MaltbyObiterScripta

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JESUS

1. A MODERN RECOVERY
[This address was delivered by the Rev. W. R. Maltby at the C.O.P.E.C. Conference (7th April 1924) to introduce the Report at the Session on 'The Nature of God and his Purpose for the World'.]

YEARS ago I acquired at a sale four volumes of an Atlas and Cosmography intended to be completed like the Copec Reports in twelve volumes. The opening sentence read: 'Cosmography is a general description of heaven and earth, of both of which an account will be given in this work. The account of the heavens is reserved to a peculiar volume, it being more expedient as we conceive that we begin with that of the earth.' The volumes, however, were not completed; the author lost his money in the undertaking and was thrown into the Fleet prison for debt, and spent his last years in writing, not that peculiar volume about the heavenly bodies, but a history of his jail. Which things are an allegory. It might seem that the programme of this Conference promises to survey heaven and earth and all things therein. But we approach that tremendous subject as those who believe that THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION INTEGRATES THE WHOLE. Religion cannot be reserved to a peculiar volume: it is not for us an appendix to life, it is the meaning of life. We put God first, not because it is seemly so to do, nor for Dogberry's reason: 'Write down that they serve God, and write God first, for God defend, but God should go before such villains.' Our reason is that we have seen a purpose of God which gives meaning to the whole of life. We accept the dilemma that life is either a nightmare or a revelation, and we choose the latter alternative, not because it is the more pleasant of the two, but because in the light of that revelation all that we see increases in significance and coherence; the apparent contradictions diminish and the harmonies multiply.

Two reasons may be given why we ought to meet for this unique Conference and why we may hope for great results. In the first place the modern social problems which we are to consider are modern. Human nature has not changed, but the conditions of human life have changed enormously and our extraordinary mastery of material resources without any corresponding increase in moral power has created a situation of bewildering trouble and fear. The social problems cannot be let alone. The modern world must find an answer or civilization is undone.

In the second place we ought to meet hopefully, because Christian people are better prepared for an answer to these crying questions than they have been in the past. There is now within reach of the Church a richer, more reasonable, more universal, and more significant message than we have ever had. If this is so it is largely due to one cause—within our own day the Christian Church has recovered the significance of our Lord's earthly life. Through that recovery Jesus Christ is increasingly directing the thoughts and sustaining the hopes of the noblest part of mankind. There is something new in the situation here. When our fathers said, 'Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate', passing straight from the miraculous birth to the sacrificial death, they told us where their interests were, and also where they were not. They were not really interested in that human life except as a preliminary to the atoning death. It is not so today. Jesus Himself as He lived among men is better known to us than for many centuries past. His significance proves to be inexhaustible. Looking at the human face of Jesus Christ we see how glorious God is. We cannot learn this by any lists of attributes eked out by analogies derived from kings' courts and the haunts of arbitrary power. The only language that was at once intelligible to us and adequate to express God was the language of a human life; this is the meaning of the Incarnation. It is astonishing how much we know of this Jesus whose story comes down to us only in a few fragmentary pages—amazing how that royal nature with all its striking contrasts is so luminous and so intelligible. Jesus Christ becomes for many of us the most knowable person in the world. The contrasts are indeed striking—the speed with which He worked, putting vast masses of work behind him every day; the peace which gave Him leisure for everyone and made Him a refuge for every hunted life; that burning moral passion and that appealing humour; that severity and that ease; that uncompromisingness and that tolerance; that rigour and that sympathy. He surprises and teaches us by what He did, but also by what He did not do, by what He said and left unsaid, by the fire He kindled on earth and the fire He would not call down from heaven, by His command over nature and the humility of His service to men, by the sweep of His power which nothing could withstand, and by those sudden halts on the threshold of the human spirit when its frail door was closed against Him. These opposites are not inharmonious in Him. It is not even right to say that they are the different sides of one character. They all mean the same thing, they are the expression of one purpose, meeting a changing situation with one intent. This Incarnate Life becomes the supreme revelation of God's dealings with us, therefore of what God is, and what we are, and what life means. So that we see in God's ways an end to which we can reach out, a process we can welcome, and a blessedness which no adversities can take away.

HE FOUND GOD'S MEANING IN NATURE

Nature has some dark riddles to ask of those who profess to explain her, and our report has something to say about them. We claim that the Christian revelation has answered some of those riddles, that it puts us in the way of answering others: and that even in the darkest of all, the Christian hypothesis is more tolerable than any other. But my concern just now is with the positive side.

Jesus Christ saw God everywhere in the world about Him. He would have known how to appreciate the ascetics, for they at least cared sufficiently to take the difficult path, but He does not take their way. We can see how rich was our Lord's outlook when we compare it even with that of His servant Paul. St Paul has left no evidence that he ever heard a bird, and he has left positive evidence that he never saw an ox. 'Doth God care for oxen?' he says. But for Jesus the whole world was 'a mighty sum of things for ever speaking'. Anyone can see the sun rise—none but He saw it rise with intent, pouring friendship from the skies. We have all seen rain fall—how few have heard its appeal, or seen in the sun and rain the sacraments of magnanimous love which disdains petty punishments and corrupting rewards! Jesus really could see birds, and feel flowers, and He understood their language. Sun, stars, wind and rain, birds and flowers, the whole universe was for Him a vast embassy, and all the ambassadors were saying: 'Be ye reconciled to God.' Perhaps no one ever came nearer than St Francis (with his Brother Sun, and Sister Earth, and all the rest of the family) to this view of nature, as friendly and co-operative, and if we had explored it more deeply and set it forth more worthily we should not so often have estranged the poets, who heard the voice even when they did not understand the language.

It is perhaps in this context that we should place some of our Lord's miracles if we are to understand them. There is something completely beyond the reach of invention in the Evangelists' story of those miracles. They are not violent interventions of a good power in an evil order; they are rather the use of a plastic and responsive material in a master hand. When he awoke out of a sleep in the boat, His surprise was not at the storm, but at His disciples' panic, as something unreasonable and discreditable. He speaks constantly as though all that we call impossibilities would yield right of way to the loving purpose of God. If we could be of His mind, we should know that this world is God's world and therefore sacramental, and we might remember oftener than we do that there are not two sacraments, nor seven, but seventy times seven. To know this is to discover a new heaven and a new earth.

HE FOUND GOD'S MEANING IN THE CONDITIONS OF HUMAN LIFE

Therefore he accepted those conditions, not grudgingly or of necessity. On the one hand, He did not resent or seek to evade the long tasks, difficulties, and frustrations with which we must grapple. He learned by them, and turned them to account and gave thanks. All our weak complaining and self-pity, that we should be set to the soldier's work, is put to shame before an example like this. On the other hand, He did not, as some of the Saints have done, divide life into sacred and secular, and, finding God interested in one corner of life and not in the rest, entrench themselves in the favoured portion. John the Baptist, like many of the typically religious men in all ages, stood on the edge of life and called people out of it. He would have no more to do with it than he could help. He reduced life to the barest simplicity and consider the rules of Holy Living, he laments the time wasted in merely growing up, and if he consents to go to bed, it is, as it were, under protest and on the understanding that it is not to be regarded as a precedent in any subsequent existence. He writes: 'When we consider how many parts of our wisest and best years are spent in eating and sleeping, in necessary business and unnecessary vanities, in worldy civilities and less useful circumstances, in the learning of arts and sciences, languages or trades, that little portion of hours that is left for the practices of piety and religious walking with God is so short and trifling, that were not the goodness of God infinitely great, it might seem unreasonable or impossible for us to expect of Him eternal joys in heaven even after the well spending those few minutes which are left for God and God's service, after we have served ourselves and our own occasions.'

We know there is something noble in this mistake, and perhaps something ironic in the language, yet it suggests a surrender of whole tracts of the common life to secular interests as being practically meaningless, and it is far from the mind of Christ. Jesus Christ took the other way. He was born a little Child and carried thankful memories of that childhood into the later years. He was for eighteen years a Carpenter and did not think it lost time. He came eating and drinking. He took His place at the common table and in the common workshop and was glad to be there, and none of all His human experience was neutral or without significance. And even when in later days He was hunted and homeless, He had the serenity of one who found life a 'a sweet thing'.

HE ACCEPTED THE SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS IN WHICH HE FOUND HIMSELF AND REVEALED GOD'S MEANING IN THEM

He had reason for doing otherwise, if ever anyone had. Of all who had dealings with Him, not one was worthy to stoop and tie His shoelace, but He never told them so. The intellectual and moral distances between Him and other men were infinite, yet He could put Himself at any man's side. In every human relationship, sooner or later He was let down. His mother, His brothers, His friends, His apostles, His disciples, His judges, the people He befriended—all in turn failed Him at one point or another, but He did not repudiate any of these relationships. However wronged by men, He never made God a refuge from men. He prayed for His enemies, not like the Psalmist, against them. And all this not grudgingly or of necessity, or because it was the part assigned to Him, but because it was more blessed to share even shame with the family than to seek peace outside it.

This overcoming evil by good was the Father's way, it was our Lord's way, and it is, He insisted, to be ours. It is the way of peace for those who follow it, and it is the way to the redemption of all social relationships.

Even Christian people scarcely realize how emphatically He taught that our relations with one another are inextricably involved with our relations toward God, so that we cannot have mercy from God and refuse mercy to our brother. If we turn our back upon our fellows we turn our back upon God. In His picture of the final judgement, when the truth of things is laid bare, all turns on one thing—compassion, and the damning sin is to be in a world of need and not to see it.

His blessedness was not, and ours is not, to be found in any private comforts or congenialities, or in escape from the family enlargement, but in laying ourselves open to the world's need and giving ourselves in love and service, remembering that we are dealing with the children of God. All this rests on the faith that there is something essentially lovable in all men. Our part is to honour all men, especially those who do not honour themselves or us, and to raise all common relationships to their highest meaning, even when that meaning is ignored by those with whom we have to do.

This is high doctrine, and it may be so stated as only to drive sincere minds to despair. For the way of Christ seems to make immense demands on very small people. There is so much it would seem that we must understand, and so much that we must resolve, that most of us would feel that we cannot wind ourselves up to that pitch. That, of course, is not the way. The way of Christ is not possible without Christ. If He who undertook to be the Saviour of the world cannot take us by the hand where we are, and, by His own fellowship with us, evoke from us the love of what should be loved, we are forlorn. But then, this is what He does.

2. THE GOSPEL
[From The Agenda (December 1922)]

SEVEN of us round the fire in a certain house the other day were talking of the things that matter: three of us were preachers, local or itinerant. One of the three complained that though the hearers will often thank a preacher for his sermon, none of them will ever help him practically to see where he misses and where he hits. Then we had our answer. 'When I was a boy', said one, 'I used to hear the preachers saying, "Come to Jesus", I used to wonder what it meant, and always waited for them to explain, but they never did. And it is still the same. Preachers go on inviting people to come to Christ, and they seem to think that everyone knows what it means, only they never explain. But last Sunday we had it.' He went on to tell us of a minister (yes, and a Tutor of a Theological Institution at that), who preached from 'Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest', and set himself to make plain in the simplest and directest language what it meant to come to Christ. The congregation sat as still as a stone, drinking it in. 'We ought to get more of that', my friend said. And we ought. It is the beginning and the end of the preacher's business.

'I rode into N—, and the next morning I offered Christ to a large company.' That entry of Wesley's is the authentic word. The evangelist's task is finished in that moment when all his persuasions, his arguments, his appeals, his threats, his theology, and he himself, are all forgotten and there are only two persons left face to face—the Saviour doing again a Saviour's work, and a human creature, swept by the cleansing tide, saying in wonder, 'Jesus saves me now'.

