feet,
Stood erect, caught at God's skirts and prayed,
So, I was afraid."
The fact is that we are only on the threshold of a personal world, but we have glimpses of its depth and power. There is hardly a person in the world who would not own to the permanent influence of some other person upon him. This may be for evil or for good, but are we justified in saying that evil personality is more influential than good? The goodness of the good often does not carry weight because of some idiosvncracy or failure, but it is one of the clear facts of life that real and undeniable goodness never seem, to fail of in~tluence and that it has an unchallengeable appeal which evil has not. It may take time, but it has in it a moral and personal imperative which is never eradicated from the memory, and which never ceases to appeal to the heart. Ancient history, as well as modern, has its noble souls whose names are cherished from generation to generation, and who call out the veneration of humanity because they appeal to it even while they condemn it. The partial failure of religion is mainly due to a warped type of life, which lacks some element of true humanity, and so causes its good to be evil spoken of. But the effect of real goodness is never lost. We may add to this fact that there is something mysterious in personal influence; the influence of the good i,, the influence of a love which looks upon another's good as its own, a.nother's sorrow as its grief; against this there is no weapon. A man will strike one who will selfishly oppose him, but will find it a difficult thing to strike the man who would die for him. In the nature of things, the man who does so never forgives himself: he goes out and it is night.
There is no saying where the influence of love ends; we are beginning to realise that telepathy is a fact; it tells of bonds which space cannot sever, and of deep calling unto deep. It is true that this may be but an influence, and that it has no moral worth until it is judged and accepted, but the deep influences of fellowship are beyond our measuring.
As these things are so, may it not be that we are ignorant of many avenues of influence the recognition of which will greatly help to solve this problem? As God is a person, and our Father, can we set limits to His personal touch and influence? May there not be many ways in which He seeks to reach us, to lead us beside the still waters, and to guide our feet into the way of life? It is true that any such influence can be but an appeal to our freedom, but again it may be said: Is it easy to use our freedom for our own destruction, through closing our ears to the voices of help?
Despite this, however, we have to acknowledge that there is no talisman which will secure physical safety and comfort in life. It is not only the desire to uphold the omnipotence of God which makes us so anxious to prove that God interferes forcibly and with material irresistibility in the government of the world, but a keen desire for personal shelter, of which we tend instinctively to think in physical terms. But does not the deepest instinct of our hearts tell us that this is not noble, and that this is not the way in which Jesus of Nazareth sought shelter when He so loved us? Neither is it consistent with the love which He calls forth in us.
True shelter is a personal thing, it consists in being known with all one's failures and aspirations, in being loved and possessed by some other soul whose faithfulness will never fail; in finding in this companionship a moral and spiritual strength which enables one to stand in truth where otherwise there would be failure. This friend who thus shelters us from our weakness, who strengthens our hand in God, and who stands to suffer and rejoice with us, is Jesus Christ. He does not take from us the burden of life, but He makes our yoke easy and our burden light, because He gives us insight to understand, and strength to bear, and causes us to realise that no one is able to harm us if we be followers of that which is good.
In this view, the untoward happenings of life, though they are not the outcome of the immediate and direct purpose of God, are not out of the order of His all-ruling Providence. They call to us to stand for the moral order in our reactions towards them, and God meets us in that demand for witness and in our response. We do not live in a static but an unfinished world in the realisation of which we are workers together with God. When therefore we understand our own meaning as we face evil and injustice, we act so that the world may realise the moral order which is its meaning. It is through such activity that true progress is realised, and God's will accomplished.
It is also necessary to note that the nature of things is intolerant of evil. This world was not made for the success of iniquity, and nothing that is not in accord with the moral order '",ill ultimately stand in it. Honesty is the best policy, for the cheap victories of iniquity are only passing triumphs; and in this also we see the providential ordering of God.
It still remains to consider the difficult question as to whether man's freedom does not involve that God is powerless, and the possibility that the Divine purpose may not be realised.
There is immanent in every person a desire for satisfaction, for some higher and better state than that which has been realised. Men seek for satisfaction in many ways, but when thev identify themselves with what is wrong, because they deny their own meaning, the result is loss and deprivation, if not physical yet personal, and the result of continuance in, evil is a state which when clearly seen is a warning to others. We should also find if we knew intimately the histories of souls, how many hide the misery that they feel, and humbly long for escape from their captivity. It is also noticeable that even among the degraded, nobility and heroism are applauded. It has been recorded that in the low theatres of Paris the Apache cheers vociferously the hero and hoots the villain.
And as we have before noticed, this immanent sense of right and justice makes us very keen censors of others, if not always of ourselves. But others also are keen censors of us, and the result is an equilibrium which, at least outwardly, has moral elements in it. Men always realise in the end that life is impossible without order, and if from no higher motives than self-defence and convenience, some kind of order is always the result. But history abundantly proves that there is always joy in attaining something higher, and there are always souls who, awaking to higher values, are impatient of the lower. The number of these is greater than we know, and there are many facts which conduce continually to make this the case. The instinct of parental love, seeks some better state for its child than it has known itself. The instinct of friendship does the same; the surprise that we feel when a rough man gives his life for another, and when men burn white in war and peace, shows how little we understand the elemental in man that stands by the moral order.
Confirmation of this upward tendency has clear proof in history. just as in Nature higher developments occur through creative syntheses which are maintained and reproduced, so in political and social life we find revolution against the outworn and inadequate, and stages are passed to which it is unthinkable that the world should consent to return. This can be paralleled also in the history of thought and of religion. All this goes to prove that while as far as we can see there are innumerable instances of men who are broken because they persistently deny the moral order and only vindicate it negatively through their own destruction, yet increasingly, in point of fact, the rnoral order comes to ever clearer expression as the fundamental condition of life.
That this unfolds the purpose and government of God who is the constant ground of our existence, indicates that a Divine providential order is a fact, and that human freedom is no barrier to the admission of the governance of God and the final victory of His purpose.
III
The final victory is achieved through Christ, "in whom and unto whom and through whom are all things.'' God has actually touched the world, but how? Was it by the arm of might which compelled men to do His will, as we should think would be the case if God ruled the world by omnipotent, direct and impersonal force? What do we find in Him, in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, the beloved Son in whom He was well pleased? He was born to poverty, and as a man had not where to lay His head; he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; His grandeur was His humility, His dignity was truth, His crown was one of thorns, borne in love. It may, however, be objected that in all this Christ was singular, that He bore what we have not to bear, and that the providential care of God was withheld from IJim in a way that it is not withheld from us. But such a view neither meets the facts, nor is consistent with justice. It would mean the abrogation of the moral order, and take all meaning away from the human life of Jesus. He entered into our lot, and took up our task, revealing the meaning of our life, not in order that we should escape these things, but that we should find our salvation in being what He was among them. God's will was manifest in this. Also we have to ask: Did He appeal to anything save insight and conviction? Did He appeal to power or to truth and love? Was He not His own appeal, as He lived our life, facing its difficulties beside us, and gaining the victory over them for us?
God took this way of seeming helplessness because it was the only way of power. Omni-potent force might compel man from without, but it could not be sure of victory; souls desperate in their freedom and divining instinctively something of their heritage might defy it even though damned, and if they were not left with the freedom to do so, they would have to be deprived of thought and will, and the love that could make any worthy choice. Such alone could be the victory of omnipotent force, but such is not the victory of Jesus of Nazareth. When He is really lifted up and understood, men are drawn near. They are like children wandering in the dark, rejoiced to find the guide who knows the way, or like the fevered body that responds to the medicine that brings health and a joyous sense of life and strength. Against His love we have no weapon. The deepest voice of our souls is on His side when He is understood.
Why should this revelation of God be the central thing in human life and history if we do not live in a personal world, and if the supreme consideration of God is not to appeal to personal freedom and love for the fulfilment of personal life and therefore for the fulfilment of the life of the world, which is a personal system? And can we say that such a God leaves the world uncontrolled? He shall reign until He has put all things under His feet, and for nothing should we be more grateful than the fact that He does not reign as man reigns, but from the cross of human and personal appeal.
This view of Providence will very probably leave some faithful Christians cold. And the last thing that the writer wishes is to take away any comfort from the children of God, or to ride rough-shod through human instincts with a hard logic. All human solutions must be imperfect, until the data are known, and in the great mystery in which we live, the wise mood is not one of dogmatism but of humility. Eut how are we to find God, save in following the truth? And the only truth that is valuable is ultimately one of conviction. A man ought therefore to state the truth as he sees it, and not to represent things as he might wish that they were. We leave our old homes with a pang, but it is often the will of God that we go out, and in after days when we look back, we see God's hand in that departure. Humbly I believe that the same experience is found here, and a few considerations may help to make it clearer. The religious instinct nearly always says, when calamity and bereavement come, "It is the Lord; let Him do unto me as seemeth Him good." Is the Lord directly behind our bereavements and calamities? When a, loved and good. son is slain on the battlefield, or is murdered, can we say: "That definite happening way: the definite act of God?" It is a terrible assumption. It often lays murder at the door of God. This is but an illustration which raises the problem, "Is it true and if so in what sense?"
The moral sense has qualified the religious instinct, and has made a distinction between His active will and His permissive will, and so we say, "God permitted it." Unhappily this does not in the least remove the difficulty. It makes the omnipotent God (and Omnipotence on this theory is a direct irresistible force) responsible for what He could have avoided and did not. A permissive will becomes morally the same as an active will. This difficulty is removed on the theory that our freedom is sacred to God, and that His influence is personal, not an irresistible and physical force.
But still remains the difficulty, which may be thus expressed: "Is God no defence to me? and when I seek Him am I still the buffet of the world's happenings?'' The very form of our question indicates that we tend to seek a life free from pain and untoward circumstances, and that while each of us is quite accustomed to think of tragedy in connection with someone else, we tend unconsciously to assume that God will not let tragedy touch us. It is an assumption for which the facts of life provide no warrant. But while this is the case, all that we can reasonably demand is fulfilled, if we can prove that God comes to us in every happening, and through every circumstance, and that to find Him in them is to transmute them into a good. This is assuredly the case. Like every wise father, God is concerned not so much with what happens to us, but with what we are as we meet life's circumstances. Difficulties and trials, as well as joys, evoke the soul, and God is found in either sorrow or joy; they are all windows to life's meaning; they all mediate strength to the soul, when we meet them aright. This is what the Apostle means when he says: "All things are yours . . . the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come, all are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." [i Cor. iii. 22 and 23.] This is only another way of saying that religion is the realisation of true freedom, and that freedom involves our standing over againot the world as its masters, and the denial that the world can make us its slaves. It was to no sheltered path that Christ sent the disciples when He said: "I send you forth as sheep among wolves," but His grace was sufficient for them. By grace is meant that personal and loving friendship through which He had identified Himself with them; their sorrows were His; their joys were His; His hope for them became their hope in Him. With one life did they face life, and that without possibility of real defeat. Is not this true to our deepest experience? The highest and holiest treasures of life are hewn out of the rock of sorrow and difficulty; our deepest friendships are "watered with tears"; and our moments of most vivid life have been those in which we were strengthened to face adversity by some noble soul who loved us with a deathless love. The friendship of Jonathan and David was realised to its very depths only through adversity. In His adversities the friendship of Jesus was and is still most clearly known, and we prove this in experience as, hearing His call, we take up our cross and walk with Him along the highway of God. Is it better that we should be physically safe or victoriously strong?
But there is another consideration of the greatest importance. It is that through the vicarious nature of life, God has given us into each other's keeping. What is it that wakes us with strange wonder as we see a mother fondly clasp a little child to her breast? It is an expression of the love of God. Childhood is thus protected by the very, instincts of nature; it is God's way of guarding it. But as parents understand, they seek to guide children so that they may be able to stand on their own feet, and walk the right way when the strong hand is removed. This also they impress upon their children that the love and charities of home are the laws of a larger and wider life. And does not a parent's soul rise to its own height when a son is found giving his life that others may live? What is the result and meaning of this but that God, for our good, has laid upon us this great responsibility, which is also a privilege, that we should love one another, seeking not the things which are our own, but the things of others, bearing one another's burdens, and so fulfil His law? Not otherwise can human life be fulfilled. We are too apt to love those who love us, and limit the sphere of our responsibility. But God has made of one blood all them that dwell upon all the face of the earth, and has set us as children in one family. Only when, responding to His will we identify ourselves with each other's good, can we mediate God's Providence to one another. It is only in this way that the external way of life will cease to be a path of thorns. It is a call to Christians to awaken to individual responsibility, "Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord."
THE consideration of the Moral Order naturally leads to the discussion of sin or moral evil which is a breach of it. Our view of sin will be determined by our conception of God and of human personality.
I
We are not here concerned with the problem of how sin originated historically; it is enough to recognise that sin is universal and to find traces of it as far back as we can follow the human race to the times of darkness and of silerce. So far as is ascertainable, sin was first regarded in an arbitrary and non-moral way. Primitive man, having not yet arrived at the stage of general ideas, had no other conception of sin than of particular acts which were a transgression of taboo or tribal custom. Any inward idea of sin as of a state of soul in which motive and intention are the vital elements was almost wholly lacking. These views, however, are not totally devoid of value; for even primitive man had the sense of the sacred and the great instincts out of which religion arises. Such views are only deserving of censure when men have passed the stage at which they should be held, and when they hold them in denial of a greater light and a more excellent way. Even in civilised communities these views are by no means extinct; their survival is seen in the love of mascots, the belief in luck and the superstitious mood which makes otherwise sensible people dread to criticise religious views in which they have been brought up. The idea of taboo still clings to certain theories about the Bible and of the Atonement and to rites and ceremonies of the Church.
With the development of reason and the consequent unification of life there came also a parallel development of religious idea resulting in the doctrine of the unity of God; and the idea of Law as found in a community was read into God's method of dealing with the universe; thus sin came to be looked on as a legal transgression. Accordingly we find sin defined in the "Westminster Catechism" as "any want of conformity unto or trangression of the Law of God." Much depends on what is meant by the "Law of God," but there was in it a conception which dominates all legal constructions in theology. It is a great advance upon the primitive view, but it was seldom an absolute advance, for the mysticism and magic that were found in the earlier views linger on, as may be seen in the cultus and theology of the Eastern and Roman Churches, though in the latter case primitive practices and theories are leavened with more ethical ideas of law and sin and grace. The quotation from the "Westminster Catechism" recalls the fact that the Protestant and Reformed Churches of Reformation times were far from breaking with Romish ways of thinking. These Churches separated owing to the developed consciousness of the worth and freedom of personality; and while this issued in a demand for an immediate touch with God and an insistence on Justification by personal faith in God, yet the Reformation Churches did not see and have not yet fully seen how tremendous is the revolution for theology and in particular for the doctrine of sin involved in their assertion of religion as a personal relationship. A personal relationship (as we have seen) is something altogether deeper and more intimate than a legal relationship. Sin therefore must be more than a mere breach of legal enactment. It will of course not be denied that even under legal terms the personal relatioiiship was experienced; for men's experience is ever richer and fuller than its theological expression.
II
(a) Sin is more than a breach of taboo or convention, more than the transgression of a legal code What then is it? It is necessary to distinguish between sin and sins. What we call sins are the outcome or effect of sin, just as the fruit, to use a metaphor frequently employed by our Lord is the outcome or effect of the tree. Sin therefore is not an act or series of acts but an inward state of soul. This is emphatically the teaching of Jesus. All the blessings of the Kingdom according to His doctrine, are the possession of those who have the right attitude or state of soul; and all sins are the outcome of the "evil heart," that is a wrong state of soul. Acts of sin involve the violation of the moral law, which, as we have seen, is our own true nature and meaning, Sin is thus a violation or destruction of our personality.
We have seen that personality involves thought, affection and will; but it involves also something more. As we think, and love, and do, so we are, and so we become. Our thoughts are not fancies which come and go and leave no trace. Every thought we deliberately think or assent to leaves its mark on the mind and is as it were a stone in the structure of character. In our affections we express ourselves, and at the same time develop ourselves; for we always grow like that which we love; and it may be that if we only understood ourselves we should realise that every man attains the end for which he really strives. [It may be untrue to say this relative to outward things and possessions, and yet in a deep sense it is true. A man may strive all his life to be rich and die poor, but he ends with the soul of the man whose object was money, and that result is the same whether he be rich or poor.] So every activity involves a state of soul, and enforces that which it involves, and though we may not succeed in the outward thing to which our desire leads us, by an unalterable and necessary law our souls form themselves according to that for which we strive, and what we are has to the all-seeing eye our history involved in it.
This principle was clearly enunciated in old days by Aristotle ["Nicomachean Ethics," Bk. II. Ch. i.] who held that virtue is the outcome of a virtuous disposition, and a particular virtue is attained through the exercise of that particular virtue, which exercise involves the strengthening of the disposition and the ability to give it fuller outward expression. So sin is the outcome of a certain disposition, and particular vices are strengthened through the exercise of those vices, and the disharmony of soul becomes ever more fixed. We may have to overcome much resistance in order to commit the first sin of a particular kind, but each time we commit it the moral repugnance is lessened, until at last the sin becomes a habit. Habit grows like the coral rock: each living action leaves its permanent resultant. It is true to say that nothing ever remains in the past; the past meets us in the present and largely determines our future.
Personality is a self-realisation; and self-realisation comes when we identify ourselves with what is right and true; when our supreme interest is not self-regard nor self-pleasing but truth. Sin enters when in the conflict waged by conscience against selfish passion and desire we "resist the truth in unrighteousness,'' that is when we refuse to let truth make its appeal to us and to respond to its appeal. But to refuse to let Reality speak to us and to be content with pleasant self-delusion without which sin would be realised in all its naked horror, is to walk the wav of personal destruction.
(b) But, it may be urged, if a man's action at any particular time is the expression of his character, which itself is the result of his past actions themselves arising out of his native disposition, in what sense can a man be said to be free? This question necessitates a philosophical digression.
