These are the principles which I would venture to submit. Probably not one of them will win universal assent even in our own communion. But amid all our amiable sentiments it is time for somebody to say something definite, or as definite as the complexity of the problem allows. In criticising and rejecting individual utterances we may at last reach a corporate mind.But let me add one particular warning about the way we go: for in my own mind I am quite sure that the Communion is just the place where we need to be divided until our unity is real. People say "How terrible to be separated there." Yes, terrible indeed! It is the measure of the sin of schism. But we must not try to escape the consequences of the sin until we have got rid of the sin itself. I say nothing of the problem of the mission field or of the possibility of exceptional occasions.[#] But I am quite sure that in normal Church life, where all people have access to their own services, intercommunion can only be disastrous, as tending to obscure the need for real unity, and the difference between the various excellences whose combination is to be desired.[#] It must of course be recognised that the problem of intercommunion in the mission field is of urgent practical importance. On the present situation, the Archbishop of Canterbury's statement,Kikuyu.But let us come back to what after all is the only true guarantee and the only condition of reunion—the achievement of holiness; that holiness needs, as we have seen, to be safeguarded, and the safeguarding of it is peculiarly entrusted to us, the ministers of the Church. What need then for personal dedication! For upon the degree in which we are wholly given to our work depends in large measure the time when God will reunite His Church.We keep separate even from many right activities, but only in order to keep pure that spirit by which we are to permeate the whole life of the world, bringing it to bear, so far as we are able in our detachment, upon every sort of problem, private or public—industrial, commercial, political, international—till at last the whole world is governed by that spirit, and there is no need for separation any more nor for any special place of worship nor special order of religious ministers; for then the world and the Church will be indistinguishable in the Holy City of God, wherein is no temple, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.LECTURE VTHE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN"Our citizenship is in heaven."—Philippians iii. 20."He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."—S. John xiv. 9.We have considered in outline the functions of the State and of the Church, the two great instruments of God for the furthering of His kingdom. Let us now turn to consider, still in mere outline, for nothing more is possible, the nature of that Kingdom itself.There are very many ways in which the subject might be approached, but I think that it will be most consonant with the general line of our thought in these meditations that we should consider it as the home of man's spirit, the fulfilment of his spiritual being. And to that end, inasmuch as the Kingdom can only be known by living according to the principles of its citizenship, and our present effort is by its very nature intellectual only, we must try to reach it in thought as the goal towards which the whole spiritual life of man is tending.No life can be set forth in scientific terms. The moment it is analysed, the vitalising power is gone. And even the poet, who has far more chance than the logician of making us realise what the life signifies for those who live it, is still speaking of it from outside. It is only by life itself that we can truly know the Kingdom of God.We find, all through the New Testament, a contrast drawn between earth and heaven. And it is worth while to consider the logical principle of that contrast, even though the result is somewhat dry and barren. The place of careful analysis here is analogous to that which criticism holds in relation to art. The critical analysis of a work of art will never of itself enable us to appreciate it, if we are without the cultivated artistic faculty; but it may enrich our appreciation. We may thereby find more than we should otherwise have found of the elements that are combined together to make up the total effect. And then in the unity of the renewed experience we receive more enjoyment than we had done before. So, too, the Kingdom of God, which for us is something that we still hope to reach, and of which the foretaste that we have as yet received is a very slight earnest of the glory that shall be revealed, may be a goal more potent in its attraction to our wills, when we have seen it as the fulfilment of the principles of our whole spiritual life as these are discoverable in other departments and activities.The goods of this world, as we have already noticed, are such that the more one has the less there is for others. The goods of heaven are of such a kind that the more one has the more there is on that account for others. So it is with the true virtues of the spiritual life, with love and joy and peace, the fruits of the spirit. So it is too with other excellences which belong to man as a spiritual being, and which are out of the reach of our animal nature: loyalty, beauty and knowledge.Now the principle of this whole spiritual life is precisely the principle of unity, not as distinct from variety but as distinct either from antagonism or transitoriness. The two things that distress the soul of man are enmities, and the passing away of that which he loves. It is by rising above these evils, which beset us in this earthly state, that the satisfaction of the soul is found.There are four main departments of the spiritual life which aspire in this way to rise above the evils which beset our mortal state. They are Science and Art and Morality and Religion. As we know them in our experience, they are all of them due on the human side to a dissatisfaction with our experience as we find it. The scientific man is disturbed by the apparent chaos in his experience, and he sets out to give order to it, and he is satisfied in so far as he discovers that all the while it was not chaotic, as it seemed, but orderly. The artist is craving for a beauty which, in his ordinary experience, he does not find. He selects, he concentrates attention on certain aspects, to reach a satisfaction which the world otherwise seems not to give. The man of moral aspiration is dissatisfied with the world as he sees it, and he sets himself therefore to alter both himself and it, that it may be modelled more in accordance with the heart's desire. And the religious man finds all of these sources of dissatisfaction working together within his soul; he seeks, and in faith finds, that which gives him both peace and power.Let us then begin with what is in itself the least rich of these forms of human activity, and consider how it is that Science reaches its unity. Let us first recall that there are two forms of multiplicity or division which we are seeking to overcome: that which arises from the clash of various ideals or desires, the antagonism of man with man; and that which arises from the changeableness of the world as we see it. With regard to the latter, science does indeed reach real unities; but they are unities which leave Time out of sight. Sometimes, no doubt, the subject matter which is handled is itself non-temporal, but not in the sense of being eternal. So, for example, geometry is entirely without relation to time. There is no temporal sequence between the equality of the sides and the equality of the angles in the isosceles triangle. But where the subject studied is something that changes in Time, it remains true that the aim of science is to reach an unchanging principle. So, for example, the student of biology may be trying to discover the unchanging principle which governs the successive variations of species. But when he has found it he has not really mastered the transitoriness; he has not in any way gathered up the past and dead into his present experience; he has merely found the principle which applies to every stage as that stage comes. He reaches some superiority to the transitoriness of things, only by abstracting from Time altogether.And, similarly, the unity between men which is produced by a common absorption in such pursuits does not strike very deep. For a man's temperament has nothing in the world to do with his scientific conclusions, or at least ought not to have. In the ideal pursuit of knowledge, all of the things that set men at variance count for nothing whatever. Consequently the differences, just because they are ignored, are not overcome, with the result that, as at the beginning of this war, we may find professors of the various nations, who had been linked together, as one might think, closely enough in the pursuit of knowledge, hurling manifestoes at one another across their national frontiers.When we pass to the second of the great departments, a real progress may be noted in just these points. For in the experience of the artist Time is genuinely mastered. We get some illustration of this from the absorption which marks the aesthetic contemplation of a picture or a statue. For the time that we are really held by it, we forget about time altogether. But the case is clearer with regard to those arts which handle temporal processes—music and poetry. For it is the whole point, let us say, of a drama, that it shall follow a certain succession; it is vital to its significance that the scenes shall be in that order and no other. If you have two plays, each in three acts, in one of which the first act is cheerful in tone, and the second is neutral, and the third depressing, while in the other the first act is depressing, the second neutral, and the third cheerful, the total effect of the two plays is not the average of the three acts in each case, which would be neutral for both, but is in the one particularly depressing, and in the other particularly cheering. For the play is grasped as a whole. It makes a single impression, if it is a good play. We know what it means—not indeed because we can state it in other words, for it is the only expression of its own meaning; but it has a definite significance for us. And the name of the play comes to stand for that significance. This is especially noticeable in tragedy, where the Greeks, with their sure instinct, chose a story whose plot is known to the spectator in advance, so that we have throughout the play both the impression of the entire story and the particular impression of each scene as it comes and passes. It is significant that the Greeks did so choose for tragedy stories whose plot was known, while their comedians invented their own plots. And most will agree that we enjoy a great play better when we have read it in advance, or when we have already seen it on the stage before; because then we do reach something that may serve perhaps as the nearest image that we can get for eternity—a grasp of the whole stretch of time, realised in its successiveness and in the meaning which that successiveness gives to it, and having the sense of the whole throughout and seeing each moment, as it comes, in the light not only of the past but of the future too.On this side, then, art is able, for the moment at least, and with regard to a period definitely limited by our capacities of comprehension, to master Time and give us a unity which includes its successiveness within it; so that the past, and even