To offer Christ and the whole Christ, might indeed seem an impossible task for such folk as we are. With our inexpressive voices, our lack-lustre eyes, our opaque countenances, our ungainly gestures, our superfluous and distracting hands, to say nothing of deeper disabilities in these mishandled personalities of ours—how should we preach him worthily? Yet He does shine through, even through all these. Of Him at least we can make our boast. We know in whom we have believed.

For when we offer Christ, we do not offer an unknown God. Our minds can have no dealings with an unknown God. We cannot draw near to a God who is a mere list of attributes. We cannot worship vastness, or lastingness, or Omnipotence, or Omniscience. We cannot know God unless He has chosen to make Himself known. But if He is to make Himself known, He must speak in our language, just as we ourselves, if we would explain anything to children, must speak in their language and begin where they are. So far as we know, the Incarnation was the only language that was both intelligible to us, and adequate to show forth God. In other words, it is only Jesus who could show us what God is like. Now the wonderful thing is that Jesus is simply the most knowable Person in the world. When we consider how short and fragmentary the Gospels are, it is astonishing how much they tell us and how sure we can be about Him. We can trace out the lineaments of His character, and each new feature seems to need a chapter and each chapter must end in wonder. We watch His incomparable efficiency, His disconcerting speed, His mysterious leisure, His moral passion, His healing pity, His appealing humour, His two-edged sword, His prodigal friendship, His piercing loneliness, and we might have been confounded by One in whom dwelt such opposite qualities. But it is not so. There is in this Man of Sorrows, Man of Joys, this Bridegroom on the Cross, such a wholeness and simplicity that we are not put to confusion or bewildered. Inexhaustible as He is, He is strangely understandable. Tell the truth about Jesus and the little children will draw near. It is impossible to look long at Jesus and not draw near. He is, I say, the most knowable Person in the world. If God is like Jesus, we are sure of at least two or three things, and I don't think I need any more.

First, we know that if God is like Jesus, He cannot be far away. He said to His disciples at the end, 'Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the ages', but our confidence in this matter does not depend on a single word. If the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection, do not tell of One who will never leave us nor forsake us, they do not mean anything. Every day of the Lord's life said the same thing. Every disciple knew that if it depended on Jesus, He would never desert them, in this world or another. If Christ's coming reveals anything at all, it tells us that God has made Himself accessible to every one of us, and that if we feel after Him we shall find Him.

Second, since God is like Jesus, we know that if we go to Him, He will not repulse us, nor ignore us, nor despise us. It is written: 'Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out.' But here again we do not build only on a word. Jesus, as we see Him in the Gospels, was incapable of refusing anyone who came to Him. If even Judas had waited a little longer and made His way to the Risen Christ, he might have been pardoned and changed and reinstated. Jesus did not, because He could not, cast anyone out who really came for help.

Third, if we come, we are sure that He will know what to do with us. There is a cloud of witnesses to tell us this, but the Gospels tell it first. He saw more deeply and penetratingly than any other, the evil in men's hearts. He declined all superficial remedies and refused to cure mere symptoms. Being a physician, He went to those who most were sick and He undertook, not to make them better, but to make them well. He never behaves as though He did not know what to do with men. He could not and would not force them to come to Him, but if they came He knew what to do. Zacchaeus in the tree-top, the woman by the well, publicans and sinners and disreputable people, people with fine temptations and with gross passions, rich young men and responsible old men—He knew what to do with them all, and if they trusted themselves to Him, He did not fail. Nothing is more beautiful in the story of St Paul's conversion than the royal way in which our Lord quietly took charge of that strong nature, and, without apology, assigned him both work and suffering.

We do not understand ourselves and we do not understand one another, but here is One who does understand us, and yet is not afraid to take us on as we are, to commit us to holiness and to admit us into His fellowship and His family. In His dealings with us He will do nothing by halves. No one is half-forgiven with Him. He will have nothing to do with tentative reconciliations. He does not experiment with us. He will have no slaves and He pays no wages. Whosoever comes in, comes in as a child, and God's word is:'All that is mine is thine'—whether it be Horatio Bottomley, Lloyd George, the Archbishop of Canterbury, or me.

1. The Authentic Christian
[From The Agenda (March 1938 and December 1939)]

IT IS NOT too much to say that of all religions in the world the Christian religion is the most personal and the least private. A Christian is a person energized in secret for life in the open world. Nothing that comes to him is to end with him. His very peace, which is so personal a thing that his environment can neither give it nor take it away, is yet part of his equipment to serve his generation according to the Will of God; and it is not open to disciples of Jesus to deny that creeds, like trees, are known by their fruits.

We have learned already that it takes two to make a Christian, and one of the two is always Jesus Christ. But if Jesus Christ and a human personality can thus interpenetrate so that the man is born into a new order of being, the result ought to be a very distinct type of personality—something far removed from a puny and pious life.

But, in point of fact, does it prove to be so? Is there not a vast disproportion between the resources available and the actual product? Being in contact with the great Redeemer, we ought to mount up with wings like eagles; why are we like tame ducks quoddling about our duck pond? Are not the distinctively Christian features so meagrely reproduced that the characteristic type scarcely emerges so as to obtain recognition? Has the Christian way been so actualized that a young Christian will know at the beginning what is expected of him and what manner of person he ought to be?

The authentic Christian is an energized personality. By his union with Christ he knows the secret of inward replenishment, and his career becomes a miracle of vitality. Once set right with God, his relations with others are quickened and transformed beyond belief; he is a new man in a new world. Having and holding peace with God, staleness and monotony fall away. You can see, if you look, that everything has become fresh. Superficially, Christian men and women may be strenuous or they may be quiescent; but being in contact with the Life, they are highly charged units among their fellows; and their presence makes all the difference in every human situation. They have access to unlimited resources, and it is their frequent privilege in the moment of personal defeat to score a point for the kingdom. On the worldy plane the authentic Christian is often an insignificant figure, and the contrast with his conscious well-being, energy, and influence gives him an inconceivable zest in life.

Now, if anyone say, 'This is the ideal Christian, but you can't expect us to be ideal', I will beg of him to beware of that disabling phrase. When I say that tigers should be swift and silent in their movement, and strong of jaw, my neighbour intervenes to say: 'Ah, now! you are describing the ideal tiger.' I answer, No, I am simply describing tigers. There may be lame tigers and toothless tigers, but they do not remain tigers for long. So we must make up our minds whether we are to accept the Christian in the New Testament dimensions, or assume in advance that in some unhappy way the divine resources miscarry and only console where they cannot renew.

The influence of Christ's man is largely unconscious and incalculable, but his reaction upon his environment is also most deliberate, and to a large extent it can be predicted. If we know the main conditions of his time, whether in the Roman Empire, or among uncivilized people, or in the complexity of modern England, we can forecast with some accuracy the manner of life which he will evolve to meet the situation. Some would say that a Christian can be recognized at sight; it would be true if Christ had His way with us at the first asking. We must beware of rash affirmations, for many of us have fearfully opaque and inexpressive countenances, and it would not be fair to rail at us on that account. But if you have been forgiven, if you have just heard the voice that cries in the heart, 'Abba, Father', if you have the secret assurance that all things are yours, could you look as though nothing had happened? If the son is drawing his allowances regularly, would he wear that shabby look?

But there are surer marks of a Christian. The Christian must do a great many things that others do, but he does them with a difference. When a man is in Christ all the meanings deepen and all the values rise. There is a new significance in his ordinary relationships. Do what you will with him, you can hardly put him into a situation where he cannot find discipline for an immortal life, room to serve his fellow and to please God. And doing this, he has to do with nothing that is common or unclean. Jesus Christ attended weddings, sat at feasts, plucked flowers, watched birds, broke bread, handled towel and water, worked, rested, talked, and He made all these things memorable, significant, sacramental, simply by raising every occasion to its highest meaning. Here is a great part of our task, to examine this common life which to so many is stale, trivial, and futile, and learn how to vitalize it and so to justify it.

The authentic Christian, however, has some things to do that others do not, and it is more than time that we understood what they are. There are divergencies from conventional conduct. There is a habit of being alone. There is a dependence on fellowship. There is a care in his use of time. There is a peculiar attitude toward money and the business of money-getting. He will not retaliate, will not bear grudges, will not assert himself. He thinks himself debtor to all the world, and is anxious to pay. He is ashamed of the city slum as though he had property there, and is anxious about China as though he had boys there. All sorts of causes and all sorts of people eat up his time and his strength and his substance, yet the blithe creature cannot understand that he is being ill-used and will not be betrayed into suburban groanings about his 'many claims'.

2. THE CHRISTIAN BY DEGREES
[From the Methodist Recorder (1927), 'Lucid Intervals'.]

SOME YEARS ago I wrote an article under the heading of 'The Gradual Christian'. But I am moved to write again about him because, after the lapse of years, there are now more of him and he has become more gradual than before. He is indeed the principal output of all the Churches, and we are all adjusting our message and our methods to the reproducing of him.

In Methodism you could almost date the change. It began in a reaction against a certain type of conversion too rigidly imposed or expected. A conversion was hardly regarded as authentic unless it was sudden, and therefore dramatic, preceded by a period of misery called conviction, accompanied by joyful emotion, and witnessed by open confession. This was the standard pattern. Varieties, if permitted, were not encouraged, for they seemed less authentic, and were certainly less interesting. How many of us listened with envy to the recital of those splendid and satisfying conversions! We who had never had the courage to assault a single policeman, how tame we seemed in the Lovefeast beside the converted prize-fighter and his well-beaten wife! Yes, and alas; how cold!

Still, the facts of a widening Church life were not to be denied. Room must be found for the stay-at-homes and other inferior specimens, and theories must be adjusted accordingly. So we have made our adjustments. The standard pattern is now very different, though the older variety is still permitted, and indeed welcomed. The standard pattern now is the gradual Christian. He was brought up in a Christian home, and 'cannot remember the time when he did not love Christ'. One day, perhaps during the holding of a Mission, he 'decided' for Christ. He was put in a junior class; later he taught in the Sunday-school, or sang in the choir. Sometimes he takes Communion; he is cheerful at home and thoughtful for his mother. Can anyone doubt that he is safely gathered in? No one, except perhaps himself. Yet no one is satisfied. If Christians ought to have a contagious quality, as though possessing a life-secret and having an impulse to communicate it, then the kind of Christian I have been describing hardly seems to function. It is agreed that for a time he must be nursed—and we have our spiritual Allen & Hanburys and our system of progressive feeding. He needs shepherding—and the shepherds are working overtime. He must have work—and we invent something for him to do, always hoping for the moment when he will start off on his own God-supplied power, and leave his instructors gloriously behind. But, to use the language of the motoring world, we have been cranking a long time and the engine does not fire. Yes, there are exceptions, thank God, and many of them; but they are exceptions. The simple truth is that just now the Christian Church is not strong enough for its task, and this brings us back in the end to the question of the quality of the individual Christian, and the degree to which he is 'charged' with heavenly power. Why are we so weak? Must every revival fade with the years? Must second-generation Christians always be a little tamer than the first? Is it decreed that unless we have been passionate sinners we can only be tepid saints?

The goodness of those who have always been good ought, one would think, to be better than the goodness of those who have once been bad. But it isn't always so. One reason may be that what we call goodness in the always good is rather a negative thing, and very much second-hand. Dora, daughter of the Manse, surrenders to her environment and becomes a Missionary collector. Harriet, daughter of the slums, surrenders to her environment and takes to drink. Let Dora thank God for her environment, but she need not regard her inertia and her collecting-card as a great moral achievement. This, however, does not carry us very far. Even if we acknowledge that a great deal of good behaviour may have very little moral quality in it, this is not a sufficient explanation why many of us, knee-deep in privilege as we are, have very little spiritual voltage and make feeble and unconvincing witnesses.