We have to be on guard against regarding freedom as the freedom of a faculty, as for instance when we say that the will is free. The will is not a faculty in itself, for in any action which is the outcome of a conscious will the personality, as a whole, is expressed and the man is responsible. Freedom does involve a power of choice, but that over which a man has choice depends upon what he is. Experience proves also that when a man surrenders to evil, his surrender tends to become habitual, and the very nature of sin involves that a man yields to the power of impulses and passions instead of asserting himself in controlling them. The result of this is that freedom is lost, because a man is then determined by irrational impulses instead of truth and righteousness, through which alone he can realise himself. This process of destruction may go so far that in any given situation what is right is never considered. Truth being resisted and held down ceases to speak to the man who has said "Evil be thou my good," and who therefore, ceasing to assert himself against the tide of temptation, inevitably floats away on it. If it should happen, as it often does, that the vision of what is true comes before him, and he remembers the time of his innocence, any regrets that he may have are often unavailing; for this is but a thought of liberty coming to one who is bound and enslaved. The fact is that when the temptation that has been habitually yielded to again presents itself it comes with a curious sense of necessity, and is even automatically obeyed. All that is left of freedom is often but a distinction in thought between what is right and wrong, without the power to make it a reality in the life, and as evil is persisted in, even this tends to fade, and all that remains is an impulsive animality. No term is more loosely used than that of freedom. There is no real freedom, except in being a servant, and a willing one, to what is seen to be true, and except in standing as a person over against things and in maintaining one's personality in any eventuality. To do otherwise is to become a mere link in a chain of causes external to the moral and rational self, and therefore to become a "thing." It is therefore evident that freedom is the greatest need of men, and in the realisation of this we waken to the fact that life as it is lived is a stage upon which men masquerade pretending to possess a freedom which is not theirs. "He is a freeman whom the truth makes free and all are slaves beside.'' [The old controversy between Freedom and Determinism often obscures the real issue. A man is free when he can use the world in the right development of his personality. He is a slave when he is determined by the world, even though in a given case the impulse to which he yields without conviction, should lead to what is beneficent. Therefore it is not a case between freedom of choice on the one hand, and external compulsion on the other, but of how God can come to a man's life from within, enlisting his conviction and at the same time breaking the chains of his slavery.]
One of the greatest mistakes in philosophical as well as theological thinking is the radical separation of thought, love and will. They are qualities or activities of a personality, and can no more be really separated from the person than colour, form and scent can be separated from a flower. We may abstract them in thought, but to forget that we have abstracted and to deal with them as independent is fatal relative to any true solution. It is always time to be on our guard when any system of theology sets out with the premiss that will is primal, or thought is primal, or affection is primal.
There is no action which on analysis does not involve Purpose, Interest and Idea. Therefore the truth is that in any given act the whole personality is involved, and the character of a person is simply a state of personality which is the resultant of certain types of activity, and this person who has in the past adopted certain aims as the principle of action, will, because he has expressed himself in that, be likely to do the same again. It is this that makes sin so terrible, and goodness so beneficent. It is because of this that a man's whole nature may become corrupted through identifying himself with what is lower; he may indeed, in the end, cease to realise that there is a higher, and find that in denying his true nature he has started a process the end of which is the utter demoralisation of his personality.
How, then, is a man free? First, freedom is not the ability to do anything; for a man very soon finds that when he identifies himself with what is wrong he becomes the slave of what is wrong. Freedom, then, is the power to identify ourselves with those things which truly develop our nature, but because it has in it the element of choice, it has also in it the possibility of freedom's destruction. There is in any given human being not only what is rational and spiritual, thought, freedom, and will, but also the material out of which personality is to be formed. Our passions and affections and instincts are roused to desire by the outward stimuli of circumstances and objects; the vital question is whether the person is to be their slave or their controlling and moulding power. It is the question as to whether we are to arrange the bricks in a building aright, though this illustration is defective because the elements out of which we build character are living impulses which we have often to restrain. Freedom is realised when, letting truth and reality speak to us, we deny that which would deny it and affirm that which is consistent with it.
We are free when we are masters in the world in which we live, because in the end we are prepared rather to yield life than, doing violence to our own true nature, to possess the earth in dishonour, which possession is a delusion; for, losing our own souls we cease from any true possession of the earth, ultimately lose ourselves in it and are mastered by it.
(c) The position thus far attained then is that sin is a state of personality and involves the violation of the true law of our being; its effect is the ultimate destruction of our personality; true freedom is much more than a mere absence of external compulsion, it is the power to use the world for the expression of the purpose of our true nature, and is an attainment, the goal of character, not a gift of birth. We have now to show that there can be no sin apart from the consent of a personality to that which is seen to be wrong.
With our limited knowledge, and in the face of the tremendously intricate problem of life, we are bound to make mistakes. Such mistakes are not necessarily sin, and do not inwardly corrupt the personality. Personal experience will make this abundantly clear. There are courses of action pursued, and theories acted upon, either without the knowledge that they are wrong, or with an honest belief that they are right, which a fuller light and a deeper personal realisation reveal to be wrong and injurious. Such a revelation fills any holiest man with deep regret, but his act was not sinful. He has not "resisted the truth in unrighteousness," and the inward effects of his action are totally different from what they would have been if the same thing had been done with the conscious knowledge that it was evil. The importance of this consideration will be manifest to any who have inside knowledge of religious life, which has often been saddened or poisoned by artificial and unreal views of sin. People have been crushed by immoral methods of judging actions; God has been supposed to look upon us in a way in which we never would honestly look upon one another; artificial and immoral views of sin have invariably led to artificial and immoral logical constructions. How often have people to be told that there is no sin in evil thoughts unless these thoughts are harboured and assented to, and how necessary it is that those who are striving against any vice should have a right understanding of this. Nothing is more refreshing in the gospel story than the honest and real way in which Jesus deals with sin and conscience. He sees more hope for the publican and harlot who faced reality than for the Pharisees whose ideas of sin were external and artificial. The latter confounded what is merely respectable with what is virtuous; they had lost moral perspective, and were living in an unreal world. The sinners and outcasts on the other hand were reminded by the censures and contempt of society as much as by their own consciences of their moral weakness and failure; their souls were as birds beating with broken wings against the bars of their cage, longing for the free air and the heavenly expanse; they lived in a sombre but real world. Jesus could deal with them upon a basis of reality and therefore could help them. Jesus can save no man while he excuses himself in his own eyes and refuses to face the real facts of his life. That explains His stern denunciation of the Pharisees; for until they saw themselves in the cold light of reality, he could do nothing for them. God is not mocked; He deals with all men with that sincerity and truth with which alone He would be worshipped.
III
Our modern world has ceased to live under the terrors imposed by the thought of a future hell of fire; but it has thought too often that sin was a light matter, an inevitable happening in human evolution. No view could be more damnable. There is no hell of literal flames, but no symbol could more adequately have embodied the truth and no terror which it evoked could be too great for the reality. As a symbol it was inadequate; it placed in the future that which is present and future; it made men think the day of terror had not come. But the day of the Lord is here and now, and the fan of the nature of things is in His hand, and unseen He is throughly purging His threshing-floor. Can anyone doubt this who knows the history of the soul? Our possibilities of self-deception are truly awful, and the results appalling. "Repeated sin impairs the judgment, and lie whose judment is impaired sins repeatedly." The weird power of sin to veil itself develops more and more; the vision becomes blinder and the heart harder. Could the happenings of any one night in a great city take place if hearts were not hard and vision clouded? For the end is vacancy and despair. Gradually the heritage of life is lost, until at last the soul, satiated with what can never satisfy, asks for nothing better than extinction, for the apples of sin are rotten at the core. It is terrible to hear the curses of those who have lost all interest in what is good, and retain no interest in unsatisfying vice, and having therefore no real interest in anything, float down the stream of impulse to the dark unfathomable ocean.
We shall mistake however, if we think that this experience is only met with in the horrid lurking-places of disgusting vice. The angel of destruction comes robed in light. It is possible for the artist to find pleasure in thinking out things which are beautiful and true, and yet to have no part nor lot with them in life. High thoughts, and all the gamut of human passion and feeling take the place of the pleasures of the ale-house, and the soul lives on, a sorry skeleton, beside them. We live in a literary and theatrical age. Many men in pursuance of their art enter into religious movements for the pleasure of a psychological pursuit and an artistic representation; and after entering into this with feeling, but with no personal moral purpose for his own life, the artist goes into the haunts of iniquity in pursuit of a new set of sensations and finds money and fame in making the great sins of life stuff for a realistic literary page. So it is with many actors, on the stage and off, who, never asserting their personalities over against their circumstances, and never exercising the power of a true subjective selection, but instead, identifying themselves with whatever character they act for the moment, or with whatever sphere in which they live, lose all consistency of personality, and therefore lose their souls. Who with any insight can read "De Profundis" without wringing his hands? It is not the awf.il miseries, so truly depicted, that sadden; it is that a soul should find its neurotic pleasure in depicting its miseries, in order to gain the sentimental sympathy of a public. It is on the Byronic model, egoism asserting itself even in hell.
"My
days are in the yellow leaf,
The flowers, the fruits of love are gone,
The worm, the canker, and the
grief
Are mine alone."
But deeper still, the veil of respectability often is the difficulty and the deception. When this veil prevents men and women who sit in the house of God from understanding their real selves, Christianity itself often becomes merely a system of self-regard. Amidst our respectable philanthropies we forget the things of real charity: Jesus was never a "philanthropist." Professional philanthropy may make our charities an insult to the person who receives them. It gives as from a height to slaves who are in the depths that it may itself bask in the sunshine of its own self-righteousness. Again it is often found that religious views are held with pride, uncharitable passion, and a determination that they shall never freely face the light of truth. And are there not thousands who trust to Churches to guarantee their salvation, as if salvation were not a real personal experience of a new life, and as if God were so powerless and foolish as not to knew what we are and what reality demands?
To see that sin is a state of soul, which concerns the whole personality, is of supreme importance. It is not a question merel,,.1 of a wrong action, it is a question of all that that implies, and of the conditions which alone can make it a wrong action. And ultimately what these conditions involve is a wrong attitude to truth and a denial of love. That is what is meant by "whatsoever is not of faith is sin." For faith is not "believing that which is known to be impossible," but it is that attitude of soul which lays a man open to truth through humility of spirit, and therefore open to Gods demand throughout the whole of his life Truth is not something which we have to seek for; it is something which we have not to resist, and we shall know it. The sun will shine into a house, if the blinds are not drawn over its windows. The apprehension of truth may be gradual, but where there is a right attitude of the soul, knowledge of truth is certain. " He that is willing to do the will of God shall know." When however we speak of truth, we do not define truth as an abstract system, but as the meaning of personal life.
(d) We come now to consider that all sin is sin against God. This will be seen from thefactthat life is a personal system, of which God, the Perfect Person, is the condition and ground. Our very dependence proves to us that we are not our own, and our independence proves that we are the recipients of gifts which it is our duty to exercise. Both in our dependence, and in our moral independence, we are brought face to face with God.
For, as we have seen, we are never morally independent, unless we are absolutely dependent upon truth, and God is the Way,the Truth and the Life. And it is because at every moment and in every thing, we are rightly or wrongly related to truth, that at every moment and in every thing we are rightly or wrongly related to God. The awakened conscience understands the meaning of the Psalmist: "against Thee, Thee only have I sinned." All sin, no matter against whom, is against God. It is the misuse of His gifts, it is the denial of His will; it is finding the centre of life in self instead of in Him. This wrong attitude, which a wrong state of soul makes habitual, takes all meaning out of life, and leads to spiritual death.
Sin is therefore not the breach of any legal command, it is a transgression against the nature of things and the meaning of life. And the nature of things is no arbitrary system, but a necessary one, which it is not possible to think of as being otherwise; and, as we have seen, what is called the Divine punishment of sin, is not arbitrary but necessary, being in the nature of things, and therefore in the sin itself. When this is realised, the problem of salvation turns out to be the great central problem of life; the need of it is absolute. To find it is to find life, to grasp the secret of harmony and development and to enter into the kingdom of God, which is love, joy, and peace. But how difficult it is! For God respects the sacred freedom of the soul, and as we have seen, the very nature of sin is a bond upon freedom and a darkening of vision.
"For
when we, in our viciousness grow hard,
(O misery on't!)
The wise gods seal our eyes;
In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us
Adore
our errors; laugh at us, while we strut
To our confusion."
Whittier, than whom no poet ever sang a kindlier song, put the terrible truth quite simply when he wrote:
"The
sweet persuasion of His voice
Respects thy sanctity of will.
He giveth day: thou hast thy choice
To walk in darkness still.
"No
word of doom may shut thee out,
No wind of wrath may downward whirl,
No swords of fire keep watch about
The open gates of pearl.
"A
tenderer light than moon or sun,
Than song of earth, a sweeter hymn,
May shine and sound forever on,
And
thou be deaf and dim.
"For
ever round the mercy-seat
The guiding lights of love shall burn,
But what
if, habit-bound, thy feet
Shall lack the will
to turn?
"What
if thine eye refuse to see,
Thine ear of Heaven's free welcome fail,
And thou a willing captive be,
Thyself thy own dark jail?"
IV
There are certain results from this analysis of sin which are very important for any theory of reconciliation. It will be sufficient here simply to state them, as a fuller consideration of them is involved when we come to deal with forgiveness. If sin has its origin in a wrong use of freedom, and if the very core of it consists in wrong motives and disposition, a wrong state of soul in fact, then it is not possible to see how it can be transferred. This does not deny the vicarious nature of life; for it is still true that the consequences of one man's sin are borne by other lives, and that one man's sin creates an environment which acts as a temptation to others, and which entails suffering; but sin itself cannot be transferred. The sense of guilt therefore is the condemnation of the soul by itself when conscious of wrongly using or neglecting opportunities, or of a wrong reaction to life due to a wrong use of freedom. Therefore it follows that guilt is personal, and cannot be corporate, save in the sense that many persons may be alike as sinners. In what is called corporate guilt, the sin of different persons may be quite different; for the degree of sin depends upon the individual enlightenment, motive and disposition. The state in a rough and ready way may treat guilt as corporate, but only because it looks on acts in an external manner; but religion deals with God, who sees the heart. The very nature of personality and therefore of sin, makes it impossible in religion to deal with men in the mass.
It is true that "wrong can be introduced into the common life by the act of an individual, wrong which works through the whole (common life) with alienating and debasing power, filling men with distrust and dislike of God." [Denny: " Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation," p. 193.] "But if that is possible, much more so must the Christian argue —is it possible that the good should be introduced by an individual, good which will work throughout the whole with reconciling power, restoring men to God in trust and love." But we must beware of thinking of the process in which this works, on the analogy of the spreading of a disease. The sin depends upon the free assent of the persons involved. The presence of temptation which may of course be brought by an individual to others does not necessarily involve the sin of others. It may, on the contrary be a condition, through its denial, for the manifeFtation of righteousness; this wholly depends upon the way in which persons react to it. Mass reactions are never moral reactions, unless the persons which compose the mass react personally and with conscious moral motive. Mass action is often the denial of morality, because it suppresses individual judgment and is merely conventional. The difficulty of bridging the gap between the individual and the mass disappears when we realise that personality is social in its nature, this however does not conflict with the truth that moral demands are personal.
THE, tendency of the last generation was to soften down the terrors of religion. The tragedy of this great war is not consistent with a sentimental universe. It will go far to bring back to this generation the realisation that there is depth as well as height, the abyss as well as heaven. No theory of wrath or punishment can be true which does not recognise the reality of tragedy as well as the joy of love. One of the defects most commonly found in religious view was that salvation was regarded as the escaping from wrath; this is a fact, but only part of the truth. And the result of this one-sidedness was a religion of slavish respectability instead of a religion of freedom. But deeper than this, the "wrath of God" was identified with a personal and destructive violence, and suffering was regarded as penalty. No doubt behind this lay the ordinary ideas of criminal law and procedure.
Now we have already seen that suffering is by no means always the result of sin, and that in the religion of Jesus there is a secret which can transmute such sufferings as come to a man apart from his sins into the fine gold of noble character. No one who has experience of this will fail to find a beneficent God in such sufferings. Suffering then is not always the result of sin; more than that, from an external and worldly point of view sin is manifestly not invariably followed by suffering and thus punished. So men postulated a literal judicial trial in the future with a credit and debit account of sins and good deeds, and the flames of hell were called in to redress the balance of this life. Now we may admit that as a pictorial way of representing the truth this is allowable and is perhaps the only possible way of presenting it at a certain stage of the development of thought. It is therefore to elucidate and not, to deny the truth underlying this theory that we now deny the adequacy of this form of statement to the fact. For it is based upon the old view that sin is a "thing" and not a state of soul. Sin has thus been hypostatised and emphasis has been laid mainly upon the act rather than upon the disposition of which the act is the outcome. This line of thought, inevitable in any case in an elementary stage of moral development, has been reinforced by reasons easily intelligible. For outward acts have social consequences, often of a terrible kind. The heinousness of the sin was therefore often regarded as relative to its consequence or probable consequence, which would be perfectly right if we could only judge from without, that is, if religion were a legal order. But such a method of judgment is obviously wrong; for innocent actions may involve the direst consequences of an outward kind, and it will be found utterly impossible to judge the quality of the sin by the quantity of its social consequences. Such form of judgment could not be right save in a world in which every person had a perfect knowledge, not only of every other person, but of nature and its effects, and a perfect knowledge also of the actual and passing circumstances relative to persons and things.
But in the discussion of the "Moral Order" and "Sin" we have seen that sin is a breach of the moral law and therefore an inward happening; which brings its inevitable result.
I
We shall first contend then, that sin brings its own punishment and that the sinner makes his own hell. That sin brings its own punishment is plain because it involves the breach of the moral law which is man's true nature and therefore the corruption of his personality. But because there is no sin apart from conscious choice, only that suffering is an outcome of sin which results from an evil state of soul. We have now to ask: "In what sense is this a judgment, or an expression of the wrath of God?" That it is a very real and terrible consequence we have seen, leading to an ever deeper degradation of soul and body, and also affecting, of necessity, the outward order of society. The position held here is, that sin is the punishment of sin, inherent in the nature of the case, involved in the very state of soul that sinned. It may be added that nothing is more needed to-day than that in seeking the forgiveness of God we should bring to God, not simply the record of the acts which we have committed, but lay open to Him the state of soul which is the cause of the iniquity. Now it must be obvious that this punishment is not the direct act of God, but is inherent in om, refusal to do what is right, and by doing what is right to attain a positive good. There is therefore a true sense in which we may say that God does not punish sin. If He did, it would follow that pain and suffering are penal; but this, God, whose purpose is redemptive, could not inflict; for what is penal is remedial neither in purpose nor, as the history of criminology will prove, in result. Our prisons do not reform, they degrade. A man who bears his penalty ceases to think he is under obligation to the society which penalises him. He supposes that if he chooses to bear the penalty he may sin the sin, which is a thoroughly immoral and degrading type of thinking. Penal judgment from its nature is always destructive, for it always involves the curtailing of the powers of a person, and a positive suffering, which, because it is relative to a past act, carries with it the idea of the equalisation of the scales and not the reformation of the soul. To say that it is also a warning to society that others may be deterred from the same kind of action, proves that the criminal is being used as a means to an end and is not regarded as an end in himself, and also that obedience to the law is demanded through fear and not through freedom. If this then were the way in which God were to punish sin, His purpose could not be purely redemptive, but would be relative to the vindication of law as an outward code. But the Moral Law, as we have seen, is no such outward code. Further, the notion of penal punishment is inconsistent with the revelation of God as love; for love is positive, not negative, and in the case of God must be a redeeming identification of Himself with the individual person, whose sin is His shame, whose suffering His sorrow, whose redemption His satisfaction.