the future, are gathered up into the real experience of the present, and we are not only conscious of what is before our eyes, but are conscious of it as a part of the whole to which it belongs.In a similar way we notice that while different temperaments are needed for the production of different types of art, yet in appreciation all are united. For example, it would be quite impossible for the great Russian novels to be produced in any other country than Russia; it would have been quite impossible for the great German philosophy to have been produced in any other nation than Germany; it would have been quite impossible for the great English poetry to have been produced in any other nation than England. These literatures belong to the soil out of which they spring. But the people of all the other nations can appreciate them, and all are glad because they are different. And so far as the artistic side of our nature governs our whole being, it is capable of linking us together in a real fellowship, which includes and is based upon our differences and the appreciation of them, and is therefore firmly rooted, because what might have been the source of antagonism is become itself the bond of unity.But we must notice that each of these only reaches a very provisional attainment. If science likes to mark off a certain department of reality for its investigation, it can reach something like finality concerning just that department. I suppose that mechanics is something like a complete system of truth, so far as the mechanical aspect of things can be isolated from all other aspects. But then, nothing in the world is mechanical and only mechanical. Nothing in the world is chemical and only chemical. There are always other qualities there, from which abstraction has been made. Science therefore inevitably sets before itself as its goal the understanding of the universe, and it could not reach any absolute certainty concerning any real fact except so far as it had obtained omniscience. In mathematics it reaches certainty, because in mathematics the object is what it is defined to be, and nothing else. But no given material thing is just a triangle. It may even be disputed whether any given thing can be, according to the definition, a triangle at all.Science then is marked by a restlessness until it reaches this omniscience. It began when the first man said "Why?" The moment that question is asked, Science is launched upon its course. But the answer to that question merely prompts anyone of scientific instincts to say "Why?" to the answer. Why is there a war? Historical science will point to the diplomatic documents, and from them to the course of history moulding national aspiration. Then if we say, "Why was the cause of war such? And, why were there such national aspirations?" we shall find ourselves soon investigating the literature of the countries and then their climates; from this we are shortly involved in astronomy and geology and all the other sciences. You can have nothing that is final until you reach omniscience. And so Science moves, perpetually saying "Why?" to every statement that is made. Far in the distance, in the infinite distance, is its goal of a complete satisfaction gained through understanding the universe in its entirety.Art can similarly only achieve a provisional attainment of its goal; but the attainment while it lasts is more substantial. Its method, as distinct from that of science, is mental rest. The aim of the artist is to concentrate attention upon the object, holding it there by various devices. That is why pictures are put into frames. Something abruptly irrelevant, although not discordant, is put round the object to help us fix our minds upon it. That is why poetry is written in metre. The mind is abruptly brought back by the recurrence of the rhythm or the recurrence of the sound in rhyme, and held within the total composition. We notice that it is precisely where the subject matter of the poem is slight that the rhythm needs to be strongly marked or the system of rhyme complicated; where the subject matter itself has a strong appeal, any rhyming seems to be out of place and tiresome. The aim is simply to grip the attention and hold it upon the object and make us see it as it is; not after the fashion of science, connecting it with other things, but understanding it by getting to know it in and for itself as thoroughly as may be.[#] Now in thus concentrating attention upon some one object and claiming complete absorption in that object, art is implicitly claiming to give a perfect mental satisfaction and an absolute peace. But it can never succeed in that unless the object upon which it is concentrating our attention is an adequate symbol for the whole truth of things in which the whole of our nature will find such satisfaction.[#] This is why no great work of art over becomes out of date, whereas the work of a great scientist is always liable to do so, because his successors revise it in the light of ever widening knowledge.Moreover, these activities of the mind or spirit fail to govern our lives as a whole precisely because they are contemplative and not active. We stand before the world gazing at it, setting our minds indeed to work upon it in certain ways, yet not fundamentally changing it. But we are active beings, with wills as well as contemplative minds, and our volitional action lies very largely outside the range which these activities and interests can control. And therefore it is that so little real unity is reached by means of them.In Morality the practical instincts and impulses are for the first time included. Morality is the science or the art, or both, of living in society; of living, that is to say, as fellow members with other beings, who also have aspirations and ideals as legitimate as our own, so that our own claim to pursue our own ideals must be won by recognition of their equal claim to pursue theirs. And the man who, with full mastery of himself, if such a man exists, is following out a great purpose that is adequate to satisfy his whole nature, is a man who has achieved the conquest of Time in the completest way. It is essential to the pursuit of a purpose that we move from stage to stage, as we adapt means to our end, and yet all of it is one thing, thought and experienced as one. Indeed a test that we always instinctively apply to a biography is whether it enables us to see the different stages of a man's life as constituting one spiritual whole. That is just what we desire the biographer to set forth before us.At the same time Morality conquers antagonism because it is the life of fellowship. It begins with the recognition that other men have as much right to live as we have, and we buy our rights precisely by conceding theirs. Its root principle is the recognition of this brotherhood or fellow-membership. And yet it, too, never reaches its goal; it fails in two ways; every man in this world, however perfectly he may achieve mastery of his own nature—and it may be doubted if any man has ever done even that by his own strength—is so conditioned by circumstances that he is never able to make his life a perfect masterpiece of art; and as regards the whole fellowship of which he is a member, and his own relation to it, he can find no absolute rules except the command to reach a state of mind which he cannot reach by his own will. There are no moral laws that are absolute except the law to love one's neighbour as oneself. All the rest have exceptions somewhere. "Thou shall not kill," was the formula of the old law. But we have altered it into, "Thou shalt do no murder." It is always wrong to murder, because murder is such killing as is wrong. But it is not always wrong to kill. And so we find no principle that can be made entirely binding and universal, except the law to love our neighbour as ourselves. But how are we to do it? Is there any man who seriously thinks that by taking thought he can make himself love somebody else?All of these three then, and the last as emphatically as any, in spite of its comprehending a greater section of human nature, fail to reach their own achievement.In the fourth stage, in Religion, all would find their fulfilment. For the purpose of God, if there be a God, is the principle of unity which the scientist is seeking. The nature of God, if there be a God, is that perfect beauty which would be the culmination of the life of Art. The righteousness of God, if there be a God, is the satisfaction of the moral aspiration. But we are not left so to conjecture what life would be like if we could carry our own spiritual faculties to their own highest development. We are given the express image of the person of God. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." We shall not indeed have perfect knowledge of the sphere of religion until we have seen how the whole of history and every detail of our lives is, after all, the result and work of creative Love; but while Science and Art and Morality struggle towards their goal and only realise their need for it, God gives Himself as the satisfaction of that need. It is His gift, not our discovery; but we see that in this principle all Time is gathered up, for if the life of Christ is the manifestation of the nature of God, then it is the manifestation of the root-principle of all history.[#][#] I am aware that the argument here isper saltum, but space forbids its full development. I hope soon to have completed a book which will fill in the outline sketch offered in this Lecture. Meanwhile I would refer to my essay onThe Divinity of ChristinFoundations, specially pp. 213-223, 242-263.Then we see, too, how all men may be united in perfect fellowship, because all men loving God will find themselves loving those whom God so loves. This hope or conviction remains in the region of faith, not of knowledge; what of that? In the other departments also we have found no knowledge. We have only found approximation towards it. We have, as it were, converging lines which never meet; and we have also the point at which we see they would meet if produced. Is that not enough? Here we find is the principle that will give unity, as we work it out, to the whole scheme of our spiritual life. Morality says, "Love all men." How can I? Science says, "Realise the truth which explains the universe." How can I? But I can gaze upon the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ; I can meditate upon His Cross and Resurrection. I can see here and there how it may be true that this is indeed the explanation of all the sorrow, even of all the sin. For if it is true that the supreme manifestation of the love of God was historically conditioned by the supreme sin of humanity in the treason of Judas, then surely one begins to see how even out of the grossest evil the glory of God wins triumph for itself, which we too may share if we are first drawn to share the sacrifice.As I become absorbed in that contemplation I find in the first place a new power to love all men, as I remember that He died for them just as He died for me. In the degree in which I really believe that this is the manifestation of the power of God and the governing authority of the universe, I find this thought over-ruling other thoughts and temptations to hostility or enmity. As I remember that those whom I am inclined to despise or hate are those for whom He thought it worth while to die, my contempt and my hatred are rebuked and cancelled.And similarly, if I realise—or in the degree in which I realise—that here is set forth the power that governs all