The earlier sort of Methodist began his Christian life in a great surprise. Wonder asked, 'And can it be?' It was almost too good to be true, and quite too good not to be true. It excited him. He wanted to know about it, and he wanted to talk about it. The official and pedestrian religion of the time could make nothing of this strange phenomenon. Every Bishop of the period thought it his duty to warn his flock against the 'enthusiasm' of the Methodists, meaning by that, what would now be called their fanaticism. But in general, their only fanaticism was that they were immensely interested in the way God was handling them. It was this which created Class-meetings, turned inarticulate rustics into preachers, and made women open their mouths in unaccustomed testimony and prayer. There must have been some powerful ferment at work to send Dinah Morris preaching in the open air. It is wonder that makes evangelists.

And now! No doubt we are better informed than our fathers and have better taste. But we are most of us Christians of the second or third generation, and religion did not come to us in a great burst of surpise. We doubt sometimes whether it was an advantage that we knew so much of it at second-hand before we ever proved it ourselves. We assented to everything before we believed anything, and, almost unaware, professed more than we possessed. We nearly sang the meaning out of our hymns before we knew there was any meaning in them, and we were told so often in the sanctuary that God was present—when He might just as well have been absent, for any difference it made—that the announcement kindles no answering emotion now. Have we been cheated, we ask, of the joy of discovery and the power that comes of it? Was the advantage of a great beginning denied to us? We could dispense with its being dramatic if only it were big enough to be authentic.

There is more than one answer to questions like these. I am concerned just now with one thing only. We are not wrong when we mend our nets, and perfect our machinery for 'retaining our young people' (though I wish we could drop that revealing phrase, which always raises the suspicion that we are thinking more of our institution than of the human beings themselves. And I wish also that people would examine the frame of mind which makes them talk of 'capturing' young people. Most young people that I know of, when they learn that you are out to capture them, are quite prepared to give you a run for your money.) We are not wrong, I say, when we mend bad methods and strive to do our work more and more efficiently. Neither are we wrong in recognizing that God's coming to the soul that He has made is not an unnatural thing, and that His ways are as manifold as they are gracious. But we are wrong if we attempt to eliminate from any life those moments of moral crisis and spiritual illumination without which the soul can hardly come to know either itself or God. We are still more deeply at fault if we lead anyone to evade or postpone that great personal encounter, dreaded and longed for, with the infinite God, and put in its place impersonal processes and unconscious influences which circumvent the sentries of the will, and seem to take what only the conscious mind can give. There is a way of stealing past the human will, sacred music being played the while, until, when the sleep is over, the convert finds himself 'roped in' with silken cords. At that juncture we may come forward with proofs to show that he is roped in in the very best place—namely the Church—and endeavour to persuade him to stay where he is. He may consent, partly from inertia. When you have done all this, you have made a capture and you have a Church Member—but not a Christian. The Church has apprehended him, but not Christ.

By all means let us make the gradations of Christian experience as natural, as easy, as gentle, as the facts of the interior life admit—but not more so. I heard some time ago of a Church which claimed that they had so perfected their system that they 'retained' ninety-five per cent of their young people. The boast stirs no enthusiasm in me and I thank God it cannot be true. I can see that crowded escalator, with its motionless figures standing mute, as they are painlessly elevated in one smooth, unstepped glide to the blessed platform of Church membership; but I can see also their blank faces as they ask helplessly of one another at the top, What are we to do now? It was not our Lord's way to soften down the moral challenge of His coming, or hypnotize men out of their freewill. To a certain young man whom he loved, Jesus said: 'Go and sell all you have and come and follow Me.' It is recorded that the young man turned away in sadness, having great possessions. The Evangelist has omitted to record that an official of the Waverley Church Membership Society followed him up. He told him that he could pay £5 down and the rest in monthly instalments. 'Besides,' he added, 'He will probably give it you all back.'

3. THE GRADUAL CHRISTAIN
[From the Methodist Recorder (1927), 'Lucid Intervals'.]

I PROPOSE to return this week to the gradual Christian, and it is the more easy to do this because, being a gradual person, he is just where we left him six weeks ago.

Let us begin with a rather large-size fact. It is beyond question that Methodism today is less contagious than it once was and our message is less communicable. In the early days every third Methodist was a propagandist. He had made a discovery of surprising significance which concerned all sorts and conditions of men. So, though he was by habit a rather inarticulate person, and furnished with a meagre vocabulary, he forced himself into speech and struggled to make the secret known.

If one looks for an analogy in our own day, it might be found perhaps in the eager witness of Christian Scientists. I find their creed inadequate, and in many respects irrational, and it is disconcerting to find that a man after thirty years of Methodism can be persuaded that the Scriptures are a cryptogram to which Mrs Eddy supplies the 'key'. But this only makes it the more remarkable that Christian Science can find so many voluntary missionaries. Believing that they have a cure for bronchitis and back-biting, for broken legs and bad tempers, and seeing a great many diseased and unhappy people about them, they must offer their remedy—and they do.

It was once like this with Methodism. It was not safe for the Squire to take a Methodist kitchenmaid into his establishment, for she brought the contagion of her Methodist experience with her and might infect the whole household. It is not quite like this now. We can organize a campaign or hold a simultaneous mission. We can attack in battalions, but O for those single spies who used to penetrate the ranks of the enemy, and unsettle their allegiance to the god of this world, telling them of a better King and another country!

Here and there we still have our dramatic conversions, when some notorious sinner is brought to God and the splendour of the contrast between what he was and what he is is too plain to be denied. But a Church cannot live on the testimony of its converted blackguards. For one thing, there are not enough blackguards, thank God; and, after all, the advantages of a lurid past can easily be overrated. We were bound to make a place in our system for those who were not dramatically turned from gross darkness into glorious light. All have not wasted their substance in riotous living. All have not fought red-handed against God. Some have been about the Father's house all their days; they know its speech and have many interests there. How can we ask them when they came in? Were they ever out? How can we expect them to give an account of their conversion or to 'remember the time?'

There are, I believe, some few people, born into a Christian home, and gifted with a happy disposition, who have never turned away from their first childlike apprehensions of a personal God, never unsaid their earliest vows, who as their powers developed and their life broadened out, made an ever-increasing response, kept their life whole and the fellowship unbroken, and retained when they came to years the wonder of a child with the depth of a man. There is nothing on earth more beautiful, but the instances are rare. I think I have known two or three in the course of a life-time who might perhaps answer to such a description—a slender basis for a general psychology.

The instances, I say, are rare, and I see no reason to think they were intended to be common. Life, as we know it, is not the steady ascent of an even gradient. It is a much more tempestuous affair. It tumbles upon us in sudden increases and unmanageable quantities. Its interests are sometimes so intoxicating, or its tasks so exacting, that for the time our religion, such as it is, is pushed down into the region of the unconscious. Even in morals, it is not good to live under a continual sense of duty; and in the things of the spirit, it is of God's kindness that the spiritual challenge has its intervals of silence, so that it may come again in a new context and greater power. It is true that God never leaves us, but He does at times stand away

He leaves us to deal with life, and with our own natures, so that we may know our need of Him when He comes again. So then if people have no memory of any crisis, it may possibly be because they never needed it; but it may be because they evaded it—and there has been a great deal to encourage the evasion.

The very riches of our spiritual inheritance become our temptation. Beauty is so beautiful; goodness, even without God, is so good; truth is so commanding, that if we are among the privileged, we can be content for a while with these, hoping that some day they may coalesce, come alive, and become God. Yet all the time we may be making of these divine realities a defence against the far more awful and far more blessed experience of personal dealings with a personal God—a God whom we can hurt. If we are young and strong and free, and have inherited a generous code, and our moral defences have never been tested by the sudden assault of passion or the slow siege of self-interest, we may go on with credit for a long time and no one will challenge us, unless we challenge ourselves. But what if all the time we are evading Him?

We were not wrong in saying that some conversions might be more gradual than others, but we were wrong if we thought they could be arranged to take place unconsciously or automatically. In making conversion less dramatic, we ought not to have made it less divine; in seeing it as more of a process, it should not have been less of a miracle. And especially we ought not to have denied to our young people the splendour of a great beginning and the wonder of a life made wonderfully new, by a whole-hearted acceptance of Christ. We never intended to substitute acquiescence in a Christian environment for the personal experience of the power of God, but this is what it has come to, with thousands of Church-going people today. And it is a poor exchange, if, instead of the ladder let down from heaven, whose foot was on the earth and its top in the skies, you have only an escalator, with its foot in the Sunday-school and its top in Church membership.

How strange it seems to read the story of Wesley again. There he is, a cultured, conscientious Christian gentleman in Holy Orders, taking his religion far more seriously than most of us do, resolute in self-denial, punctual in all observances, praying and studying his Bible, doing all the good he could, and avoiding the evil—all this, year after year in a long struggle for ten years, and no peace for his own heart and little profit to anyone else. Yet he had everything but the one thing. Then the room in Aldersgate Street and that face-to-face encounter with his Saviour. And presently that masterful little man climbed on his horse, to set out on the conquest of England, with one only resource—the assurance that had been given him that Christ had taken away his sins. Soon that spark of grace set ten thousand hearts on fire. Yes! that is the contagious thing, and without it we are nothing at all. Search the minds of earnest people today and one finds underneath all their restlessness and disquiet the question of a Personal God. Does God desire to be known? Can he be found? How can you turn second-hand associations with religion into first-hand experience of God? Is this the accepted time? and are we not needing again, as two centuries ago, a body of living testimony to break down the barriers of unbelief, and set the prisoners free?

4. CHRIST AND THE CHRISTIAN
[From The Adgenda (April 1922)]

The Dayspring from on high hath visited us
To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
And to guide our feet into the way of peace.

IT HAS been a disappointment to many minds that the New Testament has less to say about the building of the Church or the transformation of the social order than the importance of these subjects seemed to demand. But the New Testament itself contains the cure for this disappointment. The apostles were not thinking of building the Church, partly because for them the Church already existed. In their earlier thoughts Israel was the Church founded of old by God and miraculously preserved by Him through the ages. Now their minds were full of Christ, and it was as they delivered their message about Him, and that message won its response, that they found a different kind of community rising round them strangely united by the bond of a new and profound experience. They did indeed give the world a new pattern for the social structure, but they did it unawares, and it was drawing toward the evening of their day before their own handiwork gave them the vision of the Catholic Church. They had builded better than they knew, and they builded all the better because they did not know. One task was assigned to them, and it was sufficient. They had a message to deliver and an experience to share.

What was this experience? In a word, it was the experience of personal relations with God in Christ—personal relations made as God would have them to be. God, they said, is here, and He is not as we thought He was, and nothing is as we thought it was now that God is here. In Christ, God had come out of the inaccessible distances which tire and baffle the seeking mind, and now He was indescribably near. Their language labours and breaks down in the effort to tell how this ineffable Companionship continually takes the soul by surprise, and asserts itself as the commanding reality of their lives. Every preposition which can suggest relations between persons is used to describe the relations between Christ and the believer, and in the end every preposition is overworked, breathless, and strained at the joints. This strange shining in their hearts, this experience of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ was so wonderful that it seemed to those who had it that God had said a second time, and in a greater way: 'Let there be light.'

Two things may be noted in respect to this experience. It was not magical, nor even mystical, if by that is meant an experience which stuns the reason and carries the victim still unconscious into the asylum of the Church. It was a supernatural experience, and they never dreamed that it could be reproduced by explanations: but neither did they think it would be reproduced without its being explained and told afresh to each new hearer. They were not reduced to saying only that 'He was known of them in the breaking of the bread'. They were able also 'to rehearse the things which happened by the way', the things which carried the mind along up to the point at which by the will of God the whole revelation pieced itself together, and the Presence was there. The confidence with which those early evangelists went out to deliver their message, and the argumentative cast of their advocacy, are evidence that in the new experience that had come to them no violence had been done to their minds; on the contrary, their minds had been satisfied, quickened, and exalted, and were thus made ready from the first to begin the interpretation of their new experience.