This does not, however, deny that we apprehend God in sin, regarded in its consequences, and realised in suffering, and that these come home to, us with a sense of retribution, and, it may be, with the sense of guilt and the sting of remorse. But this suffering must not be regarded as the direct and separate act of God, as though He were to say, "Now you have sinned this sin, and I give you this punishment." It is inevitable in the moral order; it is the negative aspect of an order which has a positive purpose of good in it. We may illustrate it by the law of gravitation, which does not exist in order that we may break our necks, but that we may organise our lives. It is a necessary condition for physical freedom, for we could never purpose to go anywhere unless there were an order which fixed things relative to one another. Its purpose is beneficent, but when, through ignorance or folly, we fail to recognise its necessity, we suffer, and the suffering is not arbitrary, but is involved in the nature of the act, and is the outcome of the failure to realise what ought to be. Now the question comes,—"Are these consequences penal or remedial?" They are certainly penalties which we bring upon ourselves, but are they penalties, when we see the whole situation? Is not the pain inherent in the consequence a warning? Tire was not made to burn our fingers but to warm us, but "once burnt, twice shy." And does not that warning contain a positive good? Does it not come to beings whose very nature strives for some better condition, some mastery over "things "?
When we consider the moral and spiritual order, the same thing is observable. The moral order is as universal and as necessary as the law of gravitation, though it is personal and relative to personal life. A breach of it has its consequence in personal life and issues in a state which if not altered involves the destruction of personal life, that is of the possibility of personal fulfilment and self-realisation. The sufferings which are inherent in this state awaken the soul to the inevitable consequence of sin and the necessity for righteousness. It is not possible to think of a system in which joy is involved in the attainment of a harmonious good, without there being the possibility of the opposite, that is of sorrow being involved in what is inharmonious and evil. Pleasure, from the very nature of the case, involves pain, and this necessity of thought, the law of contradiction, is also a fact of experience. The key to its interpretation is the purpose that lies in it, which is not destruction but redemption.
This analysis may be seen to coincide with personal experience and to render an explanation of the sense of guilt. The sense of guilt is the sense of our responsibility, and tallies with a real consciousness of sin, when the deepest voice of our souls says "God may forgive me, but I can never forgive myself." Thus when we awaken to reality we blame ourselves and not God; we recognise the moral order as holy, just and good, and our condemnation is not the decree of some external power but the, judgment which we pass upon ourselves; our own nature condemns us Shakespeare recognised this.
"My
conscience hath a thousand several
tongues,
And every
tongue
brings
in a several
tale,
And
every tale
condemns
me for a villain.
"All
several sins, all us'd in each degree;
Throng to the bar, crying all,—Guilty! Guilty!
I shall despair.—There is no creature loves me:—
And, if I die, no soul
will pity me:—
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to
myself? "
"One
cried, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other:
As they had seen me with
these hangman's hands.
Listening
their fears, I could not
say ' Amen,'
When they did say 'God bless us!'"
II
If we cause our own hell, what truth is there in saying that God judges us, and that His wrath is manifested against all unrighteousness? This way of putting the case covers a great reality, but it also often conveys a misconception. If we identify God with the nature of things, we may say that He judges us; for reality unveils our sin. It is also apparent that the moral order of the universe involves the inevitable connection between sin and suffering, and in this order are the nature and will of God made manifest.
But we must free our minds from ideas of judgment which are magisterial and legal, and also from a certain impression of wilful destructiveness which is connoted by the word wrath.
The thought of judgment has brought a shuddering awe to many a soul. There is in the intimations of conscience a presage of judgment , the sense that one's sin is known and that judgment is unescapable. The judgment-seat of Christ may be a figurative expression, but it symbolises a great and terrible reality, and though we cannot think of legal processes and of formal awards in this connection, the reality is none the less serious, but rather more serious and awe-inspiring. What then is this judgment?
We have seen that sin is a state of soul to the forming of which every conscious act and thought and desire contribute. What then can be the judgment of the soul but the unveiling light of reality which makes apparent to all what a man is? "This is the judgment," says Jesus, "that light is come." When the light unveils us and we are known, then we take our inevitable place according to what we are, and are thereby judged.
Judgment is partial here because we are so partially known to one another, and also because the hypocrisy that is latent in sin veils our true nature from ourselves and from others. The last thing that our pride and self-regard allows us to do is to see ourselves as God sees us, and yet there is no hope for us until we are willing to be thus seen.
Nothing is more evident to the observant than that truth will out. As we have seen, every sin leaves its record in a state of the soul, but the state of the soul affects the state of the body and all the activities of life. It is possible for secret sin to be concealed for a time, but sin starts a process of unveiling because it steadily deadens one's sensibilities and therefore one's desires to keep up the veil. This does not alter the fact that veils may still be kept up, and a false character maintained, for purposes of self-interest in particular circumstances. But life is so varied and so complex that unless a character be real and not assumed, it is almost impossible consistently to maintain it. When a man relaxes, he becomes himself and every man must relax, for the bow cannot remain bent always. But further than this, the judgment of the nature of things is often written upon people's faces. Had we the insight, we could read the history of a life in the expressions of a moment.
To read a man's talents is very difficult; to read a man's character, which has been formed through his activity, is comparatively easy. Everyone does it in certain cases; it is not possible to misinterpret a Satanic leer, nor the gaze of lust, nor that of conscious cunning; equally impossible is it, at times, to misunderstand the gaze of absolute honesty. Dominant moods tend to create a fixed expression.
It is therefore evident that in the nature of things truth will eventually "out" and as we think of another world, we have every reason to suppose that it must involve a higher expression of this same law. The natural order of life is progression; it is not possible therefore to believe that the next state of existence will be one of less insight than the present. Thus everything seems to support the Apostle when he says: "Then shall I know fully, even as also I have been fully known." Real personal development involves the development of the intuitive mind, which itself involves an immediacy of apprehension, and this is a condition for judgment. But the judgment-seat of Christ is a reality of the present and not of the future only. It was impossible for Jesus to live in the world without judging it by what He was; "This is the judgment, that Light is come." And now that His bodily presence is removed, men are still judged by the attitude they take up towards Him and those who truly represent Him.
We conclude then that God judges us in that reality unveils our sin; and reality is another name for God.
III
But if we can no longer use the old language about the wrath of God, it is to be remembered that God's moral horror is a deeper thing than man's anger. Sin must, in the nature of the case, be morally abhorrent to God, but redemptive desire is always present with Him. Jesus did not lack moral horror over the sins of Jerusalem, but they were an agony to Him, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings but ye would not." Have we anything in human experience which can help us to understand this?
It will be found that the conscious suffering for sin because it is seen in its true light is not always the experience of the sinner. It is the lot of anyone who loves him and is holy enough to understand what sin involves. Many a father and mother knows what this means. There is indignation at the thought of what sin involves for others, but there is an unutterable sorrow not unmingled with pity, as its meaning for the soul and its end are realised. It was not altogether weakness that made David cry "O, Absalom my son, my son, would God I had died for thee." Many a father's joy has been buried in a son's grave. This suffering is in proportion to the measure of love and holiness. What then must it be for God? As we realise in connection with many whom we personally know, what might have been and what is; as we see the folly that goes down to inevitable misery, the victories that are really defeats, and the pleasures that can only lead to remorse if the light of heaven should ever shine upon their path; it is possible for us to understand our Lord's prayer, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." There is something deeper than anger which comes from a holy and human vision, and that is sorrow. Our Lord had it in His heart when He turned and looked on Peter, "and Peter went out and wept bitterly." Anger hardens, but this holy agony redeems.
Still, while this is true, it must never be forgotten that sin alienates from God. There can be no affinity between darkness and light. From the very nature of the case, though God is love and never ceases from His desire to redeem, the soul that sins wilfully is apart from Him; for it has denied the things of truth and love which can unite with Him.
While sin is a breach of the moral order, and therefore a breach of the law of our own nature, and while we may say that it is against ourselves, inasmuch as the man who sins wrongs his own soul, still it is of the utmost importance to bear in mind that it is also a wrong committed against others and supremely against God. It is from the nature of the case a personal offence against a person. We deny the very meaning of life which is God's purpose for our lives; we misuse His gifts and deny the fellowship for which we were made. It is therefore a true instinct that makes us to realise that our sin is against God and that it is a personal offence against a person. Without this religion would have no meaning. The new life begins when we can tally say "I am no more worthy to be called thy son."
IV
It now remains to show that the punishment or inevitable issue of sin is isolation, and that curiously enough not from the good only, but also from the wicked.
The Devil has no love for a devil, for he will treat him as a devil. Some good, or the possibility of it, is needed, for combination and fellowship. There is no community among the selfish, who are obviously and avowedly such. The result for the iniquitous man, for whom the possibility of hypocrisy is past, because it is a game that is played out, is that he loathes himself, and everyone else. This is the logical end of iniquity, but nowhere has organised Christianity more fully shown its failure to regard spiritual facts as the great realities than in its refusal to see that real judgment lies here. Is love so poor a thing that we should think that lovelessness is not a judgment? Have the pure joys of life failed for us that we should see no judgment in their deprivation. One of our poets who sings with a universal note, did not think so.
"Out
of the day and night
A joy has taken flight,
Fresh spring and summer and winter hoar
Fill my faint heart with grief
But with delight, no more, no never more."
Once to grasp the fact that the soul is determinant of the world is to see vividly what this means. The joyous moods of nature brighten us when hopes still live in our hearts, but there are many to whom the song of the birds is now not merely an idle but an awful thing. They cannot go out into the spring morning and feel a new sense of life and hope, as the crisp and glory-laden air bathes their faces. For springs in which they felt this are past and gone, and vows are unfulfilled and visions have faded, and these glorious accompaniments of memory are but mockeries.
"The
mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
We see the inevitability of this when we realise that we were made for what is high and noble, and that the very meaning of our being demands heaven as its fulfilment. When we think the matter through, as well might we imagine that the scapegoat, treading alone the burning sand, with weary feet and swollen parched tongue, could find in the desert waste a substitute for the green pastures and the still waters of God, as that the evil man can find comfort and peace in iniquity. The wages of sin is death, and death is not separate from judgment.
V
This leads to an important consideration: "What is the meaning of death? and is there an inevitable connection between physical death and sin? is physical death a punishment? Dr. Denney seems to regard a certain view of death as vital not only to the position which he takes up in his book on the Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, but also as vital to the New Testament idea. But no part of his book is so unconvincing as the pages which deal with this. He defends some of the strongholds of the old position, which he has largely abandoned, witl:i what seems somewhat like the tenacity of despair. There is a scholastic subtlety which is not of design and which leaves the reader with the uncomfortable impression that words and facts are being forced in the interests of a desired solution. But we are here simply concerned with the question of whether the view is rationally tenable. Dr. Denney contends that there is a vital connection between physical death and sin, and fights against " a tendency to overlook or depreciate the passion of Christ as a concrete historical fact, or to separate the physical aspect of the passion—the mere physical death, as it is sometimes called,—from the spirit of love and obedience in which Christ died, as though this spirit were the only thing that counted in the work of reconciliation. [p.265]
The Bible does not draw our distinctions, it does not speak about physical death at all; it knows that for man death is not an event only, but an experience, and that it depends on the the man who dies what kind of experience it shall be. It is one of the signal mercies of God to sinful men that, though sin is fatal, He enables men to win victory over death even in dying. They can die as heroes, as saints, as martyrs, but there is no such victory over death which is not at the same time a victory over sin, and that is part of the proof of an intimate connection between the two. [II, p. 212]
We cannot but think that the logical "fallacy of four terms" lies behind Dr. Denney's argument, Death being used in different senses and the shades of meaning not being differentiated. Dr. Denney refuses to separate the physical from the spiritual and yet he talks of death as being an experience. Strictly speaking, the physical is not an experience but a differentiation within my experience, from what I call "spiritual," for experience itself is a mode of consciousness and not physical. Again Dr. Denney says: "The experiences of a human being are not physical merely, or spiritual merely, they are human; and in humanity the physical and the spiritual coalesce and interpenetrate. They are indissoluble elements in one reality." [p. 269] At once the question arises, does the physical live after death? If not, does the "one reality" disintegrate? It is very difficult to follow Dr. Denney's thinking but it seems a fair statement of his purpose to say that the historical fact of the death of Jesus Christ and the physical fact of His death, are vitally necessary for the true doctrine of reconciliation. He will not allow that the spirit in which Jesus died, while it is important, exhausts the saving reality of His death. He sees, however, quite clearly, that death must be an experience, if it is to have any meaning, as only in that way can it find a moral interpretation. In what sense then is death an experience? Death itself cannot be an experience at all, though dying may be so. Death undoubtedly is understood to be the separation of the soul from the body, and to be the end of our physical existence. It is also used to represent a state of soul: "You did He make alive when ye were dead, through your trespasses and sins." "For this thy brother was dead and is alive again."
The question now comes,—in which of these senses is death the wages of sin? Dr. Denney acknowledges that from a biological point of view "Death is part of the mechanism of what we call life." If this is true, and if it is a natural phenomenon, antecedent to the stage of moral life, we fail to see how death is caused by sin. This of course does not deny that premature death may be caused by sin, and that to break the physical laws of our body shortens its natural span of life. The ultimate question is not affected.
But, deeper than this, we have to ask, where is the moral value of death? Death in the sense of the putting off of the flesh is a happening; but all happenings and all actions in themselves are non-moral; for nothing is moral which does not concern the intention or purpose of a person. This is a consideration of fundamental importance for theology; for if moral value is concerned with; the way a person handles the world, or the attitude of soul with which life's happenings are met, then, as a necessary consequence, neither the Incarnation nor the Cross nor the Resurrection have, considered as happenings, any moral value. Their value, which we do not minimise, and which is essential, is found in what Jesus was in them and what God meant by them.
If then, leaving the contention that no man actually experiences death in this life (for death is the negation of experience in this life), we take death as meaning dying, we still have to ask where its moral value can lie? Dying may involve pain or it may not; that is purely a question of circumstances. Dying may involve mental pain,—the fear of dissolution, which is the fear of the unknown, or the thought of one's body in a grave. But on the other hand it may involve no mental pain, and there are two kinds of victory over death; there are sinful men who do not fear death, who indeed rather welcome it, and there are men who through faith in the love of God and in His care in the nett world, do not fear it. It is quite true to say that of experiences "it is the most solemn and tremendous," but that is because it seeminly involves the separation from loved ones, the breach of all life's fellowships, and a journey alone to a port afar and unknown. But is not this fear of death, and this pain of dying, apart from the physical sufferings which are sometimes present, just the proof that what is needed for our triumph is to know that love never dies, and that God lives, and that in no part of the universe can we be away from His care, and that He will fulfil the demands of a human love which is in His purpose? Thus faith gains a victory over dying and sheds a sublimity upon it.
The sufferings often involved in dying may or may not come from sin; it depends upon the life and circumstances of the one who is dying. But to regard these as specially connected with sin and as a special result of sin in a sense that no other sufferings are, seems to us a theory devoid of any explanation.
If we take the conception of death as being a state of soul, it is at once comprehensible how sin and death are connected; for sin is the negation of life, and the sting of death is sin.
How then has the confusion arisen? Death has generally been considered to be an evil. To this rule the dervishes and Turks may form an exception, but an illuminating exception, for to them death is not evil, since it ushers them into a paradise of sensuous delight. How could death be any other than evil, when man thought that this was the only life that he had? When we think of the sense of dependence upon higher powers which is the instinct behind all religions, and when we realise the constant sense which these men had that God or the gods were not always favourable, and needed constant propitiation, it was most natural that they should lay death at the door of God's displeasure. And when man awoke to a higher stage, and sin was felt in its reality but still confounded with what was physical, and when the theory was held that good in this life involved outward happiness, and evil outward punishment, it was still natural for the two to be connected. And when a deeper religious stage was reached, and sin was seen to be a state of soul which was the negation of all that life held as valuable, what more natural than that this should be called death which is the total negation of our earth experience? But we are bound to say that death is not in any case the cessation of existence, and therefore when we use the words "Death" and "fatal" in theology, we should only mean an evil experience which is the negation of a true experience, for it is clear that unless the physical is essential to the spiritual, (and if it is, a future life cannot be) what we ordinarily term "Death" cannot alter the state of the soul, and therefore, cannot have a final meaning for the soul. These considerations, it is obvious, are of great importance to any inquiry into the meaning of the death of Jesus. But for the present we are simply dealing with the question—Is the dissolution of the body necessarily connected with sin? And the answer is in the negative.
ANY theory of reconciliation which represents salvation as easy involves a cheap view of the universe; and any religious theory of salvation which does not touch man's nature and which is content with legal or semi-legal ideas leads to a cheapening of religion and a breaking-down of the moral safeguards of life. Many saintly people have held views which were morally indefensible. Dr. Denney, referring to the idea that what the death of Christ does is to secure impunity for sin (our punishment being transferred to Him) says: "But this perversion has not been so common as has been sometimes supposed. It has indeed been charged from the beginning against what may be called the evangelical doctrine of atonement, but as an actual. or possible result of it in practice, rather than as something to which it led in principle." The exact obverse of this seems, however, to be the fact. But life is more than logic, and the saving grace of Christ and the renewal of the Holy Spirit are too great for the theory of any particular age.
It will be seen that in this book religion is identified with life, and not regarded as something superimposed upon life. The world is not outside God's order, but part of it; "the earth is the Lord's"; and therefore for religious theory, our conception of Nature and Providence, of the moral order and sin, of wrath and punishment are all determinative of our idea of salvation. The battle of Christianity is ultimately fought round the question: "Is Jesus Christ the meaning of life?" That is the position adopted in this book, and from it we derive our doctrine of salvation. It will be maintained in this chapter that salvation is negatively salvation from sin and positively salvation unto the likeness of Christ.
I
In the past salvation has often been regarded as remission, not of sin, but of penalty. This view has vitiated the conception in the Roman Church. The Reformation might never have taken hold as it did of the hearts and consciences of men had it not been for the moral revolt caused by the proclamation that absolution could be obtained for any crime, apart from the reformation of the sinner. It is not fair to judge Rome by the age of Tetzel, but she has never rid herself of the evil. Her doctrines of merit and of works to this day are all vitiated by it. For the stress is laid on doing and not on being, and therefore she calls to a service which is not perfect freedom. She has had many noble souls within her communion, but their hearts have learnt more deeply of God than the logic of the Roman system involves.
The Protestant Churches however, have not been free from this very taint, and the proof of this is found in the stress which in the evangelism of many generations, has been laid on hell and punishment. There has been a tendency to confound salvation with mental assent to intellectual propositions, and to trust in "saving knowledge." On the other hand there has often been a sense of sin which was false and worked up; and many men have felt themselves lost, because they were conscious of temptation, for which often enough they were in no way responsible. By many young people again, salvation has been thought of as a state free from all temptation and difficulty, instead of a life developing moral freedom through facing difficulty, under the guidance and with the friendship of God.