things, that this is the way in which God rules the world, and that Calvary is the mode of His omnipotence, I begin to find myself indifferent, and that increasingly, to those things which are called sorrow and pain.But we shall only find this as we expect to find it. All through our spiritual life we may be perpetually in contact, as it were, with the means of receiving what is good, and never receive it because we are not expecting it. We have not expected peace of mind from our worship, we have not expected a sense of security against evil; that is why we have not found it; but it is our fault. And certainly most of us have not expected to find fellowship from worship. We have known something of the grace of Jesus Christ, perhaps even of the love of God; but of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, of the sense of being linked to one another because all dominated by that one power, most of us have found nothing, because we have not expected it.But if we are expecting this, all the testimony of the saints in every generation goes to show that we shall find what we have expected.The power that can give us security against the transitoriness of the world and against the instincts of antagonism is there in the faith that we place in God. "I will put my trust in God," the Psalmist says, "I will not fear what flesh can do unto me." This is not because flesh will not do such hurt as it can to the man who puts his trust in God—the Jews crucified Christ—but because to the man who puts his trust in God, anything whatever that happens becomes part of God's purpose for his life, and therefore he will not fear it. For "all things," sorrow as well as joy, pain as well as pleasure, sin as well as righteousness, "all things work together for good to them that love God."LECTURE VIGOD IN HISTORY"I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty."—Revelation i. 8.We have considered the two great instruments of God by which He fashions the spiritual life of man, and we have considered that spiritual life itself in the outline at least of its four main departments; and now, as we close our line of thought, we need still to consider how it is that, in these fields and by these instruments, God carries forward His work.The conception of God as at work in human history, guiding it, controlling it, and judging men by its course, is the great contribution of Israel to the religion of the world. It is linked of course with that belief in the union of perfect righteousness with the divine, power which we usually speak of under the somewhat cumbrous title of Ethical Monotheism. We remember what was really at stake in that great day upon Mount Carmel when Elijah confronted the priests of Baal; it was whether the conception of God as righteous and demanding righteousness should prevail, or the conception of God as a capricious Being, needing only to be propitiated, and in connection with whose very worship licentiousness was tolerated and even encouraged.But, after all, the greatest souls, at least in every highly-developed religion, have believed that God is righteous in Himself. What gives to Israel its supreme significance in the spiritual history of mankind is the conviction that this righteous God is daily and hourly at work in the history of men; and that conviction gives to the faith of Israel a primacy and supremacy over all the other partial faiths, even though they may be superior in certain departments.If we think of some of the conceptions by means of which we try to bring before our minds the meaning of the word "God," we may find that with regard to several of them, other nations had advanced further than Israel before the coming of the Lord.God is Spirit. The Hindu knew that, and knows it still, quite as much as Israel.God is Law. The more thoughtful at least among the ancient Romans, and particularly the great Roman Stoics, knew that with a vividness that was scarcely ever attained in Israel.God is Beauty. Assuredly the ancient Greeks knew that as Israel never realised it at all.But the conception of Israel that God is at work in history means that the God of Israel gives to these other gods or conceptions of God, each its own time and place of emergence and decay. The God who is revealed to us in the Old Testament is Himself the Being who appoints that the Indian or the Roman or the Greek should reach these particular convictions; and in these partial apprehensions of the Divine, before the full revelation came, the faith of Israel is determinative and regulative for all the other faiths; and moreover, it is this faith that God is at work in the actual daily history of men, which makes the faith of Israel the natural and proper introduction to the Incarnation, where God Himself took flesh and lived among men and died at a time and in a place—in Palestine and under Pontius Pilate.This exaltation of the Holy God, actually at work within men and at their side, while it leads to a sense of awe before the Holiness of the Almighty, also leads to a sense of the dignity of this world, and of man's life in it, which is lacking, as a rule, from other great religions, and that too in proportion as those other religions are spiritual. For the Hindu, for example, this world and all that is in it is mere illusion. He is spiritual enough but he is not material enough; and we find there that contempt for the things of the body which invariably issues in a contempt for moral conduct; for our moral conduct here, while we live upon this planet, is wrought out through our bodies. But the religion of Israel, and especially its completion in the Incarnation, wherein God Himself came in the flesh, gives at once a dignity to this world of ours, to our bodies, and to all the material side of life.When Christ stood before Pilate, the Kingdom of God was in appearance, at least, undergoing judgment at the hands of the kingdom of this world; but it is not merely a contrast of good with evil. It is a contrast of the perfect with the very imperfect, but yet not merely evil, power. Pilate is not Satan; and the Lord Himself, in the moment of His trial, recognises that the authority by which He is condemned is an authority that is derived from God—"Thou couldest have no power at all against Me, except it were given thee from above." The kingdoms of this world, which are to become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, are not simply something evil. The contrast of Church and World is not the contrast between good and evil; but it is the contrast between two stages in the work which God is accomplishing in history, and those two may often come into conflict.Let us then ask what is the central principle of God's guidance of His people, so far as it may be deduced from the tiny fragment of history that we really know. In that fragment at least, we may say, I think, with little hesitation, that its method and its aim is spiritual growth, or, if you like to put it an expansion and enrichment of personality.We are sometimes inclined to think our own personality is something that is given to us from the outset, and entirely belongs to us; but that idea will not stand examination for a moment. Individual personality is a social product. It can only be developed under social influences. A man may be born with many great talents, but if his environment does not encourage their development, these talents will remain for the most part undeveloped and unknown—either to himself or to anybody else. Indeed the greater the talent with which a man is endowed, the more difference is made to him by the kind of surroundings in which he is put. A man of very few gifts and little natural capacity will be much the same, whether he has abundant opportunity for mental and spiritual growth or little opportunity; but the man of great capacities, needing for their development the encouragement of surroundings, is an entirely different being according as those surroundings are favourable or the reverse; and so we reach the curious result that the greatest personality, while no doubt he must have brought into the world something given to him by God that was capable of development, is yet more entirely dependent upon the society in which he is living than people with a less wide range of gifts.Again, it is only within a society which has developed some character for itself, which has indeed a personality of its own, that individual personality can reach very much development. You cannot have genius in a savage tribe. Genius is the focal expression of the personality of a whole people. It is that people coming to life, and possessed of voice; and you do not find it where there is little social development. It is only as the tribe or the nation begins to have some definite character of its own that it is itself sufficiently organised to develop from its own individual member those gifts, and elicit those activities, which are the signs of genius.We find then, that individual personality, or spiritual life, is dependent upon the spiritual life of society; and we need to notice that this society has every mark by which we distinguish personality in the individual. It has aspirations: it has a predominant character; it has claims, and it has duties. It has in fact, in the literal sense of the word, corporate personality, and just as the many instincts and impulses which are to be found in human nature, and may be very discordant with one another, are welded together to make up the single life of a human being, so the whole gifts and instincts and ambitions and aspirations of all the individual citizens are welded together, to make up the personality of the whole society.Moreover, every nation is in itself not only the combination of individual citizens, but also of minor groups within itself, all of which have these same marks, and all of which are in the real genuine sense persons, spiritual individuals with a life of their own.Now, as we look over the history of the development which thus goes on side by side in the individual and in society, we find that its principle in the fragment of history that we really know has been that isolated excellences should be brought to perfection first; and after something like perfection has been reached in the separate departments taken singly, the combination of them is brought about, in order that the richer and fuller life may be perfected, in which all of them find a place.European history derives its whole life from Palestine, Greece and Rome; and in each of those three peoples, some one excellence was developed to a peculiar degree. Rome perfected and has bequeathed to us the instincts for social order, as embodied in law. The history of the Roman people is of significance, precisely because one may there trace the growth and working out of this instinct for social or political life. There has never been anything to rival it in history. No modern nation has shown the same extraordinary political sense and sanity. The Romans were not great political philosophers. They did not think very much about the principles on which they acted; but simply because of their peculiar gift in this direction they welded together a social order which lasted throughout their Empire in a wonderful way; and to this day the law of Europe is to an enormous extent the law of ancient Rome.To ancient Greece, it is hard to say what we do not owe. Her peculiar characteristic is intellectual passion; a passion for reaching perfection in just what the intellect is particularly qualified to grasp, truth and beauty. No doubt the ancient Greeks themselves thought a great deal about their ordinary politics and their military activities, and the wars between the various States; but these matter very little. The Greek people are significant for evermore not because of the Athenian trireme or the Macedonian phalanx, but because Aeschylus stood in astonished awe before the operation of the Divine Justice; because Sophocles reflected the whole of human life, even its ugliest manifestations, in the mirror of a soul so calm and pure, that as we look at that reflection all life seems bathed in peace and beauty; because Euripides entered into the sorrows of simple folk; because Thucydides, with a still unrivalled zeal for the genuine truth of history, said the wise word about nearly every political condition that has arisen since his time; because Plato dreamed "a Vision of all time and all existence," proclaimed that it can never be just to do harm to any man whatever harm he may have done to us; proclaimed also that "God is in no way unrighteous, but in all ways absolutely righteous, nor is anything more like to God than whosoever among men shall become perfectly righteous;" foreseeing also that if a perfectly righteous man should come on earth he would die, scourged and crucified.