Next, if we are to call the experience mystical, we should remember that it was so just as the experience of personal relations at their best is always mystical. We need not wonder at the labour of the New Testament speech when we remember that the expression of a pure and passionate affection is the most difficult achievement of language. It is in this region we find the nearest analogy to the language of the Church about Christ. You may take some of the noblest of Shakespeare's sonnets, and, with scarcely the change of a word, offer them to simple Christians; they will accept them unsuspectingly as a worthy expression of what they feel about Christ and find in Christ, and begin to say on their knees to their Lord the words which the poet meant for an earthlier ear. On the other hand, a glance at the hymn-book of the Christian Church will remind us how through the ages Christ has attracted to Himself all the noblest part of the ancient language of love.

Just such things as these have been said of the love of one human being for another since human nature knew itself—and said in utter sincerity. Yet it is such language as this which tells us the inmost secret of the Christian's experience of Christ. It tells us how great a reply God made to the faith which His own gift invited and evoked. The Saviour of the world had broken into their consciousness and, out-shining every other reality, took the command of their lives, as of right. They loved Christ because He was there to love, and, so they almost seem to say, because they couldn't help it. It was He who began it.

With this experience, then, they confronted the world, and presently discovered that they were equipped for every moral and spiritual problem it could bring them; with this experience—and with nothing else. Silver and gold, the Church could say, have we none, but what we have we give. Of silver and gold and their equivalents, the first Christians, indeed, had none. In intellectual or moral resources the early Church was not provisioned for even a three-months' voyage. But it had its experience of the Presence, and it could communicate it, and quite soon they knew that they needed nothing else.

Consider, first, how they encountered the social cleavages of their day. Society as they knew it was divided into Jew and Gentile, male and female, bond and free—in each case a vast section of the community flung into a subhuman category and denied the rights of human beings. But presently Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and freemen, had passed into a common experience of Christ; they had, as they said, 'received the Spirit', and when they looked at one another again, the badges alike of privilege and dishonour had fallen to the ground. They did not dare now to call that humanity common or unclean which God had cleansed by the blood of His Son and authenticated by the experience of His Spirit.

Look next at the moral problems with which the Church had then to deal. The moral distances within the Church itself were appalling. There were men like Paul, who according to outward standards might have been certified 'blameless'. There were others for whom even elementary decency might seem an impossible achievement. Their sins were not 'nice' sins like yours and mine, but sins with names, and nasty names, the shameful works of the flesh. There is a list of them in the letter to the Galatians—every one of them, by the way, an anti-social sin; and remembering how we quail when we are asked what we can do for any man in the grip of the baser passions of the flesh, we ask what St Paul had to set against these strong sins. We see no quailing in him. 'Walk by the Spirit,' he says, 'attend to the Presence, hold to the Companion, and then you will not indulge the lusts of the flesh' —and he says this knowing that the tempted men will understand what he means. To a man whose blood is roaring in his veins, discarded lusts having returned upon him again, he offers no prudential restraints—'Don't you know,' he says, 'that the Spirit of God dwells within you?' The point of that appeal is that the man does know, that it is an experience and not a phrase to him; and at this word he recalls it and says: 'God be merciful to me a sinner: I had forgotten it.'

Turn from the vices they were to put off to the graces and virtues which they were to put on. In the same chapter of the Galatian letter there is a list of the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, unselfishness, self-control—social virtues every one of them. But observe, these are the fruits of the Spirit—that is, they rise out of the reality of Christ's presence in their consciousness, their knowledge and feeling that Christ was actually and utterly with them in the whole spiritual adventure to which they were called.

One of those fruits of the Spirit is joy, and it is worth detaching that one for a moment if only to observe what an incomparable engine for moral progress it is. The New Testament writers take it for granted that their readers know what the Christian joy is. When St Paul says that to gain Christ makes all other gains seem like the scourings of the streets, he speaks the truth vehemently after his own fashion, but he is not talking a language foreign to those to whom he writes. No man could be in that relation to Christ, and have that consciousness of Christ which is consistently presupposed as the normal experience of the Christian, without having a profound sense of well-being, an inner content and confidence as he faced the world with God on his side, able to look quietly at life and death and feel himself in some sense above them both. This quiet annexation of the whole contentment of the other life, this confidence that nothing in time or in eternity could separate them from the grasp in which they were held, with the drastic readjustment of all earthly values which it involved, is one of the most wonderful of all the results of Christ's ascertained presence among men. Hence these were people upon whom you could make demands, and even the uttermost demand. You could talk to them about dying, without modulating into the minor key. When they were suffering they accepted congratulations where we should have offered condolences, for the coward heart in them had been transformed. The preacher today is often aware that he is addressing appeals for new effort to people who are morally exhausted. St Paul speaks as though he were addressing people who had boundless moral and spiritual reserves. It will not do to say that he completely mistook his audience. Neither may we assume that they started with a larger moral capital than we, or that they were tougher of fibre. The explanation is that it is St Paul's constant presupposition that the Christians he addresses know what is to be
'in Christ'.

Finally this experience of personal relations with Christ brought with it the conviction that it was all God's doing, and that it was free to all who would submit to receive it. That was how the experience became the Message. Before their eyes, God had done something glorious, awful, and decisive; the scale of it demanded that is should have universal significance, and the fruits of it, felt first in a new intercourse with God in their own hearts, were now freely offered to all men. The whole thing, said St Paul, is of God, who has first reconciled us to Himself, and then given us the message of reconciliation.

We do not imagine, of course, that St Paul's experience was an average sample. The Christian's experience of Christ does no violence to his freedom, and therefore there is no mechanical way of guaranteeing it up to standard. It may, like other experiences, be indefinitely impoverished by neglect or infidelity until it is barely recognizable. It may cease to be preached, and therefore cannot be received; or it may be inadequately preached and exemplified, and therefore be inadequately apprehended. In the churches with which St Paul had to do there were many gross inconsistencies, and sometimes frightful moral lapses. This only makes it the more remarkable that even with these unworthy Christians St Paul continues to assume, as long as the assumption remains possible, that they knew the essential experience of personal relations with Christ; he has no other hope of restoring them than to recall them to Him whom they already knew. And wherever he encountered those who had never shared this experience, he conceived that he had no other task than to offer it to them and persuade them to receive it.

This conviction that it was God's doing, and that it was for all men, was indeed a part of the content of the experience itself. Christ reached their nature at a depth at which the distinctions of race, of sex, of intellectual and even moral attainment became irrelevant. He answered to needs as universal as hunger and hirst. His coming was so free and gracious and divine that a man could as little think that he had achieved it or that it was his private possession, as he could imagine that he had made the sun rise, or that when it was risen it rose only for him. There are, of course, diversities even in spiritual gifts, so that these might be given while those were witheld. But to know Christ for oneself—this was life from the dead. This was what constituted a man a Christian, and this alone made him sufficient for His calling. It belonged to God's character as they now saw it, to bring His sons to this knowledge of their relation to Him. Because we are sons, says St Paul, God finds means to let us know, for we are not really sons until we know that we are. The reciprocal recognition is an essential part of the relationship. And when they received, not the spirit that makes a fearful slave, but the spirit that makes a loving son, and the heart cried out, My Father, My Father—they knew that they had arrived where God would have all His children to be, and that nothing was given to them which was not offered to all the human race, however forlorn and wandered it might be. Their nature responded so deeply and harmoniously to this divine intimacy, that they knew without arguing about it how the wounds of all the world were ordained to be healed.

Such was the Christian experience of Christ as we recover it from the pages of the New Testament. If it was real and true, our difference of date is irrelevant. Jesus Christ was not at all what they imagined Him to be, if He is not the same today. It follows that we virtually deny such an experience when we only acknowledge it and leave it behind. We dishonour it if we try to eke it out with something else, and we lose it if we reduce it to impersonal terms. Because it is a real experience of the Divine Redeemer, it has right and it has might to rule the world.

5. THE CHRISTIAN'S RESOURCES IN GOD
[From Vision of the Kingdom (Glasgow Missionary Congress, 1922)]

THE CHRISTIAN religion is all on the scale of the infinite, and it resists all attempts to reduce it to manageable dimensions. We must receive it as little children, but when we have received it, we find we are committed to a loyalty which knows no reservations, and to a service for which we are ludicrously inadequate.

We believe we are building the walls of a kingdom that will never end and is to embrace the whole human family. There are Christian men of our own company here, ordinary people who take their meals and can be shaken hands with, who think in wider horizons, dream of greater conquests, and spend their lives planning a vaster strategy than Caesar or Alexander ever knew. Are they sane? And we ourselves! Are we the people to reunite the broken human family? Have we the secret to heal its ancient enmities, to exorcise its fiercest passions, and fulfil its most sacred faiths? Looking at ourselves and then at the scale of the enterprise, is not the disproportion grotesque? Canst thou draw out leviathan with a bent pin?

We must remember, first, that God has resources that are not committed to our hands. The Christian Church is God's messenger but not His only one. There is no history from which He is absent. When we have done all, we are only part of a greater whole, and many men are serving the will of God who intend nothing of the sort. Those who in Christ's name went out declaring the solidarity of mankind and proclaiming that in Christ there was neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, neither bond nor free, had no idea by what various processes those ancient disabilities were to be removed—by the merchant's enterprise, by the explorer's courage, by the ambitions of kings and the needs of common men, by hunger for knowledge and thirst for adventure. All the Church's missionary work looked to a situation out of men's sight, but it was the situation in which we stand today.

Our fathers proclaimed that all mankind was one, but they proclaimed it in faith, for the facts all looked the other way. Now, every thinking person can see that they were right. We know that we are so much members of one another that we must learn how to live together or we shall perish together. The old cleavages are not only displeasing to God; they are the problems of statesmen, for they are now seen to be ruinous to society and to civilization. As we look back upon the past, as Christian people, it is only our prudences and parochialism of which we feel ashamed; only our most daring ventures that stand justified. We have been disillusioned; many prophecies of steady and cautious progress look foolish enough now. We only know that if we keep the way of faith, we shall find that we come where all the roads meet, and that there are chariots and horsemen, not of our raising, sent to our aid, and the kingdoms of this world shall become the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ.

We must not imagine that the present missionary effort represents anything like the limit of what is possible. It represents pretty adequately the level of conviction within the Church. The Missionary income of most Churches today, regarded merely as a piece of organization, is no small achievement. We may do better still. But even if we continue to collect the maximum of money with the minimum of motive, we are not much furthered in our real task. On the other hand, raise the moral temperature of the Church by two degrees, and it would change all your balance sheets and embarrass all your candidates' committees with unexpected men. Even now, it is only the world view that will hold the best of our young people. That is why they are so tepid about our denominationalisms and so disrespectful about some of our sermons. The years of war have not left us where we were. Some have heard

But we must go deeper. The Christian Church is entrusted with an equipment which is peculiarly its own, and it is vital that we should know what it is. We have the truth that makes men free; and this truth is Jesus.