The phrase "salvation from sin" is not clear unless it be recognised that sin is a state and not merely an act, and that the motive and disposition which constitute acts sinful arise from a wrong attitude of personal life. Salvation therefore involves a change in a man, the effect of which is that he ceases from sin.
Remission
of penalty then can at most be only a consequence of salvation; but in fact
it is no necessary consequence. It is natural
that in
so far as the consequences are inherent in a state of soul or
follow outwardly
from
a state of soul, they are abolished when that state is changed.
But there are other consequences of sin, temptations coming from
habits
and physical
consequences inherent in the physical order, which salvation
only gradually removes and which are sometimes not removed in this life.
A man who
walks the wrong road may have to retrace every step. Though it
be a weary journey,
yet it is not unprofitable, for every step of it emphasises the
folly of the sin which made it necessary, and therefore the value
of the wisdom that would avoid it. If the journey seems long
and the goal
far distant,
it matters little; for the essential matter is not freedom from
temptation but the attitude of soul which faces now in the right
direction. "The
path of the righteous is as the shining light, which shineth
more and more unto the perfect
day."
But we should add that the consequences of sin which are not removed, when borne in humility, are transfigured into blessings. They are seen to be the outcome of the nature of things which is holy and just and good; in bearing them the soul acquires strength and vindicates its freedom; patience and humility and the wisdom that comes from seeing; God's way, all follow when a man realises that in this dispensation God deals with us as with sons.
II
If it were not the case that salvation involves a change of character, salvation would be a. purely legal matter, and Jesus of Nazareth must cease to have any meaning for personal life. It would be needless to dwell on this, which ought to be a commonplace, but the history of the Church proves that it is just here that mistakes have arisen. Salvation has been regarded as salvation from corruption or death, and the idea behind this has been physical, and also has been related to mere existence; for immortality and salvation have been identified by many who have not laid stress upon the ethical quality of the immortal life. This has been the curse of the Greek Church, which seems to have made very little progress, if any, since the days of Athanasius. Future history may find that the debacle of the Russian Empire was due to a religion which worshipped magic and might, and laid little stress upon truth, and purity of morals. A Rasputin would have been impossible in a community which identified the Divine with purity and justice and personal worth.
One of our greatest difficulties is the identification of what is ordinarily called religion with real religion. There are some races, Slays, Celts, for instance which are apparently far more religious than others; they live in the world of wonder and of awe; they are sensitive to the mystery of nature. An Indian once said to the writer "We are far more religious than you English people, we cannot go out of our doors and see the trees and the skies without a sense of the Infinite and the Unknown." But there can be no personal religion in the cult of the Infinite and the Unknown, and as a matter of fact these races are usually as deficient in ethics as they are conscious of the religious sense. They are very eloquent, and fertile in religious ideas, their natures are like harps out of which strange and beautiful music seems to come at the touch of an unknown hand, and yet all this is often curiously divorced from real life. It will be found on analysis that they possess the sense of dependence upon the Infinite, but lack the sense of moral independence, with the corresponding result that they do not realise that the nature of God and the Universe is ethical. They seek magic shelters which are no shelters, and a salvation which is an illusion. We would not, however, say anything to disparage the religious sense, for all the great have had it, and no person can be truly great without it. It is however a gift which is not a blessing but a curse, unless it is rightly understood and used. The corruption of the best is the worst. It is needful that we bring the sense of the infinite to the commonplace, to the simple things of life, to the charities of home and friendship, to the relations of business and commerce. Religion must be the true view of life and the moral sense the interpretation of its order. As Dr. Skinner says: "It is far more important that we should live rightly than understand deeply." Right living is the avenue to all real understanding; "they that are willing to do the will of God shall know."
The course of the argument has now shown that no assent to God except the assent of the heart through conviction and personal change is of any moral worth. Salvation must involve these things, for apart from them there can be no real reconciliation with God, which must be based upon a likeness or affinity. This explains why, though salvation is not of works "by their fruits ye shall know them." But while the inadequacy of many past and current theories of salvation has been exposed, it must be acknowledged that the logical implications of a theory have not always determined the lives of its adherents; and in all ages and communions God has come to those who have sought Him with a pure heart and in sincerity. It does not follow from this, however, that inadequate views do not matter. Nothing is so powerful as idea; and wrong ideas held by good men usually pervert their children if not themselves; the weak philosophy of a Locke leads to the scepticism of a Hume. It is the ideas of current theology that are chiefly responsible for the misunderstanding of religion.
Salvation then is the power to live rightly, and that not perforcedly, but because the new nature demands it and the soul has awakened with j oy and wonder to the realisation that all life is sacramental and that a God of love and truth is over all and through all and in all, blessed for ever.
But how serious is the problem of salvation from sin itself we see from the consideration of the nature of sin. It has been shown not only that sin is a state of soul, a wrong type of personality, but also that the soul becomes fixed through habit so that the moral character tends to final permanence, and that sin, as time goes on, involves the gradual fading of that light which is the soul's hope. In face of man's persistent refusal to look at naked reality, the difficulty is not to prove that there is a hell, but to prove that there can be an ultimate heaven. In view of these facts we may well be impatient with all sentimental theorising.
This discussion of the nature of salvation then has shown up vividly the problem of Atonement or Reconciliation, namely how is this change of character to be brought about, how can man turn back on the road of iniquity, and when he has turned back, how can he have power to retrace his steps? In other words we see that a new birth is necessary, and our question is that of Nicodemus "How can a man be born again?"
A doctrine of the "new nature" has always been held by the Christian Church; but the actual new nature that results from a Christian experience has seldom been so analysed that its differentia from the old nature is truly understood. This differentia will be seen when we consider the nature of Jesus of Nazareth who said, "If ye love them that love you, what thank have ye? for even sinners love those that love them. And if ye do good to them that do good to you, what thank have ye? for even sinners do the same. But love your enemies and do them good, and lend never despairing; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be sons of the Most High: for he is kind toward the unthankful and evil." His disposition was not altered by the attitude of others towards Him, and He had not to wait for the world to act rightly to Him before He had the right disposition to it. The new nature is nothing less than the nature of Jesus.
But leaving this for later consideration, we may here notice that doctrines of the Atonement have seldom had any logical nexus with the new nature without which Atonement is meaningless; for that it is which Atonement must produce. Justification and sanctification have been sundered, and it has not always been seen that no man can be justified before God unless his nature is so changed that the assent of God is the assent to a reality, of which sanctification is simply the development.
Without this realisation that salvation is a state of soul and not a remission of penalty, the New Testament experience cannot be understood; for, as a matter of fact, the disciples were not saved from pain, and loss, and death, and Christians are not saved from all the effects of their sins. On the other hand, it is evident that the disciples did not look to the future as their only reward, they found it in the present, in a new awakening, in a new vision, in a new love, in a new attitude to God, and man, and life, which caused them to know and rejoice in knowing that to their wondering souls the heart of things was revealed, and that eternal life was their possession. They found that all things worked together for good to them that loved God, and they had in their own experience the consciousness of the joy of God's rule and love through Jesus Christ their Friend and Lord.
The question which now awaits answer is "What is needed to produce this change of soul which causes a man to awake and find himself walking in the cite of God?" We shall consider this more fully hereafter: for a moment let an illustration suffice. Mere illustrations are never adequate to a principle, but in this case we can but point to an illustration which is inexhaustible; it is Jesus Christ, whom to know is life eternal. Not long ago a leading artist tried to sculpture the face of Jesus. Carefully and patiently he worked, and failed. He sent out his sculpture with another title, and a well-known Royal Academician was heard to say: "It is the most spiritual thing in the Academy." It had caught something of the far-off light, something of the meaning of earth and heaven, something of the strange power to awake. He failed, and yet he did not fail. So has it ever been, so will it ever be; it is the coming of God to man in the apprehension of Jesus that awakes and recreates the soul. All the wonder of the soul is in Jesus, all the depth of earth's and of heaven's meaning, all the rapture of peace and joy which ever called to a human heart. Only in the measure that our souls are like Him can our thought, understand Him, and who is fit to essay the task? For "He is the mightiest among the holy, and the holiest among the mighty." Many criticisms will doubtless be passed upon this book, and whatever criticism may be false this one at least will be true,—it is inadequate to explain the glory and the wonder of Jesus. We only hope to point a wav, a way which is unknown save to those who know His mercy, who find Him beside them in the way of life, who experience Him as the Eternal Shelter, amidst life's storm and trial, and in the face of death's shadow and the future's unknown way.
THE results which have been arrived at are two-fold: (1) That God is not apprehended primarily in nature but in Personality; for we must seek God in that which is highest and clearest; (2) that salvation involves a certain type of personality, which is reconciled to God because it is like Him. Without this the end of religion cannot be attained; for that end is a personal communion with God, and a realisation that the meaning of life is personal, because God meets us in every experience. These two results bring us to Jesus Christ as the revelation of God in a perfect human nature, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," said Jesus, and it follows that if we would know God we must ask what Jesus is in Himself; we must take the human road which deals with disposition, and which asks "What kind of soul had Jesus?" This must be the path of inquiry rather than that of a priori metaphysical speculation which deals with extra-natural attributes. This is not to deny that there are things beyond our comprehension, but it is to affirm that we can have no real knowledge of God unless we deal with things that we can apprehend. Jesus can only reveal God in the measure in which He makes Himself understood.
We are drawn to Jesus truly, not because of the wonder of His works, nor yet because in wisdom or in knowledge He excels the children of men, though. all these things are true of Him, but because of what He is in Himself, because of the depth of beauty in His soul. We call Him the Son of God. But we must ask ourselves what did thiF, mean, in actual life? For if we understand what He was as Son, we shall know something of His Father. We shall be learning as the disciples who always spoke of God as "God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Of all the sons of men, none walked this earth with so sure a step; in Him is exemplified moral independence at its very highest. He was perfectly free in relation to the history of the past and the conventions of the present. He insisted continually on walking by the light of His own insight, and manifested at every step an utter personal conviction. Nor did He waver because these convictions seemed strange to others and evoked their antagonism. And yet, behind all this, there was an absolute dependence upon God: "Lo, I come to do Thy will." We have many indications that this dependence was daily, even hourly. His thoughts were God's, His works were God's, His way was God's. He did not question this when hours were dark and life was hard—"If it be possible let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.'' In the will of the Father lay the fulfilment of His own life, and also of the life of man. This filial relationship, with God as Father, was to Jesus the solution of everything.
Nothing is more remarkable, in considering the life of Jesus, than the fact that this will was not the law of a cold duty, but the inspiration of eternal love. It was not only the way of that insight which is the outcome of a true mental vision, it was especially the way of the insight which is the outcome of the true heart. God was love, as well as light. His Father's love for Him was deep and personal, and nothing that happened to Him in life ever shook His assurance of this. It was the great abiding reality which enabled Him though a peasant, despised and rejected, as He walked the roads of earth, to walk and live assuredly in the city of God. He knew that the reign of God had come, because God reigned in His own heart.
This would have been absolutely impossible were it not for the fact that His soul and disposition perfectly mirrored the soul of the Father. He was what He underEtood the Father to be, and when, seeing Jesus, we are convinced that what He is, is true, and that therefore He is worthv of our trust, we awake to realise that what God is, is true, and that He is worthy of our trust.
This sonship of Jesus involved a revelation of God's attitude to life. God was father, and all mien were His children, erring and prodigal but still His. And the will of God and therefore the purpose of Jesus was that men should come into the same relationship to God as that in which Jesus Himself rejoiced. Jesus therefore, being set in the midst of His brethren, realised that they were His brethren. Love, and truth also, demanded their redemption; their sin spoke of a great need, and their need was a demand on the love of God. How could this demand be fulfilled? In order to understand this, we have to understand the nature of sinful men, and the way in which Jesus sought to change them.
II
Sin is in essence selfishness. One of the characteristics of animal life is the sense of self preservation, and in man this becomes a selfishness which has at its service all the acuteness of his mind and the strength of his will. It leads a man to seek his own way, and, unless his spirit be awakened, to endeavour to find satisfaction in pleasures and aims which can never satisfy. It is true that the moral sense, as we have seen, is in man, and that whether through struggle or through instinct, he realises that others have rights as well as himself. But this very moral sense becomes in a strange way the servant of self. All men tend to be more intent on their own rights than on the rights of their fellows, and even when the moral sense is highly developed men tend to yield to their brother his rights, not as a matter of love, but as a matter of duty.
Living as we do in communities which are more or less ordered by legal justice, this tendency becomes all the more fixed. Justice dictates the reward of the righteous, and punishment is visited upon transgression, though punishment can work no ultimate change in the heart of the transgressor to make him transgress no more.
Another result which often appears in religious communities is that men set as the aim of their lives the acquirement of a goodness which is worthy of respect. Self-regard thus appears even in what is noble. We all know the man who would scorn to take advantage of his fellow; but that scorn may be the outcome of self-regard rather than of love. This is not the kind of man to whom we go when we long for help; his strength condemns our weakness, his righteousness ignores our need. Such a man may go still further along the path of self-regard in order to attain his ideal of saintliness; he may yield all his rights in its attainment, and yet be selfish; "Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing." The reason is that this conscious and admiring self-respect is the very highest form of selfishness, and the man whose ideal it is is not the man readily to acknowledge a slip. His whole world goes to pieces if his self-respect breaks down, and he becomes even as the Pharisee, a hypocrite taking refuge in sophistries to justify himself. If there be in such a man a fundamental honesty he cannot fail to see that what he needs is a radical change of heart; a change which shall save him from self-regard and shall give him liberty through love. In the midst of struggle and failure he will cry with the Apostle Paul "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
This deliverance through a change of heart can only come about when we recognise God as our Father, and when we find in. His will our peace, and in His love our fulfilment; in other words when we understand the sonship of Jesus and find in this the meaning of our lives.
The obverse of this is that we enter into a new relationship with men. Our Father has set us in the midst of our brethren, and we look at them as God looks at them. Their sin becomes our shame ; their burdens our burdens; their joys our j oys, and their redemption our fulfilment. At once the standard by which we judge our lives is altered. God's demand upon us which also becomes our own demand is the demand of love, and love's demand is infinite. All our pride vanishes. We are, as always, unprofitable servants, but to respond to the demands of this love, which we can never adequately fulfil, is the joy of our lives.
III
Jesus Christ is Saviour because He creates this change in us, and making us like Himself, brings us into reconciliation to His Father and our Father. To understand fully what this means we must understand Him. We have seen what He was as Son of God; we have now to see what He was as Brother of man. How did His nature express itself in life? It is here that will appear the fundamental difference between His nature and that of "the natural man.'' Christ never thought of His own rights, and in a sense, it is true to say that He never thought of the rights of others. For the supreme need of man, and therefore the supreme right of man (for right and need are correlative) is to possess his fellow's soul in love. This demand of love which is the real right of man can never be satisfied and silenced by any legal formula relating to goods or position; for it is nothing less than that he should hold his fellow in his soul with a redeeming, constructive and possessive love. It was thus that Jesus of Nazareth sought the men of His day, and thus that He still seeks men through the ages. Legal justice would have kept our hearts from Christ, but Love demanded possession and took it. The fact that men yielded Him no right and took from Him everything, even life itself, could not deter Him; one thing He strove for tirelessly, the fulfilment of His own soul through His love, that is to say the possession of human souls with whom He had identified Himself. No other thing on earth could satisfy Him save that they, seeing the face of God and the face of man in Him, should share with Him the joy of the life eternal. For this did He fling Himself, stricken, afflicted, crucified, into the soil of humanity that, dying, He should not abide alone. His redemptive work was not the outcome of an intellectual plan but of a nature divinely human which could express and reveal itself in no other way. He stood to suffer and rejoice with us, to be in hell or heaven with us through the identification of love. "Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." " He was oppressed and afflicted yet He opened not His mouth." Such was the revealing of perfect personality of God and man together. If we ask "Why was He dumb, as a sheep before her shearers? why did He say 'Put up the sword into the sheath'? And why, when earth had failed Him for justice, did He refuse to call on the legions of angels? " The answer is, He could do no other than He did, not because of the fulfilment of any plan, nor because of the enactment of any law, but just because He was what He was. To smite would have been to smite Himself, for He loved others as Himself, and identified them with Himself. The sword of God always turns inwards to the heart of God To have smitten them would be to have cast them visionless and derelict, into the abyss, and all our abysses are love's defeats. He was not, however, defenceless. His silence, His patience, His unshadowed love, pierced all the outward armour of our earthliness, and it was we who died, to live again, in Him whom we thought we had conquered.
"To
Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight,
Return their thankfulness.
"For
Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
Is man, His child and care.
"For
Mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
"And
all must love the human form
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where
Mercy, Love and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too."
"If any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His." "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature." The new nature is Christ's nature. Christ is the Saviour, and to be like Him is salvation. But once again, how may this great change be accomplished?
WE have seen that our need is of a change of nature. Does Jesus meet this need, and so show Himself to be our Saviour? Salvation we have defined as a certain type of soul. It has now to be shown how the life and death of Jesus avail to create that type of soul. In this chapter we shall argue that our Lord Jesus saves by being the Light that unveils and the Love which possesses, and possessing recreates.
I
It is obvious that our first need is of light that we may be shown both what we are and what we ought to be. But that this revelation of what we ought to be may be perfectly convincing, it must come through a living person. Abstract truth, valuable as it is, has never saved any one, and we all have more light than we live by. Poets have sung and philosophers have dreamed, but their lives have often been very different from their message. The difference between abstract truth which demonstrates our errors and a righteous soul which unveils us to ourselves is the difference between form and life. However beautiful the ideal which we hold in thought, the temptation to regard it as merely abstract, utopian, or mere subjectivity,; s inevitable and almost overwhelming; for we are subtly dragged down from our world of ideals by personal influences and circumstances, and tend to question the truth of what we think as true, when in practical life we stand alone against the opinion of the mass. The Incarnation is therefore a vital necessity in order that truth may be presented to us, not merely as a mental conviction bUt also as a living reality, and that we may have realisation of it as well as knowledge.
To enable men to realise truth there is nothing so powerful as the living appeal which is not the appeal of word nor yet of action, but something far deeper and more subtle, which gives to both words and actions a meaning which may not at all lie on the surface.
Grau,
theurer Freund, ist alle theorie,
Und grün des lebens goldner Baum.
Everyone can appreciate the truth of the worcls "What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you are saying."