[#] There is nowhere before the New Testament anything that comes nearer to its own highest truths, not in the Old Testament itself, than what you will find in Plato.[#]Republici. 335*d*;Theaetetus176*c*;Republicii. 361*e*.This influence,—the influence of this intellectual passion—has been the driving force in nearly all the movements since that time. It has been said there is nothing in the world which moves that is not Greek in origin, and it is almost true; it is from the Greeks that we have learnt "the use of reason to modify experience" and they derived it from the intellectual passion for truth and beauty.To Palestine we owe the inspiring and governing faith of which I have already spoken—the one faith that can give real significance to these other two, faith in the Holy God at work in history.It is noticeable that each of these countries was conspicuously weak in those other qualities which were not especially entrusted to it. Ancient Rome was not at all specially religious and was conspicuously unintellectual. The people of Greece again are not conspicuously religious, though in their cults there is a haunting beauty; and they were not at all politically successful; the history of Athens, the flower of Greece, is the history of a State in which almost every generation threw up a supreme genius who proceeded to change the constitution in accordance with his magnificent ideas; the result was political instability of an appalling character.[#] And Palestine has contributed very little to us as regards social organisation, and is markedly lacking in the scientific and artistic gifts. We have only to consider the great images that are set before us, let us say in the Book of Ezekiel, or again in the Book of Revelation, to see that there is no attempt in these efforts of the imagination to achieve a beautiful or harmonious whole. The symbolic elements are added one to another because of the value of their meaning; but there is no effort to visualise the whole; and if we try to make it, we quickly find that such a thing was never intended.[#] It is of course true that the Greek genius gave us what we now mean by civilisation, namely, the combination of political unity and personal freedom. On this see the admirable first chapter of Mr. Edwyn Bevan'sThe House of Seleucus. But it remains true that the race from whose intellectual genius this whole product sprang had not in any considerable degree the capacity for controlling their own invention.Each of these then reached a genuine supremacy in its own department; and the history of Europe is to an enormous extent the history of the inter-action of these three forces as they mingle and combine in the polities of the barbarian invaders who wrecked the Roman Empire. We watch the periods of domination of each successively. Christianity grew up within the Roman Empire, and the fascination of that great Empire cast a glamour about it in the minds even of those who destroyed it, so that the life which emerges out of chaos in the Middle Ages is predominantly very Latin. The Renaissance is precisely the invasion of Greek influence, and the Reformation is very largely the rediscovery of the Hebrew.For a while the three new forces worked together, carrying men's thought and action forward; and then in the 18th century it would seem that there was, in England at any rate, a torpor due to their exhaustion; when revival came it was because Wesley and his friends revived the Hebrew element in our life, because Newman and Pusey with their friends revived the Latin element, and because F. D. Maurice and the Broad Church movement revived the Hellenistic, and this, with its passion for more adequate comprehension and expression, is the dominant force of our time. We watch these three influences still at work; but as they interact upon one another and within the persons of the new races, a new product is gradually being produced, and in those corporate personalities which we call nations, we see a character being born which is something that history has not known before.The first requirement of personality is always freedom—freedom as we have already said in its two senses, that conduct is not dictated from without but is governed by the whole person, and not by isolated elements; and the corporate persons need freedom just as much as the individual; hence the need, the vital and absolute need, for political sovereignty in any State which is conscious of itself as a person, that is as having a single spiritual life.But that life and freedom are exercised only in the citizens who are members of the State. We cannot surely assert that the corporate person is immortal, as the individual is; and therefore, to destroy a State is to inflict a more irreparable loss than to kill a man, which is one reason at least, perhaps the chief reason, why a man should die for the political freedom of his country, and even, if need be, kill for it; but, as freedom is the first requirement of personality, fellowship is its first duty, for it is true of corporate personalities quite as much as of individuals that they only find themselves and fulfil themselves in their inter-action upon one another, and the nations of the world do in fact need one another, and need one another's full life.In economics we found out long ago that in order to be wealthy, a country needs rich neighbours who may afford good markets. It is so in every other department. We need the gifts of the other peoples. We need that they shall be free and vigorous. Indeed the chief lesson which the world at this time needs to learn is just this—that all the nations of the world need one another, each needing also that the others should be free, in order that they may bring their contributions to the common life in which all share.But we should, I think, be reading the signs of the times amiss if we did not also take account of the fact that there has been growing up lately a new type of corporate personality, not known to history before, and exemplified by your own United States and by the British Empire; the conception of sovereign States linked together in a single life, and exercising therein a joint sovereignty in dealing with those who lie outside the federation, is something of which history bears no record; and we need to try to understand its principle, and see what it is capable of contributing to the life of men in order that we may not fail to use our opportunity, and bring our contribution.[#][#] SeeAppendix V.On Providence in History.There is our outline sketch of the way in which the history of our own civilisation has grown, within which the Church and Nation are at work. We are members of both. What duty falls upon us as the result of that dual membership? The Christian citizen is called of necessity to fulfil one of three functions—prophet, priest and king.The prophet is one who is called to testify to the ideal unflinchingly, not considering consequences, not perhaps considering ways and means of reaching the ideal, but simply insisting on its nature and calling men and nations to penitence so far as they fail to reach it. It may require more courage than the office of the king or statesman, and yet in itself it is the easiest, because it is relatively simple.In all modern nations, and more so in the degree in which they are democratic, every citizen partakes of the duty of kingship. He has some share in determining how his nation shall act, either in the management of its own internal affairs or in its dealings with other people, and one who has this responsibility and is also a Christian, is involved in the absolute duty of trying to think, and to think with genuine effort, how he may be actually guiding his nation toward the ideal. He must not be content with pious platitudes leading to no action, nor content to consider only his own country's welfare; but as a member of the Church of Christ which embraces all mankind, he is called to think out and, having thought, to pursue in act the methods by which his nation may genuinely be doing its part to build up the one great Temple of God—His Holy City.The priest is prophet and statesman, both at once. He, as minister of the Word of God, must perpetually insist upon the true ideal, and bid men to guard against all self-contentment so far as they fail to reach it; and yet he must be ready to take his stand by the side of every individual or group of individuals, even of the nation itself, nerving each to do the best of which it then and there in the circumstances of the day is capable. And meanwhile he is a wretched human being like the rest, terribly liable to pride if he upholds an ideal higher than is usually recognised; terribly liable to worldliness, alike in his own soul and in his teaching, if for a single moment he forsakes the Divine Presence; and uniquely exposed to the deadliest of all temptations; for while we preach what neither we nor anybody else can practise, we are sorely tempted to be content with spiritual mediocrity ourselves.But above all, at this time the necessity, I think, is for a clear testimony concerning the purpose of God for His people, and His kingdom that shall surely come. We have made our precepts so tame; our efforts for peace and fellowship have been so much less exhilarating than other men's efforts for war; we have been very mild; and that is not the spirit of Christ, or of His Kingdom. The spirit of Christ is the spirit of all heroism in all ages.In 1848, a little republic was founded in Rome to stand for justice and purity of government amid the corrupt States all round. It was attacked by those States, and at last it yielded; on the day when the capitulation was signed masses of people were gathered together in the great Piazza outside St. Peter's, and there rode among them the man whose faith and heroism had sustained that siege for more weeks than the wiseacres thought it could last days. When the cheering had subsided, he made no acknowledgment, but simply said:
These are the principles which I would venture to submit. Probably not one of them will win universal assent even in our own communion. But amid all our amiable sentiments it is time for somebody to say something definite, or as definite as the complexity of the problem allows. In criticising and rejecting individual utterances we may at last reach a corporate mind.