If God is revealed in Jesus Christ, then God is knowable, and fellowship with Him is possible. It is a striking thing that in this day when so much is doubtful, the whole story of that sinless life lived beneath those Syrian skies is given back to us as to no generation since the time of the Apostles. And the result is that to many of us, Jesus is simply the most knowable person in the world. At one moment we say, 'How like He is to ourselves', and at another, 'How unlike', but always the wholeness and simplicity of that life bring Him near and make Him knowable. If we try to describe Him we have to relate a series of contrasted and opposite qualities, yet there are no contradictions in Himself. We wonder to see the speed at which He moved, the mass of work He left behind Him every day, His incomparable efficiency, and His masterly handling of every situation; but we wonder yet more when we feel the depth of His tranquillity, the contagious peace which made His presence a shelter for the wounded and the shamed. We see how inexorable and uncompromising He was, and yet how generous; how vast His plan, how individual His care. The flame of His moral passion is
just as undeniable as His tolerance and understanding sympathy with all our human frailty. These are but words, and poor ones, and they do not really convey what happens to us again and again, when some word of Jesus truly heard, or some gesture truly seen, surprises us into submission and wondering trust. All the meanings of His life deepen and converge toward His Cross, where He betrothed Himself for ever to all the human race, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in an alliance that death shall never part. But even there, from that deep where all our thoughts are drowned, He does not confound or bewilder us; He draws near to us and speaks to our condition. If God is not like Jesus Christ—to many of us He is incredible. If He is like Jesus Christ, He is irresistible. This Jesus is the one 'whose glory fills the skies'—

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

When we look at Him, it is possible to draw near; when we look long, it is hard not to draw near. In the end you cannot see such a one as Jesus and not speak to Him. Jesus Christ Himself is the Gospel, and the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation. There are such things as saving truths; East or West, they are saving truths. It is a saving truth that there is a Love that will not let us go. It is a saving truth that God thinks us worth while, worth following, worth winning, worth dying for, infinitely worth while. It is a saving truth, in whatsoever language it be told, that we may come to God just as we are, not waiting to be good, not waiting till we repent, and find in His perfect fellowship, all we need to enable us 'to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God'. These are saving truths which do not require the long preface of years of instruction; they are bread for the hungry. The trouble, alas, is that it is easier to sophisticate them than to preach them.

The messengers, then, must believe in their message. But they must also believe in themselves.

On that first Easter Sunday when the Lord came again to His own, to their joy they heard Him speak again and He said just what everybody said, Peace be unto you. It was, of course, the familiar greeting. Any guest in any house would repeat the formula. Every wayfarer tossed it to every other. They were all wishing one another peace, and nothing happened. Jesus uttered the familiar words and suddenly the Peace was there. It came in with Him, and as He spoke seemed to hover awhile above them, as if waiting for the opening of a heart that it might enter in.

We are carried back to some other words of His. When He sent out seventy of His friends for their first adventure in preaching, He gave them some instructions. 'When you go into a house, first say, Peace be to this house.' Well, of course they would. They are not churls; they will be civil. But there is something more. 'First say, Peace be to this house; and, if there is a lover of peace there, your peace shall rest on him; and if not (so real a thing it is) your peace will come to you again.' Like Noah's dove it must rest somewhere. There is no mistaking this. No purse, no wallet, no spare sandals, but they are to carry peace and give it away. It is amazing that unbelieving wretches like ourselves should imagine that we have really accepted teaching like this, and should mistake the nodding of sleep for the assent of faith.

This picture of the Lord's disciple at work is astonishing. In one respect, he is a poor unfurnished, uncertificated creature, a mere 'baby', so Jesus says, a lamb matched against a wolf (so Jesus says), and shivering accordingly. In another he is seen carrying the kingdom of God about with him, and holding the door open for any who will, to enter in. It is an event (so Jesus says) in the history of any town, when one of these messengers enters it. Silver and gold he had none; but he has his wares; he is a celestial bagman, an uncommercial traveller with a store of spiritual gifts, and he can deliver 'the goods'. He deals in communicable things. The feature about the messenger of Christ is this; he does not merely talk about love and joy and peace. He carries them and offers them. It is in his commission to bestow them.

This is the note of the New Testament. The love and joy and peace of which it speaks are as real as corn and wine, and as get-at-able as money in your purse or bread on your table.

I find St Paul quite irresistible in this matter. We know the kind of people who needed his help. Many of them had been rescued from a pagan environment, and dark passions of the flesh were in their blood. Their minds were full of combustible material, and at any time a word, a look, a gesture might start the ruinous fire. Discarded lusts marched after them and watched the opportunity for a fresh assault. If we know anything of the temptations of such men, we know that nothing will succour them unless it is as swift as it is deep, and as simple as it is strong. St Paul handles them like a physician who knows what he is about. Dreadful as their case is, he is not in a panic about it; he does not wring his hands over them; his lip does not tremble, and he does not shake his head when they leave the room. 'You have put off the old nature and you have put on (as though it were a coat) the new. So now put away all these—anger, wrath, malice, shameful talk—put them off! And now,' he proceeds, still in the same sure tones, 'put on these new robes. Put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility. . . . Above all, put on love.' As though you could! Has the apostle forgotten his audience? Is this preacher's rhetoric? No, it is merely the Gospel. St Paul is in among the heavenly wardrobe and literally handing out new clothes for old. Sinner as I am, I think I should have put them on if they had been handed to me in that sure fashion.

It is pathetic to see how humanity turns again and again to the priest, and the reasons are not all ignoble. Being slow of heart and of doubtful mind we crave someone who will not only tell us about God's grace, but give it into our hands. It is no use sending us off on the mystical quest; very few of us are 'airmen'. If the help we need is not quite near, it is out of reach. It is strange that God should seem distant until a human voice brings Him near; that His promises once seemed idle till we saw a human face lighted by them; that a month's striving will sometimes bring us, not to faith, but to despair, and then five words from stammering lips will break the frost and free our souls. But the explanation is this that while the whole world is sacramental—

the most sacramental thing in the universe is a dedicated human being. We say lightly to our neighbour with our hand on the door, 'Give me your blessing', and straight-away forget because we don't believe the thing can be done. Yet Christ once taught men differently. This is why the New Testament is so rich in benedictions, and every conventional salutation changes into actual bestowment of good things. The bread of life is God's giving, but we must break it to one another from hand to hand. Every Christian should know how to 'deliver the goods'. 'I rode into the town and the next morning I offered Christ to a large company.' It is the evangelist's vocation and the missionary's commission, and what a calling it is!

6. 'WHY COULD NOT WE CAST HIM OUT?'
[From the Methodist Times (1912), 'Not on the Agenda'.]

IN THE dark days of November I endeavoured to cheer the spirits and improve the minds of my friends by asking them for an answer to the following letter:

As I carried my little letter about, and observed here its stimulating effect and there its paralysing effect, it grew upon me how fundamental a question it raised and what light it threw upon our present impotence. One would have thought that Christians would have had very clear and confident teaching to give as to the grace of Christ in the cure of so ruinous a fault. But though I have heard some very profitable discussions on the letter, I always felt that if there were an angry man sick of his own flaming passions, listening to us, he would feel that we knew as little what to do with him as he knew himself. In particular I am sure he would not have known, when we were done, whether he might expect to be cured in three weeks, three years, or thirty. Could a man with a bad temper bring more legitimate questions to the Church than these: Is there a cure for anger? Does it take long? These questions are indeed being silently asked every day, but they cannot be answered out of the Catechism, nor out of Banks' Manual. They must be answered out of the confident experience of living Christians, and the witnesses should be standing ready when their names are called in Court.

Of course, if you raise such questions in any modern company, someone will tell you (without smiling) that irritability generally has a 'physical cause', and I have often observed how these wise words paralyse the whole thinking machinery of a company. There is, indeed, an element of truth in it—one per cent., perhaps, and the rest is chloroform; but it is the chloroform we like. Every human experience has a 'physical cause', for we are in the body, not out of it, and queer bodies they are, some of them. Theft, murder, drunkenness, and sensuality—they all have a physical cause, in the sense that the body makes its contribution to every human reaction. If anyone will make me a list of six faults or vices with which the body has nothing to do, I will make a donation to the Supplementary Historic Roll, or present Pope's Compendium to the nearest infirmary, or perform any similar sacrificial act. To say it for the thousandth time, every man's probation is affected by his temperament, and his temperament has its roots in his physical nature. But his probation means his opportunity, and his temptation is not his necessity. How shall I get anybody to believe that I am ready to mortify the flesh, overcome the world, and defy the devil, but that if the juices of my body are below sample, not all the grace of God can save me from being morose, or cantankerous, or passionate? The publican of old went up to the temple and said, 'God be merciful to me a sinner'. But the modern sinner's plea is different: 'My mother says I am run down.' Thus he pleads: and so say his sisters and his cousins and his aunts. And so do all the half-baked psychologists, and all those modern doctors who have injections for every complaint, from piety to hydrophobia, and guarantee, if not to cure you, at least to exchange the disease you have for the disease you have not.

'But my brother says it is my infernal temper.' Suppose the brutal brother is right; what then? Suppose there is a man with an infernal temper or a cantankerous disposition—what will happen to him if he comes into a Christian Church? First, will he become aware that he is a cantankerous creature? Next, will he be made to feel that he need not be so any longer? Next, will he be made to feel that if he need not be so, it is a very shocking and abominable thing to be? Then, will he find, right at his hand, the miracle of grace that he needs? Will he hear the emancipating word rising clear above all the arguments of past habit and mightily persuading him that the hour of his deliverance has come? This is what happened to a Methodist a little while ago, but it did not take place, I am sorry to say, in a Methodist church. He was a cantankerous creature. His special gift was to give and take offence. He carried an aura of discontent with him whereever he went, miserable himself and a cause of misery in others. One fine day he went to the Christian Scientists and heard them testifying of the various ills, bodily and other, from which they had been delivered: heard a man say that now for eight years he had not been angry and for five years had not even felt annoyed. He discovered himself much in need. He saw himself a poor, miserable cantankerous and superfluous being. He wondered most eagerly whether he might cease to be what he was; and not all the delirium of the Christian Science system could confuse the truth that God did not intend a man to be like that, and that he need be quarrelsome no more. He saw this; he believed it. He put off his quarrelsome habit like a poisoned shirt, and put on a new robe (which God gave him) of cheerful zest. He walked out a new man and an evangelist. A new man and an evangelist he remains: the devil has gone out of him.

Now why could not we cast him out? We Methodists used to do a good deal in that line of business, and it is a very useful business in this world. The world can never afford to let a Church die which can cast out devils. It is not that we have no doctrine to apply to such a situation, though the doctrine might be clearer than most of us find it to be. Neither do we lack many an instance of the delivering power of our Lord. But there is a point at which the conviction of a Church or a company of Christians becomes passionate and almost irresistible: their offer of divine grace for human need becomes amazingly distinct, authoritative, and sacramental—and it is then that the blind begin to receive their sight, the lame walk, and the lepers are cleansed. But there are regions of Christian experience below this point, where faith does indeed persist, but it is precarious for those who have it and almost incommunicable to those who have it not. Then the preaching of the preachers and the testimony of the Church insensibly retreats from the face-to-face challenge of common evils, hurries past the sick of the palsy, refers the blind to the educational authorities, calls in the police for the demoniac, and discourses on sin in general because it cannot cure anybody in particular.

We often complain today that there is no sense of sin. Perhaps we are not always very good judges of it when it is there, and it may be that we do not know how to evoke it when it is latent. But it is a more radical fact that we do not know what to do with sins when they are discovered. It is time for us all to gather each man what companions he can, and return to the battlefield we deserted: to confront the moral impotence of men, their anger, their discontent, their self-assertion, their covetousness, and ascertain afresh what kind of deliverance it is that Christ would bestow upon them, and by what human means it may be communicated. We shall not then have people groping for the grace that we ought to have in our hands, or inquiring disconsolately: 'Could I be cured by Christmas?'