Behind this there is the distinction between two kinds of truth—on the one hand truth of disposition and purpose, that truth which we apprehend as beauty of soul, and on the other hand, logical truth, a formal correctness of thought or action. There is in human nature an intuitive sense to which apart from all distinctions of rank or differences of learning, beauty and nobility of soul make appeal. It is truth in its ultimate and essential form, without which "knowledge profiteth nothing." It is what we mean when we say that "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin," or that "One loving spirit sets another on fire." It is an experience we have all shared and can understand. Every human soul represents a certain kind of world, and we are all conscious of what it is to look into a human face and to realise the inadequacy of the world in which we habitually live, and of the beauty of this higher world of which we catch some vision. It is here that we find the secret of ' esus,--His power to unveil and allure the human heart. He unveiled the men of His dav, and He stands before humanity unveiling all who look into His face.
His words were the mere expression of what He was, and against the sophistries of the human mind His words would have been powerless, had it not been for what He was in Himself, for it is always possible to impute the basest motives to the noblest sounding words. This was the refuge of the Pharisee, who said He had a devil. But this marks sin in its final antagonism and in its subtlest and deadliest form, for which, while it persists, there is no forgiveness, either in this world or in the next. The question as to the necessity for the crucifixion we shall examine later; for the present we observe that the vital thing is to understand the soul of Jesus as it was revealed in all the circumstances of His life and death. For there is nothing intrinsically different in happenings as happenings; the facts of His death were circumstances just as the facts of His life were circumstances; the important matter is only what Jesus was in relation to them, how He handled life and how He faced death, and what therefore was revealed of Him through these circumstances. The circumstances of life not only form the media through which we are developed but the media through which we are expressed. And this is the reason why difficulties and sorrows and joys, evoking the soul, enable it to accomplish its real work through the expression of what it is. "All noblest things are born in agony." What makes the mystery of the sorrows of Tesus is the wondrous depth of His sorrowing soul.
This unveiling by a perfect purity of soul, which make us say with Peter: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord," and which makes us conscious of the judgment of holiness, is our first great need. But this revelation of Jesus, in itself, would constitute our deepest despair, if it were a revelation only. To will is present with us, but how to perform we know not. And it is here that all merely moral theories of the Atonement break down, and that all mere appeals to our insight and conviction alone are inadequate. Jesus spoke of bringing liberty to the captives,—and truly we are captives,—sadly conscious of our broken wings when we see the heaven which we might have reached. We need something beside knowledge and light, we need power; we need someone to take possession of us, to strengthen the weak hands and to confirm the feeble knees, and to make straight paths for our feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way.
Now this our second and greatest need, is satisfied by Jesus who conquers and takes possession of our souls, coming personally to us through love.
II
A Mohammedan once said to the writer, "Jesus of Nazareth unveils me, but I need the power to live in His world." That power is impossible apart from the living presence and personal individual love of Jesus Himself. As we study the life of Jesus we are struck by the wonderful effect He made on the persons whom He met. Nicodemus, fearing the voice of convention, comes to Him by night; the result of the interview is that henceforward the cowardly heart is captured. He was not brave enough to come out into the open; it may be he still was in mental difficulty through the trammels of that Rabbinic faith in which he was so well versed and in which he had been taught to see the sanctions of God; but as time passed and Jesus was defeated, His earthly agony over and Himself hanging cold and still upon the tree of dishonour and shame, then Nicodemus forgot his fear and came to proclaim himself His friend. In that hour when circumstances would powerfully support the conviction that Jesus was wrong in the sight of God and of man, when the anger of the insensate mob would add new fears to the tremulous Nicodemus, this man, whose mind was dark, but in whose heart was light, defied the common faith, and all his fears, and begged the body of Jesus. It was but dust, but it was the dust of the noblest man whom he had ever known, and, led by this human conviction, though earth and heaven had failed, his paid his absolute homage to a living and a human truth. The world which was represented by the soul of Jesus was the only world in which he wished to live. Illustrations of a similar kind could be multiplied from the Gospels. But it will suffice to add that this is the only thing which will explain the faithfulness of the eleven, who were very deficient in spiritual perception, and who did not believe that Jesus would rise again. It confirms our contention that ultimate truth is personal and that the impression which this truth makes is undying.
This is the ultimate meaning of the Resurrection and the reason why it lay at the heart of the disciple's joy. In the Resurrection they saw not only the triumph of right but also through the presence of Jesus they realised the power that would make them right, and thus making them like the Saviour cause them ever more deeply to enter into His fellowship.
In order to understand this, we have to define love, a word which in our language has many meanings. Real love is a personal identification of oneself with another, and when it is the love of the holy for the sinful, it is the personal redeeming identification of oneself with another. It is here that we touch the central mystery of life, but it is a mystery of which we have experience; for all real love has this characteristic that it identifies itself with another, and with that other's good. Love is never apart from truth, and can only stand in righteousness; it yields itself, yet never yields; it goes out from itself, but always remains itself; it sorrows, but is never weak; it suffers, but it never breaks; it waits patiently, and never fails; and amidst all change, it never changes.
Such is the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. To understand its power, we have to realise that at its heart is the very secret of personal life. We often foolishly think that we are independent. It is true that morally we should be independent, but it is equally true that personally we are dependent one on the other. Heredity is one great proof of this, and history another. It makes all the difference whether we are born in England or in the heart of Africa: the whole content of our personalities is affected by the personalities with whom we live. Our moods are changed, our thoughts directed, and our activities affected, through personal influence. As we ask what we are, and look back upon our lives, we realise how we cannot think of ourselves without thinking of those who have lived in us and in whom we live, and we should not be just what we are were this personal dependence and interdependence not a fact. But when we ask what is the chief proof of our personal dependence, there is no doubt that it is love. Real love involves more than a mere relationship; it involves identification. It is the mystery of duality in unity. How often has a child, looking upon a dying parent, cried out from the heart that death is impossible, unthinkable! What is the explanation of this contradiction? for indeed it is a contradiction. The soul says one thing, and the external facts of life another. The real explanation is that we dread to be sundered from ourselves. It is this that lies behind our deepest griefs. Death causes us to live in a world which is not our world; it causes us to walk in a desert place; indeed it is hardly we who walk there, for instead of living possessions there are but the shadows of memory. Its terror is not only that it destroys others, but that it destroys us in destroying them. It is a pitiless blast which wrecks our shelters and leaves us bare to the storm and rain. But more than this, it makes the sunshine and the song of the birds but idle things, for we can possess no true human joy except by sharing it In our possessing it, another must possess it in us
"O
Day, he cannot die
When thou so fair art shining!
O Sun, in such a glorious sky
So tranquilly
declining;
"He
cannot leave thee now,
While fresh west winds are blowing,
And all around his youthful brow
Thy
cheerful light is glowing!
"Edward,
awake, awake—
The golden evening gleams
Warm and bright on Arden's lake—
Arouse thee from thy dreams!"
It does not disprove this contention to say that the answer to this is faith, which causes us to live in the world of immortal things, a faith without which the deepest things in life have no explanation. Death's shadow but brings to light the reality that soul interspheres soul. All this explains how love is creative and formative. A supreme affection has often changed a man to the depths of his being, for what we love we grow like. Our love expresses that which we seek, and the ultimate purpose for which we work, and as we labour we develop according to the nature of our love. There is a real sense in which it is true to say that every man attains that for which he seeks. The pleasure-seeker ends with the soul of the pleasure-seeker, the man who loves money ends with the soul of a miser, it is in the very nature of personality that this should be so.
It will readily be seen that no love is permanently satisfying, or is capable of fulfilling a life in any real sense, unless it is love to persons and not to things. But it is also noteworthy that personal love, however deep, is always accompanied by a sense of solitude, unless it is recognised as a symbol of life's meaning, and in it and over it there is apprehended the personal love of God. The love of Jesus awoke the heart of Phillip, and he cried "Lord show us the Father and it sufficeth us." That is the voice also of the human heart. Our need is not only to know that God is personal; it is that God should come to us and possess us, and that we should possess Him, that we should love Him with a human love, which makes His service perfect freedom, that with human loyalty we should be faithful to Him, who alone is the fulfilment of our human hopes. The answer of Jesus was very plain: "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," and with a wondering joy not only Philip but his companions apprehended this. Everything that Jesus had done for them had a new light shed upon it. Everything He had done for them told of something that He was to them, and that He wished to be in them. In all His words and actions He claimed them as His possessions, and at last He awoke them to the fact that they possessed Him, and in possessing Him possessed the Father. This fact of His creative love which involved His being revealed in there, also involved a change in their nature. Unique in the record of the world's friendships is the story of the change in these men. From being worldly and self-regarding they became like Him, and when He died He lived again in them. Thus were they saved. To sum up all that has been said in this chapter let us take an illustration which shall show both the light which unveils and the love which possesses, and possessing recreates.
No one will doubt that the woman who was a sinner was saved by Jesus; but it is instructive to notice how. We read of her that "She was a woman in the city, which was a sinner." There is no name; she was one of a nameless throng: "A woman in the city," and yet homeless. We know nothing of her, save that she was lost to earth and heaven alike, winged and down, yet with a soul that might have soared. Something had happened on the wayside. An incident lies behind this, probably one of many: Jesus had crossed her path, and had not spurned her. We do not know what He said, but we know what He did. As she looked into His face, what she was was unveiled; she looked into a higher world. She must have told Him, mutely perhaps but fully, one of earth's saddest stories: but He did not turn away, nor could she go away. She was crushed, but not with scorn; she was broken, but not by force; what might have been and was not, was in her vision; the purity of God illuminated every corner of her soul, and she realised that sin means a broken heart, that it is the way of selfishness making all things unlovely, the apple that has rottenness at its core, the cup that has bitterness in its dregs. But she had eaten and drunk, and was helpless. Wonderingly, she realised something more, as Jesus looked upon her. She became conscious that this man, who did not pass her by, was bearing her sin; her brokenness was upon Him; it was He who realised it in its awfulness; it was He who, dwelling in love's world, shuddered most and felt most deeply. But stranger still, He would not pass; He seemed to hold her soul and say, "It is mine, I come to save you from yourself." He abode in the midst of her brokenness, and she fled for refuge to the haven of His soul. In that moment, she knew that her loss was His loss, that there was one who followed her unceasingly, whose love would never consent to her destruction, who, broken though she was, and valueless to all the world beside, regarded her as having an infinite worth, and her redemption as involved in His heaven. She might be solitary in the city, but He was solitary unless He dwelt in her soul. From that moment she was His captive. She followed Him, and as He sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at His feet behind Him weeping,—"and began to wash His feet with tears and did wipe them with the hairs of her head." It was strange to the Pharisee, and so it always will be. But thus did God come to her in Jesus Christ, with a forgiveness which was not deserved, and a mercy which was unexpected. She went her way, but with a changed heart, a heart broken by mercy, wondering with astonished wonder at the love which had opened to her both earth and heaven. She realised that however hard the world might be, she was reconciled to God, for she had found God in the compassion of Jesus, and God possessed her in His love. In this is the story of salvation.
XIII. CHRIST AND HIM CRUCIFIED
THE Christian consciousness has always centred in Christ and Him crucified, and no one can read the Epistles without realising that in them the chief stress is laid upon the Cross. No solution of the problem of reconciliation which does not account for this can be adequate to the experience of the early Church or the experience of Christians in all ages. It may seem to some that our theory as at present elaborated makes the Cross unnecessary. This is far fom the truth. Our theory may, and does, set aside as obsolete many older theories of the Cross; but we hope to show that behind it there is an interpretation of the Cross which satisfies the religious experience underlying the teaching of the Gospels and the Epistles, and what is equally important, unifies the message, the life, and the death of our Lord.
Theological explanation has oscillated between the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement as the centre and heart of Christianity. It ought to be obvious that what is needed is a deeper conception in which both will find their meaning. This is found in the person of Jesus, which alone can give meaning to either the Incarnation or the Atonement. Examination has already been made of the fact that actions and happenings have in themselves no moral or spiritual meaning. Events take their meaning solely from the motives and disposition of those responsible for them, or from the attitude taken towards them by those whom they affect. The mere facts of the Incarnation and the death of our Lord, as also indeed His miracles, have in themselves no specific quality, apart from what He was in Himself, and what He mediated through these things. That no example can in itself I effect salvation, is taken as proved from what has been already said, but this is also true of any mere outward transaction as such. An outward transaction may reveal and mediate a person to others, but it is obvious that the essential thing is not the transaction but the person revealed and mediated. To say that God, because of any transaction, or because of any perfection in Jesus, ca.n forgive the guilty, is to say that God does not regard reality.
No doubt passages may be quoted from the New Testament which may seem to bear out tradition and interpretation. But if all the explanations of the Cross in the New Testament involved the old interpretations, it would be necessary to face the question of the cleavage between Christianity and the moral and spiritual sense of mankind; and Christianity, if bound to any such theory, would be bankrupt in an honest world. But we are by no means shut up to this conclusion; for the thought-forms of any given time represent the mental stage at which an age has arrived. We are always, in mental explanations, proceeding from the inadequate to the more adequate; and in those matters which have the deepest import for life, our explanations can never be perfect. The important thing is to make sure of the living reality which needs to be explained. To expect that the Apostles should have apprehended thought-forms which have become obvious only through the labour of centuries, would have involved that what they said could not be understood by their own day, nor yet by ours. And to say that they framed theories which they themselves could not understand, involves a wholly artificial conception of inspiration. One must note however, that we are here concerned with the theology and not the religious experience of the Apostles, the form and not the fact. When they interpreted, they had to use the only instruments which lay to their hands. And it is noteworthy that the form of statement differed according to the audience to which it was addressed. [Nothing is more noticeable than the strange gulf between the New Testament treatment of the death of our Lord and later theorising. The living inspiration of the former is at once apparent.] The history of the doctrine of reconciliation serves to illustrate the same contention. No one believes the pre-Anselmic theory of the Atonement, and the diverse literature which has since marked the discussion of that doctrine surely proves at once the reality of the experience which underlay it, and the inadequacy of any known mental interpretation. This is but to say that the Cross is greater than all our thought of it. For none will deny that in all ages, however inadequate the theory held, men and women have been truly reconciled unto God, and created in the image and likeness of Jesus.
I
The Christian consciousness cannot suffer anything which questions the uniqueness of Jesus. This feeling is well expressed by Dr. Denney, "Christ has done something for us which gives Him His place forever as the only redeemer of men, and, no matter how thoroughly under His inspiration we are changed into His likeness, we never cease to be the redeemed nor invade His solitary place." ["Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation." p. 280-281] It is for this reason that we cannot be satisfied with the thought that the death of esus is merely one of many martyrdoms, and it is not in this way that the New Testament looks at it. Such expressions as "He bore our sins," or "He suffered for sins once, the just for the unjust." or "He is the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world,'' all assume, says Dr. Denney, in the death of Jesus a relation to sin which has no parallel in martyrdom. While in the main this is true, yet it is not perfectly correct to say that there is no parallel between the death of Jesus and martyrdom, for this would be to deny the humanity of Jesus in the denial that He witnessed to the eternal moral and spiritual order to which all human life, in the measure that it is true, must also be a witness. Nothing has spelt such moral disaster in the Church of Christ as the idea that the principles to which Jesus stood true in life and death., and without which He would not have been true to Himself, nor to God nor man, are not the same principles which are imperative for any human life. There is therefore a relationship, but there is also a fundamental difference. The latter needs to be dealt with first. The fundamental difference is the difference between Jesus and men "God was in Christ." This is proved in His consciousness, and by His moral and spiritual perfection; but perfection involves a difference in kind, because it involves an absolute relation to things. In Jesus the ultimate meaning of life is expressed. It is this perfection which differentiates Jesus from men, and which therefore gives an absolute meaning to His death which is found in no other. Other martyrs have been men with what was noble and what was sinful in their lives. It could not therefore be said that they perfectly vindicated the moral order in a perfectly righteous life, and that they sealed this in their death. But this Jesus did. In His death therefore He has an absolute and complete value for all, and so He died for all. His death was a. complete and therefore final expression of God's relation, not only to the Moral Order, but to Humanity as subjects of that order. It is this which makes the Cross central, and which is the ultimate differentiation of the death of Jesus from other deaths. It has also to be said that it is one thing to be a perfect archetype, and another to be an imperfect follower. The world's greatest martyrdoms would never have been, but for Jesus.
But in seeking to avoid putting Jesus in the same category as other martyrs, it is illegitimate to seek refuge in explanations which find the essential value of the death of Jesus in what is not personal. This is to seek refuge in a mysticism which can have for us no meaning and therefore no explanation. Theology is useless if it is the theory of the unintelligible. Such explanations are radically inconsistent with what is moral and spiritual, and they involve that the deepest thing in religion lies altogether beyond the sphere of insight and conviction. That such an explanation has been adopted in Reformed Christianity show, that the genius of Protestantism was only partially triumphant at the Reformation, and has never since fully expressed its meaning.
We have also to be on our guard against any theory which would involve that an action "in itself" is altered because of the importance (in the worldly sense) of the person who performs it. Its quality is in the meaning and not in the position of the person, it is the quality of the soul and not its "power" which constitutes its real value. Also we have to be on our guard against thinking that a sin is greater because it is committed against a person of special importance (in the worldly sense), This is to say that "respect of persons" because of wealth or power, involves disrespect of personality and is therefore immoral. "God is no respecter of persons," because He holds personality as sacred. To sin against Jesus when He is understood is more heinous, but that is because it is a sin against greater light, and not because of the action itself. Pilate's sin was not that he was unjust to the Son of God,—for he did not know that He was the Son of God,—but that he failed to manifest the simple justice which the situation demanded, when as judge he faced the innocent. Our Lord illustrates this principle, when He asserts that it is a grievous sin to sin against a little child, and when He commends those who fed Him when He was hungry, though they did not know Him.
On the other hand, there is areal relationship between the death of Christ and that of any man who has died for men in dying for Him. Surely no one can doubt that Stephen died in the power of Jesus and that Jesus suffered again in Stephen, manifesting afresh something of the personal wonder of His Cross because of His union with His servant. And did not Stephen in some measure fill up that which was behind of the sufferings of Christ, for His body's sake, which is the Church? But the martyrdom of Stephen was only possible because the martyrdom of Jesus had preceded it.
II
Christian experience has always apprehended certain things in the Cross,—the judgment and unveiling of sin, the vindication of righteousness, the everlasting mercy, and the revelation of an infinite love. These are facts of Christian experience, and any theory that would satisfy the Christian consciousness must satisfy these demands.