But let me add one particular warning about the way we go: for in my own mind I am quite sure that the Communion is just the place where we need to be divided until our unity is real. People say "How terrible to be separated there." Yes, terrible indeed! It is the measure of the sin of schism. But we must not try to escape the consequences of the sin until we have got rid of the sin itself. I say nothing of the problem of the mission field or of the possibility of exceptional occasions.[#] But I am quite sure that in normal Church life, where all people have access to their own services, intercommunion can only be disastrous, as tending to obscure the need for real unity, and the difference between the various excellences whose combination is to be desired.
[#] It must of course be recognised that the problem of intercommunion in the mission field is of urgent practical importance. On the present situation, the Archbishop of Canterbury's statement,Kikuyu.
But let us come back to what after all is the only true guarantee and the only condition of reunion—the achievement of holiness; that holiness needs, as we have seen, to be safeguarded, and the safeguarding of it is peculiarly entrusted to us, the ministers of the Church. What need then for personal dedication! For upon the degree in which we are wholly given to our work depends in large measure the time when God will reunite His Church.
We keep separate even from many right activities, but only in order to keep pure that spirit by which we are to permeate the whole life of the world, bringing it to bear, so far as we are able in our detachment, upon every sort of problem, private or public—industrial, commercial, political, international—till at last the whole world is governed by that spirit, and there is no need for separation any more nor for any special place of worship nor special order of religious ministers; for then the world and the Church will be indistinguishable in the Holy City of God, wherein is no temple, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.
LECTURE V
THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN
"Our citizenship is in heaven."—Philippians iii. 20.
"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."—S. John xiv. 9.
We have considered in outline the functions of the State and of the Church, the two great instruments of God for the furthering of His kingdom. Let us now turn to consider, still in mere outline, for nothing more is possible, the nature of that Kingdom itself.
There are very many ways in which the subject might be approached, but I think that it will be most consonant with the general line of our thought in these meditations that we should consider it as the home of man's spirit, the fulfilment of his spiritual being. And to that end, inasmuch as the Kingdom can only be known by living according to the principles of its citizenship, and our present effort is by its very nature intellectual only, we must try to reach it in thought as the goal towards which the whole spiritual life of man is tending.
No life can be set forth in scientific terms. The moment it is analysed, the vitalising power is gone. And even the poet, who has far more chance than the logician of making us realise what the life signifies for those who live it, is still speaking of it from outside. It is only by life itself that we can truly know the Kingdom of God.
We find, all through the New Testament, a contrast drawn between earth and heaven. And it is worth while to consider the logical principle of that contrast, even though the result is somewhat dry and barren. The place of careful analysis here is analogous to that which criticism holds in relation to art. The critical analysis of a work of art will never of itself enable us to appreciate it, if we are without the cultivated artistic faculty; but it may enrich our appreciation. We may thereby find more than we should otherwise have found of the elements that are combined together to make up the total effect. And then in the unity of the renewed experience we receive more enjoyment than we had done before. So, too, the Kingdom of God, which for us is something that we still hope to reach, and of which the foretaste that we have as yet received is a very slight earnest of the glory that shall be revealed, may be a goal more potent in its attraction to our wills, when we have seen it as the fulfilment of the principles of our whole spiritual life as these are discoverable in other departments and activities.
The goods of this world, as we have already noticed, are such that the more one has the less there is for others. The goods of heaven are of such a kind that the more one has the more there is on that account for others. So it is with the true virtues of the spiritual life, with love and joy and peace, the fruits of the spirit. So it is too with other excellences which belong to man as a spiritual being, and which are out of the reach of our animal nature: loyalty, beauty and knowledge.
Now the principle of this whole spiritual life is precisely the principle of unity, not as distinct from variety but as distinct either from antagonism or transitoriness. The two things that distress the soul of man are enmities, and the passing away of that which he loves. It is by rising above these evils, which beset us in this earthly state, that the satisfaction of the soul is found.
There are four main departments of the spiritual life which aspire in this way to rise above the evils which beset our mortal state. They are Science and Art and Morality and Religion. As we know them in our experience, they are all of them due on the human side to a dissatisfaction with our experience as we find it. The scientific man is disturbed by the apparent chaos in his experience, and he sets out to give order to it, and he is satisfied in so far as he discovers that all the while it was not chaotic, as it seemed, but orderly. The artist is craving for a beauty which, in his ordinary experience, he does not find. He selects, he concentrates attention on certain aspects, to reach a satisfaction which the world otherwise seems not to give. The man of moral aspiration is dissatisfied with the world as he sees it, and he sets himself therefore to alter both himself and it, that it may be modelled more in accordance with the heart's desire. And the religious man finds all of these sources of dissatisfaction working together within his soul; he seeks, and in faith finds, that which gives him both peace and power.
Let us then begin with what is in itself the least rich of these forms of human activity, and consider how it is that Science reaches its unity. Let us first recall that there are two forms of multiplicity or division which we are seeking to overcome: that which arises from the clash of various ideals or desires, the antagonism of man with man; and that which arises from the changeableness of the world as we see it. With regard to the latter, science does indeed reach real unities; but they are unities which leave Time out of sight. Sometimes, no doubt, the subject matter which is handled is itself non-temporal, but not in the sense of being eternal. So, for example, geometry is entirely without relation to time. There is no temporal sequence between the equality of the sides and the equality of the angles in the isosceles triangle. But where the subject studied is something that changes in Time, it remains true that the aim of science is to reach an unchanging principle. So, for example, the student of biology may be trying to discover the unchanging principle which governs the successive variations of species. But when he has found it he has not really mastered the transitoriness; he has not in any way gathered up the past and dead into his present experience; he has merely found the principle which applies to every stage as that stage comes. He reaches some superiority to the transitoriness of things, only by abstracting from Time altogether.
And, similarly, the unity between men which is produced by a common absorption in such pursuits does not strike very deep. For a man's temperament has nothing in the world to do with his scientific conclusions, or at least ought not to have. In the ideal pursuit of knowledge, all of the things that set men at variance count for nothing whatever. Consequently the differences, just because they are ignored, are not overcome, with the result that, as at the beginning of this war, we may find professors of the various nations, who had been linked together, as one might think, closely enough in the pursuit of knowledge, hurling manifestoes at one another across their national frontiers.
When we pass to the second of the great departments, a real progress may be noted in just these points. For in the experience of the artist Time is genuinely mastered. We get some illustration of this from the absorption which marks the aesthetic contemplation of a picture or a statue. For the time that we are really held by it, we forget about time altogether. But the case is clearer with regard to those arts which handle temporal processes—music and poetry. For it is the whole point, let us say, of a drama, that it shall follow a certain succession; it is vital to its significance that the scenes shall be in that order and no other. If you have two plays, each in three acts, in one of which the first act is cheerful in tone, and the second is neutral, and the third depressing, while in the other the first act is depressing, the second neutral, and the third cheerful, the total effect of the two plays is not the average of the three acts in each case, which would be neutral for both, but is in the one particularly depressing, and in the other particularly cheering. For the play is grasped as a whole. It makes a single impression, if it is a good play. We know what it means—not indeed because we can state it in other words, for it is the only expression of its own meaning; but it has a definite significance for us. And the name of the play comes to stand for that significance. This is especially noticeable in tragedy, where the Greeks, with their sure instinct, chose a story whose plot is known to the spectator in advance, so that we have throughout the play both the impression of the entire story and the particular impression of each scene as it comes and passes. It is significant that the Greeks did so choose for tragedy stories whose plot was known, while their comedians invented their own plots. And most will agree that we enjoy a great play better when we have read it in advance, or when we have already seen it on the stage before; because then we do reach something that may serve perhaps as the nearest image that we can get for eternity—a grasp of the whole stretch of time, realised in its successiveness and in the meaning which that successiveness gives to it, and having the sense of the whole throughout and seeing each moment, as it comes, in the light not only of the past but of the future too.
On this side, then, art is able, for the moment at least, and with regard to a period definitely limited by our capacities of comprehension, to master Time and give us a unity which includes its successiveness within it; so that the past, and even the future, are gathered up into the real experience of the present, and we are not only conscious of what is before our eyes, but are conscious of it as a part of the whole to which it belongs.