7. THE UNBELIEVERS IN THE VESTRY
[From the Methodist Recorder (1918), 'Ephraim's Cakes'.]

MESHACH, who is subject to telepathic invasions, reports the following message, which I give with all reserves:

Meshach called this a vision, and I have called it a night-mare, but as I prize his friendship, we have compromised and agreed to call it a subliminal uprush and to treat it as an allegory. Regarded in that light, I think we may say that if there were not enough bombs to go round, they dropped in the right place. There is an unbelief outside the Church and there is an unbelief inside, but it is the unbelief within that matters. For the unbelief of Christians is the paralysis of the very instrument of redemption. The world is unbelieving—of course. When it believes, it is no longer the world; it is the Church. We complain sometimes of the indifference and apathy of the people, but this is to complain of the apathy of the flour when the bread won't rise. In a controversy between the leaven and the flour, the leaven is not permitted to say, 'I know I'm rather sterile, but you have your faults, too'; for then the flour will reply, 'Of course I have, but you are here to raise me'; and it's mate next move.

Now the Church does know that there is a good deal wrong with it, and it receives with almost touching humility the rebukes and advices of those who themselves are no better than they should be. But the Church might save itself a good deal of diagnosis if it would but look at its own message and learn that it has but one malady that matters—and that is unbelief. The proof of this is quite simple. The Christian Church confronts the world with the religion of grace, and declares, on the authority of its own experience, that a great and transforming gift awaits all those who will but receive it. No moral weakness, no tyranny of passion, no fetter of habit avails against Christ if we do but give Him entrance and allow Him to confront it. True, we cannot remain merely passive and be saved. But bring Jesus Christ and the human soul into relations, and that contact will liberate all the moral and spiritual energy of which the man is capable. All things are possible to him that believes. Whereupon the outsider answers; 'Then since you believe, have all these great things happened to you?' At this point our explanations become long and involved, and the outsider generally leaves while we are in the middle of them. But however long we may take in deciding, there are only three roads to choose from. We may turn back and say that we overstated our message about Christ; or we may say that we are what our creed would lead men to expect; or we may say that we are not and that it is because we have not ourselves really believed. The first road we cannot take, for we know too much of God's grace. The second no one takes now—not since the Official Optimist went that way and died in a cul de sac, in the act of taking a broad and statesmanlike view. The third is the only road. We are not at present a Society of Believers; we are a Society of Little-faiths. The disciples said: 'Lord, increase our faith.' Brush the dust off his answer and we find Christ saying with a smile: 'Increase it! You haven't got any. If you had as much as a grain of mustard seed you could do anything.' We have no malady that matters except our unbelief; for Christ asks nothing more of us than to be believed.

The Christian Church is the Church of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, and of Pentecost, and these tremendous facts passed into the experience of the Church, and at times have been clearly visible there. I know that there are many in our borders now who dwell among these unsearchable riches. But the scale of the New Testament is merely embarrassing to the majority of the people who profess and call themselves Christians. They have not found in Christ, or, for that matter, anywhere else, those unsearchable riches, the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field, the gain that makes all other gains seem like the scouring of the streets. Their religion is not the Christian religion, but a kind of Natural Religion. They do not ask much from it, and they are embarrassed and sometimes irritated with an upsetting religion like Christianity, that offers them too much. They bring their pannikins looking for a tap, and they are offered Niagara, and they don't like it. Nevertheless, if they express their religion at all, or even if they think about it, they have to use the Christian language and the Christian forms of thought, because they know no other, and the clothes are far too big for the experience. Hence a certain air of staleness and of unreality in many Church services, which we should all discern instantly if we had not breathed it for so long. The continuous use of overstrained language, language always bigger than our facts, becomes very wearisome. We are always tedious when we are not real.

I know that the Church has got something, and there are many, many true disciples among us who, through faith, have entered into great possessions. But we all know now that the world has gone round the Church, and looked it up and down, and cannot see any sign of superlative well-being. It observes that the big message is not authenticated by a corresponding experience, and that we do not carry ourselves like 'sons and heirs'. It asks of the Church—at such times as it thinks it worth while asking—'What have you got that is worth everybody's having?' and it does not get a very satisfactory answer. I have asked various companies of Christian people to make a comparison. Suppose we took a photograph of a Sunday-morning congregation singing a hymn of praise to Christ, and then a photograph of a dinner of licensed victuallers singing 'For he's a jolly good fellow'. Which of the two would look the happier group? By trying this on my various friends I have ascertained that the comparison is irrelevant, misleading, and improper. But I observe that none of them feels quite easy to leave it alone. Therefore they volunteer explanations. The licensed victuallers' happiness, they tell me, is transient and superficial, while ours is deep and enduring—which is a reason, I suppose, for looking so solemn about it. The licensed victuallers, they say, will probably be all dead and buried in a few years' time, while the Christians will be preserved to a green old age and go to heaven when they must. But when all these considerations have been digested there remains a disquieting fact. Two hundred heirs of God assured of their prospects gathered together in one building ought in the mass to give an impression of their having found something extraordinarily good. There would appear a quite striking overplus of happiness— if they were believers.

It might be thought that, with the New Testament open before them, Christian people could not drift into unbelieving ways without knowing it. Certainly the language of the New Testament and our own traditions are challenging enough, but the human mind, if you give it time, is very fertile in evasions. Most of us have been rather frightened at one time or another to discover how we can hear the most august and splendid truths without the faintest reaction of mind or heart. It seems so fatally easy to approach the holiest things as though we knew all about them, and only needed the mild stimulus of an occasional reminder. We say 'The Fatherhood of God', and turn in to tea. When the Apostle tells us that all things are ours—the world, life, death, present and future, all ours—no one rises up in Church, saying, 'Perfect nonsense, and not one of you believes it', and leaves the building in indignation. Yet such an incident would be quite a healthy proceeding. What is not healthy is to sit it out as though it were all a matter of course, and as though it did not matter. The other day I heard a man expounding one of the most wonderful affirmations of the Gospel, and he did it with no more animation than we show when we say to one another on rainy mornings: 'Wet again.' The kindest and truest thing to say about such a man is that he is not all there—only the mere automatic part of him is working. He is not a believer. He is a gramophone, and some one has put one of the Christian 'records' in him.

This cake is getting a little burned on one side. I will only add this for the present. I propose to form a Society
of serious Unbelievers, and the rules are —
1. That each member believes enough to know himself an unbeliever.
2. That when any member attainsto faith of the New Testament dimensions he is expelled from the Society.
3. The aim of the Society is its own extinction, under the operation of Rule 2.

Of this society I am willing to be the first President (as knowing more of the e shoart and uld mpchc covet of
the unbelief than honour of anyone else). But I should much covet the honour of being the first member to be expelled.

8. THE FALL OF THE CURRENCY
[From the Methodist Recorder (1918), 'Ephraim's Cakes'.]

MESHACH, who has a gift in bad dreams, avers that one morning when he had gone to Church he must have fallen asleep. In his dream the service seemed to be prolonged far beyond the usual time, until at last he inquired in a whisper of his neighbour whether anything was wrong. He was told that when the congregation had assembled some adversary had closed the doors and locked them all in. He suggested breaking the windows, and instantly recoiled at the thought, for they were Gothic and stained. No one with any sense of decorum would break such windows. So while they waited for something to happen, the parson, in order to allay panic, was continuing the service, when a wicked voice cried in from the outside: 'Preach your old Gospel of freedom now.'

'From each of which heads', I interposed, 'you will proceed to pluck a few short hairs, but this time you must do it alone, for I have other business.' I know by experience that Meshach can make any subject divide itself naturally into three heads, when he wants to talk about it, but I prefer to read his allegory my own way. Anyone who has had opportunity to get to know the feeling of the Churches, Anglican or Noncomformist, from within, has found a certain feeling of helplessness as they look out on the world which they were sent to win. They are anxious to deliver their message and do their work, but they are mysteriously disabled. No Church in the land could get together a body of its leaders which would not betray a visible perplexity and bewilderment. They are not buoyant; they are not hopeful. By the strategy of the devil we have been quietly locked in. And as the first problem is how to get out, I wish to point to the door which appears to me to give. Those who have eaten my first cake will understand. We have only one trouble that matters. It is a form of unbelief—the unbelief of those who know all about it.

It is, of course, impossible in human affairs to make any generalization against which exceptions cannot be alleged. This is one reason why it has been so difficult for us in Methodism to know where we are, for Methodism is a big thing, and it never has been all success or all failure. Of late years whenever the facts have disquieted us, someone has started up to encourage us by relating a local success. The process is officially known as 'striking a hopeful note', and though it is a weakness it has its amiable side. But you can win in the raids and lose in the battle, and something like that has been our experience of late. Our lines have not been advancing, and the arrest is the arrest of unbelief—our own, not the world's.

It is worth while making sure of this. An evangelical Church, by its very existence, says to every son of Adam: 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.' And when the son of Adam asks what we mean by being saved, we have to answer him by analogies, but they are the biggest analogies that the human mind can find. We say that it is like being born again—a rather startling image; it is like being dead and buried and then raised again; it is as though God had made a new creation; as though God had said once again, Let there be light, and there is light. The peace it brings passes understanding; the joy is unspeakable; the desires it awakens are unutterable; its riches are unsearchable; the power of God that works in it is so extraordinary that there is no analogy for it but the Resurrection of the Lord. What is all this straining of language if it is not the attempt to describe something indescribably good for men, because it is altogether worthy of God? Now, is the salvation we believe in on that scale? I don't care much whether a man is projected suddenly into this salvation 'catastrophically' (Selah!) or whether he evolved gradually into it, unfolding like a blessed daisy. The question is: Is it anything like the New Testament thing when he has got it?

Mary Smith waves me aside here. She says I am talking Paul, and 'Paul does not appeal to her'. She believes this is an important statement to make about Paul. I am not so sure of this; it sounds to me like some damaging information about Mary Smith. But we have higher authority than St Paul's. No one could have lived through one of those earlier days with our Lord without the feeling that anything might happen, so long as it was good enough. No problem, either physical or moral, that was really submitted to Him, found Him wanting. You needed only to take Jesus at His word and deed and you stood in a new world. Every decision as to what could or could not be done had to be revised when Jesus was there. It was precisely the same exhilarating confidence which carried forward the Wesleys.

When He first the work begun
Small and feeble was His day,
Now the word doth swiftly run,
Now it wins its widening way.
More and more it spreads and grows,
Ever mighty to prevail,
Sin's strongholds it now o'erthrows,
Shakes the trembling gates of hell.

Men who wrote like that did not simply see miracles. They lived and moved and had their being in them. When they read, 'With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible', something in them shouted assent. They marked the boundary of the humanly possible and began their journey on the other side. What was other people's terminus was their starting-point.

Now this is believing in Jesus. This being on top of things, this sense of sufficiency because God is sufficient, this discovery that the infinite resources of God are here and are usable—this is believing in Jesus. Is it in such a frame that the Church faces the world today? Does the bench of Bishops look like it? Or the Methodist Conference, or the Synod, or a Local Preachers' Meeting? Or, if you please, Mary Smith, do you and I?

So, then, there really has been a shrinkage of the experience, a decline of faith. But the vocabulary of the great days remains, and we cannot get rid of it. We are tied to this tremendous Bible of ours. We have to use the old terms, but we use them with a depreciated significance. In no other region has the currency fallen so disastrously as in religion—for in no other region had it so far to fall. In no other subject are we able to say so much more than we really mean, without conscious insincerity. The language of the pulpit is tacitly discounted at a ruinous rate even before it reaches the pew. The sovereign is still a sovereign, but it only buys a shilling's-worth. If our creed would fetch but ten per cent of its face value, we should be the happiest people alive.

We could not go on at all like this, unless unbelief were a very cunning thing. But it is a cunning thing. It is a laboratory where all the things of God are chemically treated before they reach the soul; and what with neutralizing agents carefully assorted, and what with mere water from the tap, the most active and powerful truths reach us as harmless as the pilules of the homeopathist. We never deny a staggering saying of Christ's. We only balance it with something else. Take any bit of true Christian experience, the genuine, free, authentic thing, into a Class-meeting, and presently someone will be telling us that there are 'varieties of religious experience'. A few drops from this well-used bottle, and you cannot tell the taste of anything. It took me some time to realize that when people said there were varieties of religious experience they were arguing that all the the varieties were allowable and normal, which, of course, is quite absurd. It is as though a teacher should say: 'Life takes many forms, running, walking, climbing, singing, measles, pneumonia, gangrene, and coma.' I cannot conceive that this is a useful way of speaking, whether of things material or things spiritual. Nor would people be betrayed into it unless the difficulties of the situation made them glad of a formula of evasion.