In order to do this, we must first ask, what is the Cross? It is surely strange that the word "cross" should have been so often on our Lord's lips. It was the deepest symbol of personal suffering and public shame. It held in it more than the mere conception of death; it was a malefactor's death quite as often as a martyr's; it was death at the hands of the hated Roman Empire, and what it meant to the impotent Jew can be well imagined. The almost daily crucifixions outside Jerusalem must have stirred the people's hearts to their depths. It does not seem possible to understand all that the Cross meant to Jesus, without understanding what He meant by it, when in His conversations with His disciples He alluded to it. "And He said unto all, If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whosoever would save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose or forfeit his own soul?" Jesus was preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, that is the reign of God. The reign of God was to be in the individual soul; for without that, the Kingdom of God in the community could not exist. Men were to find rest for their souls when they apprehended what was in His own soul and so learned meekness and lowliness of heart. This new disposition involved, under the circumstances of life, a cross, and that daily and inevitably; for God could reign in the heart of no man who compromised with evil, and who would not, in the inevitable conflict of obligations, place Him first. To do so in the midst of the society of that time, or indeed of any time, involved suffering. This disposition, again, because it includes the meek and lowly heart which is open to truth, the pure heart which sees God, the merciful spirit which regards the outcast with compassion, the sensitiveness which mourns with the grief of others, the hunger for righteousness which shudders at iniquity, and the love which seeks to redeem, has the Cross in its heart. We have only to watch the Saviour as He lived, to realise that this disposition in the midst of life caused Him to feel others' burdens as His own. Not only so; it caused Him in His dealings with people to adopt courses of action which necessarily led to His being despised and rejected. He had to unveil the hypocrisy of the Pharisees; for in this unveiling lay the only chance of their redemption. He incurred the displeasure of the respectable, because in His redemptive love He ate with publicans and sinners; and He aroused the anger of the patriotic when He said to Zacchaeus, "To-day I must abide at thy house." Daily was He unveiling sin by the revelation of an active holiness; dailv was He vindicating righteousness by being righteous; daily did He express the everlasting mercy and the love that passeth knowledge. This involved public disapproval and shame; it involved also the stricken heart. He did not touch the sick as a mere physician; we read that "virtue went out of Him." He identified Himself with them. He did not give to the poor as a philanthropist, He suffered with them. "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head." But chiefly do we find the great quality of His soul in the way He faced iniquity; that also was His cross. He saw that iniquity meant deprivation; He realised what might have been and was not; the inevitable retribution of sin did not settle the sinner's account for Him. The sinner stood, blind, iniquitous but unutterably needy, he awoke moral horror, but his need was a demand on an absolute love. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets and stoneth them that are sent unto her, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings and ye would not."
Seeing the women weeping as He went to the Cross, with a deep and far-sighted love, unmindful of Himself, He said,"Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me but for yourselves and for your children." There spoke the great and gentle of heart who had taken children on His knee and blessed them. It is not possible to resist the thoughtthat in the agony of Gethsemane there is the same element. We cannot know what He suffered in His own heart at the defection of Judas, but His selfless perception of reality made abundantly clear to Him that in doing what he did Judas was going out into the night of desolation. It was worse for Judas than for Jesus. The tragedy which Jesus knew would be consummated involved for Him not the triumph of iniquity, but the dereliction of the iniquitous, and in that He found no revenge; it only brought Him agony.
To understand the Cross we must understand these things. The Cross was the inevitable con-summation of the antagonism between light and darkness; but the nature that suffered it was the same that had lived with the Cross in its heart. And Jesus' attitude to sin and to men was not altered in the awful close, where iniquity did its worst. He did not seek to fly from it, for He could not go back upon what He was. To fly from it would have been to fly from men, to veil the light that alone could unveil them, and the love which alone could save. It was what He was that led Him there; they crucified Him because they were what they were. No words can plumb the depths involved in this. Sin was judged by His holiness; His righteousness was vindicated because it was revealed; the tide of human iniquity swept up against His soul, but never soiled it; men's malice was powerless to make Him malicious, their injustice to make Him bitter. In vain did their hatred seek to conquer His love. Dying but victorious, standing for them still, He uttered the divinest word the world has ever heard: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Thus was Jesus revealed—and also man.
There
is a moving story [Quoted by Dr. Fordyce in "Aspects
of Scepticism," p.112.]
told of himself by Lange, the author of the "History
of Materialism," a book the purport of which was to deliver
men from the thraldom of religion. Lange saw clearly that worship
of some sort is
an ineradicable human instinct, and he proposed to take over "our
best church hymns into the new worship." He writes, "Ueberweg
asked me what hymn I proposed to take from the Protestant hymn-book;
and in full
consciousness of our difference I answered immediately, 'O Haupt
voll Blut and Wunden' " (O sacred Head sore wounded). This
is but one instance of the almost irresistible appeal of the Cross.
What it means to the Christian
can best be described in the words of Bunyan:
"He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending, and upon that
place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a sepulchre.
So I saw in
my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross,
his burden
loosed from off his
shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so
continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre where
it fell in, and
I saw it no more.
"Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by His sorrow, and Life by His death. Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him, that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden, he looked therefore, and looked again, even till the springs that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks. . . . Then Christian gave three leaps for joy, and went on singing:
"Thus far did I come laden with my sin; Nor could aught ease the grief that I was in, Till I came hither: What a place is this! Must here be the beginning of my bliss? Must here the Burden fall from off my back? Must here the strings that bound it to me crack? Blest Cross! blest Sepulcbre! blest rather be The MAN that there was put to shame for me!"
THE meaning of the Cross is the meaning of Jesus, and the revelation of God. We say symbolically that it is the Cross that saves, but the Cross in itself is a ghastly tragedy, as meaningless as iniquity. Could any loved disciple have ever wished to see the blood-stained wood — [The worship of relics, as for example, pieces of the Cross belongs to the realm of magic, not of personal love. Would a son preserve the knife that had slain his father?] — again, or could he ever pass that " place somewhat ascending" without a shuddering horror? Theology made mysteries of what is humanly clear, and never more so than in dealing with the crucifixion. Its secret is not transaction, but meaning, and it is what Jesus was in Himself that gives it meaning. Action is a form of speech and the Cross is the language in which the Saviour is perfectly revealed, and through which He comes to us. The peculiar quality of Jesus was His self-giving, in fact His love. This marked His life, but was proved supremely in His death. The Cross does not, therefore,merely tell us something that happened twenty centuries ago, it tells us what Jesus is, Who is the same yesterday, to-day, yea and forever.
I
The cross has been regarded as a pre-ordained happening. This presupposes that the actors who were necessary for its tragedy and its sin were also divinely predestined for this sin. It is obvious that there must be something wrong in such a theory. Jesus made a real not a sham appeal to the Jews,—an appeal which they were free to accept as to reject. It is not irrelevant, as Dr. Denney thinks, to put the question "Would Calvary have happened if if His appeal had been responded to?" What would response have meant? Is it not that the Jews would have come into the same attitude to God as that in which Jesus rejoiced, that they, like Zacchaeus, would have been changed in heart and therefore brought into a right relationship to one another? That they should have brought Him to the Cross in that event is unthinkable. The responsibility for their sin must rest upon them as free beings. Therefore as an event the Cross could no more have been pre-determined by God than any other iniquity.
But in essence the Cross is inevitable wherever God in Jesus meets sin. Had Israel turned in response to His preaching, it would not have been a cross of wood; but its real meaning is not affected by this. The Cross is the means whereby Christ expresses Himself and through which He takes possession of us. It is Jesus facing the world as He faced Peter in the moment of denial. The meaning in both cases is the same. Not because of what happened to Him but because of what He was we call Him the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." The Cross however was inevitable as the resultant of certain definite forces of iniquity; and Jesus saw it to be inevitable.
II
We now turn to discuss the relation of the Cross to God. In doing this it will be necessary to repeat in somewhat different form what has been treated more philosophically in earlier chapters. The limits of this book preclude the textual treatment of New Testament passages. We are here concerned with the validity of certain types of religious thought. But it is important to notice that the word translated as "propitiation" involves an act of God or Christ which annuls sin. It is never used in the New Testament to describe an act intended to propitiate God. If it did, the thought would be unthinkable, and in flat contradiction to such texts as "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing unto men their trespasses." In what sense then, can the Cross vindicate the Divine righteousness?
Righteousness cannot be vindicated by legal justice, it can only be vindicated by one who lives righteously, — [Our Lord could not be holden of death because He perfectly vindicated the Moral Order.]— and who, in living thus, expresses the real meaning of the world-order. Jesus vindicated the world-order positively by being righteous, and commending Himself to men's consciences. The sufferings which men draw upon themselves when they are unlike Jesus, vindicate righteousness negatively; they prove conversely that Jesus and the moral order of the world are one. But the physical sufferings of Jesus onthe Cross were in no sense penalties which God allowed to be inflicted in order to vindicate righteousness. They were iniquities. over against which the righteousness of Jesus was vindicated in the way He faced them. The sufferings of Jesus did express the vicarious nature of life, which is that we share the outcome of others' iniquities as we share the outcome of other's good; but unless we are to stultify our moral sense by saying that innocence should be punished, we cannot hold that Jesus paid the penalty of our sin instead of us.
That Jesus suffered the inevitable consequences of iniquity, the outcome of the social life which in its turn was the outcome of the evil hearts of the men among whom He lived, is simply to say that Jesus sought to save us despite all the difficulties that lay in the way of reaching us. It is true that He did not murmur because of them; for He recognised that God has made all mankind a family, so that the sin of one member brings suffering on the others, and that love in such a world involves more and not less suffering, than does lack of love. He saw also that this vicarious principle of love is the Divine method of over-coming evil. Therefore He accepted His Cross as the will of God for Him. Yet because love is the weapon whereby sin is slain, in bearing our suffering Christ showed us the way to remove it.
III
It may however be objected here that our theory offers no satisfactory explanation of the cry of dereliction from the Cross. For does not that involve that God had indeed forsaken Jesus, and what could be the cause of that but that our sin was laid upon Him? Behind this interpretation however there lies a certain view of the consciousness of Jesus. He is not really regarded as man, and so here is read into the words a mystery they do not involve. There are two explanations, either of which is satisfactory. The words are a quotation from the twenty-second psalm, which goes on to tell how, "He hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath He hid His face from Him; but when He cried unto Him He heard . . . for the Kingdom is the Lord's; and He is ruler over the nations." To quote the words of Mr. Coates in "The Gospel of the Cross,'' " The words 'My God, My God, why bast thou forsaken Me?' prove to be the words of faith, but the sufferer had uttered no more than the first verse when His strength ebbed."
If however, this interpretation is not thought adequate, because the other words of the psalm were not quoted; if indeed the words have to be taken by themselves with the meaning which then`must attach to them, it does not seem difficult to find a natural solution. We have to remember the awful circumstances; the atmosphere of iniquity and hatred, than which nothing is more calculated to breathe upon us the sense of solitude from holiness; the physical agony, and the weakness coming from loss of blood, which must have made the consciousness fitful and been accompanied with a sinking sense of awful depression. What could be more natural than that in such a moment this cry should come from His lips? But it argues no loss of faith, for we have to remember that the cry has its prefix, " My God, My God.'' It tells us perfectly the state of human feeling which was Jesus' awful experience, but it also tells us of the victory which was the outcome of a life-long sense of possession, and that this was the case is proved by the closing words, "Into thy hands I commend my spirit." The mystery here is part of the mystery of Christian experience. The writer was once called to the bedside of a lady who was dying of cancer. She had been for long years one of the brightest of Christians, winning a battle against fearful odds. In answer to the question "How are you?'' she said, "All seems so dark, God has forsaken me, and there is no hope." She was asked if there was anything particular in her life that explained the sense of being forsaken of God, and the answer was "no." The writer turned to a table at the bedside and saw a hymn-book which he opened at the hymn, "The King of Love my Shepherd is, Whose goodness faileth never.'' He turned and read it through, and at the end was surprised as he saw a wonderful change in the worn face. It was radiant. It was a favourite hymn, one which had often been sung in days gone by with the sense of the Saviour's love and presence. A few hours after the end came, but it was in fulness of faith and joy.
"Our feelings are not the compass that Christ steers by." If our feelings condemn us, God is greater than our feelings. Nothing is more important in the Christian life than to realise that feeling may be an enemy as well as an ally. Our feelings are not under our command but our principles are. It is well to know that in this matter, which at some time or other is the lot of every Christian, "we have not an High Priest that cannot be touched with a feeling of our infirmity, but was in all points tempted like as we are.''
That the interpretation of the cry of dereliction as the turning of God's face from Christ is wrong, becomes clear when we consider the moral issues involved. Jesus was innocent, and though our sin was His burden, it was never His sin. That our sin was His burden must have drawn the Father's heart in love and approbation, not in anger. To say that Jesus was so identified with our sin that the Father had to turn His face from Him, as from iniquity, is totally to misunderstand the nature of sin and the way in which, alone, Jesus could bear it. True it stands written in Scripture that He was made a curse, or as we should say accursed, for us. He was technically but not in reality. Metaphorical and allusive language of this kind is natural enough in the case of the disciples as they pondered over all He had done and suffered for them; but we must ever beware of treating the language of the heart as the language of science. The former seeks to express the inexpressible; it exhausts metaphor and simile, and still sinks back unsatisfied; the latter must be exact and well defined. It is most necessary, however, to bear in mind the obverse of this, namely that a true theology will never be the outcome of mere study; it needs the heart which loves the Lord and the soul which awakes to poetry. Pectus facit theologum.
IV
The cross is regarded by many as a Divine reaction against sin and as a Divine sentence upon it; as Dr. Denney says, "The cup the Father put into His hand, the cup of trembling from which He shrank in deadly fear—this is the meaning of agonia—was the cup our sins had mingled. It has to be interpreted, not only through the moral heroism of Jesus triumphing over sin, but through the judgment of God reacting inexorably against sin; The redeemer on His cross not only vanquished every temptation to sin; He bowed His head in submission to God's sentence upon it, and tasted death for every man." The answer to this is that as we have shown before, the judgment of God and the reaction against sin are in nature. The moral order is the ultimate reality of the world, and its reactions against sin, while appearing also in the phvsical and social order, are essentially expressed in the state of the soul which sins. The judgment of God was not, therefore, upon Jesus, but in the souls of those who erected the cross. Who would be Judas, or Caiaphas or Pilate? It is true that "He tasted death for every man" through His loving self-identification with sinful men, through the shuddering realisation of what death meant for them, and also through the physical agony of the body; but these were consequences which fell upon innocence and not judgments upon Jesus. The truth that the Cross reveals the awfulness of sin and the fact that our redemption could only come through a terrible cost to God is quite another matter. It is, at once, the revelation of heaven and hell, and in its light not only the processes of iniquity and the inevitable reaction of Nature against them, but also the beauty of holiness and the wonder of eternal love are revealed. Theological theories have erred, not in finding all these things in the Cross, but in the interpretation of how they are in the Cross.
There is another question which is of irnportance because of the place that it has taken in theology. It is that of the value of the obedience of Jesus. Was His obedience an offering to God, and in what sense was it necessary to our redemption? This raises the question as to how far sacrificial language is suitable when discussing the Atonement.
Real obedience is never an offering. It is the expression of a true personality. It is never a price, because it is not in the sphere in which prices reign, and to talk of it as an offering implies that it is not a necessity to love and goodness, and that Jesus has the right to be otherwise than one with the Father; it is to make obedience a merit. But the whole conception of merit is apart from true personality and is never the thought of a nature whose meaning is truth and love. It is obvious that the obedience of Jesus was necessary to our salvation, but it was not so as a legal acknowledgment of the Law of God, but as the exhibition of a holiness which was innate and not compelled by anything from without, of a reality which expressed the nature of God and of the moral order of the world.
It is evident that, if God demands reality, neither the righteousness nor the obedience of Jesus can be taken in lieu of righteousness and obedience on our part.
V
The question then comes, how can the righteousness and obedience of Jesus avail for us, so that we can say that He is our righteousness?
We have seen how it availed in the case of His contemporaries, but the difficulty is that they saw His face and knew that He had a personal relationship with them. Our difficulty lies largely in this that we do not see His face. How are we to realise and how is it to be brought home to us that God is in esus seeking us and claiming us, that He may also possess and change our hearts. To answer this we have to look back and notice the story of the disciples. They lived with Jesus and sawv His glory and were captured by His love. Even when He was dead they did not turn against His memory. The world from which He had led them could no longer satisfy their hearts, and they waited, unconsciously perhaps, for the world in which. He had a place. We know how they rejoiced when He appeared unto them, but soon His bodily presence was withdrawn. Again they waited in obedience to His command, and there came to them the certainty that He was still with them, and they lived in a world in which He possessed them and they Him. This is the explanation of Pentecost, Jesus coming to them in the Spirit. He lived in them and through them, and mere and women whom they touched awoke to the kingdom of God, to the fact that God lives and reigns in human hearts and lives. Two things made Jesus a living reality to the people of that day. Jesus in the disciples, and the Spirit of God in their own hearts, intuitively convincing them that the Jesus who was the burden of the disciples' message and who lived in the disciples had come also to them.
Certain considerations may help to make this clear. If God is Father, and if God is love, we should expect that He should seek to come to His children by every avenue, and that the circumstances of life would awaken the sense of need for Him, and also provide the avenue of His approach. Any intelligible doctrine of the Holy Spirit must recognise that this has been the case in history, and it is corroborated by individual experience. There is one particular individual experience among many others which may serve both to illustrate this and help to illuminate the point of present consideration. Death is irreconcilable with love. It is a common human experience, where friendship has been as deep as life itself, that grief at death comes with an intimation of personal immortality. True nobility of soul breathes the air of immortality. There is no meaning in life if death is victor over it. This is to say that the assurance of immortality is found in a certain kind of life and experience, and if thi: is the case, how could those who knew and understood Jesus believe in death?
But this fact leads us further. This type of life and experience witnesses to immortality in the sense of a future life, but it witnesses also to immortality in the sense that it involves an eternal world apprehended in the present, and a living and personal God. It is therefore not difficult to understand how the Holy Spirit, taking advantage of human need, awakens the soul to the conviction of Jesus living and present as the revelation of God the ever-present. But once there is the conviction of Jesus as living and present, and the understanding of what He is in Himself, of the wonder and beauty of His love, there is nothing to hinder the soul being changed into the righteous image of the Lord.
Very few of us profess to disbelieve in a God. The difficulty is to understand what God is. Human need instinctively images God as personal, and when Jesus is known and understood, the God with whom we inevitably have to come face to face is found in Him.
XV. WAS IT NECESSARY FOR CHRIST TO DIE?
AMONG the deepest feelings in the heart of the Christian is that which reverences the Cross as being connected with the only way of salvation. Even to ask the question which heads this chapter will be felt by many to be a sacrilege. But it is in no iconoclastic spirit that this task is now taken up. Many reasons have been given as to why it was necessary for Christ to die, the chief being that He died to satisfy Divine justice. Dr. Denney says, "Mercy and justice do not need to be reconciled, for they are never at war. The true opposite of justice is not mercy, but injustice, with which God can have nothing to do, either in reconciliation or in any other of His works." He also says: "There is not in Christian experience any antagonism between justice and mercy.'' This latter statement is true, but it is not true when instead of "Christian experience" we say "Christian theory." If God demanded the Cross as a satisfaction to His justice, it would take a good deal of sophistry to avoid the conclusion that He was unjust to Christ in order to be merciful to man. Theologians have sought to escape this dilemma by saying that Christ, identifying Himself with man and representing man, was treated as justice demanded that humanity shouldbe treated. We have seen ... that this is impossible. Our moral sense frankly says it is unjust, and we may add that if theology persists in this explanation it will never satisfy the moral sense of humanity. One of the deepest things in the heart of a man who, knowing he has failed, looks at reality, is that he must bear his own burden, for it is mean to let innocence bear it. We must beware of theories of the Cross which arouse moral repugnance. Too often have men taken refuge in Jesus without yielding to Jesus the rights of a man. The fact is that mercy and justice are necessarily opposed when they are named together; they are not logically contradictories; but they are logically contraries, and therefore to assert the one is to deny the other To abrogate justice in a single human case is to make it unjust to be just in any similar human case; it is to be partial; and justice must be blindfold as she holds the scales.