In a similar way we notice that while different temperaments are needed for the production of different types of art, yet in appreciation all are united. For example, it would be quite impossible for the great Russian novels to be produced in any other country than Russia; it would have been quite impossible for the great German philosophy to have been produced in any other nation than Germany; it would have been quite impossible for the great English poetry to have been produced in any other nation than England. These literatures belong to the soil out of which they spring. But the people of all the other nations can appreciate them, and all are glad because they are different. And so far as the artistic side of our nature governs our whole being, it is capable of linking us together in a real fellowship, which includes and is based upon our differences and the appreciation of them, and is therefore firmly rooted, because what might have been the source of antagonism is become itself the bond of unity.
But we must notice that each of these only reaches a very provisional attainment. If science likes to mark off a certain department of reality for its investigation, it can reach something like finality concerning just that department. I suppose that mechanics is something like a complete system of truth, so far as the mechanical aspect of things can be isolated from all other aspects. But then, nothing in the world is mechanical and only mechanical. Nothing in the world is chemical and only chemical. There are always other qualities there, from which abstraction has been made. Science therefore inevitably sets before itself as its goal the understanding of the universe, and it could not reach any absolute certainty concerning any real fact except so far as it had obtained omniscience. In mathematics it reaches certainty, because in mathematics the object is what it is defined to be, and nothing else. But no given material thing is just a triangle. It may even be disputed whether any given thing can be, according to the definition, a triangle at all.
Science then is marked by a restlessness until it reaches this omniscience. It began when the first man said "Why?" The moment that question is asked, Science is launched upon its course. But the answer to that question merely prompts anyone of scientific instincts to say "Why?" to the answer. Why is there a war? Historical science will point to the diplomatic documents, and from them to the course of history moulding national aspiration. Then if we say, "Why was the cause of war such? And, why were there such national aspirations?" we shall find ourselves soon investigating the literature of the countries and then their climates; from this we are shortly involved in astronomy and geology and all the other sciences. You can have nothing that is final until you reach omniscience. And so Science moves, perpetually saying "Why?" to every statement that is made. Far in the distance, in the infinite distance, is its goal of a complete satisfaction gained through understanding the universe in its entirety.
Art can similarly only achieve a provisional attainment of its goal; but the attainment while it lasts is more substantial. Its method, as distinct from that of science, is mental rest. The aim of the artist is to concentrate attention upon the object, holding it there by various devices. That is why pictures are put into frames. Something abruptly irrelevant, although not discordant, is put round the object to help us fix our minds upon it. That is why poetry is written in metre. The mind is abruptly brought back by the recurrence of the rhythm or the recurrence of the sound in rhyme, and held within the total composition. We notice that it is precisely where the subject matter of the poem is slight that the rhythm needs to be strongly marked or the system of rhyme complicated; where the subject matter itself has a strong appeal, any rhyming seems to be out of place and tiresome. The aim is simply to grip the attention and hold it upon the object and make us see it as it is; not after the fashion of science, connecting it with other things, but understanding it by getting to know it in and for itself as thoroughly as may be.[#] Now in thus concentrating attention upon some one object and claiming complete absorption in that object, art is implicitly claiming to give a perfect mental satisfaction and an absolute peace. But it can never succeed in that unless the object upon which it is concentrating our attention is an adequate symbol for the whole truth of things in which the whole of our nature will find such satisfaction.
[#] This is why no great work of art over becomes out of date, whereas the work of a great scientist is always liable to do so, because his successors revise it in the light of ever widening knowledge.
Moreover, these activities of the mind or spirit fail to govern our lives as a whole precisely because they are contemplative and not active. We stand before the world gazing at it, setting our minds indeed to work upon it in certain ways, yet not fundamentally changing it. But we are active beings, with wills as well as contemplative minds, and our volitional action lies very largely outside the range which these activities and interests can control. And therefore it is that so little real unity is reached by means of them.
In Morality the practical instincts and impulses are for the first time included. Morality is the science or the art, or both, of living in society; of living, that is to say, as fellow members with other beings, who also have aspirations and ideals as legitimate as our own, so that our own claim to pursue our own ideals must be won by recognition of their equal claim to pursue theirs. And the man who, with full mastery of himself, if such a man exists, is following out a great purpose that is adequate to satisfy his whole nature, is a man who has achieved the conquest of Time in the completest way. It is essential to the pursuit of a purpose that we move from stage to stage, as we adapt means to our end, and yet all of it is one thing, thought and experienced as one. Indeed a test that we always instinctively apply to a biography is whether it enables us to see the different stages of a man's life as constituting one spiritual whole. That is just what we desire the biographer to set forth before us.
At the same time Morality conquers antagonism because it is the life of fellowship. It begins with the recognition that other men have as much right to live as we have, and we buy our rights precisely by conceding theirs. Its root principle is the recognition of this brotherhood or fellow-membership. And yet it, too, never reaches its goal; it fails in two ways; every man in this world, however perfectly he may achieve mastery of his own nature—and it may be doubted if any man has ever done even that by his own strength—is so conditioned by circumstances that he is never able to make his life a perfect masterpiece of art; and as regards the whole fellowship of which he is a member, and his own relation to it, he can find no absolute rules except the command to reach a state of mind which he cannot reach by his own will. There are no moral laws that are absolute except the law to love one's neighbour as oneself. All the rest have exceptions somewhere. "Thou shall not kill," was the formula of the old law. But we have altered it into, "Thou shalt do no murder." It is always wrong to murder, because murder is such killing as is wrong. But it is not always wrong to kill. And so we find no principle that can be made entirely binding and universal, except the law to love our neighbour as ourselves. But how are we to do it? Is there any man who seriously thinks that by taking thought he can make himself love somebody else?
All of these three then, and the last as emphatically as any, in spite of its comprehending a greater section of human nature, fail to reach their own achievement.
In the fourth stage, in Religion, all would find their fulfilment. For the purpose of God, if there be a God, is the principle of unity which the scientist is seeking. The nature of God, if there be a God, is that perfect beauty which would be the culmination of the life of Art. The righteousness of God, if there be a God, is the satisfaction of the moral aspiration. But we are not left so to conjecture what life would be like if we could carry our own spiritual faculties to their own highest development. We are given the express image of the person of God. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." We shall not indeed have perfect knowledge of the sphere of religion until we have seen how the whole of history and every detail of our lives is, after all, the result and work of creative Love; but while Science and Art and Morality struggle towards their goal and only realise their need for it, God gives Himself as the satisfaction of that need. It is His gift, not our discovery; but we see that in this principle all Time is gathered up, for if the life of Christ is the manifestation of the nature of God, then it is the manifestation of the root-principle of all history.[#]
[#] I am aware that the argument here isper saltum, but space forbids its full development. I hope soon to have completed a book which will fill in the outline sketch offered in this Lecture. Meanwhile I would refer to my essay onThe Divinity of ChristinFoundations, specially pp. 213-223, 242-263.
Then we see, too, how all men may be united in perfect fellowship, because all men loving God will find themselves loving those whom God so loves. This hope or conviction remains in the region of faith, not of knowledge; what of that? In the other departments also we have found no knowledge. We have only found approximation towards it. We have, as it were, converging lines which never meet; and we have also the point at which we see they would meet if produced. Is that not enough? Here we find is the principle that will give unity, as we work it out, to the whole scheme of our spiritual life. Morality says, "Love all men." How can I? Science says, "Realise the truth which explains the universe." How can I? But I can gaze upon the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ; I can meditate upon His Cross and Resurrection. I can see here and there how it may be true that this is indeed the explanation of all the sorrow, even of all the sin. For if it is true that the supreme manifestation of the love of God was historically conditioned by the supreme sin of humanity in the treason of Judas, then surely one begins to see how even out of the grossest evil the glory of God wins triumph for itself, which we too may share if we are first drawn to share the sacrifice.
As I become absorbed in that contemplation I find in the first place a new power to love all men, as I remember that He died for them just as He died for me. In the degree in which I really believe that this is the manifestation of the power of God and the governing authority of the universe, I find this thought over-ruling other thoughts and temptations to hostility or enmity. As I remember that those whom I am inclined to despise or hate are those for whom He thought it worth while to die, my contempt and my hatred are rebuked and cancelled.