The sum is this. Looking at the Church as it is, we have to acknowledge either that Christianity does not now work, or that we have not believed. There is no refuge from the first alternative except in the second. Few people realize how the odd fear that, after all, Christianity does not work, has, though unacknowledged, invaded the minds of Christian people. The facts sometimes look like it. George Bernard Shaw says that Christianity has not been tried—meaning, no doubt, that he has not tried it. But a Christian mind must say that if it does not work, it is because it has not been believed. And this, I affirm, is a really joyful message. To lament the decline of faith in general, and to urge people to believe, is indeed a futile thing. But it is not a futile thing to tell people, and ourselves first of all, to believe in Jesus, for that sets us looking at Him who, just by being what He is, makes men believers and all things possible. Knowing this, it is not easy for some of us to be very enthusiastic for more Commissions of Inquiry, searching the patient with two hundred and fifty questions. For it is tedious to go on cataloguing the symptoms when you know the disease, and this pre-occupation with ourselves may keep us from the straight road, which is the road back to Christ. We see not yet all things put under Him, it is true, but that would not matter if we saw Jesus as He is. We need nothing for ourselves but to know Jesus Christ today, and nothing for men but to know how to tell it.

MY FRIEND Meshach has been relating to me an experience which has much impressed him. Indeed, he is pleased to think that he has received it as a message and a warning, and insists that I shall help him to communicate it to those whom it may concern.

The other night, the day's work being done, and a modest supper of herbs dispatched, he seated himself comfortably by the fire, and in order to calm his mind (which I am bound to admit frequently needs calming) before retiring to rest, took down the Standard Edition of Wesley's Journal and began to read. Somewhere between twelve and one he must have ceased to read and fallen asleep, for in his sleep he dreamed a dream. He found himself seated in a small apartment, furnished in most exquisite taste. The ample chairs, upholstered in crimson leather, moved on noiseless castors upon a generous carpet. A companionable fire burned in the grate; a shaded lamp gave a softened light to the lower part of the room; a little incense smouldered in a golden censer, richly chased, and its fragrance seemed to complete the cloistral effect. Meshach thought he could detect another odour, which disguised and subdued was not unpleasing, though, thought he, if it were more pungent, it might be offensive. Looking about him, he found at his right hand a desk, in faultless order kept, and on the desk an open diary, closely written in shorthand, and, as appeared on a second look, in some kind of cipher.

In his waking hours, Meshach is an honourable man, but in his dreams, I regret to say, he stooped to baseness. Curiosity was awake while conscience slept, and he pored over the diary, striving to explore its secrets. But the shorthand was not Pitman's, and the cipher had no key. He was not baffled for long, however, for bethinking himself how H. K. solved a famous cipher in a dream, he resolved to try the same expedient. Accordingly he put himself to sleep; that is to say, he dreamed that he slept, and he dreamed that he dreamed, and sure enough the key was revealed. Springing up (that is, out of the inside dream) he turned eagerly to the diary and applied his clue, and found to his joy that it worked. Judge of his astonishment when he discovered that the book he was making so free with was no other than the Diary of Satan. Soon, however, he cast away his fears and scruples, for all seemed fair in war with such an enemy, and set himself to master the contents of this extraordinary volume. Large parts of it he had already committed to memory when the door opened, and a very gentlemanlike person entered the room. With faultless breeding, he betrayed not the slightest surprise, and merely said: 'I see you are interested in my little book. I hope you feel rested.' Whereupon he awoke, and found his wife in dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, surveying him with some severity, and saying, oddly enough: 'I hope you feel rested.'

The shamefaced Meshach went to bed, resolving to commit to paper the contents of the Diary the first thing in the morning. Unfortunately, by the morning all the details had vanished from his mind, nor could he recollect them in any coherent manner until the following Wednesday, when, as he was ascending in the lift of the Mission House to attend a Connexional committee, the whole returned to him. He descended forthwith, went home and wrote as he remembered, and brought it to me. He was good enough to mark the passages which he thought would be of special interest to Methodists, and I give some of them as they stand, without prejudice.

'Oct. 17.—Called on J—M— (aged 22). Has been thinking about his soul, and wants to be happy (silly creature!). Last time I cured him with Formula 1, Stop thinking: but he has had a relapse. Has been reading his Bible and disturbing his mind. Thinks if he was forgiven he would probably feel like it. I gave him Formula 2, 'It is a question of temperament', warned him against Emotionalism, and supplied him with instances of excellent people who had no joy in believing. Quite cured.

Nov. 19.—Found L— R— greatly disturbed about his class, the usual minister's class. He thought their silence might be the sleep of death: had been reading 'Acts' (dangerous book) and is struck with the contrast. I explained Formula 53, that as people grow cultured they grow reticent. Could not persuade him of this: accompanied him to class and supplied him with more material for his address; kept him at it till he had talked the class dumb. Then he asked if anyone would like to say anything. Painful silence ensued. I should have been content to leave well alone, but could not resist the temptation to prompt one lady to address L— R— and say; 'We all prefer to listen; we learn more from you.' This had an excellent effect. Could have pronounced the Benediction myself. After class they discussed arrangements for bazaar. All talked freely. Everybody pleased. So am I.

Dec. 11.—L— R— worrying again. Has been reading 'Acts' and thinking about Fellowship. I had much trouble with him: got down his Concordance and went through all the passages where the word occurred. Showed him it meant something different every time. Wonderful trick this of making a word mean nothing by making it mean everything! L— R— much interested. Left him making a sermon on Silent Fellowship. No harm in this. But 'Acts' is a dangerous book; I should lose heart if people took to reading it in any large numbers.

Jan 14.—H— N— is thinking about her Sunday-school class. (Half the trouble in the world is caused by thinking.) She has had them for twelve months and wonders whether they are any further on than they were. Thinks she must talk to them one by one; does not know what to say, and resolves 'just to tell them some of her own experience'. I offered the usual Formula, number 5, that such work requires great tact, or it may do more harm than good. She replied that she knew that, but she must do the best she could, and perhaps help would be given her. I then urged Formula 17, to let her life speak. This beautiful phrase quite subdued her.

March 19.—Attended Quarterly Meeting. A foolish man wanted to talk about the work of God. Didn't mean he said, to disparage the administrative matters brought before them, but thought there were other and graver concerns, and so on. Feeling of meeting evidently with him. Superintendent's agenda in danger of being dislocated. I felt for him, being myself a Superintendent, and offered him number 13 from 'Pious Irrelevances', and 31 from 'Formulae of postponement', which he dexterously combined. He said he must protest against the idea that the business of the meeting was not all the work of God: affirmed that the whole of their agenda was sacred if they did it in the right spirit: but in part he sympathized with the brother in question, and if they would attend strictly to the business, then at the close, if time permitted, they might spend a little time together in the manner proposed. Meeting agreed, and proceeded to thank 'everybody' and reelect him. Agenda finished 10:15 p.m. No further trouble.'

I have recommended Meshach to eat meat suppers and not to read after midnight; but if any reader can suggest suitable treatment for his case it would be a kindness.

MESHACH, with his unhallowed dreams, is getting me into trouble. Some of my friends have been expostulating with me about Satan's Diary—expostulating with me and agreeing with Satan. It is surprising what a general agreement there is with Satan. It is a lonely thing—I feel it more and more—to be right in a world where so many are wrong. Not that my friends describe their view as I have done; on the contrary, they detect no smell of Satan in those irreproachable phrases which Meshach says he copied from the Diary. There are people who are, in Bunyan's phrase, 'strangers to much conflict with the devil', but this is not my case. Those who do not know the ways of Satan may take it from me that Satan is always with the majority, because he always deserts an unpopular cause. He always passes over to the winning side and proceeds to defile their banners. When at last a truth has gained recognition and won general consent the devil does not fight it, he uses it. His next business is to make that particular truth serve the purposes of a lie and turn that glimpse of liberty into an oppression. So you may always look for the characteristic things of Satan in the words that are commonly passed round.

Some thirty years ago I remember hearing a sermon on the conversion of Lydia and the Philippian jailer. I learned that the Lord opened the hearts of some gentle folk by the river brink, while others He took by storm, bursting in with crash of earthquake at dead of night. I remember it being talked over at home and we agreed with a mild surprise that we had not fully recognized how much room there was for wide varieties of conversion. There was a need for that truth to be asserted then, and it was asserted and received, until about the year 1890 its honest work was done. Everybody was agreed about it, if everybody is ever agreed about anything, and then it was ripe for Satan's use. It was used. For a long time now a preacher can scarcely mention conversion without having to explain that conversion need not be sudden, that we may not be able to name the place and the time. Then it came to be said that it was principally disreputable people with a prison record who were converted suddenly. Zacchaeus, it seems, had been thinking about it for a long time. Paul was half converted before he set out for Damascus, and the rest of it was done in Arabia. In the case of people trained in Christian surroundings conversion should be gradual, like the dawn, like the opening of a flower, like the melting of the snow, like any natural process so long as it is slow and unconscious. In this atmosphere the tremendous challenge of the Gospel to the human will has been neutralized. Men feel themselves excused from immediate response, and great numbers of people who are not Lydias are still dawdling about the river bank waiting (in company) for the Lord to open the hearts which they themselves have shut. That conversions may be very gradual has become one of Satan's most useful formulae.

It must be remembered that all the formulae of Satan have some truth in them, and most of them are quite true—but they are misapplied. A bad cause ceases to have any power for mischief when there is no longer anything to be said for it. There is always a great deal to be said for Satan. 'This ointment might have been sold and given to the poor.' There is a great deal to be said for that. None the less it is the authentic voice of Satan. So as to the formula: 'It is a question of temperament.' Of course there is something in it. A friend of mine said to me quite solemnly, as if he were reciting a portion of the creed: 'I believe in temperament.' If I ever said anything to the contrary, I am prepared this very night (about bedtime) to stand in penance sheet, and, candle in hand, to swear on any specified part of my body that I believe in temperament. But before we turn loose this tremendous platitude to work for good or ill let us know what we are doing. Are all the fruits of the Spirit a matter of temperament? If a Christian has no joy, will you pity him for his temperament, or will you preach him the Gospel? Is a cold nature to find love inaccessible because of his temperament; is a moody man bereft of joy, a harassed man debarred from peace, an aggressive man excused from meekness, and a passionate man denied self-control, all because of their temperament? It is to such results as these that the plea is being used today. I know there is such a thing as temperament, in other words, there are varieties in the same species. I know there are no two sheep precisely alike, and no two Christians, but there must be some characteristic assemblage of qualities which constitutes a sheep a sheep, and a Christian a Christian; and it is time to cease proclaiming how many of the characteristic marks of Christianity a Christian may be without. There are people born without thumbs, and others born without a sense of humour; both kinds are human, but abnormal. And there are Christians without joy, without the filial confidence, without the best robe, but they are abnormal. People who are born without thumbs or without humour must not blame their parents, for their parents could not help it; but a Church which delivers a mutilated Gospel whose characteristic gifts are at the mercy of a man's temperament, is to blame if its converts are found without liberty or joy. All observers must see that one of the most real perils to religion is the resolving of all religious experience into mere subjectivism—an experience which each man manufactures in the laboratory of his own mind and from his own materials.