It is not to deny that justice and mercy are facts in life as we know it, tc say that these two ideas form an antinomy which must be transcended by any true solution. Just as we saw that the Incarnation and the Atonement were both realities, but that to take one as the basis of theology left unexplained elements in the other, and that therefore we had to find a deeper conception, synthesisin, both namely that what Jesus was in Himself was the meaning behind each of them, so here it must not be misunderstood when the statement is made that if we take the ordinary meanings of justice and mercy, God is neither just nor merciful. This is not to say that He is unjust or unmerciful, but it is to say that He acts on a principle which transcends both and synthesises them; God is redeeming. In the parable of the Prodigal Son we have the figure of the Elder Brother, who, criticise him as we will in our hearts, we know has a case. He stood for legal justice; nor does the father deny this case, save by transcending its plea. He does not say "It is just," but "It is meet to make merry and be glad, for this thy brother was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found." The father, who represents our Father Who is in heaven, was more than just, he was redeeming. Would he have thought of himself as merciful? The thought would never enter his mind. To be merciful implies a merit, but to be redeeming satisfies the heart. It answers not onlv the heart's need, but the sinner's need. Let us suppose that a father in an ordinary earthly home has said to his children that a certain thing must not be done, or certain penalties will follow. His son commits that fault, unknown to the father, but afterwards, stricken by con-science, and awake to the fact that the reason why his father gave the command was because in love he desired the best for his children, he comes to his father and confesses, and opening his heart, makes it clear that he has changed and has become one with his father in love for what is right. Is the father then to punish him, or to accept the change of heart as the fulfilment of his law? The father in his refusal to punish will not regard himself as merciful, but will realise that his son has been punished through remorse. His instinct is rather to rejoice that the purpose of all his commands is fulfilled, and the order of his home lovingly secured. But the illustration is not adequate as a perfect example of God's relation to us, for it will be replied, "What about the other children?" Here we come to the contradiction between legal justice and redemption. It may be said that there are two solutions, either to place the whole matter before the children that they may be convinced that all real demands are satisfied. But if the children are not sensitive to real demands, what then? Or the son may consent to bear his formal punishment in order to satisfy those whose only conception of life is a system of rules. But let us note that this dilemma is not one in which God is placed. His dealings with us are not in the sphere of legal or arbitrary penalties. We have seen that penalties are necessary consequences owing to the nature of the moral order and of sin. Theology has too often added arbitrary and capricious penalties where, if it had seen more deeply, it would have recognised that sin is punishment. The soul that sins is in a state of deprivation, and by its sin increases its loss. Over against this system, inherent in the moral order in the world, is the Father, seeking to save us from ourselves by awakening us to ourselves. His thought is as to how He can redeem and restore, for judgment has already gone forth, and works inexorably where sin is. But redemption, while satisfying all the demand which mercy would seek to meet, does not deny justice when to justice we give a deeper meaning. For the restored soul, having the law written in its heart, fulfills the demands of law in life, and attains, not because of obedience to an outer demand, but through the freedom of inner conviction and love, all that which legal justice could ever demand and far more. Jesus did not therefore die to satisfy the demands of justice, but the demands of redeeming love created by a need which was present, because the moral order, expressed in the world and in the soul, has inexorably bound up sin with judgment, and therefore with destruction. Our need is that we should transcend law through freedom. God's love meets this by creating the freedom which is no denial of law. [Mercy has in it an element of redemption, it regards the person and not the act, but it brings no blessing as a mere remission of penalty, apart from the change of soul which issues in a love for right and a hatred for wrong. But the inner demand for mercy, as the outward demand of justice, are both satisfied through redemption.]
The Cross has been regarded as a sacrifice, [—The Cross not being a sacrifice, the altar disappears from religion; the altar and the whole system that gathers round it is at once seen as an anachronism as soon as Christianity is understood.—] but strictly speaking it was not, for as we have seen it did not satisfy and could not satisfy the demands of justice in any penal sense; for the guilty are the only subjects of such a justice, if it exist, and He was innocent. All such theories impinge on the moral purity of God. When we take the meaning of sacrifice to be dedication, then it is indeed true to say that He sacrificed Himself for us. Neither in the deepest sense was the Cross a personal sacrifice. Nothing so clearly reveals the fact that the world still tends to hold us in its thraldom as that for ages Christianity should have emphasised the personal sacrifice of Jesus with the thought that He gave up something that was hard to yield, and that in yielding He acquired a merit. We talk in this language because we tend to think that the things of the world have a value apart from the things of God. We have to ask ourselves plainly the question, Is it a sacrifice when we accept the best, and when we yield that which, if we kept it, would involve our ruin?
Reverently let it be said, for Jesus to have failed to take the way of the Cross would be to have shown that He was not righteous; it would have meant that He was untrue to His real nature, and over against this, bodily comfort and all that the non-spiritual world could give would be no compensation. To have failed would have been to have lost the objects of His holy and Divine quest, for it would have meant the failure of love, and that which was needed to reach the hearts of men would have been lacking; they would have been left derelict. The sacrifice to one whose love was so utter, whose courage so great, and whose insight into man's need so complete would not have been in the bearing of the Cross which secured God and man and all together, but in refusing and bein derelict with a derelict and ignoble world. This does not alter the fact that Jesus freely gave Himself. "Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life that I may take it again. No one taketh it away from me, but I lay it down of myself." But it enhances the value of the giving, because it reveals a perfect soul, and also the nature of true freedom. No man is free who will not give up the world, if need be, for the things of the soul; no man can possess the world who is not first willing to yield it, for only thus can he prove that the soul is to determine the world, and not the world the soul, that is to say his freedom, and only thus can he prove a true sense of values. "For the joy that was set before Him Jesus endured the Cross despising shame."
II
Apart from the question as to whether the Cross satisfies Divine justice, we have now to consider, was it necessary for Christ to die? `'Would His work have been complete apart from His death? The answer is, under the conditions of our world as it was and is, No. Death is a climax, not because of the putting off of the body, but because of the assertion of the soul. It is the ultimate test of the victory of the soul against opposing conditions, and therefore the final and complete revelation of the soul and that for which it stands. Its meaning is not apart from the meaning of life; it seals life's meaning as immortal. No man ever spake like Jesus. We should acclaim the beauty of His words, even if He had not died on Calvary, but, dying as He did, He proved how utterly His words were the expression of His soul, thus causing us to get behind the spoken word to the living word, behind the utterance to the living soul. He not only speaks the word but makes it credible. The Cross is in the Sermon on the Mount; as Dr. Skinner says: "Only He who died for men could have spoken thus." His death was involved because He and His message were one, and the conditions of life as they were would neither suffer Him nor it; but men sealed His message when they crucified Him. Their iniquity was the occasion through which Jesus not only spoke to humanity but revealed Himself to humanity. Righteousness inevitably led Christ to Calvary, the righteousness of a nature which drew sin into inevitable conflict with itself. He vindicated righteousness and His own soul at the same time, because He stood for righteousness to the uttermost and to the end. To have turned from the consequences of the conflict would have been to fail, —fail in obedience to the Divine will, which has righteousness as its supreme care--fail in the innermost shrine of His own soul, in response to the demands of fear and self-preservation, and in opposition to the demand which, in the very nature of the circumstances, God made upon Him.
Love, also, as well as righteousness led Christ to Calvary, and only a Calvary could, under the circumstances of that time, have proved the absolute quality of His love; for in that supreme close, alone, could He prove His utter devotion to the souls He came to seek and to save. It is the nature of love to be self-giving, and in that utter self-giving He revealed a love which nothing could daunt, and which never would let go. No one could really believe that God was revealed in Jesus without the personal conviction that God was seeking Him in Jesus.
Love and righteousness led Jesus to Calvary, and yet He did not create His Calvary. It was created by the state of the men amongst whom His lot was cast, and it is interesting to notice that no matter what the state of society the real Jesus would have been revealed. A world of Nathaniels would not have crucified Jesus; they would have apprehended God in Him and been saved by Him. Their guilelessness would have laid them open to His infinite quality. The fact is that revelation is subject to human conditions, but God is equal to any condition. Under any human circumstances Jesus Himself is absolutely necessary; in this world as it was and is, Jesus crucified is absolutely necessary.
It is indeed no wonder that the Epistles lay such stress upon the death of Jesus. It is the key to what Jesus was in Himself, and also the key to Christianity as a theology. It is the key for reasons which are very simple. In all friend-ships there are moments which are as windows to the soul. What our friend proves Himself to be to us in the darkest hour, is what we hold Nim to be in every other hour. Jesus' attitude to His disciples and to all; His strength, His thoughtfulness, His holiness, His patience, His yearning love, proved to them what He was and therefore what God was. And what He was to them in that hour He was to them forever. Everything that He had ever said or done could only be fully interpreted in its light. Christ Crucified was the living revelation of God, and the centre of all things.
What it involved was deeper than any theory through which they tried to express it. All and more that any theory could yield was livingly here. No one who understood Jesus on the Cross could fail to say " Who loved me and gave Himself for me." He was their ransom because He was their liberator; He was the Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world, with outstretched arms seeking to draw all men unto Him.
Is there any need which this will not supply? Is there any experience which it will not explain? Can the heart fail to say
''Nothing
in my hands I bring,
Simply to Thy Cross I cling?"
Every Christian wants to be certain of forgiveness and acceptance with God. The theory that Calvary was a price paid and accepted, brought a sense of certainty. Some may think that the foregoing explanation takes this away. It will be seen not to be so, when we realise that even if the Cross were a transaction or price, we are ultimately driven back to the faith that the God who accepted it is worthy of our trust and will be true to it. But this is also the purport of our theory. God is worthy of our trust and of our assurance in Christ Jesus. Our trust is not simply in any act of God but in the God who acts, and the end of the matter is that God in Christ is Saviour, and that, though all our theories be wrong, that is true, and all our need is met.
III
We turn now to discuss the problem: if salvation, as according to traditional theories, depends upon the death of Christ, would it not then have been non-available for the saints of the Old Testament? Or conversely, if God was able to forgive men in the old days before Christ, as the Bible says He was, in what sense can we say that the Cross is necessary for salvation and forgiveness?
Most unsatisfactory are the accounts that have been given of the relation of the Old Testament saints to the saving work of Jesus Christ. To sav, as has so often been said, that they were saved in virtue of events which were to happen in the future is quite unsatisfying to the mind, because such future happening could not affect the personal dispositions which they had when alive on the earth, unless it could be proved that they foreknew it and apprehended the nature of God and His love for them in it. This is wholly unproved, and indeed it is amazing that it should appear credible, since the disciples did not possess such understanding long after they had begun to be in the company of Jesus.
The fact must be the exact obverse, namely, that the Prophets and Psalmists, being awakened in the midst of life's circumstances to personal reality of heart and moral and spiritual sincerity, apprehended by faith the God who was later revealed in Jesus Christ, and who, when He was so revealed, thereby proved that their faith had apprehended what was eternally real and true. Zhe author of their faith was God; for they realised that He was worthy of their trust, and they saw in the things of truth and righteousness the revelation of His mind and will. If it be asked how they were forgiven, it will be found that it was not by reason of any sacrifice (Ps. 51:16) nor any personal merit, but simply because in utter sincerity, realising their utter personal need, they cast themselves upon a personal God, who sought for a living and not a merely legal righteousness. It is true, naturally enough, that their light was not full and their faith was often tremulous, but they were saved, not because of their attainment, but because of a personal trust in and relation to God, who was ever the same as He was revealed to be in Christ. Jesus it was who fully revealed this salvation by faith or personal trust; because of this the Apostle could say when looking back and realising that the fathers were in living touch with God, "The rock was Christ !" They lived in the twilight; we live in the noonday, but the same sun has been the light of both.
It is only on this theory that we can see the continuity of the Kingdom of God. Our Lord was not the first to proclaim it historically; His vocation was to reveal it fully and to establish it. When we realise that the Kingdom of God is the rule of God in the heart, and that only because it is first in the heart can it become the rule of God in the community and society, we have the clue to the problem, for there is no doubt that the prophets were surrendered in heart and life to God, and that He ruled in them and through them. The perfection of that rule is always dependent, not only on sincerity but on the stage of a soul's development, and this accounts for the fact that though the prophets were so wonderful, they pale before the glory of the Lord Jesus; but He was in their succession, and they it was who through the eternal Spirit began the work which He consummated in His historic person, in life and death.
IV
In concluding this chapter it may be well to examine a thought which is often uttered, that God sacrificed Himself for us in Christ, that we might love Him. Does God want us as a selfish possession? All the wonder of the world could not wake our hearts if that were true. Our love would be the paying back of a price; but this is an inadequate conception; for in it is neither freedom nor life. It is rather the fact that just because God is love, therefore He has no self-regard.
His thought is for us and for our joy. In this He manifests His glory; and we reach, it may be, a sublimer height than we have yet glimpsed when we say, [This is not to say that God does not rejoice in possessing us and our love, but to affirm the moral rule that God does not do right in order to gain selfish pleasure, but that His joy is the resultant of a selfless righteousness.] "It is not because of what He has done that we love Him, but because of what He is which is manifested in what He has done."
"Thou, O my Jesus, Thou didst me
Upon
the Cross embrace;
For me didst bear the nails and spear
And manifold disgrace.
"And
griefs and torments numberless
And sweat of agony,
Yea, death itself—and all for one
That was thine enemy.
"Then
why, O blessdd Jesus Christ,
Should I not love Thee well?
Not for the sake of winning heaven
Or of escaping hell;
"Not
with the hope of gaining aught,
Not seeking a reward;
But as Thyself hast loved me,
O ever-loving Lord,"
In other words, it is not the Cross that saves, but the Saviour Himself: we never understand the Cross until we understand the heart that was pierced there. It is the character of the motive and desire that gives meaning to all actions; and so we never understand the Cross, unless it is the speech through which the Lord Himself comes to us as He is. The present day worship of the crucifix and the sacred heart greatly misses the mark; for, when our eyes are lightened, the symbol and the accidents are gone and the Saviour is living and present. His finished work is His perfect and desiring heart, perfectly revealed, present to us, and understood; and when we see Him, we awake to the inevitable victory of God, who possesses us selflessly. All earth's beauty pales beside this glory; all earth's wonder is but dim beside this wonder. Nothing that we can think can add to its height; no ecstasy of feeling can plumb its depth of bliss; we have broken through the trees of the forest; the light of heaven shimmers on the bosom of the lake; we have no words, but our hearts have awakened; we are besought by the mercies of the Lord, and are the captives of heaven. Our captivity is our freedom; for we see Him "to serve whom is to reign."
I
THE question of forgiveness is one of the deepest and most crucial for religion, and, though nothing is more certain than the fact, the explanations of it are many and various.
It has been made clear that God cannot be reconciled to any man unless he is changed, but we know that even when a man seeks in all humility to yield himself to God, and even though his heart is aglow with love because of what Jesus has been to and done for him, he would be the first to own how imperfect he is and how unprofitable a servant. How then can he be accepted of God? Here we have two problems. How can the past be put away and reckoned as not existing, and how can an imperfect man be accepted by God?
1. It will not be denied that those who truly respond to Christ, being unveiled by His holiness, see themselves as sinners, and look upon sin with abhorrence. To look upon sin with abhorrence involves that we seek that which is good because we desire it; that we seek Jesus because we desire Him. But do not many come to Christ because of fear? This may for some be the first impulse and motive, but such are never saved unless they come to love Him who died for them, and loving Him to love what He is and seek to be like Him. Salvation therefore involves, as we have seen, a new nature and an attitude of soul to God and man.
Strange as it may seem, this does not involve unalloyed happiness. It may indeed involve agony as well as bliss. The agony of the first birth is borne by another, but the agony of the second birth is borne by the self. When the prodigal came to himself, he awoke to the sense of his unworthiness, and the agony that was in the heart of the father became his own. This is a true Christian experience, though its manifestations vary according to the life that has been lived and the temperament of the person. The new world into which the soul awakes is a world of light and the light shines not only upon the dark soul but also upon the dark deeds. Sin always comes back like a boomerang. No man ever smote another heart who did not smite his own, and this the light of God reveals.
To the sinner reviewing his life in God's presence it seems impossible that He can forgive, and the more we dwell on the facts of our lives the more impossible it seems. So John Donne writes:
"Wilt
Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made their sin
their door?
Wilt thou
forgive that sin
which I
did shun
A year or
two, but wallowed in a score?
When Thou hast
done, Thou
hast not done;
For I
have more."
There is more; for we are not only beset with the knowledge of the past, but with the knowledge of our helplessness.
"Intense
the agony
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse
begins to throb, and the brain to think
again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the
chain."
The reason for this misery is twofold. We never can forgive ourselves. "Forgive, O Lord, the sin I never can forgive " is the cry of every soul that wakes to moral and religious reality. The other reason is that we cannot trust ourselves, knowing the strength of habits and the difficulty of the way.
It is obvious, however, that the person who is in this state of soul is changed, and it is clear from what has been said before that the practical and actual answer in experience is found in a living and personal relation to God in Jesus Christ, whose wondrous love is manifested in the fact that despite all He comes, forgives, and possesses. But there remains the question as to how He can do this, for the sin of the past is a fact, as also the inadequacy of the present.
In solving this problem the first thing to bear in mind is that there is a change of heart and will, and a sincere desire for righteousness. This being the case, it is evident that the man is no more what he was. Jesus has not only unveiled but altered him. This fact is fundamental for forgiveness when we remember that sin is a state of soul, and that every sin which results from that state of soul leaves its resultant in the soul. In a very real sense our past is in our present. At any given time we are the resultant of the past.
Therefore when we are changed the past is overcome, for we are no longer what we were, and no longer will what once we willed. It is true to say that God cannot forgive sin, but it is also gloriously true to say that God can and does forgive the sinner. Forgiveness is not legal, it is personal. God sees in the man's heart and will the change which Jesus has produced, the earnest of all that the soul ought to be and will yet be. Because of this change which alters a man's attitude to righteousness, and which expresses a real unity with God, he is reconciled and forgiven. Forgiveness is not a mere word; it is the necessary acceptance on God's part of that which He needs must accept because it cannot but be approved; and this is just, for God can do no other. This may be illustrated from ordinary life. A true father cannot but be reconciled when he sees that his child has a new and real purpose of obedience and a real desire for what is right. His forgiveness of this child may be expressed in a word, but it is not the expression but the fact expressed that is the reality, and it is a reality which certain given conditions make inevitable.