And similarly, if I realise—or in the degree in which I realise—that here is set forth the power that governs all things, that this is the way in which God rules the world, and that Calvary is the mode of His omnipotence, I begin to find myself indifferent, and that increasingly, to those things which are called sorrow and pain.
But we shall only find this as we expect to find it. All through our spiritual life we may be perpetually in contact, as it were, with the means of receiving what is good, and never receive it because we are not expecting it. We have not expected peace of mind from our worship, we have not expected a sense of security against evil; that is why we have not found it; but it is our fault. And certainly most of us have not expected to find fellowship from worship. We have known something of the grace of Jesus Christ, perhaps even of the love of God; but of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, of the sense of being linked to one another because all dominated by that one power, most of us have found nothing, because we have not expected it.
But if we are expecting this, all the testimony of the saints in every generation goes to show that we shall find what we have expected.
The power that can give us security against the transitoriness of the world and against the instincts of antagonism is there in the faith that we place in God. "I will put my trust in God," the Psalmist says, "I will not fear what flesh can do unto me." This is not because flesh will not do such hurt as it can to the man who puts his trust in God—the Jews crucified Christ—but because to the man who puts his trust in God, anything whatever that happens becomes part of God's purpose for his life, and therefore he will not fear it. For "all things," sorrow as well as joy, pain as well as pleasure, sin as well as righteousness, "all things work together for good to them that love God."
LECTURE VI
GOD IN HISTORY
"I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty."—Revelation i. 8.
We have considered the two great instruments of God by which He fashions the spiritual life of man, and we have considered that spiritual life itself in the outline at least of its four main departments; and now, as we close our line of thought, we need still to consider how it is that, in these fields and by these instruments, God carries forward His work.
The conception of God as at work in human history, guiding it, controlling it, and judging men by its course, is the great contribution of Israel to the religion of the world. It is linked of course with that belief in the union of perfect righteousness with the divine, power which we usually speak of under the somewhat cumbrous title of Ethical Monotheism. We remember what was really at stake in that great day upon Mount Carmel when Elijah confronted the priests of Baal; it was whether the conception of God as righteous and demanding righteousness should prevail, or the conception of God as a capricious Being, needing only to be propitiated, and in connection with whose very worship licentiousness was tolerated and even encouraged.
But, after all, the greatest souls, at least in every highly-developed religion, have believed that God is righteous in Himself. What gives to Israel its supreme significance in the spiritual history of mankind is the conviction that this righteous God is daily and hourly at work in the history of men; and that conviction gives to the faith of Israel a primacy and supremacy over all the other partial faiths, even though they may be superior in certain departments.
If we think of some of the conceptions by means of which we try to bring before our minds the meaning of the word "God," we may find that with regard to several of them, other nations had advanced further than Israel before the coming of the Lord.
God is Spirit. The Hindu knew that, and knows it still, quite as much as Israel.
God is Law. The more thoughtful at least among the ancient Romans, and particularly the great Roman Stoics, knew that with a vividness that was scarcely ever attained in Israel.
God is Beauty. Assuredly the ancient Greeks knew that as Israel never realised it at all.
But the conception of Israel that God is at work in history means that the God of Israel gives to these other gods or conceptions of God, each its own time and place of emergence and decay. The God who is revealed to us in the Old Testament is Himself the Being who appoints that the Indian or the Roman or the Greek should reach these particular convictions; and in these partial apprehensions of the Divine, before the full revelation came, the faith of Israel is determinative and regulative for all the other faiths; and moreover, it is this faith that God is at work in the actual daily history of men, which makes the faith of Israel the natural and proper introduction to the Incarnation, where God Himself took flesh and lived among men and died at a time and in a place—in Palestine and under Pontius Pilate.
This exaltation of the Holy God, actually at work within men and at their side, while it leads to a sense of awe before the Holiness of the Almighty, also leads to a sense of the dignity of this world, and of man's life in it, which is lacking, as a rule, from other great religions, and that too in proportion as those other religions are spiritual. For the Hindu, for example, this world and all that is in it is mere illusion. He is spiritual enough but he is not material enough; and we find there that contempt for the things of the body which invariably issues in a contempt for moral conduct; for our moral conduct here, while we live upon this planet, is wrought out through our bodies. But the religion of Israel, and especially its completion in the Incarnation, wherein God Himself came in the flesh, gives at once a dignity to this world of ours, to our bodies, and to all the material side of life.
When Christ stood before Pilate, the Kingdom of God was in appearance, at least, undergoing judgment at the hands of the kingdom of this world; but it is not merely a contrast of good with evil. It is a contrast of the perfect with the very imperfect, but yet not merely evil, power. Pilate is not Satan; and the Lord Himself, in the moment of His trial, recognises that the authority by which He is condemned is an authority that is derived from God—"Thou couldest have no power at all against Me, except it were given thee from above." The kingdoms of this world, which are to become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, are not simply something evil. The contrast of Church and World is not the contrast between good and evil; but it is the contrast between two stages in the work which God is accomplishing in history, and those two may often come into conflict.
Let us then ask what is the central principle of God's guidance of His people, so far as it may be deduced from the tiny fragment of history that we really know. In that fragment at least, we may say, I think, with little hesitation, that its method and its aim is spiritual growth, or, if you like to put it an expansion and enrichment of personality.
We are sometimes inclined to think our own personality is something that is given to us from the outset, and entirely belongs to us; but that idea will not stand examination for a moment. Individual personality is a social product. It can only be developed under social influences. A man may be born with many great talents, but if his environment does not encourage their development, these talents will remain for the most part undeveloped and unknown—either to himself or to anybody else. Indeed the greater the talent with which a man is endowed, the more difference is made to him by the kind of surroundings in which he is put. A man of very few gifts and little natural capacity will be much the same, whether he has abundant opportunity for mental and spiritual growth or little opportunity; but the man of great capacities, needing for their development the encouragement of surroundings, is an entirely different being according as those surroundings are favourable or the reverse; and so we reach the curious result that the greatest personality, while no doubt he must have brought into the world something given to him by God that was capable of development, is yet more entirely dependent upon the society in which he is living than people with a less wide range of gifts.
Again, it is only within a society which has developed some character for itself, which has indeed a personality of its own, that individual personality can reach very much development. You cannot have genius in a savage tribe. Genius is the focal expression of the personality of a whole people. It is that people coming to life, and possessed of voice; and you do not find it where there is little social development. It is only as the tribe or the nation begins to have some definite character of its own that it is itself sufficiently organised to develop from its own individual member those gifts, and elicit those activities, which are the signs of genius.
We find then, that individual personality, or spiritual life, is dependent upon the spiritual life of society; and we need to notice that this society has every mark by which we distinguish personality in the individual. It has aspirations: it has a predominant character; it has claims, and it has duties. It has in fact, in the literal sense of the word, corporate personality, and just as the many instincts and impulses which are to be found in human nature, and may be very discordant with one another, are welded together to make up the single life of a human being, so the whole gifts and instincts and ambitions and aspirations of all the individual citizens are welded together, to make up the personality of the whole society.
Moreover, every nation is in itself not only the combination of individual citizens, but also of minor groups within itself, all of which have these same marks, and all of which are in the real genuine sense persons, spiritual individuals with a life of their own.
Now, as we look over the history of the development which thus goes on side by side in the individual and in society, we find that its principle in the fragment of history that we really know has been that isolated excellences should be brought to perfection first; and after something like perfection has been reached in the separate departments taken singly, the combination of them is brought about, in order that the richer and fuller life may be perfected, in which all of them find a place.
European history derives its whole life from Palestine, Greece and Rome; and in each of those three peoples, some one excellence was developed to a peculiar degree. Rome perfected and has bequeathed to us the instincts for social order, as embodied in law. The history of the Roman people is of significance, precisely because one may there trace the growth and working out of this instinct for social or political life. There has never been anything to rival it in history. No modern nation has shown the same extraordinary political sense and sanity. The Romans were not great political philosophers. They did not think very much about the principles on which they acted; but simply because of their peculiar gift in this direction they welded together a social order which lasted throughout their Empire in a wonderful way; and to this day the law of Europe is to an enormous extent the law of ancient Rome.