I wrote some time ago a faithful obituary of the Optimist, who was a great hand with the formulae of Satan. When I had described him I really thought I must have overdone it, for in cold print it seemed as if such things as the Optimist propagated and lived on could never have persuaded anybody. Yet I opened another Methodist paper this last week and there it is all over again, in two prominent columns. Once more we are told that we have decreases in membership only because we haven't found out how to count our members properly. No doubt there will be some different reason why the other Christian Churches report decreases also; and still some other reason why the Sunday-schools do the same. I do not wish to be exacting. Any reason will do, but for the sake of complete mental satisfaction a reason of some kind might be given. Then we are told that we are producing a superior type of manhood and womanhood today (the truth must be told, though it hurts our modesty to say it); that while our hotheaded fathers mistook their own noise for the power of the Holy Ghost, we are cool headed, and our love is just a wonder. That we don't make so many converts because we are so busy building up a Church of 'improved morality', and so on. Nearly all the formulae can be found here. The whole apparatus of confusion is at work. As I read these columns and then read them again to make sure, I found myself back in Meshach's dreamroom. I saw the shaded lamp and the soft-carpeted floor, and felt again that faint odour of decay now grown too pungent to be disguised by any incense.

1. THE PRACTICE OF PRAYER
[Written for and published by, The Free Church Fellowship.]

HOW, dwelling among men, He showed them the glory as of the only-begotten Son, full of grace and truth: How, though He was undistracted and Master of Himself, yet in His communion sought help from times and seasons and places:

He loved men, yet retired from them to pray: rose a great while before day: watched through a night: stayed in the wilderness: went up into a mountain: sought a garden: And so doing, kept unbroken the proportion and beauty of the perfect life, tranquil, recollected, glad, at leisure from Himself, punctual with the hour, raising all common occasions, honouring all common relationships, keeping the transcendent goal in view:

His aspect, as He came from praying, made men desire to pray like Him:
And, as He was praying, was transfigured:

When He would help a tempted disciple, He prayed for him:
In unbroken communion with the Father, He could do nothing of Himself, and spoke nothing from Himself:
Being alone, He was yet never alone, save only once when He cried an exceeding bitter cry:
Though He was a Son, He offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, and was heard for His godly fear:

So by word and deed He taught us to do as He had done Himself, to ask and seek and knock, to enter our chamber and shut our door and pray to the Father who is in secret, assuring us of answers far beyond the scale of human love, graciously rebuking us for our want of expectancy, and bidding us always to pray and not to faint.

And thus remembering Him who once gave us an example, as now He gives us His Spirit, that we may follow His steps,

If we do not take time to worship and adore, if we cannot forget ourselves, if the greatness of God does not hold us, if with angels and archangels we do not laud and magnify His glorious Name, praising Him and saying Holy, Holy, Holy:

If we have not hungered and thirsted after holiness: if we have acknowledged our sins without expecting to forsake them: if we have sought forgiveness without shame or taken it without wonder:

If we do not rejoice in the Lord, if we forget His benefits and are slow to discern His kindness in daily things:

If we care too little for others or believe too little in God to be able to intercede for others with energy and faith:

If in our approaches to God in prayer we have been reluctant, hurried, unmannerly, casual, talkative—if we interrupt and cannot listen, cannot wait:

Grant us, most gracious Lord, Thy forgiveness, and teach us to amend our ways. Amen.

WHEN we go into God's presence it must be a surrender. In childhood we can say our prayers and tumble into bed, but there comes a time when 'saying prayers' won't do. As we learn more adequate thoughts of God, and have glimpses of Him as Infinite Love, it is nothing less than an indecency to bargain and haggle, to keep back this and conceal that, or try to persuade Him to our way of thinking. We find we cannot go to God at all unless we are prepared to be straight. To open our heart and mind to God in quiet and deliberate communion is the most searching experience that we can go through. It cannot always be easy. If we were really childlike children of God, if our relations with our Father were redeemed from inconstancy and were steadily right, then prayer would be natural and restful, and always welcome—or almost always. Even then there might be exceptions, for we remember some prayers in a certain Garden. But we are not childlike children. There is a great deal in all of us to be conquered, a strong man in us to be bound hand and foot, and bundled out before we shall find prayer always restful. If prayer means a surrender to God, it means inevitably a challenge to all the evil that is within us. That is an explanation of all that conscious and subconscious reluctance to pray which at times seems so strange. It is this subconscious reluctance to surrender which lies behind many difficulties which seem intellectual, but are quite often moral difficulties disguised as intellectual. It is a good thing to ask yourselves what your horizon is, how far you are looking forward. It is worth while, for instance, in this one matter of prayer to ask where one would like to be in ten years' time, what sort of person one hopes to be by then. This I know, that anyone who had kept a faithful habit of prayer for ten years would be rather a rare kind of person, and the sort of person who is very badly needed today. Think of it! In ten years' time some things, at any rate, would be settled for ever for me, for you. Some victories would be final. Emancipated from meaner wrestlings, we should be free in heart and mind for service and command which at present we cannot even imagine. But the crucial victory is in this matter of prayer.

PRAYING for others has always presented some real difficulties to those who endeavour to think coherently about their religion. They may be called intellectual difficulties, and therefore they cannot be resolved without serious thinking: but neither can they be solved merely by thinking. Those can help most who have taken up the ministry of intercession seriously, and still kept their minds at work. It has been no help that some who speak very boldly of faith, and tell us of striking answers to prayer, are often very uncritical, thinking it irreverent to question and inquire. They may be so eager to vindicate God, and to see Him dealing, according to their own pattern, with our human prayers, that they may cease to be rigorously truthful, and unconsciously allow themselves to omit, and add, and improve, and synchronize. They have a bias for the sensational, and forget that the ways of God are not usually sensational. Some stories of answered prayers only leave one wondering why other prayers, at least equally sincere, were left unanswered; or why God attends to trivial requests and stands aloof from far greater and more unselfish prayers. Some instances offered of the triumph of faith seem to tell of an arbitrary God whose power moves only at our bidding. No unbelief that I heard of was so blatant a blasphemy as that of the man who offered, for so many guineas, to pray your son safely through the war—and it wasn't only the intrusion of the guineas that made it all wrong.

But when we have dismissed all such crude and unhumble presentations, we are not excused from the task now most urgent of clearing our minds, finding some reasonable reconciliation between the 'wondrous power of faithful prayer' and the challenging facts of human life. We shall find no such reconciliation by reducing our expectations in prayer to the low level of current experience, nor by any watering down of our Lord's own words. I am of the faith that we shall find our Lord's words true far beyond our present expectation, but we may find that His way is not our way. His way we may be sure will be more divine and also more reasonable than we thought. There will be nothing arbitrary, nothing that contradicts the glorious but humbling revelation of God as He is manifested in Christ Jesus, and nothing that allows us to think that God has surrendered the government and care of His world into our weak and ignorant hands. I know that 'in everything (great and small) by prayer and supplication' we are to 'make our requests known before God', but it is before God, not before some Baal made in our own image, who may be moved by our much speaking and our loud crying. Might not an outsider listening to some of our public prayers imagine that we were directing the Almighty's attention to something or someone He had overlooked; or were persuading Him to be merciful where He was otherwise disposed. My neighbour is dangerously ill. I pray: 'Lord recover him. Let him not suffer like this.' Is that a good prayer? It may be, or it may not be. For did you never hear a voice within, that replied saying: 'How long hast thou cared for him? And dost thou know that I have cared for him day and night without ceasing this forty years from his birth? I know all. What dost thou know? Will he be safer in thy hands than in mine?' Yes, I have heard that voice and felt that rebuke. Does it then silence my prayers? Not at all, but it changes them. No prayer is really addressed to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ which does not remember that we are bringing our little love to His boundless love, and speaking in our ignorance to an Infinite Wisdom. Every true prayer ends in the solemn and glorious words, 'Not my will, but Thine be done', because we know that His will alone is good and beautiful and perfect.

Every crisis such as we have been watching brings forth a flood of emergency prayers for peace—and safety. Are they to be despised because they are emergency prayers? No, we must pray as we can and ask forgiveness that we cannot pray as we ought. But when in our public prayers we are asking God to avert war, or to stop the brutalities of the strong against the weak, and then wonder why He doesn't do it, those vivid words which Jeremiah puts into the mouth of God come to one's mind: 'I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not; and I called you but ye answered not.' Or those of Isaiah: 'I have spread out my hands all day long unto a rebellious people which walketh in a way which is not good, after their own thoughts.'

Does this mean then that we are not to pray for peace? Oh, no, not that! A thousand times not that! But it does mean that we remember who and what we are and who He is: that we renounce the pharisee within us, and recoil from impertinent prayers. It means that we do not climb into the Judge's seat, write out the sentence of condemnation, and present it to God for His signature. There comes an instant meaning into the words: 'My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.' Hearing that word again our prayers will perhaps not be so explicit, nor so fluent as they were. Broken words and the silence of a great longing may be all we can attain, but God will understand and answer.

I did not intend so to write when I began this theme. It is, I suppose, the events of the past few days that have bent my mind to these wide issues. Let me go back to my original intention. In the August letter to the Sisters, I disclosed, not without some hesitations, that I had resolved to go through our new List of Appointments in my time of prayer, naming the Sisters one by one and calling them to my mind as in the presence of God. And I think that perhaps the Fellowship of our Order might be willing to help me and to help each other. We might gather the fruits of our experience, share with one another what we have learned about praying for others, being candid about our difficulties, or hindrances if we have them, and bearing testimony as to how they can be overcome—if we know.

I am myself a slow scholar in the school. If I say anything of my own discoveries in carrying out my plan, it is not that they are anything new. They will be the commonplaces of intercession for many of you. If I had first seen them written down I think I might have passed them with an easy assent as things which everybody knew. But as they have come to mean a great deal to me I will do what I can, inviting others to do likewise and share with us what may have been given to them.

First, I found that to pray for other people is a thing that cannot be hurried. It did not suffice, it was not even real, to name a dozen names and ask God's blessing on them. Every name I found had to stand alone until it was the name of someone as real as myself. Sometimes it was a trouble to me that I did not know one or another sufficiently well to establish the kind of spiritual sympathy that seemed right. At any rate, I found that sincerity required me to be deliberate—one friend at a time.

Next, I found that I could not think of any of these, my friends, in the presence of God without some change coming over my thoughts, some stronger sense of their worth before God, some deeper sympathy with them as with hard toilers in a great sea, some spontaneous delight in their qualities. It did not mean that the critical mind was submerged in a wash of sentiment: or that those we pray for are idealized out of recognition. On the contrary they are seen more clearly and individually as they are, but all censoriousness fades from the mind when we look at others in the presence of God.

Third, I find that usually I can think of them best, not picturing them as going about their daily work—though I have tried to do that. I think I get nearest to them when I think of them as at prayer before their God and mine, 'around one common Mercy-seat'. There we seem more truly to meet and each of us is looking to Him and yet conscious of one another.

Fourth, I find I am not usually asking anything specific for them or perhaps not asking anything at all. It must at times be entirely right that we should ask for this or that particular blessing because some one need is vividly in our mind. But often, to make specific requests seems to be moving away from reality, away from the Will of God and the quiet certainty of His love, into a more dubious region. I remember a word in one of George Macdonald's novels: 'I will not say that I will pray for you but I will think of God and you together.'

Fifth, I find that whosoever else is blest by this exercise I am myself: and blest at the point where I need it most. It helps me against my self-centred ways; rebukes the endless intrusions of self and widens the narrow door of my being that more love may come in. It may be that to pray for others is God's effectual way of dealing with our own sinfulness.

All this you will see is but one end of intercession. What happens at the other end? What benefits reach those we pray for? How little do I know! Perhaps we are not intended to know. We can reject some theories because we know them to be unworthy of God, but how our prayers may make a channel for the currents of God's grace, we hardly know at all.