The second difficulty, the fact of our inadequacy, is also a real problem. It was easy of solution for those who were satisfied with the phrase that we who were imperfect were accepted, because we were in Christ who was perfect. This may pass as a religious expression, but we have to ask, what does it mean for thought, and how can it be explained?
Underneath it there lies an assumption which must first be questioned. It is that God accepts only the perfect. This is strictly accurate, if by perfection we mean a right attitude of soul. But it is not accurate if by perfection we mean attainment. The difficulty arises because religious thinking was overshadowed by the old impression that everything was made perfect at the first, whereas the fact is that the revelation of God on the one hand, and the realisation by the soul of what God requires on the other, is abundantly proved by history to be gradual. This is not denied by Biblical scholars, but its implications are not always realised by theologians. Nothing could be more unjust, in a world constituted like the present, than to demand perfection of attainment. For attainment, knowledge is required; but the acquirement of knowledge is a gradual matter. Personality itself, as we have seen, is an attainment. While, however, this is true, there are certain conditions without which salvation is not possible and without which no soul can be accepted of God. These conditions are, sincerity, a willingness to let reality speak to one, and an utter dependence upon the will and grace of God, as manifested in Jesus Christ. This is but another way of saying that salvation is by faith; for faith is not a believing in things which are impossible to the mind, neither is it a venture in the dark, nor a doubtful experiment, but a humble openness to truth and reality, because one is willing to know God's demand, and to trust him who makes it.
Dr.
Oman well says: "But if God's gift of faith is through showing
Himself worthy of belief, we may readily have towards it
a sin of unbelief, not by failing to force ourselves to believe, but by warding
off the necessity
of believing." It is not possible, unless we "hold
down the truth in unrighteousness," to escape the
conviction
that Jesus Christ reveals the things of truth and love,
and that in the things of truth and love God's dealings
with
us are unfolded.
No
man's
soul is awakened by Jesus Christ, without the inevitable
conviction that the God who deals with him in Jesus Christ
is worthy of
his trust. Now,
when this faith exists, all else follows from it of necessity.
Grace is involved in it; as the Scripture says, "By
grace have ye been saved through faith.'' But grace is
not a magical force but a personal relationship
with God in Christ, mediated through all the details of
our lives. Faith is the condition through which God comes
to us personally, and God's coming
to us personally is grace. It may be said that this does
not involve that we are perfect, —that is true. But
it is the earnest of our perfection,
for again we read, "Faith worketh by love," and
what we love we grow like. For love as we have seen is
a personal identification with
another, and to identify ourselves with Jesus Christ, when
through a personal conviction we realise God in Him to
be worthy of our trust, involves our
growing likeness to Christ. We may fail in many ways, but
we learn also by these failures, and even they, when we
are honest with them, lead us
to a deeper view of God and a more utter dependence upon
Him. This experience, the reality of which no Christians
can doubt, explains the fact that in
the New Testament, the emphasis is not on "saved" and "lost" but
on "being saved" and "being lost." We
are saved when we have the right attitude to God and a
soul open to reality; for
Jesus Christ and moral and spiritual and personal reality
are one. But we also go on to know the
Lord; we grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ. We "work out our own salvation
with fear and trembling; for it is God which worketh in
us both to will and to do of His good pleasure."
Nothing is more needed to-day than a real idea of faith. If it is the magical and mystical thing which it is commonly conceived to be, it might then be the gift of some magical God, but He could not be good; for all men do not possess it. Faith of this kind would not be dependent upon our convictions, nor appeal to sincerity; it would override both with an impersonal irresistibility. But if faith is, as we have said, a conviction that God is worthy of our trust, then it is a plain duty so to preach Jesus Christ, so to unfold the things which evoke the consciousness of worth and trust, that men will inevitably be drawn unto Him if they cease consciously to resist the truth in unrighteousness. God made us for Himself; He must therefore appeal to us with the appeal of truth and reality, for our real meaning and fulfilment are not to be found apart from these things. It is no answer to this to say that faith involves believing in what we do not see, for all the great realities and great values of life are unseen. Faith is to the unseen world what the eye of flesh is to the visible, and the evidences of faith are just as truly knowledge as the evidences of our physical senses.
It is of course impossible to prove this except to experience, but it is a certainty to those who have experience, and all our doubts and fears vanish when we truly apprehend God in Jesus Christ, At long last everything depends upon whether we trust Him, upon whether He eternally is what lie is revealed to be. It is no wonder that we doubt when we look in upon ourselves; but salvation comes, not by self-trust, but by the trust that commits one's life to God, and opens the heart to Him. Greater than any of His activities is God Himself; deeper than any love revealed in any particular act is the heart of Him who is Love. Our assurance then is ultimate and absolute, when it is in Him, in whom is the meaning of all that He has done. What Jesus is in Himself is our ultimate assurance. As John Donne writes again:
"I
have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine, as He shines
now and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast
done;
I fear no more."
"In Him is yea."
II
Closely connected with these questions of forgiveness and acceptance is the problem raised by the presence of the consequences of our sin. Some of the consequences of our sin are destroyed, for as we have seen, the state of soul which is a consequence of sin is changed, but others, such as habits of mind and feeling, bodily pain and suffering, and, worse than all for the soul born to nobility, the suffering and ruin of others, remain. These have often been regarded as penalties, and as such they may be regarded, until God forgives and accepts the sinner, but after this the relation of the man to them is utterly changed, and God is apprehended in them in a way totally different from what formerly could have been possible. The consequences of sin, as we saw above, are the outcome of a world-order which reacts a nainst evil, and the reconciled soul accepts this order and therefore its consequences. A humble acceptance of the consequences is a necessity for victory over them. In this acceptance the real man takes sides with the moral order even against his own comfort, advantage and self-regard, and therefore proves the sincerity of his reconciliation. Not to do this simply proves that i man has sought God to avert consequences and not because of moral sincerity and spiritual insight.
The consequences of sin being accepted, they become for him part and parcel of his lot in life, part of the set of circumstances with which he has to deal, an absolutely necessary part of the conditions, in which finding God he acts so as to develop his soul and manifest God's love and power. It is in this way that they are transmuted into blessings, revealing the deep seriousnesss of life, the real nature of goodness and its necessary demands, and the love of God manifested in all His ways and works. "All things work together for good to them who love God."
This becomes clear with a little consideration, for it is character and disposition and not our abilities or our easy circumstances which are the source of our true happiness or real influence.
The chief difficulty with many souls is not in connection with the consequences of their sins as they affect themselves, but with the consequences which affect others. There is no pain so great as that which comes through the knowledge of others who have been led into sin and degradation through one's faults or iniquities. Willingly would any true soul be anathema if these consequences could be truly annulled, and in a real sense there can be no heaven for the Christian while those whom he has led astray are in the wilderness in which once he lived. He never can and never does forgive himself, and like the apostle he regards himself as the chief of sinners. The wonderful thing is that it is just because of this that the situation can be redeemed. Those who are thus sinned against, chafing because of sin's consequences, often regard these who led them into it with a fury of anger and great bitterness, and even if they themselves come to God the thought of them is not unmixed with horror. But is anything more calculated to change this than to realise that this iniquity has become the agony of those who once were either the thoughtless or else designing enemies of their souls? To realise that their misery is shared is a great step in its removal, for in this is proved that the oldtime selfishness is gone, and that now heaven cannot be found apart from them. And if it be answered, "What if they are dead? " the problem is not radically altered.
"I
hid my face in the grass,
Said, listen to my despair.
I repent me of all I have done,
Speak a little."
Who could see that and not be softened? Has it not in it the love of God dealing with sin's problem at the heart? In the day when all is known this also shall be revealed. It is the expression of the redeemed seeking to redeem their own world. It has however to be borne in mind that while we can tempt we cannot compel others to sin, for sin is not an outward act, but the consent of the soul to wrong; this prevents those who have been sinned against from laying their sin at any other's door.
It is of absolute importance that stress should be laid upon the fact that the proof of salvation is shown by the way in which we act towards those whom we have wronged. All too common is the thought that any situation can be put right or that we can be changed without confessing our wrong to the person we have wronged. To confess to God and not to the wronged is to mock God and the wronged, because it holds the personality of the wronged in disrespect, and does not concede its actual worth, which is the essence of all immorality. It is the outcome of pride issuing in a false self-respect, and God never undertakes to fortify our self-respect. It also leaves the wound unhealed and the situation unredeemed.
Out of this arises the question; If we can never forgive ourselves how can we ever be happy with ourselves? Under this there lies the misconception that we should look within and not without. Salvation is salvation from self-regard in every respect. It is a salvation through love and to love which lifts the soul into other hearts and into the heart of God. " Nothing in my hands " will be an eternal word for those redeemed. Out of this prison of the self one enters into the glorious world of the great redeeming love of God. We are never equal to love's demand; but it is love's demand that awakens unselfish regret; it is the demand of a love which will not let us go, and which through its eternal mercy becomes our eternal joy. "To Him be all the praise and the glory, world without end."
NOTHING has injured Christianity more than the suspicion that the salvation with which it is concerned is a purely individual matter. Nothing is more foreign to its nature and spirit. Christianity must be judged by Jesus; none was ever freer from self-regard than He. His personality was not static but dynamic; it was expressed in a tireless self-giving for " every creature " When His visible presence was removed, He still did not leave the world; not only did He appeal to Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road, but He sent forth His disciples to be His " witnesses," that is, to stand for that for which He stood. The cross was to go forth into the world, vexilla Regis prodeunt. What does this involve?
The first moment in the Christian life is when a man sees Jesus Christ and Him Crucified; the second moment is when he finds the cross, which his own iniquity has caused, in his own heart, but the third and last moment is when, looking out on the world, he sees it as Jesus sees it, struggling, toiling, sinning, suffering, and finds its unutterable need his burden, and the supply of that need his task. This is the result of no arbitrary command but of the new nature which is in union with Christ; it is inevitable because Jesus lives again in His own and seeks the world through His own. This is abundantly clear both from the nature of the case, and from the actual history of His disciples.
It is clear from the nature of the case, for no man is saved by Jesus who does not become like Him; no man has faith in Jesus who does not believe in the things in which He believed, and stand for the things for which He stood. It is not simply that we receive the mercy of God in Christ: mercy becomes our nature and we are merciful. It is not that we receive the love of God in Christ: Love becomes our nature and we love as Jesus loved. It is not that we have been redeemed: to redeem becomes inseparable from our life, and all this follows because we are created anew in Christ Jesus.
As we have seen in the last chapter, there is a fundamental sense in which the Christian is reconciled to the world. The sufferings which are the outcome of Nature's reaction against sin are borne without bitterness. But this is also the case when the sufferings are the outcome, not of the general reaction of Nature, but of the injustice of man. It is not the Christian who needs to be reconciled to his brother; for the man who is in Christ Jesus is reconciled, though this involves no condonation of iniquity. Not only is the change that is necessary for a harmony of life not needed on the side of the Christian, but he is willing to bear life's wrongs without bitterness, for in this is the secret of revealing Jesus, and in this is the secret which banishes life's enmities and changes the enemy into the friend. This is the thought of the Apostle Paul when he writes; "Avenge not yourselves, beloved but give place unto wrath: for it is written 'Vengeance belongeth unto me; I will recompense, saith the Lord.' But if thine enemy hunger feed him, if he thirst, give him to drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." There is a secret joy which comes from the benediction of God in the soul, which is found when the things of malice but serve to illumine the things of love. It is in the piritual sphere what the judgment of sublimity is in the natural. In the latter case, what we call the sublime, comes because the soul rises to its own height, over against the wild might of Nature's storm. The body may be overcome but the citadel of the soul is never captured; it abides in the immortal world. And so it is when instead of the disordered might of Nature, we have the malice and injustice of man. It may work what to the world is ruin and death, but the Christian sees above the earthly host of adversity the glorious cloud of witnesses and Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of Faith.
It would be a selfish satisfaction which should content itself with its own victory; the nature of the awakened personality forbids this possibility. The salvation which destroys our self-regard causes us to realise that God has set us in the midst of our brethren; in a very real sense they become part of ourselves. We are not satisfied that the Kingdom of God should come merely in our own hearts; indeed when we understand what the reign of God means, such a thought involves a contradiction. In the measure that God reigns in 'us are we like Jesus, in whom He reigns perfectly. In the measure that we are one with Jesus, do we share in His insight and sympathy, and understand love's demands relative to others. It is because of this that the fellowship of Jesus is called the body of Christ; it is the medium of His activity, through which He continues to live in the world. And it is in this new character that we have the secret of all true reconstruction, and therefore the reason why Reconciliation must be the basis of any permanent civilisation, as well as that which alone, as we saw, gives Providence a final meaning.
What this involves for life can be only discovered gradually. There are many problems which Jesus had not to face, the solution of which cannot comefrom anything which He said. But there is no problem which the new nature that is in Jesus Christ cannot ultimately solve, because of that insight and love which is inherent in it, and which is creative of its own world. The only solution of the deep and intricate problems which meet us in connection with religious, social, and political life, will never be found until we realise that the first condition of a true world-order is true personality. That is why Jesus is the meaning of life, and why the Apostle Paul saw in Jesus the Man from heaven, the final meaning of all things.
It is a high and holy task to which the redeemed are called. They are called to be in the world as He was in the world, in order that the world may finally be in Him. "If any man hath not the spirit of Christ He is none of His." It is not only the imperfection of our own hearts which leads us to veil the issue from our minds, it is often a deep humility, as we realise what we are and what He is. But the issue has to be faced, and the question asked, "What does this mean for us?" If we are sincere we must answer, though we tremble to say it, "It must mean the same for us as it meant for Christ, a nature which changes all the values and the aspirations of life, as well as the motive and method of all life's activities." But let us realise that Christ is not calling us to sacrifice but to attainment, not to the acquiring of merit but to privilege. For in the creation of the new nature He brings us into the only way of possessing the true joy of life, acquiring what we can never lose, or accomplishing what we can never regret, of living in the city of God, which hath foundations.
Privilege, however, involves responsibility. All our talents are talents held for the Community; all we have is relative to the common good. This involves a new thought of property; the emphasis is taken off the possession of those things which with the fashion of this world pass away, and laid on the possession of love, which never faileth. The things of this world become the means through which the personality is expressed, and through which in love other souls are evoked and possessed. Need is then seen to constitute right, for love can withold nothing that is necessary to another life's fulfilment, it becomes plain that even if we lose for love's sake we gain; for we ultimately gain him who dispossessed us. Thus we see why Jesus refused to be a judge and a divider amongst us, and why He laid upon us but these commandments that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and. strength and mind, and our neighbour as ourself. For love satisfies itself in giving to the other which is itself, and to deny the fulfilment of our brother's need will mean that we must go unsatisfied. And further in proportion as we have entered into Christ's world we shall know the supreme joy of the Cross; as we face the men who play the game which is all loss and never gain, we shall have compassion, for their darkness is their judgment. Their souls, isolated, fevered and heavenless, will blindly and unconsciously cry to us as they cried to Jesus out of the depths of a profound though unrealised need (for who needs like the man who is lost and what is misery but a demand for joy? and what are man's blind stumblings after happiness but a dumb and visionless cry?). As we see these our brothers, "who know not what they do," we shall know that any Cross is worth while, and no Calvary in vain, if they can only be awakened, to sit clothed and in their right minds at the feet of Jesus. The crucifixion on Golgotha while it is the supreme fact of history, is but the symbol of God's method which is the necessary outcome of His nature. As we are reconciled to God and are new creatures in Christ Jesus, no other method will be possible to us; for to act otherwise would be to destroy the very nature that we possess, and to live in an earth whose springtime brought no hope, because we had severed ourselves from the "God of Hope."
Life has manv conflicts, and among the most desperate are the conflicts of obligation which struggle in honest hearts, but the key to the solution is "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God." When the interests of the Kingdom of God are at variance with any other interest there is no doubt where the Christian should stand. It should not be possible to do as a man what one would not do as a Christian; for a man's personality cannot be divided nor his moral responsibility evaded. Greater than that of the crowd or of convention is the authority of truth and the command of God. Only thus can we really do our duty to others, for not to stand for truth is to be losers with them, and as we stand for truth it is their cause also that we uphold.
It may be thought that this is unpractical theorising, but we have been seeking no theories practical or otherwise, but the definition of an historic fact which has illunined the world, and to analyse the nature which through it has been awakened. It may be asked "What will it lead to in this present evil world, and at this present time?'' The answer is: Let us learn of Christ: and let Him come and take up His abode in us, and while we may not know the path our brother should take, we shall, at least, know that there is light upon our own. As we follows on to know the Lord, we shall know that the path of the just is as the shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. There will be things which we cannot do, though once we might have done them, for to do them would be to violate our nature. There will be things which we must do, for love demands expression and to serve in love is to be free. Life's complexities will make us humble, but the vision of the Son of God will make us happy. We shall be humble, for we shall know even if we could do all, love's demand would yet be unfulfilled; we shall be happy, for though we may fail, He never fails, and His love will teach us. "Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel and afterward receive me to glory."
Many winters and summers have gone since Jesus of Nazareth died on Calvary, and many generations have contended fiercely about the question of His deity; even the stake and the block have been called in to clinch the argument. But Jesus needs no such aids; He shines in His own light. We know that in God there must be the unsearchable depths and also the illimitable height. These things, however, are but solitudes to us unless He comes to our hearts. When He comes in Christ, and when with a meek and lowly heart we try to understand Him, we are awed before that majesty, which is not of force but of love; we find that depths and heights are things of the soul, and as in some measure we see life as He sees it and the task which He essayed, and the victory which He won, we need no one to tell our wondering spirits that He is the Son of God. Our failure unveils Him; our highest visions are but stray gleams of His glory. We feel helpless as we face His love's demands but we cannot refuse them. We pray that our efforts, feeble though they may be, may be some witness to His love; we know that, though it be not in our day, yet it shall be one day, that our earth shall not groan and travail in pain, waiting for redemption, for Jesus shall be seen to be the meaning of it, and it shall find its fulfilment in Him. Thus He is not only the Reconciler of man to man and of man to God; He is also the key to the meaning of the world. The mystery of Providence finds its solution, for its kev is the redemption which is in Him. The end of creation is the kingdom of God, and the meaning of the Kingdom of God is found in Jesus. He shall reign for ever and for ever, and of His Kingdom there shall be no end.
"Yea,
through life, death, through sorrow and through
sinning
Christ shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed.
Christ is the end, for Christ
was the beginning,
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ."
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