To ancient Greece, it is hard to say what we do not owe. Her peculiar characteristic is intellectual passion; a passion for reaching perfection in just what the intellect is particularly qualified to grasp, truth and beauty. No doubt the ancient Greeks themselves thought a great deal about their ordinary politics and their military activities, and the wars between the various States; but these matter very little. The Greek people are significant for evermore not because of the Athenian trireme or the Macedonian phalanx, but because Aeschylus stood in astonished awe before the operation of the Divine Justice; because Sophocles reflected the whole of human life, even its ugliest manifestations, in the mirror of a soul so calm and pure, that as we look at that reflection all life seems bathed in peace and beauty; because Euripides entered into the sorrows of simple folk; because Thucydides, with a still unrivalled zeal for the genuine truth of history, said the wise word about nearly every political condition that has arisen since his time; because Plato dreamed "a Vision of all time and all existence," proclaimed that it can never be just to do harm to any man whatever harm he may have done to us; proclaimed also that "God is in no way unrighteous, but in all ways absolutely righteous, nor is anything more like to God than whosoever among men shall become perfectly righteous;" foreseeing also that if a perfectly righteous man should come on earth he would die, scourged and crucified.[#] There is nowhere before the New Testament anything that comes nearer to its own highest truths, not in the Old Testament itself, than what you will find in Plato.
[#]Republici. 335*d*;Theaetetus176*c*;Republicii. 361*e*.
This influence,—the influence of this intellectual passion—has been the driving force in nearly all the movements since that time. It has been said there is nothing in the world which moves that is not Greek in origin, and it is almost true; it is from the Greeks that we have learnt "the use of reason to modify experience" and they derived it from the intellectual passion for truth and beauty.
To Palestine we owe the inspiring and governing faith of which I have already spoken—the one faith that can give real significance to these other two, faith in the Holy God at work in history.
It is noticeable that each of these countries was conspicuously weak in those other qualities which were not especially entrusted to it. Ancient Rome was not at all specially religious and was conspicuously unintellectual. The people of Greece again are not conspicuously religious, though in their cults there is a haunting beauty; and they were not at all politically successful; the history of Athens, the flower of Greece, is the history of a State in which almost every generation threw up a supreme genius who proceeded to change the constitution in accordance with his magnificent ideas; the result was political instability of an appalling character.[#] And Palestine has contributed very little to us as regards social organisation, and is markedly lacking in the scientific and artistic gifts. We have only to consider the great images that are set before us, let us say in the Book of Ezekiel, or again in the Book of Revelation, to see that there is no attempt in these efforts of the imagination to achieve a beautiful or harmonious whole. The symbolic elements are added one to another because of the value of their meaning; but there is no effort to visualise the whole; and if we try to make it, we quickly find that such a thing was never intended.
[#] It is of course true that the Greek genius gave us what we now mean by civilisation, namely, the combination of political unity and personal freedom. On this see the admirable first chapter of Mr. Edwyn Bevan'sThe House of Seleucus. But it remains true that the race from whose intellectual genius this whole product sprang had not in any considerable degree the capacity for controlling their own invention.
Each of these then reached a genuine supremacy in its own department; and the history of Europe is to an enormous extent the history of the inter-action of these three forces as they mingle and combine in the polities of the barbarian invaders who wrecked the Roman Empire. We watch the periods of domination of each successively. Christianity grew up within the Roman Empire, and the fascination of that great Empire cast a glamour about it in the minds even of those who destroyed it, so that the life which emerges out of chaos in the Middle Ages is predominantly very Latin. The Renaissance is precisely the invasion of Greek influence, and the Reformation is very largely the rediscovery of the Hebrew.
For a while the three new forces worked together, carrying men's thought and action forward; and then in the 18th century it would seem that there was, in England at any rate, a torpor due to their exhaustion; when revival came it was because Wesley and his friends revived the Hebrew element in our life, because Newman and Pusey with their friends revived the Latin element, and because F. D. Maurice and the Broad Church movement revived the Hellenistic, and this, with its passion for more adequate comprehension and expression, is the dominant force of our time. We watch these three influences still at work; but as they interact upon one another and within the persons of the new races, a new product is gradually being produced, and in those corporate personalities which we call nations, we see a character being born which is something that history has not known before.
The first requirement of personality is always freedom—freedom as we have already said in its two senses, that conduct is not dictated from without but is governed by the whole person, and not by isolated elements; and the corporate persons need freedom just as much as the individual; hence the need, the vital and absolute need, for political sovereignty in any State which is conscious of itself as a person, that is as having a single spiritual life.
But that life and freedom are exercised only in the citizens who are members of the State. We cannot surely assert that the corporate person is immortal, as the individual is; and therefore, to destroy a State is to inflict a more irreparable loss than to kill a man, which is one reason at least, perhaps the chief reason, why a man should die for the political freedom of his country, and even, if need be, kill for it; but, as freedom is the first requirement of personality, fellowship is its first duty, for it is true of corporate personalities quite as much as of individuals that they only find themselves and fulfil themselves in their inter-action upon one another, and the nations of the world do in fact need one another, and need one another's full life.
In economics we found out long ago that in order to be wealthy, a country needs rich neighbours who may afford good markets. It is so in every other department. We need the gifts of the other peoples. We need that they shall be free and vigorous. Indeed the chief lesson which the world at this time needs to learn is just this—that all the nations of the world need one another, each needing also that the others should be free, in order that they may bring their contributions to the common life in which all share.
But we should, I think, be reading the signs of the times amiss if we did not also take account of the fact that there has been growing up lately a new type of corporate personality, not known to history before, and exemplified by your own United States and by the British Empire; the conception of sovereign States linked together in a single life, and exercising therein a joint sovereignty in dealing with those who lie outside the federation, is something of which history bears no record; and we need to try to understand its principle, and see what it is capable of contributing to the life of men in order that we may not fail to use our opportunity, and bring our contribution.[#]
[#] SeeAppendix V.On Providence in History.
There is our outline sketch of the way in which the history of our own civilisation has grown, within which the Church and Nation are at work. We are members of both. What duty falls upon us as the result of that dual membership? The Christian citizen is called of necessity to fulfil one of three functions—prophet, priest and king.
The prophet is one who is called to testify to the ideal unflinchingly, not considering consequences, not perhaps considering ways and means of reaching the ideal, but simply insisting on its nature and calling men and nations to penitence so far as they fail to reach it. It may require more courage than the office of the king or statesman, and yet in itself it is the easiest, because it is relatively simple.
In all modern nations, and more so in the degree in which they are democratic, every citizen partakes of the duty of kingship. He has some share in determining how his nation shall act, either in the management of its own internal affairs or in its dealings with other people, and one who has this responsibility and is also a Christian, is involved in the absolute duty of trying to think, and to think with genuine effort, how he may be actually guiding his nation toward the ideal. He must not be content with pious platitudes leading to no action, nor content to consider only his own country's welfare; but as a member of the Church of Christ which embraces all mankind, he is called to think out and, having thought, to pursue in act the methods by which his nation may genuinely be doing its part to build up the one great Temple of God—His Holy City.
The priest is prophet and statesman, both at once. He, as minister of the Word of God, must perpetually insist upon the true ideal, and bid men to guard against all self-contentment so far as they fail to reach it; and yet he must be ready to take his stand by the side of every individual or group of individuals, even of the nation itself, nerving each to do the best of which it then and there in the circumstances of the day is capable. And meanwhile he is a wretched human being like the rest, terribly liable to pride if he upholds an ideal higher than is usually recognised; terribly liable to worldliness, alike in his own soul and in his teaching, if for a single moment he forsakes the Divine Presence; and uniquely exposed to the deadliest of all temptations; for while we preach what neither we nor anybody else can practise, we are sorely tempted to be content with spiritual mediocrity ourselves.
But above all, at this time the necessity, I think, is for a clear testimony concerning the purpose of God for His people, and His kingdom that shall surely come. We have made our precepts so tame; our efforts for peace and fellowship have been so much less exhilarating than other men's efforts for war; we have been very mild; and that is not the spirit of Christ, or of His Kingdom. The spirit of Christ is the spirit of all heroism in all ages.
In 1848, a little republic was founded in Rome to stand for justice and purity of government amid the corrupt States all round. It was attacked by those States, and at last it yielded; on the day when the capitulation was signed masses of people were gathered together in the great Piazza outside St. Peter's, and there rode among them the man whose faith and heroism had sustained that siege for more weeks than the wiseacres thought it could last days. When the cheering had subsided, he made no acknowledgment, but simply said: